Living-Deliberately.com

I’m rewatching a favorite: A & E’s version of Pride and Prejudice. I love this version…the newer one seems to breathlessly rush through the scenes, the little moments that really make the tension of the story.

For most of the years I’ve watched it (and since the kids love it too, we rewatch it regularly, having most of it memorized), my favorite parts have been the quick and witty dialog scenes, the dances, the dawning of the main character’s minds and hearts toward one another. Today though, I’m thinking about a different dynamic: the heroism of the active love shown, the love that ultimately saves the day.

Near the end, when the scandal that had been building through the story comes to a climax, and it explodes in devastating ugliness, Lizzy is faced with the unavoidable visibility and consequent loss that comes with it. Her life is messy: she has a disgraced sister whose choice reflects upon the whole family. Just before, and 3/4 of the story along, she and Darcy have lowered their guard…they have let one another in and fallen in love. Then comes the blow. He comes to see her at the moment she hears the news and the unspoken words are almost stronger than what is verbally said in that scene: she is desperate for her family, she is marked by the drama, and she sees him turn cold at the news. Understanding his predicament, she freely lets him go, knowing though, “I will never see him again”.

True to the age, she never would have. The bonds of propriety were too strong, as shown in all of Austen’s novels. And yet, unbeknowst to her, he is not running from her scandal….he is repairing it. Facing it. Freeing her from it. Saving the day. She does indeed see him again, and is proposed to, at that.

Jane Austen’s story is timeless because lives are still messy. We still form prejudices and suffer from pride. We still flee getting involved in others’ dramas and traumas. We still self-protect and attempt to make only “advantageous matches”. Hopefully there are still heroes out there, heroes who look beyond pride and prejudice and scandal. I think Lizzy was a heroine as well…without coercion she released him, she gave up her dream, even though it cost personal suffering.

It’s a whole level of the story I’d not considered before. It’s depth that defies time.

************

Ammended to say: it does still annoy me a bit that he couldn’t have at least told her something to reassure her when he left…some little tidbit of steadfastness and intent. Anguish would have been avoided and how could he exactly, have kept from at least uttering, “please don’t cry…it will be alright in the end”? Even heroes have flaws I suppose.

With the days finally getting darker earlier, meaning the near-end of “daylight savings time”, cozy times are settling back into our routine. Even though the renovation is not yet done and the bunkbeds are still in the living room, we are wrapping up playtime and work hours more to the clock than to the sun, getting baths and clean jammies on, and snuggling up for story time. For ever how many reasons this ritual gets derailed in the summer (and it always does), I’m ever so grateful for it’s return.

I guess part of this is because I directly feel good or bad as a mother based on a very seemingly superficial thing: if the beds are made each day, the sheets clean, and the jammies fresh…put on bodies with sweet-soap scents still lingering, at a decent hour of twilight, I feel there is a healthy order in our universe. Really, the whole kit and kaboodle can be in serious jeoprody, but if they get washed every night and slip into clean, well made sleep spots, with a story, prayers, and kisses, I can manage quite a bit of daytime mayhem. The worst days are when the beds are rumpled and the dog’s been sleeping on them or worse yet…the kids go to bed in jeans. (shudder).

But as sure as the seasons change, the nighttime ritual returns. No more running barefoot into a way-past-bedtime sunset or watching fireflies. Mom and Dad have cups of hot tea and children get baths and story, and the stars align just as they should.

With the age range of our kids, 2.5-11.5, and the fact that the older kids are doing school with Dad at night, we’ve found a new pocket of opportunity: one-on-one time with the littles, snuggled up in Mom’s bed. Days are busy and everyone around here is always together. But this has become a special treat; a chance to spend a few quiet moments with each child. I have no idea how long it will last….only that the thought joins a little mental catch I have to savor it because our days spent with childhood, before the teenage years are upon us, are surely limited.

And so to the bookshelves where our stacks of picture books have sat waiting all summer long do the little boys return. The pile is migrating to my bedroom, where it accumulates night after night, and I am loathe to take them back down and reshelve them, in an effort to postpone the passing of the memory as long as I can. Tonight we opened Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, a book I bought them all for christmas our first year here in Tennessee. It opens, “Once there was a tree….and she loved a little boy.” Within is a tale of time, and childhood, and mothering, and giving until there is no more to give…when, just at the end, a little more is found.

May these days slow down…just a little bit. They are golden.

