Sugar

Hello dears, please, please, please watch this video. It is long- 1.5 hours, but vitally important. It is the anatomical/physiological reason why I do not eat sugar and you should not either. I did not know this when I stopped eating it a year ago, but I did know I was addicted to it and it made me fat and bloated and cranky. If you are not addicted to sugar (which i don't believe, but i'll give you the benefit of the doubt) then splurge once in a while(say, birthday cake), but otherwise don't eat it. Instead of sugar, I eat fresh, cooked, or dried fruit, honey, maple syrup, and rice syrup and I feel very different after eating these things than when I ate sugar. Here is why: Sugar:The Bitter Truth.

Snow

It is finally winter here in Germany after an early visit from Spring over Christmas. It has snowed several days in a row and things are looking decidedly wintry, which I am grateful for. I can hear the earth settling in finally for a rest and the trees and birds finally joining in the silence and deep waiting of winter. Somehow, with it being this cold and snowy, I allow myself the time to cook, to stay indoors, and to be quieter. because of last weeks unseasonally warm temperatures and the welcome visit of 5 days of sun (unbelievable!)we had such a fit of spring cleaning and cabin fever that everything whipped up into action around here- moving furniture, throwing papers away that have been piled up and not looked at for the entire year of 2012, the commitment- again- to consuming less and having less and overcoming both of our inheritances of "eclectic stuff piling up on every flat surface" and the "inability to throw things away for sentimental reasons" and keep the house devoid of said piles and extraneousness.

I have been cooking lots of buckwheat crepes, or Galette, filled with savory things like kale in a goat cheese sauce with green tomato chutney. And I received a Kitchen-Aid from my loving parents for my belated birthday present and plan on baking lots of gluten free, sugar free, cow dairy free cakes. Spanish almond tort, beet and chickpea cake (which I have already baked and is amazing) greek walnut cake, something with poppy seeds, and so forth.

And I thought I would include the recipe for the Dessert I made last night. YUM!
Apple Puree with Almond Butter Vanilla Sauce

For the apple puree:
4-8 (depending on size) apples of several different varieties-  If you can find old varieties from the farmer's market that would be best. Otherwise, Boskop, Macintosh, Braeburn, Fiji, whatever floats your boat.
Juice from one half a lemon
Nutmeg to taste

Peel and core the apples. Chop half of them and put them into a pan with a bit of water covering the bottom. Bring to a boil, cover, and let sit until cool. Grate the other half of the apples and leave them raw. When the cooked apples are cool, add the grated apple, lemon juice and Nutmeg and puree with desired implement.

For the sauce:
1/2 cup almond butter
1 cup water
Honey to taste
Vanilla to taste

Slowly add the water to the almond butter, stirring well to incorporate the water as you go. Add honey and vanilla and heat over low heat just until the sauce thickens but long before it boils.

Portion apple puree in bowls and pour over the warm almond butter sauce.

Tonight after dinner we are going to make hot apple cherry juice with mulling spices and watch a movie, perfect for a snowy evening.






 

Going Feral

Lost

Stand still.The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask it permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner

Renewing my commitment to spending time at least out of doors into whatever green I can, if not completely out of reach or out of ear shot of trains, cars, and people. Playing with the idea of  Friday Foray, in which I go out, regardless of weather, to be with the Ravens, Wrens, Trees and Bushes and further my knowing and being known. To harvest plants or to just spend time with the green ones and the brook and the sky and the Mouse Buzzard. And then maybe posting about it to keep me honest and to reflect on and report what I have heard and been touched by. And also longing desperately and deeply for mountains and wilderness and hatching plans for when and how as soon as possible to get out into them. Anyway, that is what is important for me at the start of the new year- spending more time outside, committing afresh to study and spiritual practice, and giving energy to my Tai Chi and bodywork practice. Blessings.

It is like this every year, isn't it, honey?

The end of the year closes in on us, as it does every year. I have had my usual holiday overwhelm from too much food and people and am now in a sort of half-retreat, studying plant medicine and walking in the meadows. However, this year I did not have the health crisis I did last year! Hooray! I have eaten no sugar for one year and I made it through Christmas in Germany without eating sugar, cow milk, gluten and pork.

