Making Food

Making food connects me to Earth. It reminds me of my need to survive through nourishment. Making food is chemistry and artistry and experience all rolled up into a room with fire and smells. Spitting tempura batter sizzles smells throughout my kitchen as I plop each chicken piece into the hot oil. Making food is time consuming and exhausting. Chopping five ingredients to bring together a beautiful coleslaw, heating the dressing to boil and pouring over the greens to cook them lightly in the bowl. Tossing. Vinegar wafting up through the sugar smells, running over each vegetable piece and locking in flavor for the tongue to savor. The scent of sourdough comes from my upstairs where it is warming on a heating pad and filling my house with aroma. Soon I will spill it out with more flour and it will become a bread or pancakes that digest easily and make others smile. That is often what making food is all about. Giving love to others. Saying you love them and showing it through taking the time to make something amazing on the tongue, tantalizing to the spirit and awakening in the soul. Nutritious collection of Earth's treasures I have brought here to feed you. Mixing and combining, freezing and cooking and kneading and chopping. Quietly I listen in my head as I work for the health that comes, the joy that comes, the art that is revealed.

Those who make our food are easily overlooked. They often toil some place hidden from view. Many times I have put on a party only to spend most of it in the kitchen preparing dishes to make my guests happy. Daily I serve my family food that will keep them well, like an umbrella of my love following them everywhere they will go that day. I know it isn't seen as powerful to be a woman at home, making food. It isn't respected and often isn't paid work. But when I thrust my hands into the warm soil of my spring garden and smell life through Earth's love, I don't care. I was born for this tilling and feeding and watering and growing. I was born to care and nurture souls and lives. I am not a rock star and do not wear expensive clothes. I am not seeking fame nor fortune. I am only waiting for that sound from my loved ones that means so much to me. "Mmmmmmm, this is amazingly delicious." All is quiet as they take it in. My work, my love, my cooking.

Lost During the Holidays

When you have no family, the holidays can be tough. I use to have a family but my parents' long, drawn out divorce brought that divisiveness to the whole family and we scattered. I refuse to be "friends" with a brother who is told it's okay to call me a "money grabbing bitch." Every holiday season we go spend time with my husbands' lovely family, lots of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His mother, the matriarch, still alive at 91 and all her clan running around happily enjoying the fun. Every year, for years, I've been lucky to get to share in on this family which I married into, but it isn't my family. My grown children come and celebrate with us, having no children yet of their own, and we feel like family. But they will not ever be parents which leaves us in a perpetual relationship of being the parents. My adult children won't learn the lessons that having a child teaches. They will not come to the exhaustive understanding of the sacrifice we made to raise them and how much we loved them. They are good kids and great people, but they are not in the family way unless they are with us. They bring us no grandchildren. And we are okay with that since we raised our children to be free-thinkers and to step outside of the box. But it is hard and the holidays always leaves me feeling lost in it.

I remember as a child going to my Dad's parents' house on Christmas Eve and all my cousins would be there. Cathy was a year younger than me and we'd instantly connect and become the best of friends within minutes. Living in S. California allowed us to go outside during the holidays and run around. We played games out in the leaves and then came in and sat around my grandparents' huge dining room table and ate amazing food prepared by their full-time help. Santa Claus always appeared later in the evening, frightening the littler ones and bringing presents to calm their fears. I remember the awesome strangeness of having the actual Santa in their living room, alive, talking to us. We felt very special. And I had a brother and sister who, at the end of all the presents at Grandma and Grandpa's house, would climb into the backseat of the car with me, and we'd talk about how exciting it was to still have Christmas morning upon us. We were in ecstasy. My parents seem to love each other, but then they also were disconnected and that disconnect only got bigger as we got older. When I was 24, they finally divorced, creating the largest divorce file in Benton County history as they fought over money and who had it and who owed it and how much and why weren't they paying?? My sister was other-needs and just turned 16 when my dad moved out. I was a single mother at the time, with a newborn and trying to go to school. My dad turned off the electricity to the house my mom and sister were living in by not paying the bill. My mother had never supported herself financially before, and my dad was ruthlessly mean when he left, although I think he'd say he was broke. Always his excuse. He let the small amount of taxes due on the house go unpaid and the house was foreclosed upon, forcing my mother and sister to move out. Our holidays were no longer joyful, but a tug-of-war over who was going where and who did what when. Broken. So if you have a large family get-together over the holidays, remember, there may be some people there really struggling. People put on their best face and walk into difficult situations at Christmas/Hanukkah time. They smile, they love, they converse, but inside some may be struggling just to get through the day. Kindness goes so far. Reach out and see clearly who is around you. Happy holidays.