Green & Black has this out…and they flaunted the little tub of glory in a magazine I perused the other day. Alas, I’m not sure where to find it and even if I do, it won’t be in time for this rainy night. Autumn is hanging out over on the other side of the mountain and will blow in soon but it’s not here yet and the result is an environmental funk. The trees can’t seem to decide if there should be a breeze, the rain comes and goes, the crickets are half-hearted. I’m working late ‘else I’d be slicing fresh fries and crawling under my ancient blanket.

Madeleine L’Engle died last Thursday. This makes me want to reread the A Wrinkle in Time series and Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (The Crosswicks Journal, Book 4) and all the others I have on the shelf that I haven’t delved into yet collected out of love for her. I imagine her walking in the fields of her farm in Conneticut though her last three years were spent in a nursing home. Over the past year I’d waited to hear this announcement of her passing, knowing it had to be close. She is a comfortable, intelligent, creative read; if you’ve never heard her read her books aloud, get a recording. It adds a new dimension to books that were already quite in another dimension.

This is a total gear shift but on one level, another “comfort” read of mine is People mag, so maybe within the realm of cozy-vegging it’s not such a shift: hot around the internet today was the building common head shaking over Britney Spears’s disasterous performance at the VMA’s. Say what you will about booty-shaking, half-dressed, sex-charged music, performing is Britney’s JOB. No one making her do it…presummably anyway; it would seem her “come back” is up to her. Who shows up on the job drunk and gets away with it? But that scene is scary. She’s glazed over and stoned looking, being steered around by dancers that were more in step than she was. I read somewhere that she looked nervous…I don’t think so. I think she looks disinterested and careless and lost and really, like a million red alarms over her health and well being should be screaming. It looked to me that rather than lip-syncing, “Gimme More”, she was saying, “Get me off this crazy thing….called life.”

The video, being posted all over the place, is also being pulled all over the place. Internet freedom is fading in whispers but that is a rant for another night.

While I’m posting tonight, let’s add a little “on topic” link love. A friend of mine had this delicious little clarifiying way to remember how to make the step from inaction towards action, from a Fortune Cookie of all sources! then Seth Godin had this post on the willingness to take little chances.

Maybe there’s some ice cream and Ancient Blanket Vegetation in my future after all; I’ll skip the fries and the mice who try to take over the world….this time.

This experiment was interesting; I’d certainly pick the book up for a read, along the lines of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses. Someone wondered something (how tied are we to a global economy?), gave it a deliberate try (live without things made in China for one year), to the end of a discovery (buying locally reduces your eco-footprint) and a book, (A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy).

The kids and I often talk (usually in the car) about the rise of China; they are particularly interested in China’s large military, girls being adopted in America, declining population, and control of our manufacturing. It’s complex, that’s for sure. For now, our focus has not be to avoid things made in China, mostly because they seem so umbiquitous that it would feel like an overwhelming task. Instead, we are buying them second-hand as much as possible so that at least we are changing our mindset from “disposable consumer goods”. It’s a baby step I suppose. But we’ve striven to eat locally for years and this year have given added focus to supporting local business; buying locally made products can not be far behind, ideologically speaking.

Here and there I’ve also read things about toxins and poisons commonly used in China’s manufacturing, lately showing up in the Thomas The Train recall, which directly affected our family. As they surpass us in Carbon Emisssions, it is yet another reminder of the future of America and China connection. Anyone else have any China concerns and the future?

“To live more voluntarily is to live more deliberately, intentionally, and purposefully- in short, it is to live more consciously. We cannot be deliberate when we are distracted from life. We cannot be deliberate when we are distracted from life. We can not be intentional when we are not paying attention. We cannot be purposeful when we are not being present. Therefore, to act in a voluntary manner is to be aware of ourselves as we move through life….

….To live more simply is to live more purposefully and with a minimum of needless distraction. The particular expression of simplicity is a personal matter. We each know where our lives are unnecessarily complicated. We are all painfully aware of the clutter and pretense that weigh upon us and make our passage through the world more cumbersom and awkward. To live more simply is to unburden ourselves- to live more lightly, cleanly, aerodynamically. It is to establish a more direct, unpretentious, and unencombered relationship with all aspects of our lives….

…Simplicity of living means meeting life face-to-face. It means confronting life clearly, without unnecessary distractions. It means being direct and honest in relationships of all kinds….

