on nourishing yourself

Nourishing yourself is not only a food thing, but rather the much more holistic effort to fill your life with meaning.  Author Karen Armstrong said that “we are meaning-seeking creatures.”  Along those lines, the late Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote, loosely translated, „What defines our existence is not what we experience, but how we feel about what we experience.”

Our life is literally meaningless if we don’t pour meaning into it.  Meaning nourishes us, meaninglessness destroys us.  The worst punishment is solitary confinement and total lockdown is not far behind.  Just think back to your last year in lockdown, how meaning was sucked out of life because activities and social interaction came to a standstill. 

The question then is how to create meaning.  Where does meaning come from?  Meaning is something we literally create in our minds, meaning is not inherently out there.  Meaning is tied to the kinds of stories we create, tell and believe in.  When the story changes the meaning changes.  No story, no meaning. What brings you joy and makes you feel “full” has meaning to you. Do some detective work and think about all the things that make you feel good.  Those are the things that have meaning for you.

Easter or Passover for example are days that only become meaningful and special through the stories we imbue them with, and the rituals, decorations, and traditions we create around them.  For those who celebrate other holidays, Easter or Passover are just regular days.

We usually create meaning through doing, like traveling, doing sports, shopping, being with people.  But the deeper meaning comes from within and the thoughts and beliefs you have about yourself and your place in the universe.  The secret is to build the connections all around you - to the web of life, your community, yourself, the sacredness of nature, and all your relationships.  Then you find meaning in the small things and many places, the beautiful sky, your kid’s smile, your dog’s wagging tail, anything. 

taking charge

Our cultural approach to health and healing tends to be mostly reactionary.  That means that we wait until something happens, and then we act to counter the symptom.  It’s a simplistic way to look at healing.  Actually, that is not healing but treating.

So many people seem to be frozen in fear until they’ve had their Covid vaccine.  Sure, the conversation around this virus is complex, and everybody has a different and personal risk level (and it’s good to be aware of yours).  On the other hand, we give up control over our health when we keep believing that we are powerless without a vaccine, powerless without outside intervention, powerless on our own.  It also gives others control over you.

The proactive way to health is not symptom treatment oriented but strives to maintain a healthy body and mind through ongoing preventative maintenance measures, call it self-care.  It involves movement, sorting through your thoughts, beliefs and emotions, a good diet, boosting your immune system, feeling purposeful, being socially interactive, maintaining loving relationships, and being intimately connected to yourself, your body and mind.  Hence, health and healing are complex processes that are always in flux and involve our mental disposition (thoughts and beliefs), individual body chemistry and constitution, and how we interact with our body and mind (food, movement, awareness). Thus, a one-treatment-fits-all approach doesn’t work too well, besides letting you off the hook instead of being invested in your body and mind. 

The key is to participate in your health and healing, to be involved and invested in your mental and physical topography,  to take charge.   So much of it is in your own hands. It may be tedious, it may be time consuming, you may need to deal with emotional fallout. But the alternative is potentially more painful.

being human?

From an emotional and psychological perspective the social isolation side effects of the pandemic guidelines and directives have become an existential conundrum.  This is not the place where I wish to discuss the pros and cons of such directives but rather what defines our humanness.  

Already before the pandemic much of our reading had shifted from paper to screen (granted, it saves trees); many of our financial transactions shifted from bills, coins and bank visits to online and cashless transactions (no loss there); and cinema has moved from movie theatres to the home screen (there are definite pros and cons here).  The pandemic has accelerated this development and we have to ask ourselves some urgent questions. Now, many job related activities, teaching, consulting, diagnosing, coaching, and meeting come to mind, even entire jobs, have moved online in just a few short months.  My daughter even does virtual dissection in one of her bio labs, a crutch to bridge the pandemic yes, here to stay I hope not.  Luckily, there are still many professions that cannot be accomplished virtually, such as sports, the visual arts, chefing, farming, surgeoning, nursing and many more.  The big question is what we give up and how we compromise our humanness when we move further and further into an online environment just because we can.

