FOODIE

 

This is some local NE chevre with some herbes de provence and peppercorns, a slice of homemade wheatberry bread, a mason jar with Spanish olive oil and the core of a locally grown green pepper.

hi, lunch. 

 

These are some cookies I made for Purim, the Jewish traditional holiday where the Biblical heroine Esther is celebrated with exchanges of good fortune in the form of cookies and other foodstuffs. This sounds like my ideal holiday: the celebration of a righteously diplomatic, kind and principled woman and food (specifically cookies, my kryptonite). 

Yes. 

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Sometimes I pride myself on being a little bit of a foodsnob, and other times I am more humble because I occasionally want a bowl of cheerios at midnight (albeit they are usually the artisan local variety adrift in locally sourced soy milk). And sometimes (usually at the end of the month), I feel a slight sense of remorse at the goodness a new paycheque has brought me in the form of ingredients and fixins. This article helped me gain a little bit of perspective and guidance, although the author's focus was on food associated with hanging out with other 14 year olds and my problem is focused on food associated with afternoon walks in suburbs of Paris, mistakenly delicious alleyways in Brugges, and markets in London. That's not even to mention the cafes in New York or even The Garden. 

(OH! That Garden!!)

Like I said: I'm a snob.

The same basic principle applies in the long run I guess:
Be more humble.

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CONSTANTLY:

Nourish your body: nourish your spirit.

Nourish each other.

Subvert the system that is feeding you garbage.

Fill with love.

(that was to be read as a command)

Real Work

I just got off a plane where a baby was literally howling for three hours straight. The connector from Denver to Lincoln should have only taken an hour and forty, but some troublesome air, and we doubled our flight time.

It gave me more time to think.

I always need more time to think.

I probably need less time to think.

Today, work was the main topic chasing itself around inside my brains. Not my work per se, not my employment, but the big, theoretical WORK work. I’m sitting there watching all of the screens in the plane. I suddenly get totally creeped out by how many screens there are. It felt very sci-borg grossy to me: this is the matrix, and we are all plugged into it. 

Every seat-back has a screen embedded, and they are a one foot distance away from the face of every human being in the plane’s womb. One is given a crumb of control in the armrest that seemingly allows volume change. What a pitiful modicum of dominion, paltry pretension of stewardship. The screens are all playing the same thing, in-synch with one another. Mine is graciously malfunctioning, and so is the only blank screen in the place (what luck).

The scene is an extended five-minute commercial for a line of luxury vehicles. Because that’s obviously what we need. 

I am struck by the juxtaposition of the wailing child and the monotony of the hyper- tan man on the screens.

There is a girl across the aisle from me that has her headphones plugged into the armrest: she is listening politely to everything they are trying to tell her, but her eyes look tired and she might not understand everything. The good news is that the exact same thing will reload in five minutes. She doesn’t need to listen. 

I incur Wendell Berry (because that is always who I incur).

Breathe with unconditional breath   

the unconditioned air.   

Shun electric wire.   

Communicate slowly. Live   

a three-dimensioned life;   

stay away from screens.   

Stay away from anything   

that obscures the place it is in.   

There are no unsacred places;   

there are only sacred places   

and desecrated places.   

 -from How To Be A Poet, 2001

And then, probably because I have been reading a book that makes me think about things like work and the world and the gospel, I begin, and I cannot stop. Why are they trying to sell a luxury sedan to this girl? What is she thinking? How insidious and totally brilliant. They win! We loose.

What are we all working for?

And then I get into meaning.

I flex my legs.

I was afraid last week that I was atrophying in my mind and my body for lack of use. I realize that my body is in the shape it is because my actions have carved it so. I'm reminded of how the story of 2010 exhibited itself on my legs after I chased my professor across Europe. The story is the same for my mind. With a holiday break, my body goes lesser-used and aches from the falling down and scrapes it encountered. Blegh. My leg is feeling weak, and not as chiseled as I remembered it. I flex, and it isn’t difficult. I need it to be difficult in order to improve. I need things to be difficult in order to improve generally. Thus, opposition in all things? Sure. 