….When we combine these two ideas for integrating the inner and outer aspects of our lives, we can describe voluntary simplicity as a manner of living that is outwardly more simple and inwardly more rich, a way of being in which our most authentic and alive self is brought into direct and conscious contact with living….

…the object is not to dogmatically live with less, but is a more demanding intention of living with balance in order to find a life of greater purpose, fulfillment, and satisfaction.”

From chapter 1 of Voluntary Simplicity, Revised Edition: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturidly and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to it’s lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness out of it, and publish it’s meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

This, of course, is the quote that gave the name for my blog a few years ago. I re-read it today as part of the writing I’m doing on my book and every time, it’s just as inspiring as the first. Routing out all the “fake” in my world….living honestly and with integrity, even when it’s not always positive but mean even… giving a “true account”. It’s the essense for me; it’s what empowers the marrow-sucking. Because there can be no real savoring of life if we romanticizing reality or not confronting the ugly in the world; if we cling to the artificial that is all we’ll be left with in the end.

Oh what an exciting week it has been! And few will probably appreciate the magnitude of that statement…this was the week of our daughter Clara’s 8th birthday. Due to a misunderstanding of where I was on the calendar (itself a minor miracle in the last week of March), I first thought her birthday was Sunday. Then Tuesday. But really, it was yesterday. What struck me as beautiful is that is was the kind of comical befuddlement that happens to my living children’s birthdays too. It was the first time it had happened with Clara’s; the darkness that has followed me every spring has been lifted. I attribute this almost completely to the fact that she has been remembered in corporate, public prayers for the departed since late fall. Her presense as one who prays for me as well has been validated; something I’ve long felt but never heard another say so seriously and earnestly as I have this winter. That she is no longer my “secret”, that I no longer feel like I must fight the tendancy to make the dead invisible, has been it’s own miracle in my spirit and the result has been the lack of dread as we’ve approached the season of anniversaries.

And so this has been a good week! Tulips and butterflies and ivy and daffodils! Sunshine and supreme warmth! As I type there is birdsong outside my open window.

Last night we made our first confession, in preparation for our upcoming chrismation. I’ve been pondering what confession really is: said privately it really is only an admission that you know what God has already known. True confession does require another’s ears hear your words. I made a list, one to help me remember and stay focused, but what the true result was the creation of a record resulting in self-loathing and shame. And I think for the first time my embarrassment at needing to say this before another human being, especially one I love and respect so much, gave me a glimpse at what must be so much more grievous before a heavenly father. And in to an earthly, lesser, extent, I think what happened was glorious. Because this confessor, this human being, did not seem to look at me differently afterward and certainly not with the scorn I’d feared. Rather than rejection I was given grace and love. I left feeling comfort and reassurance that my redemption is truly a possible thing, even with habitutal sins that I’ve long struggled with, even as I fight battles like everyone else, not so odd after all. And if that is model of what really happens in a heavenly realm then I stand amazed and bit sad that this was missing from my tradition for a lifetime.

I’ve two major projects in the works: a book and new business. This blog has over 50k hits per month and the readership is growing, what I’m told is a good performance for a young site. Requests for web work and blog make-overs have come, putting together a “professional blogger” kind of service. So I’ve assembled packages for business people who want a blog, or have a blog that needs revamping, and out of time or knowledge constraints, want some help with it. It’s work I love to do, love to learn, and in some ways, feels like a cummulative way to use what I’ve been developing for a long time.

The book is the other Major Undertaking, one that is much fun and since NanoWriMo, is not all that intimidating. The goal is to have it ready to show to an editor/publisher by the end of September of this year. The working title is Low Income is Better Than Owed Income: How One Family Decided to Live on purpose and Become Debt Free. I’ve got extensive notes and the outline done, and oh yeah, I lived it. It’s our story, plus the testimonies of other like minds, and lots of practical tips for those wanting to give it a go as well.

The image of a puzzle keeps coming to mind, pieces fitting together and the completed picture working its way into focus, a metaphor for the coming year. Everything is a part: healing, committment, work and effort, rest and prayer. The result is clarity; the irony to me, in a year resplendant with ironic moments, is that clarity is the meaning of her name. Some gifts take a long time to open.

