The Passions of the Dream Work Magic

My son Stuart and I went to the Tattered Cover Bookstore last night to listen to Robert Moss speak about his book, Dreamgates.

He was very engaging, a great storyteller, clearly at the top of his game in a genre: shamanic dreaming, that he has been restoring to the western world for decades. It was inspiring to be in the presence of someone who radiates authentic, grounded shamanic wisdom. I was charmed by his Australian accent, which reminded me of my four years there, and would gladly undertake study with him.

From his website: "A central premise of Moss’s approach is that dreaming isn’t just what happens during sleep; dreaming is waking up to sources of guidance, healing and creativity beyond the reach of the everyday mind."

I asked about the fragments of dreams. I often have dreams that are so psychedelic that I can't find the thread of the meaning. Surely it is easier to bring a dream's message into this waking world when there is a logical narrative to follow. My dreams tend to go like this: While tulips sprout from the ceiling, my mother hurriedly drops a package of bacon on the floor while an albatross taps its beak against the window.

A friend of mine has the most lucid, fairy-tale like dreams. She is English, and has a memory and talent for narrative that can only be said to have been cultivated over the millenia from Taliesin onwards in her bloodlines. She dreams like this: A white owl spreads its wings and leads her to an abandoned church where a wizened hag stoops over a steaming broth...

Mr. Moss said that he is in favor of dream fragments because they provide disparate clues which one can follow further during shamanic journeys, or even further in dreams. Journey separately to the tulips, or to the albatross, or to the bacon, for further enlightenment.

Especially relevant was: perhaps the appearance of a particular food in a dream provides a clue that you need that food (or should avoid that food) in your waking life. Let's say that food is carrots. The circle is completed when we recognize a wink and a nod from spirit during our waking life: a friend shares a recipe for shredded carrots, our attention is drawn to a handbag with carrots on it.

From his blog of that night: "We need to regard dreams more literally and waking events more symbolically."

He went on to speak movingly of other cultures' centrality of dreams and attention to sharing them, and how dreams in modern society are disregarded, how even the human need to dream cannot be satisfied during our unnatural sleep patterns -- this has a great deal to do with why so many people suffer from a dream drought.

As he was signing his book for us, Mr. Moss introduced himself to my eleven year-old son and shook his hand. He gave me an intense look after he asked Stu if he remembers his dreams, and he suggested that we buy him a notebook in which to write them down. (With workshops filled with dreaming women, there is a shortage of male dreamers.)

Stu's grandfather is a great dreamer and rememberer, so notwithstanding my bizarre dreams, I believe Stuart was there with me to brush his dreamer's wings against the dreaming expert that night.

www.tatteredcover.com/

www.mossdreams.com/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1577318919/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=051788710X&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=08BECDW42KP1RV8ZCJC6

http://mossdreams.blogspot.com/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliesin

Going Raw Stories, 1

Raw chef Mila at Raw Radiance is in Delicious Magazine with an article about emotional eating. She has put up 3 other posts related to the issue: Overcoming Emotional Eating

Compulsive Emotional Eating, including thoughts about a talk given by Angela Stokes-Monarch who pioneered the change to a raw diet to revolutionize her body...

And Mila's personal look back at where she was when she started eating raw, and how far she's come.

Very inspiring!

Sacred Quinoa Facts

A sweet post from Katharine about Quinoa, the sacred grain of Ecuador: WHERE DID SHE GO?: Quinoa Soup = SUPERFOOD!


What WIKI has to say about Quinoa: a chenopod, technically...

"Committed to environmental protection and poverty reduction, Andean Naturals offers only non-GMO, organically-farmed products from small producer groups."

Beautiful photos of the Bolivian quinoa planting cycle and harvest.

"Quinoa contains more protein than any other grain; an average of 16.2 percent, compared with 7.5 percent for rice, 9.9 percent for millet, and 14 percent for wheat. Some varieties of quinoa are more than 20 percent protein." - Quinoa.net

Drink "Quinoa Gold" and step back 5000 years. A Rhode Island company developed a Quinoa-based protein drink four years ago.
Quinoa
Here's how to make a sprouted quinoa pilaf, at Coconut and Quinoa.

How I Lost 60 pounds of fat Without even Trying

Several years ago I moved to Europe. After three babies, I weighed about 260 pounds, but felt I was only about 200. That is what my driver's license said: 200 pounds. I was in denial of the extra 60. I figured I could get rid of it before anyone really checked.

I was a mother staying at home for the children. I didn't have a job. I found myself sitting daily in our Jugendstil-era apartment, alone, deciding what to do with the rest of my life. I didn't speak the language. My husband found himself working a great deal more hours than he had done in America. Our grand European adventure wasn't necessarily grand or adventurous.

