small change

posthaste to post

I started November with the quiet resolution to post something on this blog every day. It seems that with the end of the month, after a quiet journey of small posts, I am ready to put in at the nearest harbor. I can't say it was a hard month, because no matter how at a loss I was for words while I thought about sitting down to write, once I sat down, the words came effortlessly. The difficult part was herding them into coherent sentences and paragraphs, all in the service of making a point, however small that point might have been.

There are people who say, without much thought, that writing is easy. I am not one of those people. Writing is incredibly difficult. (As is painting, by the way … but that's another post). I can think of a million other things I would rather do than write. And yet, as much as I squirm when it comes to sitting down to write, the felling that comes from “having written,” is a sweet satisfaction, indeed. Especially when that “written” thing of words I made manages to capture an elegant glimmer from the architecture of the ineffable. (I suppose this sentence is not an example of one those instances.)

One month is not enough to turn a challenge into a habit. I read somewhere that it takes, on the average, 60 or more days to form a new habit. I would have to keep going for at least another month to turn this daily post thing into, well, a daily post thing. So maybe that shore for putting in for awhile is not as near as I thought....

settlements

In yesterday's post I talked about my yoga practice as the road to settling the mind as a positive experience. Today I am having a hard time emptying my mind of emotions when I read of the sudden windfall that will fill the pockets of those whom we were forced to bail out only recently:

Wall Street is booming again in large part because the rest of America -- categories (1) [people who can't afford to pay their mortgages, and, in some cases feed their children, because they lost their jobs] and (2) [people who are managing, but just that], above -- bailed it out to the tune of $700 billion last year. The Street has repaid some of that but, according to the bailout program's inspector general, much of it is gone forever. For example, the taxpayer money that bailed out giant insurer AIG went directly through AIG to its "counterparties" like Goldman Sachs -- to whom Tim Geithner, according to the inspector general, gave away the store. As Goldman Sachs prepares to dole out some $17 billion to its executives and traders, it's worth noting that Goldman received $13 billion a year ago from the rest of us via AIG and Geithner, no strings attached.
-- The Housing Crisis and Wall Street Shame, by Robert Reich

I suppose the inexplicable incredulity I feel in the face of all this is a somewhat empty notion, leaving my mind empty, though not in the sense in which a Buddhist would approve.

practice

The wind this morning tried its best to intimidate birds and humans alike. Well, at least this human, who was reluctant to get out of bed to head to yoga class relatively early on a holiday weekend. But, once I got myself out of bed and gathered my wits enough to make coffee and then put out seed for the birds, I realized that this wind was all huff and empty howl, without the icy breath to back up the threat. Outside my doors, it turned out, there was a gloriously bright and balmy morning.

It didn't take long for the sparrows to gather for the seeds. They appeared in small waves, flying forth from the berry-ridden bush. But no sooner did they start on their feast, the quails arrived, in force, too, ready to claim their sizable share of the freshly dished seeds. There was no mixing among this group, as there usually is between the doves and sparrows and juncos. The quail ate fast, while one of them stood watch, then they disappeared as fast as they had come.

I had my coffee and since I didn't make it to class, proceeded to practice at home. I looked for a sequence of poses for shoulder problems, since I did strain that area with efforts to build some muscle, a reasonable plan, but not if you go about the business of it with the mind of a 30-year-old in the body of a 50+ person. I settled on a sequence of 30 poses, as outlined by Iyengar in his therapeutic yoga suggestions in The Path to Holistic Health.

The entire sequence took almost 2 hours, because of the way I was practicing, which was by engaging in a quiet dialog with my body. It's a common place new-agism to say to let your body be the teacher, but if you get your mind out of the picture, or rather, if you get the picture out of your mind of what yoga should be and what you should be doing while practicing yoga, your body will steer you in a direction that can lead to a place where you'll find that the least effort will produce the most benefit. Of course, this doesn't mean that you don't work hard; it's just that you don't need the effort, because you will have known how strength manifests as grace in a pose.