At first, I had no intention of making cookies, not having eaten them for a year, but then about a week before Christmas I gave in and made Buckwheat gingerbread men, thank you to the fabulous simply sugar and gluten free website. And I made chocolate covered toasted almond haystacks with orange peel and cardamom and little balls of yumminess out of honey marzipan rolled with a mix  of dates, raisins, and apricots, spices, and cocoa. Yum. And my dear friends and family went along and cooked only things I can eat. So there was no sugar hangover and no weight gain and no having to say, i am sorry but I cannot eat that. What a relief. And I received as a belated birthday present from my beloved parents who came to visit for 12 days, a Kitchen-aid! Hooray! Now I can cook, bake, and later make ice cream from coconut milk once I buy the ice cream bowl. Life is good.

And I had my usual Christmas religious/spiritual confusion and Great Doubt, as it is called in Buddhism. After growing up the first 9 years of my life with no church of any kind and a secular Christmas, and then the next 7 years with weekly church visits (which I never found meaningful and would sit in the back of the church using sign language to talk with my friends) and then the years of my early twenties where I explored religion, spirituality and mysticism, practicing yoga, reading Joseph Campbell, moving to Santa Fe and finally moving into a Buddhist Center, it is all rather jumbled up. (Oh and we still had a secular Christmas complete with tree and presents in the Buddhist Center!) So, every year when Christmas comes around, the secular celebrations of feasting together and giving gifts, and the returning of the light as the days grow longer, still hold meaning for me. But I never know what to do with the religious overlay/underlay with the whole thing and end up feeling very confused why I celebrate anything in the first place on the 25th, because that doesn't have any spiritual meaning for me. There is always an underlying level of restlessness and questioning around this that doesn't have the time in stillness and meditation or walking in the forests that it needs to be with because of all of the cooking, shopping, eating etcetera.

But more will have to wait, because the sun is now shining for the first time in weeks there is a blue sky and I have to go out into it because it is truly the return of life at this latitude!
I promise, I'll write more soon.

Back

Writing again, a bit hesitantly, but also curious about what will come up out of this system that is me. My life is still full of the same components as 6 months ago- loving food and cooking it for people, spinning and knitting wool, learning about and from the plants around me, studying to be a naturopath, developing my bodywork practice of massage, Ortho-Bionomy®, energy work, practicing Chi Gong and Tai Chi, being with friends and making new ones, working at the little organic foods shop down the street, writing my plays (still the same one, it takes sooooo long), eating/healing with Rosacea and food allergies, giving time to my marriage with my wonderful wife, and moving with intention towards our vision of land and sheep and garden and working with girls who are victims of sex-trafficking.

I am touched, every day, by the beauty of this world, the fragility of it and of our species, overwhelmed, every day by our immense stupidity and the senseless destruction of our own environment and the non-sensical idea and therefore reality that we are separate from nature rather than an eating, sleeping, defecating, sexing animal, jus like all of the other mammals around us. Every day, I hunger for the remedy for this huge suffering , this gaping wound that we have inflicted upon ourselves and our world. I attempt to assuage this hunger with the above mentioned list, I attempt to feed beauty to this crack of despair always shining through whatever it is I am involved in. I practice every day, to remember, to not forget, the way it really is, where we really come from, and the real work of this lifetime. Maturation is not an easy task, soul level revolution is not easy to come by when living in this consumer plagued sleep of ours.

This is what hand made means- to remember, to always and again, remember. To remember that I am a part of this golden web of life- as all of us are, that my life- as everyone's is-, simply by the living of it and the struggle to stay awake and to offer beauty with each word, each meal, each conversation, each touch, is a part of the great work all of us have at this time to do. To allow this pain- the grief and despair at the "state of things" to pull me, as it always does, and as I always beg it to, to pull me down, into soul, into depth. Persephone-like, returning to the deeps, the dark, the ancestors, the dreams, the too-long-neglected parts of myself that are hungrily nipping at my feet, thighs, knees, for nourishment, for attention and recognition, for inclusion and integration. The call to go down and in must be answered, it is the only way for me to find wholeness, health, and heart in the face of such crushing mindless destruction (and the fight for the presidency).

So, here I am again, writing. Perhaps this next while will show the chronicle of my time through this part of the yearly cycle, Persephone's disappearance- her abduction, perhaps, but maybe also her answering of the call, of what is wild and dark and unseen and powerful in her. The call of renewal, of entering the cave of the Bear in hibernation- she who dreams the world again into life.

We are moving towards the darkest night of the year, moving towards the festivals of the light, moving towards the time of death, of cold, of white and gray and dark. We are moving towards the time of surviving the winter. The garlic is planted, the last Tomatoes hang on the plants, the snows are gathering, and the compost needs to be laid out on the gardens. I wonder, what will happen in this time of loss and renewal?