While I was away this weekend, David found this blog and was anxious to share it with me this morning. I soon saw why…lots of great nuggets on there directly relating to a few of my current endeavors. The blog writer, Guy Kawasaki, recently reviewed an article called The Effort Effect. Restructuring how I say things, first and foremost to my kids, is a huge recent undertaking and the author also wrote a book sounds like it might have some interesting things to say about that. It’s called Mindset. Take a look.

a fellow kindred spirit began her own experiment with a boycot of Walmart and thankfully kept good records! She shared them today:

The figures are in.

I quit shopping at Walmart last August 31st as a protest against several of their policies.

BUT I figured not shopping at Walmart our budget would take a hit. It has proven opposite. It has helped the budget AND I my pantry is full, my freezer is full, PLUS it is so much less stressful to shop the local grocery store or smaller, less busy discount and hardware stores.

In a side by side compaison of Sept. - Dec. 2005 to Sept. - Dec. 2006 I spent $263.14 LESS NOT shopping at Walmart. In 2005 I shopped almost exclusively at Walmart for colthing, groceries & household needs. The 2006 figure even included the extra feed I needed for the extra livestock we now own.

I started not shopping at Walmart in protest. I will continue as it has proven beneficial.

Expenditures for clothing, household, animal feed & groceries
Sept. - Dec. 2005 = 3474.27
Sept. - Dec. 2006 = 3211.13
Savings = 263.14

Rock On Girl! And thanks for letting me share this with everyone, in hopes of encouraging others that shopping at a store we hate doesn’t have to hurt our budgets!

Also, a book recommendation was passed on. Big Box Swindle.  I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it soon…..bbwwwwwwhhaaahaaaaahaaa!

This book arrived in the mail for Rowan today as a part of a book service he’s signed up for in Tennessee. And what a sweet surprise of a children’s picture book it is! Rowan instantly went crazy over the animal stencils in the inside cover and the entire thing is beautifully illustrated. The story, told in a lyrical rhyme, is a young boy asking him Momma questions for “me and baby” and her answers. It was a tender representation of a stay at home mother on a small farm; definitely a new favorite.

The other day an old post of mine on Kathryn Sansone got a couple of new comments. This happens from time to time; her book is still a hot topic for some I guess. Being very involved over the last few days with bigger fish to fry, I didn’t reply to the comments but last night, when I was suposed to be dreaming I think, some thoughts came to me instead that this morning I’d like to express.

Carolyn said, “Both Duggar and Sansone should be appreciated for having the courage to publish useful tips to other mothers.
Hopefully neither one of them will ever have to read the less than charitable comments/critiques thrown around about them online.
Both families clearly have a lot of love which is what really matters…whether we’re rich and send our kids to school or living simply and homeschooling. Why don’t we spend our free time encouraging each other rather than comparing?”

Why compare indeed? Well here’s why:

• Kathryn Sanson wrote a book, putting herself out there, inviting the world into her life. Responsible, intelligent people won’t just read stuff; they will think about it, they will filter it through their worldview. One way or another they will form an opinion. Maybe they will gain encouragment from a book like this; many women found it disheartening. I wrote a review of what I found it to be, but I think it’s important to say that what I said wasn’t personally motivated. Kathryn Sansone, and Michelle Duggar for that matter, became almost analogies for a “kind” of mother in our society, both on opposite ends of the spectrum. I’m sure they both love their families and they both show it in radically different ways. It’s okay to compare methods.
• one my mottos: method matters. Or one could say, “the ends don’t justify the means”. Something may be very well worth doing, for instance, mothering, or making time for oneself, or making extra money. But HOW it is done matters. Looking at how another does something is one way to see what their method resulted in, what kind of consequence, and then makes it easier to decide if that’s a similiar path one wants to follow.

One thing I found interesting in the reaction to Woman First, Family Always, was the idea that she was being criticised for “being rich and putting her children in school”. I wonder if these people really read the book! Kathryn Sansone advocated much, much more than just using a schooling source than homeschooling, and really, that is so NOT the issue. I myself contrasted her with Michelle Duggar, not because I think the Duggars do it the “right” way but because she was her polar opposite in how time was spent and how priorities were arranged and yet here is a woman who appears every bit as satisfied and assurred in her role. She didn’t need to farm out her kids and over extend herself to the point of napping the bank teller line (a real story KS not only tells but recommends) to acheive it and I thought that was worth noting.