I suppose this effortless steady state is what The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali point to in the following verses:

• The physical postures should be steady and comfortable.
• They are mastered when all effort is relaxed and the mind is absorbed in the Infinite.
• Then we are no longer upset by the play of opposites.

what has been lost is safe

This week's Photo Friday challenge is “from my past.” And this is my response to the challenge:

Apparently, these stuffed animals, blind and bald, were things that once meant a great deal to me in a past so distant to me now as to be the stuff of legends. My mother went through her locker in the basement of her apartment building in Budapest to retrieve this dynamic duo when I was there this last September. She thought I might want to claim them and take them home with me, now that my own children have grown up and beyond the need for transitional objects of this kind.

I left these two there, but took this photo of them. As it is, there is no room for them on my desk, where there is another stuffed bear, that of my older son's, holding a silent vigil over an unshareable past.

my thanksgiving

I know I should post a list of things I am thankful for, but I think it would bore you all to death, and, besides, it would go on too long, kind of like this sentence is about to do... so, I'll pick up from yesterday's post, where I outlined my plans for the day, to see what materialized from them.

Yoga class: now, that was absolutely delicious. There was quite the crowd in class today. Some of us brought children in town for the holidays, others turned up in this class for the first time, all of which had us mat to mat, sweating up an appetite. After class we lingered briefly, discussing holiday plans. When one of my yoga buddies heard that I had not prepared a pie, she insisted I follow her home and take one of the extra pumpkin pies she baked for her family.

By the time I got home, the spouse, who has been battling a cold/flu thing has come and gone to the grocery store and had a gluten-free berry pie waiting for me as well. Awash in courtesy pies, I started to cook up the rest of the meal. Baked a squash and yellow and red onions with sage. I also fried up some sage leaves to crumble on the squash later. I caramelized leeks for the broccoli rabe saute. I put the butter fish in foil with olive oil, leeks, sage and some white wine to bake. I prepared the salad, but left the steak to the spouse to cook.

And this is what we sat down to after the flurry of cooking was over.

Meanwhile, outside the haze was thickening fast, as people kept fire burning in the fireplaces, in spite of the “spare the air day” warning issued by authorities. And in spite of the temperatures in the balmy 60s. When I went out to feed the birds, my lungs felt as if they had been shoved into the thick of an LA freeway.

But it's Thanksgiving, so let the haze settle where it may then and go get myself some pie, even if there is now way to walk it off later in the airless suburbs.

holigaze

Well, the day is winding down, but I still can't decide whether to cook anything resembling a feast for Thanksgiving for tomorrow, or to take my chances on a restaurant. For all these years there have been gatherings of family and friends, at either our house or those of relatives. This year the crowd's dwindled down: it's the spouse and the younger son. Neither happens to be very helpful when it comes to making the decision about that holiday meal.

So here I am, sipping tea, pondering the light waning, even though it's early afternoon, waiting to read the tea leaves for an answer. They seem to say to cook something, anything, now that the pressure of roasting the perfect bird and juggling the creation of all the side dishes is off. Besides, the spouse, who went dutifully for his flu shot some time ago, is coming down with something that looks a bit more than just a regular old cold. I think it would be best to keep those germs housebound with him....

So what will I cook? Roasted veggies for the (mostly) vegetarian (that would be me), and maybe some chicken, or fish for the guys. I'll make a salad for the guys too, a mushroom soup for me, since I am off raw foods just now. And we'll skip the pies, opting for some yummy local goat cheese with fruit and nuts.

Well, thank you for hearing me out and for helping me decide. I wish you could all join us for the meal, now that we worked out the menu.... The again, I am thankful for this small break in tradition, for this island of peace and the chance to share a nourishing meal with the spouse and the younger son. With the weather rumored to stay glorious and with a yoga class on the agenda for the morning, it looks like I am in for a treat!

holigaze = a new way to look at a holiday

another kind of social network

The Wall Street Journal, in the Personal Journal pages, ran a big article on boosting your immunity with nutrition, both as a helpful measure to help prevent getting the flu and as an added resource to fight, if you happen to succumb to it. To read the article you need to be a subscriber, and that doesn't come free or cheap, but I'll quote from my paper edition of it, crossing my finger all along that Rupert Murdoch won't seek his lawyers on me to extract fees for quoting form his publications, while also giving free PR to it here....