What does it mean to you to be human?  What experiences actually distinguish us as humans?  I think we hit the limits with virtual weddings, cocktail hours, Thanksgiving and Christmas meals.  Lack of in-person contact steeply increased depression during the pandemic, and it is incredibly sad to see nursing home residents isolated from friends and family withering away, mere shells of their former selves.  

In our human history we have always come to crossroads where we’ve had to decide what’s a good idea and what’s not.  Moving forward with nuclear, GMO and CRISPR technology in human reproduction is questionable and proves that just because we can doesn’t mean we must.  I drew the online line when faced with the option of shifting my talks and workshops to the screen a year ago.  It gives me no pleasure to speak to a screen and having to imagine my listeners, or interacting with a flat workshop audience on a screen in my kitchen.  And isn’t life all about the physical experience?  My definition of being human involves the senses. I want to experience the entire you, look you directly into the eyes, detect every minute facial expression, feel your hug and touch,  take in the three dimensionality of your outfit, smell your perfume or cologne, unwrap your beautiful present with you by my side,  hear people’s voices mingling and overlapping in joyful conversation, or popping in unexpectedly to hash something out in person.

Ask yourself to what extent you want to live in an increasingly virtual world going forward?  Where do you draw the line for yourself? 

the need to nurture

What we do is an expression of who we are.  A sporty person explores the relationship between their body and its physical expression in terms of flexiblity or endurance, muscle development or movement; an artsy person establishes a relationship between their creativity and a particular medium, perhaps stone or flowers; a scientific researcher might explore the relationship between her keen intellect, her ability to see out-of-the-box connections, and a particular biological subject.

With diminished human connection and in-person interaction during the pandemic, many have had to satisfy their need to nurture and connect in a different way.  Pet adoption skyrocketed during the pandemic, and there is a boom in house plant hobbyists who collect exotic species, propagate plants, or simply enjoy a green and living thing at home that’s less emotionally involved than a pet.  Both, however, are rewarding for the reciprocal result of unconditional love when we nurture them. 

Just as a dog or cat takes half a year to acclimate to a new household, it takes a new plant as long to settle in when I bring it home.  Being a nurturing person - many women are, but men are getting there too - and needing to express that in what I do, I love to experiment together with my plants to find the perfect spot with the perfect light conditions, the perfect watering and fertilization ratio, the perfect soil medium, and the perfect pot for its size.   I am always awed anew at discovering tiny leaves emerge, grow and unfold, watching them slowly morph from light green to dark green, losing some yellow or browned leaves, discovering new air roots emerge, being disappointed when some plants sputter and die, and being happy when they eventually thrive.  

During my weekly weekend watering and care ritual which can take a few hours I commune and check in with my plants.  It’s meditative, intuitive, rewarding, and nurturing, a perfect antidote for surviving in an unsettled world.

peace, pause, pensiveness

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is a dud of a week.  Between eating, drinking, days off to celebrate, the year coming to an end, and work spirits on half mast, it makes for a good pregnant pause, a sort of mini hibernation while collecting our energy for a new start. 

It feels good to not do much of anything, pausing my usual high energy doingness and busyness, and sliding into that in between space before we start again.  This is a transition week between the old and the new, stale and fresh, cynicism and hope, lethargy and inspiration.

Once the new year starts, I usually can’t wait to put the Christmas decorations away, ready for a fresh outlook, new opportunities and ideas, leaving the old behind, a chance to reinvent myself a bit even though the traditional new year resolutions usually don’t stick as research has shown (here a previous post on that).

If time stretched forever in an endless stream, without our stellar calendar  subdivisions derived from the repetitive revolutions around our own axis, recurring trips around the sun, all while the moon spins around us, we might flounder at the sheer endlessness of time.

And so we need the ebbs and flows between ends and beginnings, between high mental and physical activity and a slowed pace.  This buffer week before the new year, before our life starts again with renewed vigor, is a good time for some pensiveness and rest, a time to pause and regroup.  This in between week is a time to slowly let go of this most unsettling of years so we can begin the new year with hope, imagination, creativity, inspiration, and energy.