Yet over the course of about two years I lost 60 pounds. Without even trying to lose it. What happened was: I gradually acclimatized to the European lifestyle, and it simply took the pounds away. I did not intentionally eat less. I did not exercise on purpose. I did not exercise any willpower to change myself, believe me. I never weighed myself. I wouldn't have dreamed of counting calories.

So what did I do? Here is the list. Here are the first two parts of a ten part series. Yes! There are ten parts to it, to post every Wednesday. Read on...

1. I never ate between meals. In Europe, if you're eating something and not sitting down during a meal, people will look at you quizzically. Why are you eating? Are you sick, is something wrong? Do you have a medical condition? We only eat during mealtimes: what's so hard about that?

2. I never ate anywhere unless I was sitting in a chair at a table. I never ate in town, walking around (rarely: an ice cream cone), I never ate in my car, I never ate standing up. People watch other people much more closely in Europe. There are people sitting at outdoor cafes and walking past you almost all the time. If you are doing something unusual, folks will look at you and not even attempt to disguise their interest, curiosity or contempt. So it feels quite uncomfortable to be the only person in a 3 mile radius walking and eating a sandwich. It is undignified, it is sloppy: not even little children do it. The public approbation really does its work on the individual. It looks desperate and wrong to eat in public unless you are taking the time to enjoy a meal. That's just how it is.

Join me next Friday for more...

Not to Meat

A friend of mine told me how he stopped eating meat. He had for years given free rein to his desires: he smoked, he ate whatever he wanted.
This was in Europe, and a heavily meat-eating culture, in a region where there is even less accommodation made for vegetarians. Where the thought of going without meat is far more freakish than in the English-speaking world of today.

My friend was also addicted to documentaries, and one night he watched one about the treatment of animals during the raising and butchering process. He went to bed that night and woke up in the morning and never ate animals again.

How did you stop eating meat? Tell me.

Here are some ideas:
The Easy Way to Give up Meat: http://lighterfootstep.com/2007/05/the-easy-way-to-give-up-meat/.

A pretty comprehensive list:
49 Good Reasons for being a Vegetarian, http://www.britishmeat.com/49.htm

Refuting one of the most common beliefs, that vegetarianism makes you weak:
Giving up Meat doesn't hurt Princeton's athletes, http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/02/27/20262

And a wonderful article by Johnathon Safran Foer about how and why he decided to go
meatless: The Fruits of Family Trees, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11foer-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Apologies to everyone who decided years ago to give up flesh-eating...find out how far or how little the debate has advanced since then.

An Unconscious Bounty

I've been digging around on YouTube lots lately, and devouring the short talks of David Wolfe, a raw foods expert and author. His enthusiasm is infectious. His language is Dude. He is great! I’ve flipped through his book Amazing Grace and it is deeply, joyfully inspiring.

"Why are people sick, eating the food they’re eating? The soil’s not loved, the animals aren’t loved, the way its shipped isn’t loving, the way its stored isn’t loving, the way its prepared isn’t loving, the way its eaten isn’t loving. No wonder. And we’re still surviving. Barely. People aren’t living longer, but they’re dying longer."

He is so right about the love. He's saying what I am thinking.

And then, I hear the fear implanted in this way of thinking, along with the superiority of it (“We raw foodists are among the top 1%,” he told a self-congratulatory group during a juicing workshop) and...I wish it didn't have to go there. Saying over and over: “We’re dying from this. It’s a tragedy. Milk has pus in it. It’s astounding anyone can survive how we eat. It’s killing us.”

This rhetoric is not about the love. It is spreading the fear. People are eating fear. And other people are thinking they are superior for eating the healthiest food ever, but they are soaking in fear and separation-thinking, too.

Sure, I’m conflicted.

I've been on a backslide lately. I've been attracted again to lowly sugar-based crud for the first time in ages. Only lard-filled, chocolate-flavored pseudo cakes would do, eaten compulsively. Ho-Hos. Hostess cupcakes covered with the icing you can lift off like one unbroken carpet of frosting, the white squiggles clearly drawn on by a machine.

Time for a visit to the dig site for a bit of nutritional/emotional archeology. Upon excavation, I have found a pattern.

It was the mid 70’s and I was a little kid. My parents were on a “health kick.” They were collecting ‘Back to the Land’ books. They were also into our heritage, so the Norwegian portions of us were forced to swallow a tablespoon of cod liver oil every evening. We had health foods in the house, but no real will to prepare them.

Raw foods had only been barely invented by a bunch of crazies in some California commune. Juicing was done by recluses who used to be insurance agents in places like Big Sur to prepare the body for the rigors of interplanetary travel. There was no soy, little understanding of organic produce, Goji berries were still hiding out in the Himalayas, and every health food store was simply lined with plastic bottles of vitamins. With fruit leather planted next to the cash register.