With vaccines short on the supply and with controversies for pro and con the vaccine running high online and through grapevines set aflame with rumors and fear mongering, it is hardly news that even such publications as the staid Journal would go looking for more natural solutions. Laura Landro, who is the health and medical columnist for the Journal did a really nice job on this piece I thought, because she introduced a concept into her narrative that is probably more “native” in left-leaning circles: the idea that infectious diseases leverage their social networks to the fullest, not unlike enterprising people:

Researchers warn that malnourished people may be a breeding ground for more dangerous infectious diseases [since their immune systems are compromised]. Animal studies at the University of North Carolina show that in a host with poor nutrition, viruses mutate in the face of a weak immune response to become more powerful. And once those mutations occur, even well-nourished hosts are susceptible to the newly virulent virus. “A lot of people may think malnutrition on the other side of the world isn't their problem," say Melinda A. Beck, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. But malnutrition “is a driving force in emerging infectious diseases that are spreading around the world,” she says.

Of course, malnutrition is not just a distant third-world issue. Malnutrition itself maybe spreading even in the US, just as fast the flu. Or is that the flu is spreading faster around these days because malnutrition is becoming one of the more invisible but fast-growing products of the tanked economy?

transcendent grammar

The sun is about to set and I realize that I lost this day. A Monday, too, which sets the tone for the week. It's not what I planned, but so be it. Well, to be truthful, I was lost to the day as I kept on reading Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. Most of last night was also lost by me to this book. Now my head is filled Atwood's gardeners, romping through the compost of ideas gleaned from the strange world she created out of the bits and pieces of the one in we already live in.

There is one passage in the novel that is likely to stay with me, like a refrain, long after the plot and characters will sink into the silent swamp in which the books I read live on airlessly, hoping for rescue in the small craft of conversations:

“Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I'll be dead,” you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know – the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said; it's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water.”

--from The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood

mind the batter

I made pancakes this morning, with quinoa flour. I wanted to feed my family something healthy and indulgent at the same time. The pancakes were dense and rubbery. Not to mention without much taste, except for the slosh of vanilla and whatever else we put on them once they were cooked.

All the want in the world to have these pancakes turn out fluffy, airy, golden and light – ah, yes, really light – made no difference as I anxiously watched over them in the pan. Once you wreck the batter, your pancakes are done for.

I should have minded the batter. I should have measured with care all the things that went into it. I should have followed a recipe, however uninspiring that might have been.

Well, yes, my airless pancakes, while a ruinous breakfast, they are satisfying plenty as metaphors. And, there is a lesson to be had, one of mindful focus, of knowing what matters and what matter one makes:

If you want heavenly pancakes, be the air for the batter.

sound off

Last night we went out to dinner to one of the fancier restaurants in our neighborhood. Not that you can't go there dressed in casual wear, but since the tables are sheathed in linen and you are given real linen napkins, and the waiters wear ties, there is a sense of formality, even if the fare is Californionized French bistro cuisine. Oh well, that was quite a mouthful, but let me say, in case of the actual food, quite tasty.

It was quite amazing to be able to snag a table without much forethought on a Friday night. The economy, in spite of the rosy words from Wall Street, is tanking even in this county, where there are still quite a few people who are profiting through their investments or running companies that keep amazing the pundits with those steady jobless growth spikes in income statements.

Even before we got to our dessert, not even by 9 pm, the restaurant was more than half empty. All of which gave me an excellent view of the couples and small parties at the various tables. About 90 percent of the tables, laden as they were with drinks, plates, and bread baskets, also had a menage of iPhones or other smart phones in plain view.

I half expected that waiters would arrive with trays of small chargers for the phones, ready to feed them choice electricity, to keep them humming along. But lucky for us, these phones were all lethargic, reluctant to go off or even grab their owner's attention away form the company or the food. Still, there they were, even in stealth mode, erasing distances as much as making closeness a faraway concept.