Comparisons can be valuable things. Even scripture recommends we hold up our faith and behavior in order to acheive what we should have as our goal. As we listen to other viewpoints and ways of doing things (more on that in another post), at some point we have to compare it against what we do and decide if we’ll keep, discard, or divide it. I don’t find doing so either encouraging or discouraging; there’s a person behind each idea. The idea is what is being compared here, not the individual.

Like I’ve said before, this week dh and I are reading “Facing East” by Frederica Matthewes-Green, not to be confused with last week’s read, “At the Corner of East and Now”.

Last night’s chapter delved a bit into the use of icons, which I found helpful because it is THE biggest difference I’m grappling with. It occurred to me that I may not be the only one fairly clueless about the role icons play in Orthodox worship and why, and maybe a few excerpts from the book would be helpful.

The author tells a story about a book she read her children when they were small called “The Little Lost Lamb” that had pictures of Jesus with children in it. Her children spontaneously kissed the picture each night (they were Episcopalian at the time). She says,

“My problem, then, was not with using images of Jesus or depictions of Bible stories or heroes of the faith. I knew our love wasn’t being lavished on a laminated plaque but was being offered through the picture to the Lord himself. The image was like a window, a seen object opening us to things unseen.”

The idea of icons being windows (which is why they are always flat and not 3-D) is much of the Orthodox position. A quote from St. Basil the Great is, “Honor shown to the icon passes to the prototype it represents.”

It was upon reading this that I had two memories strike me that caused this to resonate with me: one, was that as a pre-teen girl I’d hide pictures of the boy I liked at the moment and sometimes kiss them; the other was the memory, fairly recent, of how I’d kiss our daughter Clara’s pictures. I knew I wasn’t kissing her (to my great pain); but that some secret hope within me existed that my kiss would somehow pass onto her where she was, and that somehow, she’d “feel” my kiss. Like a window to my baby.

In the eighth and ninth century there was a great debate over the use of icons and a group called the iconoclasts (icon smashers) destroyed icons believing them to be idols. On pro-icon argument reminded me of my little protest over R. C Sproul’s comparison of them to the golden calf.

“How can they be idols? They’re pictures of Jesus. If it was a picture of Baal, that would be an idol. But Jesus is God!”

She says, “But the Orthodox have no illusion that an icon is itself a god. They distinguish between worship, given only to God, and veneration, the honor that may be accorded an icon, a saint, or the Theotokos (Mary, God-bearer).”

And of course, what is often pointed to is the incarnation itself. Where God in the OT wanted no visible image, he then “took flesh and became a baby. He became visible, concrete, with shocking specificity: a man of certain height, build, and eye color, eating a roast fish on a Sunday afternoon. Because God chose to become visible, we can represent him; we can represent any person or event in his story because these are manifestations of God’s will to invade earthly life, to make himself concrete and visible.”

Which brings out the point that icons must be images of actual happenings and people; not conjectures and ideas of what we want to portray. For instance, an icon can show Jesus and the Holy Spirit as a Dove, but not the God the Father.

David fell asleep at that point and so we only got halfway through the chapter. This week Netflix is sending me the series by Sister Wendy and I’m hoping at least one of the discs delves into religious art and icons, both eastern and western. I’m still uncertain what to think; only that they’ve done it this way for a long, long, long time, while an image-less worship is much more fairly recent and I think, for that reason, some suspicion of that would be appropriate.

We read this book in the evenings, curled up on the futon under blankets with mugs of hot tea. Frederica’s movie reviews have been something I’ve read for a few years now and David wonders why I’ve never passed them on, like I was holding out on a great secret. She also is a writer for NPR’s All Things Considered and her writing is both excellent and humerous. This book is giving us a peek into an aspect of christianity we’ve never before seen or been around, it’s history, it’s practices, it’s hunger for the “why” in worship. Orthodox liturgy isn’t satified with just talking about wanting to worship….they emphasize what about God we DO worship.

Here are a few excerpts from last night’s chapters:

“People newly coming to church should have an unfamiliar experience. It should be apparent to them that they are encountering something very different from the mundane. It should be discontinuous with their everyday experience, because God is discontinuous. God is holy, other, incomprehensible, strange, and if we go expecting an affable market-tested nice guy, we won’t be getting the whole picture. We’ll be getting the short God in a straw hat, not the big one beyond all thought.”

“A liturgical church has an advantage over one where worship is relatively spontaneous, in that people powered by religious emotion simply do run out of steam. Where there is a Liturgy, you show up each week and merge into that stream, and allow the prayers to shape you. But where the test of successful worship is how much you feel moved, there’s always performance anxiety; even the audience has to perform.

