Towards a Food Culture

A culture of Food is the living relationship with a place. Humans, over hundreds of years, have developed ways of eating that allow them to survive in a place according to what grows there. Eating what thrives in a place allows us as animals also to thrive. We learned what not to eat because it is poisonous and we learned how to prepare foods so that by cooking them or preparing them in certain ways or in certain combinations, we are able to receive the most nourishment out of them. And accordingly, as this was passed down mother to daughter, the ways of cooking and preparing what is locally abundant became a culture, a way of eating that when looked at as a whole, epitomizes a culture and its relationship to place. Think of Mexican food, Thai food, Italian food, Japanese food. Greek food.

We were in Greece, and it was absolutely extraordinarily beautiful and wonderful. And part of why it was so stunning- apart from amazing sunny weather, warm ocean water for swimming, Tai Chi and Chi Gong every day for 6 hours, and friends- is that the food was not only completely delicious, the food culture came from there. Being an Island, it is easier to keep one's food culture intact without the press of fast food and corn syrup breathing quite so steeply down one's neck.

We ate mussels with ouzo and dill-feta cheese sauce, sundried- grilled Mackerel, tzatziki, dolmades, bread with sesame seeds all over it, wine, ouzo, sun-dried grape wine, Greek salad, cooked chicory greens, spinach, grilled lamb, baklava and on and on. Everything was in season, delicious, and came out of the food traditions of that place. I wanted to eat Greece into my belly and bring it home- I bought salt, sage, thyme, oregano, olive oil, and stuffed grape leaves to bring home. And then, when I got here, I recreated as many of the meals as I could. But it tasted different. Being here, one needs to eat things from here. Maybe not all the time- it is still fun to go out to an Italian or Thai restaurant once in a while. Bt i notice, that I want to eat the things that grow here and that come from here. I don't cook, for example, the way I did in New Mexico, because I learned the food that was traditional there to eat.  Now, I am learning what is traditional for here.

For example, corn, beans, squash, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, are all "New World" plants, meaning they come from the American Continent (north and south). Fava beans, lentils, grains, brassicas (the cabbage family), carrots, parsnips, turnips come from here. That doesn't mean I am never going eat a potato or that I won't have tomatoes in my garden next year. But it is an interesting thing to begin to be aware of what belongs here, to this soil. What grows best, how the traditions of cooking come from the things that are indigenous to this place.

I don't know the answer, but I am definitely interested in trying to cook and grow my way into an answer.

Buying a House

or preparing to, is a rather frightening, life altering, enormous, rather disordering thing. Looking through ones finances, which are embarrassingly small and unlooked through, trying to put together a list of what needs to be paid each month, which is a frighteningly huge amount, and trying to keep the garden planning to a bare minimum before I know I am actually going to have one, which is damn near impossible, are all the order of the day. Combined with fighting with my wife, crying at the drop of  a hat, feeling all disturbed and somewhere else most of the time, and in turns not eating and not sleeping (at least they don't occur simultaneously for some reason). I'm a slight mess, as you can probably imagine.

The handmade life and vision of living with the land and plants and animals through the experiments, skills, prayers, and creativity that we can muster up to create beauty in the small piece of earth we call home is about to become one step closer to true. After almost 10 years of dreaming about it, it is possibly going to find root, or seed, and begin to actually grow in the actual earth. I am a slight mess, as you can probably imagine and am taking refuge in making peach pies and plum butter and apple butter and apple cake and apple sauce so that the bounty of this season right now right here does not go to waste.

Oh, and the 25 tomato plants are still doing fine and producing happily. We have three actual eggplants growing and I am going to plant some lettuce. For dinner, I am making tomato-thyme stuffed sourdough flatbread with lebanese Labneh cheese and olive oil cured eggplant tonight. WIth Peach Pie for dessert. So is this life, great huge choices and decisions and then dinner. Trying to build a relationship with the food culture here as well as the food itself and where it comes from. Most preferably, in our backyard, is fraught with both such moments- it is that big and that small, that life changing and that every day. Somehow, we live our lives in the tension between, fighting, playing, making love, making choices, and offering as much beauty to the world as possible.