Wishing you renewed optimism and courage, inner peace and inspiration for 2021!

like an orchestra

When I recently listened to a classic orchestral piece on my car radio it struck me how the sound of so many different instruments melds into one, and how that one complex sound can only be achieved if all hundred or so musicians play together in total harmony, unison and synchronicity.  Take away the brass instruments, or ten violins, or a particular instrument that is crucial to one particular segment, and the whole is diminished.  One instrument on its own can never do what an orchestra does.  The whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts, and individual parts shine more brightly in the context of the composite whole.  

Through Suzanne Simard’s work with forest ecosystems for example we are beginning to realize that trees are less competitively Darwinian and individualistic, and exist within a mutually beneficial and cooperative mycorrhizal network of nutrient distribution from mother trees to seedlings rather than existing in isolation.  Take the big mother trees away and new seedlings suffer.

How is it that we humans have come to think of ourselves as distinct and separate, from one another and from nature?  Maybe the pandemic has brought to the forefront that we exist within a network of interdependence.  How dependent we are of postal workers, healthcare professionals, supermarket staff, bus and subway drivers, warehouse workers and delivery drivers to keep the whole running.  How dependent we are of our network of friends and family to keep us mentally sane, and how difficult isolation is.  We can accomplish so much more when we get together around common goals than if we go it alone.  We feel so much more grounded and settled, emotionally nurtured and embraced, in company.

Interdependence is not a sign of weakness but strengthens the whole and furthers a common cause exponentially.  Regardless, for example, of what your stance is on vaccines, the huge effort to bring a Corona vaccine to market within a year could only be accomplished through the work of a huge interdependent network of scientists and government efforts all working in unison towards a common goal.  Alone we are powerless at the enormity of the challenges of climate change.  But in the spring, when the earth stood still during the worldwide lockdown, we saw how fast pollution can be reversed.  

A whole orchestra can produce a gloriously complex, powerful, and magical listening experience in a way an individual violin simply cannot.

always a way out!

Recently, my husband visited a jobsite in an unsavory Brooklyn neighborhood and parked his car in the street. When he returned, he absentmindedly opened the trunk, put his bag in, put his cellphone in, put his key in, and shut the trunk.  

Oh no! Now cellphone and key were in the trunk and the car door was locked.  No cellphone, no way to call for help.  A building maintenance person nearby had one of those wire door break-in contraptions and offered to help.  Hope!  

Oh no! That didn’t’ work. What now? The maintenance guy let my husband use his cellphone to make a call, and a while later a guy from Pop-a-Lock showed up.  Hope!  Pop-a-Lock unlocked the car door and also popped the hood, but since the electronics had been bypassed, they self-disabled automatically, and with it the electronic trunk pop device was also disabled.  

Oh no, for the third time!  Pop-a-Lock had no further solution, suggested to get the car towed, and left.  I was too far away to drive down to bring the other car key, and towing the car home would be big hoopla.   My husband had to find another solution.  Knowing about electronics, he asked the building maintenance guy for a wrench to disconnect the car battery.  Hope!  Lo and behold, disconnecting the battery also disabled the electronics, and he was able to open the trunk manually.  Success!

All this to say that the only limitation to a solution is the mind.  When the mind shifts, so does the problem, and possibilities open up. Hopelessness is in the mind, there is always a way out.  

collecting the pieces

Many years ago, my husband and I traveled through Europe for six months.  After a while the experiences became a blur, we could no longer remember what we did three and four weeks ago because it became too much to take in. It was time to return home to integrate and process the travel impressions.  

During very busy times it seems similarly that I become fragmented, losing bits of myself here and there along the way.  When the busyness subsides, I need to collect and ground myself to bring all those scattered fragments back under one roof.  

The English meaning of collecting oneself  has to do more with composure, while the German expression sich sammeln, which translates identically, has more to do with reintegration after this kind of fragmentation.  Reintegration for me consists of quiet time by myself, puttering around without agenda or an appointment looming, reading a book, cooking something, or drinking tea and reading the newspaper.  A good night’s sleep can do wonders but may not be enough.  Regular meditation is a good way to ground yourself but is not for everyone. Walking in nature, going on a vacation, coloring or working on a crafts project, taking a bath, making music, are all ways to bring yourself back home because these activities inactivate the rational-analytical left side of the brain and make room for the subconscious to do its work.  The effect can be compared to tidying up a messy closet so you see again what you actually have and can find everything easily.  