I’d been a chrisitan about ten years when I noticed to my dismay that my spiritual feelings were changing; the experience was growing quieter, less exciting. I feared that I was losing my faith, or that I might hear the Lord’s words to the church as Ephesus, ‘I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first’ (Rev. 2:4). Then I came to sense that my faith had undergone a shift of location. It had moved deep inside and was glowing there like a little oil lamp; if I was swept away with emotionally noisy worship, it might tip and sputter. Silence and attentiveness were now key.

I think this happens naturally in a believer’s relationship with God, just as it does between two people who are in love. At first, being in love is so strange, and the beloved is so other and exciting, that every moment is a thrill. But gradually over long years the couple grows together and grows alike. They no longer find each other a thrilling unknown but drink deeply of a treasured known that will always extend to mystery. At the beginning, the heart pounds just to see the beloved’s handwriting on an envelope; at the end, two sit side by side before a fire and don’t need to speak at all. When these rock bands [spoken of in the chapter] urge their audience not to let the joy fade, they may be calling them to fight a fruitless battle against moving to the next stage of spiritual communion, the one where God moves deep inside. When years shape us to be like him, his presense is less electric and strange; yet as we draw nearer, deeper faith yeilds deeper awe.”

I’m cooking through Nourishing Traditions and hope to take as many people with me as possible (evil laugh )…. so here’s a list review of what I’ve tried so far. “Stars” are equivelent to family members, so you’ll know what the crew thought too.