I'll post pictures of the house when it is ours. Wish us luck!

on some ship, passing through

the next bardo. I woke up somehow, simply, ready, this morning. That is, ready to be an adult in my life and step into this great vision that we were bold enough to dream up and even bolder to now make manifest. Or allow to manifested through us while our butts are getting kicked by the holy. It is a scary thing when all of your dreams are about to come true and anyone who says anything else is either lying or selling something. In any event, I woke up this morning and sat at the altar with the roses and the Picture of Matka Chestechowa (yesterday was her feast day) and felt somehow calm and at peace and ready. Still scared, but willing to do it anyway- start a business of a healing arts center, teach classes, have clients, make herbal medicines, have a garden, a dog, chickens and sheep, and whatever else shows us is needed.

And still, I feel as if I am passing through the Bardo time, the time between. It is only that I've stopped kicking and screaming as I was being dragged into the boat. Or being beaten by Chairon's oar. Chairon is the ferrier across the river Styx. He must be paid by a coin and usually the passage is one way. Unless you are lucky enough to have a second coin, or a golden bough, be a heroine, or to borrow from another myth, a Phoenix. Even though I have no idea which of the options will show up at their appointed time, I now I am sitting calmly, with no idea of where I am being taken, but watching the scenery go by and the journey unfold. At the moment, it is enough to notice that the fear and doubt and overwhelm, is only a mind trick, a moment of freak out that need only be recognized and then, as my friend said the other night, "put where it belongs", to which I replied, "The Compost!"

Schwindelig

Or, dizzy. Which is how I feel. We went to the bank to talk about buying this house and we are not even sure if we want this one. And new jobs are starting and Nic is turning 40, and my sister is getting married, and there is a whole list of things running around in my head and I am frankly, dizzy. And have no appetite, so there will be no foodie posts for the next little while.

What is interesting to me is to think about what a person needs and what for and why. How much land does a person need? Is it important to have one's own land or can one rent it long term with first right of refusal in case the owner decides to sell. And what about a garden? For food? For flowers? For healing herbs? What about a community healing herb garden? But where?

I have the longing for my/our own land and house and the opportunity to grow roots that flower through art, bodywork and healing arts practices, tai chi and chi gong, cooking and being a foodie, gardens of food and healing herbs, a place for gathering, a place to offer performances, maybe, or have musical gatherings and food gatherings, a place to have contact with the natural, unhuman, wild (as wild as possible in western europe outside of the Alps) world, for others to go out into the green and experience Hildegard's Viriditas. And I am fully aware of the sickness of owning things, of consumption and greed in which I was raised. The United States being the prime explosively grand example of humanity's three downfalls, or as the Buddha said, Three Poisons, Greed, Hatred, and Delusion.

And yet, the longing to live such a life, albeit beset by greed and the perilous pitfalls and temptations that lie therein, is actually based on the larger, deeper, older callings of my soul. My soul's call to create a vision of good, of wellbeing, peace and ultimately the expression of Love that we all are and, unhindered by the three aforementioned poisons, freely express and offer as our life energy and life work. The wish is to offer or assist healing in people, the earth, our relationships with other people, with plants, the earth and all elements, our own souls and this wildness we continually attempt to destroy within us.

The question, is this the right house/land/place/crucible for our vision to manifest in its full beauty and entirety in a never before thought or seen way that is bigger than anything we can dream up, is, on the one hand, pointless, in that all places can and are available for such an undertaking because it is our own energy and hands and hearts that make the vision jump up and live. On the other, it is absolutely valid, in that we need, for example, community, clients, friends, fellow foodie marauders dedicated to such a strange underworld path with which we can commune, celebrate, co-create, communicate, and collaborate. And we need the space to do it. And, perhaps most of all, the blessing of the spirits and the ancestors of the place in order that we and our ancestors and all the unseen holy can work together to create such a thing of beauty that it feeds the whole universe.

This is not just a small question, or a question of great spiritual weight. It is also a question of money, of pragmatics- can we afford to pay the mortgage? Where do we find more money to put in at the beginning so there is less to pay over the long haul (interest rates being what they are)? How do we build a healing arts practice that actually flourishes and feeds us, not only metaphorically, but literally. How do we build a life and can we do it there? And why there and not somewhere else? If we stop looking now, perhaps we have missed the right house just around the next corner? This is only the third house we have actually looked at, shouldn't we wait and see a few more?