Broken Womb

My womb is full like the moon that moves the tide out. Scattered brokenness revealed, snagged in the nets of connective tissue, lying there, uncovered. In my heavy I'm angered by the nakedness of imperfection on my shore. Entangled in the mess that is life, I try to remove each unyielding piece. Jagged edges cut soft finger tips not designed to handle sharp, broken pieces of monstrous hurt poured from my heart. Past injuries, barbed with intentions to disturb any romantic dream I may fall into, poke me awake, awake, awake.

Full womb of missed fertility ready to spill, the blood, the pain, the open wound of recessed tides laying bare-glistening-sharpness that blinds my eye, so I must look away. Snared and tied up like caught fodder in a spider web I lie, unmoving lump of oozing surrender, the imperfections have won. Incoming tide washes the pain. Sleep descends to push all cuts into forgetful, hidden hallways beneath the green blue water of false contentment. Asleep I wait for broken life to fall away and free me into flight of other world.

The Right To Remain Silent

Do we only have the right to remain silent when we are suspected of a crime? Do we have the right to remain silent when our hearts are broken and our minds overwhelmed? Do we have the right to remain silent when our words seem to diffuse our meaning rather than come to its aid? Do we have the right to remain silent when we want to hear or when we want to commune with the infinite rather than remove ourselves by articulation?

Does silence have any rights? In those places where Nature only dwells alone, no sound of machine or human made projection, is there a right, a protection of the quiet? How can I assure myself these places will be left to continue and that I can go to them when I need Silence, quiet, no people? Aren't our words largly the forcing of our wills on others? Do they not do the work of the Ego saying "I do not really believe I'm here and so I speak, blah, blah, blah. I'm so important! Look at what I know. I'm not you. I'm separate and my words prove my intelligence greater than yours, my me greater than you, my sound greater than silence, my life greater than death?"

In this I need no words to speak to show you that you are me. I only need the right to remain silent. For there is no brighter light, no louder noise, no more disturbing presence than that of silence. It illuminates the falseness of words, the fake of other, the pretentiousness of human. And there is nothing that separates humans from God greater than the word. It was only the beginning of the end when "there was the word." Everything that came after that was an attempt to use the evil tool to coerce and convince a separateness from the All, The Oneness, Goddess and God, the Divine. To own the stars and the Creator and to extract life from life in meaningless babble, the use of words continue. I take the fifth. I have a right to be inside the infinite and only in Silence do I find myself with enough presence of mind to see, hear, love and envelope It. But I don't have the right to remain silent. The morning comes and I must say "hello" to the faces for a purpose of creating a false connection, while a real one goes ignored.

Being With One Self

It is hard to sit alone in the quiet, not attached to the social flow in any way. To sit, engaging in the layers of what "is", is an easily overlooked necessity to health.

In a way, yoga is engaged with changing things at the cellular level in our bodies. Yoga understands that we are walking memories, stored at the cellular level. Memories that make us move a certain way, or don't allow us to move a certain way. Memories that make us believe a certain way, or that hide us from our ugliness, i.e. ways we need to change. Memories that bring anxiety or perhaps memories that produce a feeling of loss or insufficiency. Memories, created by our past-living. The experiences and emotional interpretations, all stored. The images are all in our mind, sleeping folded under the brain's barely explored terrain. They are in our cells, in our little toes and in our thoughts. To sit alone, in quiet, is to allow the inside to come forward from the hidden fold. One has to acknowledge the challenge of feeling "good" in the present moment and the unconscious drive to engage with 'habit' feeling.

The propensity is to bring along all that one believes makes one self. To let go of these beliefs, to drain the cell of practiced memories, to make one self(cell) 'clear', brings forward contradictory experiences of desirability and that which feels undesirable. In clarity is emptiness, nothingness and freedom. All three are very frightening, huge experiences that seem to chuckle at the need to 'make something of oneself'. So hard it is to sit here and not make something, to allow the knowing of who I am to penetrate and refuse to cover it up. Falling deeper into the "Beingness" of life. The Beingness which is massive when compared to the doing, which is superficial and sometimes reflective of insecurity. Letting go in muscles, letting go in opinions, letting go in perceptions, worries, beliefs, breath, allows the openness of being to appear. Being, unfettered by story, words, linear perceptions scaled down into a two-dimensional flat, left to right telling. Life "is" when we sit alone, quiet, and there is much here to learn. All the important stuff is here, alone, quiet. If only I could remember that!