• Whey and Cream Cheese, page 87: Addicted!! I make the cream cheese with whole milk yogurt. Super simple: put it in cheese cloth and let drain for 7 or so hours. The liquid left over is the whey, for use in porridges, fermenting veggies, and other recipes. The cream cheese is dense and tangy and fabulous. Most often we eat it spread on whole grain toast with jam OR topped with blueberries and toasted almonds and then drizzled with local honey. Shazzam! Six out of six stars.
• Ginger Carrots, page 95: the first fermented veggie I’ve tried. Easy to make but time consuming as I had to grate my carrots by hand since I don’t have a food processor. When we had them a week or so later they were a nice, salty condiment, and nice to have in the fridge when you want a relish of some kind. Three out of six stars.
• Sour cream sauce, page 140: easy, golden, and good. Made it to top Lentil Pecan Patties and found it especially fabulous over braised tomatoes. Great on the patties too. 4 stars.
• Carrot Salad, page 193: a familiar favorite. 5 stars
• Coconut Chicken Soup, page 198: just as promised, warm and soothing. It’s an island flavored broth really and will be great in the months to come served in steamy mugfulls. Filling and comforting. 5 stars.
• Roman Lentil Soup, page 215: FANTASTIC. Should have made a double batch. Hearty and flavorful; every kid had seconds and begged for thirds. 6 stars.
• Carrot Soup, page 221: pretty good. Warm and orange and brightening. Got it a touch too spicy for one of my kiddos or this would have been six stars. As it stands, 5 stars.
• Traditional pot roast, page 340: made it both times without adding the veggies. Good roast; makes good gravy. I shred the beef and serve it in gravy because it’s easier to serve to a crowd that way. Both times I used a chuck roast. 5 stars.
• Potatoes Anna, page 399: made with the roast twice. The kids like the crispier slices. Neither time has it made a “cake” like the recipe suggests. But tasty and Andrew sliced the potatoes for me; anytime he gets time with a knife he’s happy. 5 stars.
• Leek Fritata, page 442: Great! Nice that it has such a generous amount of montery jack cheese. Nice and easy supper though it only gets 4 stars here. And one of those missing stars is quite vocal over his displeasure with this on the menu!
• Breakfast porridge, page 455: done so many ways! Our far and away favorite so far is Steel Cut oats. That one get 6 stars. I think we like it’s familiarity and that it stays someone “toothy” even after soaking all night in water and whey. We’ve also had millet (4 stars) and Amaranth (4 stars). Amaranth tastes exactly like corn on the cob but has a “beady” texture that put one of us off. And the other was just being a booger about trying something new. We serve all of them with butter, maple syrup, crispy pecans, and berries.
• Millet Cakes, page 460: already posted about these. YUM!! We love them here and they are very versatile. Can be a side dish or a main, depending. 5 stars.
• Bulgar Casserole, page 462: I buy mine already sprouted and ground from the health food store because I don’t have a grinder. I love this, though it’s misnamed. I think of “casserole” as something saucy, maybe cheesy, and it definately clumps together on the spoon. Not this. More like rice. But toasty and nutty and really great with salmon. 5 stars.
• Wheat Berry Casserole, page 463: again, misnamed. And a total BOMB. All it did was absorb chicken stock and toast in the oven. It was completely inedible though I probably could have salvaged it nicely if I had a grinder or food processor to make a paste and create some patty recipe. I may not have sprouted them long enough but it was a disappointment for sure. Can’t win ‘em all I guess. no stars
• Mexican Rice Casserole, page 471: topped it with crushed tortilla chips. Really good side for a big salad, fajitas, black beans or the like. 6 stars.
• I’ve done well tweaking my pancake recipe and hers, on page 478. I soak half of the flour, whole wheat, overnight in half of the buttermilk and the morning we have them I add another cup of unbleached white flour and the rest of the buttermilk. More if I want them runnier. I’m doing very well not using white sugar (haven’t had it in the house in a month!) or baking powder (contains aluminum) and my recipes that called for it don’t seem to be affected. 6 stars.
• Banana Bread, page 483: gorss. Heavy and not even close to my paradigm for nana bread. zippo stars.
• Yogurt Dough, page 485: used it for the pizza recipe. Have to wonder why? Regular pizza dough is great, easy, and fits within the book’s nutritional view. This dough was very rich, flat, and not worth the trouble or expense. Might work better for a tart needing a rich background. 1 star.
• Lentil Pecan Patties, page 508: GREAT! I served these to David and he thought at first it was a hamburger patty. I wasn’t able to make the sprouted lentils into paste, nor the almonds, but I chopped the nuts fine and I had a great amount of sprouting in my beans. The patties were a touch on the dry side but like I said above, with the sour cream sauce they were worthy of an entertainment menu. They’d also be good on a whole grain bun with lettuce, tomato and cheese for a high protein/vegetarian sandwich. 6 stars.
• Crispy Pecans (and almonds, pine nuts, and walnuts), page 513: Again, addicted!! It’s so nice to have a jar of toasty nuts on hand at all times. They make a great snack and I toss them into recipes at least twice a day. I totally “buy in” to the idea of pre-digestion with the removal of phytates in nuts through soaking, and also with soaking grains; I can see the results first hand! 6 stars.
• pizza, page 523: will stick to my tried and true, more faithfully italian recipes thankyouverymuch. This didn’t taste authentic in the least. 1 star.
• carob chip cookies, page 531: may carob never ever enter my house!!! Where I will not follow this book is in the total removal of chocolate, wine, and coffee, nor do I forsee a Brain omelet or other organ meat specialties having a chance. ever. So….I made these with dark chocolate chips (high in antioxidants you know!) and Rapadura, the unrefined sugar that I”m so excited about. I also used unbleached flour rather than bulgar flour. And the result was pretty good. Still a bit dry; I may experiment with using coconut oil next time. But a good treat to have around. 6 stars.
• tapioca pudding, page 544: there must be better, “real” tapioca out there but all I could find was minute stuff. And after soaking it, I had a sticky, glue-like mess. Ick. The kids wondered what happened to dessert. 1 star.

We are enjoying whole milk, veggies sauted in coconut oil, no white sugar, and hearty meals that feel nourshing right down to our toes. We’ve all had better digestion, fewer headaches, and we can see a clearly defined sugar high/low anytime we have something like commercial ice cream or soda. In fact, we feel so gross after that, it’s almost like an allergic reaction and it certainly makes us want to eat it less the next time! The kids are in the “notice it” stage and still get googled-eyed at the soda display so there is no unreality around here! But still, I bought a head of cabbage this week at Andrew’s request and he and I have that sauted almost daily. Celia and I eat more than our fill of tomatoes. Andrew begged for goat milk rather than the host of other treats he could have had. W has a fondness for herbal teas. Baby will still eat just about anything put before him. I think we see definite improvement for all of us and there is still so many more neat things to try!! The boys’ reflux is only around when they’ve had a product with corn syrup; David and I are both noticing trimmer bodies, despite the fat in our menus…and it’s all good fat and REAL fat so it’s nice to see the visible proof.

If you haven’t bought or gotten from the library Nourishing Traditions yet, consider this yet another plug for it. It is most certainly on the list of “10 books that changed my life”.