Or is it just a matter of choosing? Of saying, ok, there is this place, offered to us, brought to us by the owners who want to sell it to us. Here is a place that for our practice and the Zusammen Center for Healing Arts is incredibly well situated. A house that is well connected to Frankfurt, in a beautiful area, with potential community and not too far from our friends. Let's just do it and get to work. Let's just decide this will work and go leaping into the future. Flying is possible, but one must leap away from everything one knew, all ideas, visions of how something would or should or could. One must be willing to risk everything to gain everything. One gets out only what one puts in, which could be everything. One can fly, but one must risk the dying and trust in the phoenix' flight out of the ashes. One can only trust in the holy, the divine, and one's own heart. The rest must be offered wholly and totally. Flying is possible when one has the couer-age, the heart, to leap. And before the leap, looking down from these heights, thinking oh, no, I can't jump out into that, it is too high, too vast, too big, too everything I have wished for, too everything is possible, too there are no excuses anymore, too there are no safety nets, one gets a bit dizzy.

To buy a house

is a very great thing indeed. And scary, and exhilarating, and in turns full of doubt and confusion and followed by blinding insight and vision. We don't know yet if this is the one. But someone showed up and said that they are selling a house and they would like to sell it to us. And it doesn't have very much land attached to it, but we can rent land for the fields and sheep with a right of refusal if the owners decide to sell. We go on Sunday for cake and to look around and see the area more and go swimming nearby (!) in the forest (!) and walk in the fields and see how it feels.

But if all goes well, we would buy this house and the dream/vision will have officially begun. Chickens, sheep and dog to follow. And no more vacations for a while. So everyone has to come visit us! There is a guest room available in exchange for help in the garden, which now is full of grass. And there are so many ideas! instead of my own healing herbs garden, i would start a community one in the area. I would put in an horno and we would have a small seasonal restaurant in our courtyard, and we would start fundraising for the girls, and on and on...so, the plans just change and mutate according to what we are being offered and given. Which in this case could be a house with a separate practice space attached- for bodywork, tai chi, chi gong, singing, herbs, homeopathy...

Life is full right now, and I have no idea what will happen next. We hear from the Bank next week about how much it would cost each month for mortgage and insurance and then we see if we can afford it. Everything is possible. (House on the left, workshops and stalls on the right.)

Priesthood

I was talking with a friend the day before yesterday about religion and spirituality and church and priesthood. He is thinking about starting a church for folks who don't fit into and don't want to fit into any religious box. A place for folks to come together and then drift away again after having a place in which to reconnect to source. I wished him always great invisibility, and that no one would make of him the charismatic center of the center. I've seen how that ruins people. Who said that?- absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Another friend has recently ordained and it took me several days or maybe weeks to write to him because my own past was too much in front of my eyes and heavy on my heart to be able to write a limpid "congratulations, how wonderful" and leave it at that.

Here is an excerpt from my email to him:

I did not write, but I thought of you on the day you ordained... for my own person, i am at a place in my life where it is clear to me that it does not serve for me to be a priest in a traditional way, and I did not know how to write to you of these things on that day, when your own ordination was so fresh and new and beautiful and strong within you. I wanted you to have that time without writing something that would seem, on the surface, to contradict what you have just undergone. Which i do not, actually, contradict, it is only that I now have a more trickster, backwards, underworld approach to it all.

I
 no longer put on my robes or shave my head or sit zazen, but that does not mean i do not live my vows every day. It is just that there is absolutely no recognizable form. My life has its own form and shape and container in which i try to express beauty and share my gifts. i strive to be patient (a life long process of learning), gentle, kind, wild, powerful, strong, creative, and respectful of all life. This is what i wish for you as well. No matter what form it takes- and it may take this zen form for the rest of this lifetime and it may not-i wish for you that you always live beyond the form, bigger than it, not beholden to any dogma but only to the urgings and wisdom and calling of your own wild soul. I hope that you are a priest always in the temple of your own heart… i wish for you that you do not lose the myriad facets and jewel-like beauty of your you-ness in all that black cloth, but that you become even more you, more brightly alive in your you-ness with each passing day… honor the teacher within you, always, he will never steer you wrong.