My personal idea of health food would have been granola-ice cream bars with about 890 calories a piece. Which were considered healthy because they used brown sugar instead of white sugar to make them. But we didn’t buy those.

I packed my own lunch for school. It was usually a piece of fruit and some warmed-up Campbell’s soup in a thermos. Eating this was like eating a moderately portioned serving of self-hatred and low self-worth every day. All the other kids could just smell the neglected freak in me.

Other kids had cute metal lunch boxes with a white bread samwich, little crunchy bag of potato chips, an apple or banana, a thermos of orange juice, and a plastic wrapped Hostess cupcake. Their jewel-like perfection looked delicious to me. So that’s how it tasted, when your mom was there to pack your lunch every morning. So that’s what it was like when she even considerately put a cute paper napkin along with. The dream childhood. A very Brady Christmas.

Now. To a nutritional "extremist," the typical packed American kid’s lunch sounds like it should be included in a study of Unconscious Societal Infanticide. That kind of lunch and living has led to my fellow students now struggling with hanging white bread guts and cola-poked teeth, diverticulosis, ovarian cysts, early heart attacks. Did my parents do me a favor, not buying that?

My family had an OCD approach to weekends. We struggled through the week with the health food plans, but on the weekend we could taste the freedom. We shared popcorn or chips with Friday night TV. We ate a box of Keebler cookies or a Sara Lee Bavarian Cream pie after weekend dinners. Because we couldn’t have anything sweet during the week, we tore into these, a bunch of slavering wolves. Even so, the food was carefully controlled so that we didn’t get more than we needed. And there wasn’t enough to go around. Everyone got a medium-sized piece, my mom asked for ‘just a sliver,’ and my always-athletically slim dad sneakily and thoroughly gobbled down the rest when our backs were turned.

If food is really love, according to MFK Fisher, there was not a surfeit of love in the house. My folks were in survival mode -- survival in the suburbs. They were both strangely dissatisfied, trying to make things better and more healthy and more family, but unaware that what was missing was more heart, more love, more presence.

Those sweets to me represented power and freedom. The freedom of the weekend, to let the straitjacket of rules and high intentions drop. The power to eat whatever satisfies you. And what satisfied me, or rather what glimmered at me, was cheap chocolate snack foods, the more shallowly made and brightly packaged and conspicuously useless, the better. They represented rightness to me. No controversy, no dissatisfaction. The right kind of kid, the right kind of family, with harmony and plenty for all.

They say kids copy the eating habits of the dominant parent. I soaked up the effect of my dad’s power over the food. He always got more treats to eat than anyone else, and he always ate them alone. I do the same thing to this day, when my Hyde is laughing in my Jekyll’s face.

In some ways, it wouldn’t have mattered if I my mom had packed me a healthy lunch rather than a twinkified lunch. It was the care and nurturing I was after. I wanted to know her, by feeling her care of me. I know she was doing her best, and in the 70's, she was in the minority as a working mother, yet still alone responsible for feeding everyone even though she worked as hard as my dad did.

But I craved the experience of not having to constantly comfort myself; rather the safety of knowing someone cared about what I ate, and that I ate at all, and that I didn’t go hungry. The act of packing food for a child with love is an important one.

It’s packing a juicer with the love that is a major element of the success of the David Wolfes (and I only know him from Youtube) of the world. But the superiority act leaves a burnt taste in my mouth. Tell me more about the love and the nurturing, Dude. That’s what we’re really after.

Wild Rice Creation Story

I found a lovely film about the sacred food of the Anishinabe in Minnesota: the wild, long grain rice.



It's interesting the language that the seed companies have already implanted into our society: that they would be creating "genetically superior" rice. It astounds me that anyone, thinking about it deeply, could ever imagine that something artificially altered could be genetically 'superior' to something that has lived on earth and responded to natural conditions, altering itself and adapting, for millenia. How could that be? The Anishinabe narrator tells the story using the language that we have all begun to absorb: a concept of 'genetic superiority' that was supposed to have died with Hitler.

It was just something that stuck out and shouted at me when I watched the film. I don't want to learn the Monsantan language, thank you, because it plants in my consciousness unhealthy and altered words that have nothing to do with the real thing.

Course Description

Here is my website description for my class on Enchanted Cooking & Soul Nutrition. I am continuing to look for venues and gather courage to teach it. It is going to be great.

Once upon a time people sang to the seeds during planting and loved the roots free as the earth released them during harvest. Learn skills of intense and gentle focus in order to enhance every aspect of your life, beginning with self-nourishment. Undertaking shamanic journeys to the land spirits of our food, we will re-enchant the raw materials with their ancestral dreams as we cook and bake together. As we explore soul nutrition and the role of sacred food, we will practice the skills of singing the seeds and animative breathing as well as the art of composing the palate/palette of a meal...whose ingredients become a metaphor for the wholly-lived, delicious life.