Earlier this week, I read (well, devoured actually) The Mermaid Chair, by Sue Monk Kidd.

I’ll try not to give any spoilers to the story.
So, from the back cover the reader knows going into it that this is a story about a woman and a monk and a woman and her husband and her journey with herself. She’s at that stage…kids grown, identity shaken, feeling lost and like she hasn’t really lived. She’s been down for a long time and is struggling to ariticulate just what it is exactly that she wants, when catastrophe strikes and she has to back to a place that she’s spent years trying to escape.

I was somewhat bummed to have figured out the major plot twists before the first three chapterw were over. But Sue Monk Kidd is a very good writer; she compells the reader to keep going, and even though I knew what the character was going to do, I still hoped things for her and had to keep reading to find out if my hope was going to be rewarded or not.

I was angry as I read though. I don’t get this justification that seems to go on where women hit a rough spot, even a *really* rough spot, and convince themselves that they NEED to go on this journey that treats all of their lives like they don’t matter. No expense is too high if it gets her “to know herself” better. Think: stories that involved women leaving husbands or children to find out “who I really am”.

So I was aware of a big contrast between the lovers. I felt no hostiltiy against Whit…he hadn’t taken his vows yet. His exploration really had no context that he was violating. I find this to be a bothersome attitude of mine; he knew she was married, which makes him a very guilty party. Whereas Jessie on the other hand, was already vowed to one man. She was a mother. Two things, that if she need to do some soul searching, ultimately HAVE to include.

She’s done nothing but continue the cycle: she starts out trying to run from her past. Hepizibah reminds her, “You can’t leave home. You can go other places alright, you can live on the other side of the world, but you can’t ever leave home.” She confronts this, the island past, all the while trying to run from her *other* past, her life as a man’s wife.

It could be argued I supose that in the end, she makes peace with them both. But I don’t buy it. In the end, she’s looking back at her affair as something sacred, something necessary. She might be thankful her good husband took her back but she isn’t sorry she screwed around. And irony of ironies, when she “finds herself”, she has a friggin’ marriage ceremony in the ocean with herself! I couldn’t help but scoff at the hilarity of that…someone who already treated one vow sooo lightly is making another one?! And we’re suposed to buy into the beauty of that?!

Not leaving home…not ever leaving home. There are things that *indelibly* make us who we are. They are an undeniable context. All the exploration and growth we go through HAS to keep this context in mind in order to stay true.

Applied to myself: I AM someone’s mother. 5 Someones. If I get weary with identifying myself as “mother” or “stay at home mom” or “homeschooler” I might want to branch out and try other things. But I can’t forget that it isn’t skin I can just shed. Those people ARE. Or a wife…so he’s gotten comfy in 20 years. So he wasn’t the first one to realize women need to stretch themselves, shed their wings. Growth can happen and still be that man’s wife. Infidelity isn’t necessary in order to truly find oneself. Then again, loosing one’s self in order to commit adultry may be.

I hear a a line in my head: “you may have to lose yourself in order to find yourself.” Maybe that’s the message of this book. Maybe that’s why it’s making me angry. People get hurt with this kind of message. And “loosing one’s self” isn’t really possible in the long run. You can only do it for a short, unsustainable time. There’s a day of reckoning eventually.

And I never thought I’d say this, back when I liked the Ya Ya movie, and loved Traving Pants, and The Secret Life of Bees came out…but if I read ONE MORE woman-power ceremony involving mysticism and chants and weird dances and rituals I’m gonna roll. As in roll my eyes right up to the back of my brain. Yawn. I’m so impatient with it!

After thinking more about it and talkling to some friends about the story, I’ve calmed down a little. A little ;-). I see this story, this character, as a kind of cautionary tale. Don’t lose yourself. Don’t be dishonest and untrue to who you are so that you find yourself, to quote a friend, “backing into” questions and paths that are much more than you bargained for in a search for answers. I still think the book condones the crossing of boundaries I find unacceptable (and inauthentic) in a search for a deeper knowing of thyself. I still find it rather maddening, unable as I am to just separate it out as a “summer read”.

I think that opening quote (that I posted a few days ago) might have set me up to go into the story thinking SMK was holding up the monk as her soul-lover. But today I changed my mind. Her true love, the one who’d been a part of her as much as she’d been a part of him, was with her on both end papers of the book.