On Thriving

From an email to a friend

 I remember I said to you that I am lucky because I have this skin problem which forced me to eat this way to gain my health back. The korean buddhist teacher of my former teacher always used to say, bad karma is good karma, and this is a good example of it. Somehow, the human species just doesn't do things to take care of itself until things hurt or are sick- the same is true on the environmental level- it has to get to a crisis before we'll change our habits. And I think many women have the idea that they want to lose weight, usually first for vanity reasons (i know it always was with me, and i still check out my stomach every morning to see if it is bigger or smaller, some habits die hard, if at all). I always wanted to lose weight and be thinner and, in my mind, more beautiful. And I also wanted to be healthy, but not as much as I wanted to be beautiful, which in my idea meant thinner and in better shape. And interestingly, although I tortured myself with self incrimination, the longing to be thinner or in better shape and the hating of the fat on my body never, ever, got me to lose weight. I always just kept eating yummy food, enjoying it and continued along being miserable afterwards.

Now that I have done years of healing around my eating issues and worked with my own feelings of self-judgment and self-hate to the extent that I can honestly say that I love myself, I have the opportunity to work with this skin problem of mine on a "physical" level. (Though, of course, nothing is only physical.) But now coming from the physical health standpoint, in terms of digestion and assimilation, elimination, Liver, Kidney, and so on, and how that then shows itself on my skin as Rosacea. The more I do this way of eating, the more I see that it is not something I am doing "to get rid of the Rosacea" although that was definitely my idea at the beginning, but actually something I am doing for my wellbeing for the long term. That I have lost weight and my skin is getting better are important side effects, as it were, but they are becoming less the central focus. I am also lucky because I am curious about health and I want to be an herbalist and a naturopathic doctor and so forth, so I have the inspiration as well as the imperative to live what I learn and what I hope to impart to others. I look at why folks go to massage therapists or doctors or herbalists or whoever, and I see the same thing there is some discomfort and there is a wish for that discomfort to go away and we hope that those people will help us. And usually we want them to cure it without our having to change anything about our own lives.

However, we also know that prevention is the best medicine, right? and that actually we need to live a lifestyle that supports our life energy, that allows us to live the life we dream of, that helps us to achieve our goals while keeping our health, energy, vibrancy, and joy alive. And I believe it is really important to have an intention for "eating healthy" that is connected with who we really are and the expression of our unique voice, our gift in the world. Our wish does not have to be huge, or be about serving selflessly and saving the world or whatever. It can be simply the wish to live a life full of good friends, love, work that is fulfilling and the ability to be present with what is actually going on in our lives, to enjoy things while they are happening, to listen, to care and be cared about, and to live fully whatever it is we are dreaming of. Somehow, eating well, or being healthy needs to tie into that intention and be a part of realizing it and not to an intention based on losing weight so we'll look better, or be more acceptable to ourselves or society or whomever. Because that is yoking our energy and intention to that which is making us unwell, rather than what makes us thrive. And I can say only, I want to thrive.

Stinging Nettle Teachings

There is a place near here, next to a meadow and gardens, along a brook, across from a school, next to a high rise apartment building. This place has two strong beech trees, and a beautiful flowering I don't know what kind of tree, Elder trees, planties- Stinging nettle, Butterbur, Blackberry, Meadow Geranium, Cinquefoil, Giersch, wild garlic, and others I have not yet met on a first name basis. I have been going there every few days to visit, ti sit by the brook, to talk with the planties, especially one of them who is  becoming a particular friend.

Today, when I arrived, I saw that a person had been all through there ripping up the nettle for their garden (nettle makes an amazing green manure, it is as good for the garden as it is for us). The whole right side between the path and the brook was ravaged, stalks of nettle stuck nakedly up into the air, frayed at the ends from being ripped rather than cut or snapped. From the looks of it, it happened either early this morning or yesterday afternoon.  I was shocked, like the earth and plants there as well, and I started to sing and pray and put my hands on the earth to listen to what had happened and how the plant community there was feeling. And I felt an overall numbness of shock, which at first I thought was my inability to tune in because of my upset, but as my own thoughts settled, there seemed to be the familiar life energy pulse and then a feeling of cotton batting over the whole area. And then, I asked the tree next to me to tell me. I had some overall images that corroborated my feeling for how the events had "played out" and then I heard very clearly, "they will grow again".   Not as a "oh get over yourself girl" response, rather the regenerative, unstoppable, spring coming again power of the earth roaring her truth. There was sadness too in how it had happened, but there was a clear imperative to GROW, that even though I could only see the destruction, was already at work. I was a bit stunned. In my naivete and human-centric thinking, I expected from the tree a whole gamut of human emotions of outrage and anger and sadness to grief. But then again, this is not a new behavior of the human species to thoughtlessly rip out what we want from the earth and leave, whether we are thinking we are doing something good, or not (like feeding a garden that will feed us, like harvesting plants to sell or to make medicine from or to eat).