Sound

We are afraid of silence. Most animals fear noise, but we have desensitized ourselves into being the only animal that fears silence. We need to move, we need to turn something on, we need to produce and validate and compete to be comfortable. Silence is the not moving, not getting done, not, not, not, of our existence, and we are frightened of it. But silence still exist. It means we must be brave to go into silence and still be a person in the world of noise, the superficial or laid-over-the-top world. The only thing harder than becoming aware of silence-world while dwelling in the world of the distracted, is to dwell in the world of the distracted and never become aware of the world of silence. To believe that one IS the world of the distracted and never venture to find deeper is devastation of the spirit.

The Line

My mother didn't want to turn the lights on because my father was resting in the hotel room. I colored on the floor at the foot of the bed as my mother gently stepped around my art creation. I think I asked my mother several times if we could live here forever. She thought this was humorous, but I meant it! I loved having so many people around us, and I loved that we were close together in this small place. Most of all, I loved that we were in a state of change, not a permanent state of the known. "When the house is completed it will be so exciting to go live in it", my mother countered. She looked at me. "Yes", I said, meaning "no". I liked the relaxed people my parents had become without all the stress of house, yard, job. They had been transformed by the impermanence of the situation without even realizing it. My dad had been playful with us and would take naps and was happier and my mom found time to read and talk to me and would throw the laundry at my dad and laugh. I liked the hotel and saw no reason why we should move onto some new place that would return us to our original selves.

With the lights off I continued to color in my coloring book. "Why aren't you coloring in the lines?" my mother asked, again. "Because I don't like to " I'd answer every time. I think that should have been a clear warning to my mom that I would always want to step outside the lines and that a life of neat, orderly line following was not in the cards. But despite my best efforts of art that covered right over the girl in a bonnet watering flowers that I was suppose to color, my mother did not see the signs of a constant, pain-in-the-ass, step outside of the lines, kid. I did my best to please my mom when I could, but a person designed to push boundaries must do so in life as well as on paper. So it should have come as no surprise when, at 15, I decided it was a good time to leave high school and strike out on my own. It was not the way it was suppose to be done, which made it the perfect path for me. Lots of us are boundary pushers, we walk among the line dwellers. We aren't satisfied with normal jobs and do few things the customary way. We disappoint those with hard-line expectations that embrace tradition.

Yet I was someone who loved my family and wanted to please those around me. It would have all worked out fine if they could have come to appreciate teal-colored faces that dripped green, ice-cube shaped tears that fell upon black, pointy, spear-shaped leaves on maroon roses in the snow. The girl with the bonnet was underneath my drawing and I didn't complain about that!

In life that is bigger than us, we have a right to more than the lines set up by convenience and culture. With minds that can interpret infinity inside of bodies painfully finite, it is a daunting task to remain inside the lines. Convicts have to stay inside the lines of bars and wear lines on their clothes. Children trapped at school have to "get in line" or "line up" or "form a single-file line" in order to move forward and do what is correct and if you blow it they send you to "the back of the line." Soldiers march in a line and they kill people and are sometimes killed and one needs a "clear line of sight" to hit one's target. Only in agriculture do plants grow in a line, Nature never does that and you don't want to be "lined out" when hoping to make the cut. Lines on my face aren't good and lines on the mirror means your wasting your money and life. Cops get mad when someone "crosses over the line" or make you "walk the line" if they think you have been drinking. When driving cars you can be in a head-on collision if you go over the center line and you may be "flat-lined" when you arrive at the hospital. I have found it healthiest to just avoid lines all together and when someone tries to get me in line, I smile and say "that's interesting".

And yet some days when my light-filled mind has expanded amidst the conversation of polite superficiality, the lines are so wonderful to fall back on so I can smile and you can think that I was listening when I wasn't. "That's interesting", smile. Or when I'm just too tired to do anything but walk the line, it is there like a good friend, the line of convention, of routine, of no real thought. In my exhaustion I can even be caught hugging that line, defending that line and upholding that boring, phallic line. But when I'm full with health, rest, and space, the line is nothing more than a chord I can play off of to illustrate how vast we are and how uncreative most of life becomes inside the line.

Birthright Knowing

The Yoga Loft has just released the first edition of its book Birthright Knowing. It is written from the heart of intuition and includes essays, children's stories, poems, and original artwork.

Birthright Knowing is available from Amazon or here.

You can see some of the artwork from the book, in color (the images are in black and white in the book) here.

We hope you will enjoy the book.

Peace in you, all around you, of you.