You can’t go a mile a minute all the time without disintegrating, starting to coast and going on auto-pilot. Depression is actually an advanced form of loss of connection to self. Being aware of this need to push the stop button periodically and reintegrating is helpful and you can do it any which way that fits your personality and lifestyle.   

valuing our resources

Trash and waste, whether in the form of pollution or garbage, are leftovers in an open linear system, a system which is unsustainable in the long run and no longer viable.

When we honor and respect our resources and acknowledge that all raw materials ultimately come from the earth and are finite one way or the other, we become more vested in how we use them.  Shifting to sustainable and circular systems leaves less waste, preferably little or none at all (here an earlier post on zero waste).  This is where recycling with its Reduce-Reuse-Recycle tenet comes in, and the various ways in which we can apply those principles.

One of our most essential resources is water because the total water amount on earth is finite, while our population and water needs have grown exponentially.  In a linear system wastewater is considered waste.  But in a circular system it is reused after having been cleaned and purified.  Israel, a desert country, has put regulatory government mechanisms in place over the past 70 years that have made it water independent with surplus (!), and an agricultural force to contend with.  Israel’s agriculture shifted to water conserving drip irrigation, the country desalinates sea water for drinking, cleanse its wastewater for reuse in agriculture, puts a price tag on water by charging for its consumption, and swiftly detects and repairs over 90% of its water leaks to prevent waste, as described in Seth’s Siegel’s Let There Be Water.   Israel is a shining example and pioneer on how to value and manage resources responsibly, something all other countries must learn to do swiftly. 

On a related note, we are just starting to come around to managing better the trash from the stuff of our material culture (here an earlier related post).  This is how the Repair Café and Fixit Revolution, thoroughly researched and entertainingly narrated in Repair Revolution: How Fixers are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture, arose in the past two decades, a counter movement to the post war effort of ramping up production and consumption via built-in obsolescence.  Buying it cheap and throwing it away when it no longer works, and products such as single-use plastic bags and containers, have left us with enough trash to drown in.  Besides reducing, reusing, and recycling, we now need to add repairing to our Rs in becoming more conscientious and responsible consumers.  Repair that lamp, replace that zipper, bring the shoes to the cobbler.  Just fix it!

In our shift to a more sustainable culture with more sustainable consumption patterns let’s keep our beautiful planet earth in mind that provides us with everything we need to exist as long as we care for it.  Our earth is all we have.  We must nurture, not trash it, so it can be beautiful and healthy for us, so we can be beautiful and healthy.

the world's alive

The minimalist cleaner upper guru Marie Kondo has encouraged people for years to connect with their clothes, books, furnishings and nick-nacks to make sure you get a charge out of them, and if not, kindly thanking your stuff for its service before giving it away or discarding it.  Silly, you might say.

Milana Perepyolkina, author of Gypsy Energy Secrets, calls the world alive.  She writes, “We experience that each thing has a soul,” including “plants, trees and even stones,” and she treats her pillow with love and respect because it is her key to sweet dreams.

As a pet owner you probably agree that your dog, cat or horse has a soul.  Although not so sure about the goldfish, right? And we can probably agree that trees and plants are alive.  After that you may need to stretch your mind, and the rest is up for reflection, philosophy, speculation, cosmology, and individual belief.

Author and founder of the Perelandra Center for Nature Research, Machaelle Small Wright, communicates with flower divas to create her flower essences, and nature and spirit entities for a cocreative healing relationship with nature.

A feng shui consultant told me years ago to connect with my house in a deeper way. With things it’s perhaps less that they are truly ensouled than that they absorb our personal energy, which is why for example they recommend smudging an antique piece of furniture or a second-hand clothing item with sage before bringing it into your life.  

Philosophy has all sorts of fancy names for an alive world, like hylozoism, panpsychism, or animism, the Gaia Theory (here a previous post), and more, depending on how far to take aliveness, ensoulment and nature intelligence.  Soil, plants, rocks, and crystals all may seem more evidently alive one way or another, while inanimate objects, like your house, your pillow, or your clothes not so much.  

Have you thought how far you’d be comfortable taking the idea of an alive world?