I walked away from there a bit stunned, but also grateful, as always, to have heard a small glimpse of what the plant world is humming about. And as I walked towards home, I came upon a huge stand of nettle that was larger and healthier looking than the one I had just left, and I thought, oh, I can harvest nettle here. (One of the things I had wanted to do at my place, like times before, was to fill a bag full of nettle tops for lunch tomorrow.) And I asked if I could harvest there, and heard no strong answer either way, but a general openness, and I started to harvest. And to sing the song I usually sing to the planties when I harvest- Returning, returning, returning, to the mother of us all- very mindfully harvesting stinging nettle with my bare hands, which I should say, is not usually a problem, I know how to hold the leaves without getting stung. However, this time, I got a huge sting on my middle finger, when I came in contact with the plant. I can still feel it. And I kept harvesting. And moved through the stand of nettle to another place to get fresh tips and without taking all of the tips from one area, like I learned from my grandmother.

As I looked around to see where I would go next, it struck me like a bolt of lightening in the heart- I'm not doing anything different than the man who ripped the nettle out at my place. Plants were knocked down as I had made my way through the stand, big gaps in foliage were left behind. From the path later on, I would see no trace of having been there, a trick of perspective, but the fact was, I was exactly the same kind of perpetrator, only I was taking the plants to feed my belly directly rather than my garden. I heard suddenly the voice of Paul Bergner, who I had listened to in an interview on herbmentor.com, saying," You cannot take a plant from its home, and ask the spirit of that being to move somewhere else without explaining to the plant and to the creator why you need it and how much you want to take". And then you have to receive a yes. I had asked, but not explained, I had treated the plant as my servant, expecting it to give itself to me for my health without the dignity of explaining what I wanted to do and asking for permission. When I had asked,  I had taken general non-disagreement as perfunctory permission. But the nettle people had no idea what they were supposed to agree or not agree to, so of course there was no clear response! All of these thoughts went rapid fire through my consciousness and I began to cry and to speak to the nettle people.

I apologized, and asked for their pardon, for doing exactly what I had been so outraged about a moment before. I thanked them for the lesson, for stinging me with the truth, and for helping me to wake up. I shared my appreciation for them and I began to elucidate my request, to explain why I wanted to take a part of these beings from their home, attached to the rest of the plant, with me. And I got to the words, "and I want to bring you with me because....." and there was nothing more there to say. I could not say why I wanted to bring nettle with me other than, "because I want to eat you", which seemed rather paltry and somehow obvious and needed no stating. Why did I really want to bring nettle home with me and eat her into my belly? To bring wildness, to bring wakefulness, to heal my liver and kidneys and my skin problem. To learn about nettle from nettle and to learn what it is to have my food be my medicine and my medicine, my food. To eat all of these things into my belly along with my commitment not to make this mistake again. And to not just go randomly harvesting something- through joy and excitement and appreciation and love, for sure- but without explaining to the plant and the creator why I wanted to take this plant away from where she was and what I would do with her. And to wait until I had received an unequivocal yes, and only then would I harvest the amount I was given permission to harvest.

As I made my way back to the path, still weepy and sensitive, I felt the whole circle of the process come together. And as I continued along the path a little ways, I saw that there was another stand of nettle, bigger and healthier looking, right along the path! And I heard the words, "let us come to you, do not take what you have to go and get, but let us come to you". And I thought, oh no, I can't harvest more nettle after all of that. I stood there, on the path not knowing what to do. And I felt that the words I heard were truly an acceptance of my apology and intention and explanation and an invitation to harvest a little more. So I did, but only from those plants along the path that were facing in my direction and close enough to reach. The others I left there, and I thanked the nettle people for their offering.

Crossing the brook and turning away from her around the corner, I saw the nettle plants on the left hand side of the path had been mown down with a hand scythe and had been left there. And of course, this is the worst that can happen, cutting down a plant and leaving it there for no reason, without any relationship or use. The lesson was complete and I walked home to eat, to read, and to take a nap. Tomorrow, when I eat nettle lasagne, I will eat the Beauty, the viriditas, the vital force, the chi of the nettle people into my belly, becoming one with my blood, liver, kidneys, lymph, and hormones, and the minerals becoming a part of every cell in my body.

Thank you, nettle people, for the teaching. (And to soul flower farm for the photo)