I think they are telling her that there is meaning in having things. In buying the luxury sedan and loading your dogs into it and going to the beach alone. It’s really all about the sedan- lifestyle that accompanies such a purchase. I want to take her headphones out and ask her what she loves, her favorite color, whether she prefers early mornings or late nights, have her tell me about the boys she admires in secret. I want to tell her to love the glittery pink shirt she is wearing because she is almost too old for it. I want to tell her that it will be hard to grow up because that’s what growing is: hard. And that it will hurt. It always hurts. I want to tell her that they are lying to her. They are enslaving her into a life that is filled with working for dinero that will enable her to buy, buy, buy.

This is not where life has meaning. Life has meaning in working to overcome difficulty. Life exists in opposition to death, and while we may not face it on a daily basis in our cush first-world of-luxury-sedan-advertisements on airplane-rides-in-the-middle-of-the-country, it is the actual basis of existence. And we a re being lied to if we can really divorce ourselves from the actuality of death's encroachment. Death is stagnation. I want to rail at myself for forgetting this; for forgetting the beauty that comes in growth and the power that is hidden in opposition. I need to remember that it isn’t all about the benjamins. It’s about the people; always the people. 

And here we are.

Meaning in life is found in opposition and in its absence. Meaning is found in work and overcoming. Meaning is found in change. Not luxury sedans, but howling babies whose ears hurt because of the altitude's sharpness. The baby who doesn't know that his pain will end.

roots.

I just finished another book last week. It makes for seven so far this year (secret wish: 2011 will be the the year of the book. So far, so good.).
It was good. I don't want to hyperbolize in saying that it was amazing or incredible or ground-breaking, earth-shattering, mind-blowing, but life-changing might be apt.


I have a longstanding love affair going with a man.


His name is Wendell.
This latest book, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community is tempting to eclipse my first love, The Unsettling of America. In some ways, it's the same story re-told 20 years later. In other ways, it's refined stewardship, refined love. Refinements are nice.

I think a big factor in why I love W. Berry so much is that he makes me feel like I am at home. He helps me remember that earth is a sacred place, and that there is love in abundance. Lately, I have been feeling rather home-less. I have a roof over my head, but a roof that I can't afford any longer, and a home that feels like it has been invaded and changed. It's a strange feeling, one with which I am not well acquainted, and which I am having a hard time coping. Berry is a steward of the earth, and his words beg common sense, not political partying and raucous silliness.  He talks about sex as a communion, and as a integral part of communities. His words are clearsighted and beautiful.
I should stop raving about him and just encourage you to read his books.

And then I will tell you how it has changed me.

I read that the Bible is a a hypaethral book, one that is to be read open to the skies. Like so many ancient temples. I will let Berry do the rest of the explaining:  It (the Bible) is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. That is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air, and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances, will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine--which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.
What the Bible might mean, or how it could mean anything, in a closed, air-conditioned building, I do not know. I know that holiness cannot be confined. When you think you have captured it, it has already escaped; only its poor, pale ashes are left. It is after this foolish capture and the inevitable escape that you get translations of the Bible that read like a newspaper. Holiness is everywhere in Creation, it is as common as raindrops and leaves and blades of grass, but it does not sound like a newspaper. 
(As a side note, my baby brother wrote me from Germany, encouraging me to consider the lilies of the field, saying, "You don't have to run around frantically trying to find yourself and what you should do when all you've got to do is calm down and look to your father in heaven for guidance." What a great human being, B. Harris.) 

 

zinnia babies sprouted this week!

It makes me yearn for spring so much. It makes me wish for our garden and to community we built there. In some ways I hate that community, and the ways that it became so all-encompassing and so engaging of my life.  I maybe need a new community. Maybe I need to go home to help my dad build a house. And then again, that community is one of the major reasons I am still in Provo. Basically this all brings me to feeling rootless and ill at ease, unsure of my convictions and my decision to stay.
So I plant zinnias and rosemary and put them on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. I bake whole wheat bread and I pray for direction as to where I can put some roots into the soil so that again, I can open up that book and open my heart to the sky.

ps. If anyone wants to give me another reason to stay (or better yet, BE my reason to stay), I am open to suggestions. The only thing keeping me here now is my signature on a contract and the vague promises of summer.