 So, congratulations on passing through this threshold, this next initiation in your life. I am proud of you, you are still "doin' it", opening up your life to the depths of source.

                                    -----------------------

The truth of the matter is, I think the time for priests is over. I cannot now put on my robes and fill that role, because I do not see any meaning it. I see no reason to uphold the tradition of Zen, which comes at the expense of women, through a male Japanese lineage. Culturally beautiful though it is, it doesn't have anything to do with my life here, in Germany. And though there was great and immense and deep value in my having undergone the training I did, there is at this time not a reason for me to continue to carry the dogma of the tradition around. Whether or not I will return to the teachings of the Buddha as a practitioner and student remains yet to be seen. I do not know where my spiritual path will lead. But I do know that I have been cured of wanting to be someone's priest. That role seems doomed to failure- both socially, spiritually, and societally. I do not see a reason for it as a meaningful way for the development of my own path and for the releasing of habits, fears, infantilisms, wounds, and hierarchies within my own or anyone else's mind.

My deep and abiding vow has been and always will be to love all beings. Said another way, to be always in love with life and her myriad expressions. To see the holy in all things and to offer beauty to feed that which feeds me, namely the divine. I seek now only, as the write Herman Hesse wrote, to listen to the whisperings of my blood. Here is a portion of the prologue from the book Demian, a book which deeply affected me as a teenager, which expresses well that which I have attempted to express. (Read Hesse's word "man" as gender neutral for person/human being.)

...I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

…Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at anytime before, and men—each one of whom represents an unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature—are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and re-markable point at which the world's phenomena intersect,only once in this way and never again. That is why everyman's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why everyman, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration.

…I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. 1 have been and still am a seeker, hut I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.

…Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that—one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birth—the slime and eggshells of his primeval past—with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below. Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of us—experiments of the depths—strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.
                                                           -------------------
Enough said. Until next time.

because there are so many things I don't want to do right now...

 i am procrastinating, but  as creatively as possible.

I should do the dishes, pack, clean the house, make phone calls, etc. But it is late and i worked almost 12 hours today standing up the whole time and i hurt all over. So, i think it is ok to procrastinate, a little.

My favorite way f procrastinating at the moment is looking up cool stuff on the internet, checking people's blogs, and watching gourmet's diary of a foodie, which i have mentioned before.

The fun thing is, we are going to Belgium tomorrow to visit friends for the long weekend. And I should be excited about packing, but I have ti find a suitcase and empty it out first in order to be able to pack. And that means moving the bed frame from in front of the attic door and climbing up into the now growing dark attic and finding a suitcase, lugging it down the stairs, turning on the bottom step 180 degrees to deposit my disgusting attic only shoes on the top step so they don't come into the house. Then I have take out whatever is in it- winter clothes, a duvet, blankets, whatever else- and put it somewhere. Then I actually have to pack the things I want to bring, which require looking through my closet and actually making decisions about what i want to wear in two days time. Which I hate. I think packing for a short trip is worse than for a long one, because you don't want to bring too much and there fore have to plan ahead of time what to wear. The only thing I plan ahead of time is food, sometimes days in advance.

Like for my new job, for instance. I started cooking at  a little health food store cafe today (not having anything to do with the other health food store or that cafe across the courtyard) at a farm. I made Zucchini Pancakes, pepper and eggplant sauce ( a la ratatouille), green salad, a big plum cake (german not english), and an apple wine cake. I had all of that planned last friday. Easy peasy. Clothing? not really.

But the important thing is we are going away for a few days and we are going to visit two dear friends who just moved to Brussels. And they are foodies, so we have, of course, already planned a large part of the menu. We're going to try dosas, he is going to make fresh Spaetzle, which I have not yet had, she is making a soup tomorrow night for which i should bring cilantro, and we are going out to breakfast, so that leaves only a few meals to maybe go out and eat something belgian, or give our bellies a rest and eat a salad.

Ok, enough procrastinating, time to pack the ingredients for dosas and rummage around up there in the waning light for a suitcase.....au revoir!