a better lunch

Deli take-out lunches not only cost a lot of money, they are also not necessarily the healthiest choice, what with the bun, all that Deli meat, the bag of chips, and the soda that often goes with it.  Or that "salad bar" that tempts with prepared foods, Chinese or otherwise - oops, forgot about the salad part.  And don't get me started on those fantasy coffee drinks with whipped cream and flavored syrups, the reward for being away from home all day.  Very expensive if you add the cost up over a year, and not exactly beneficial to your health or weight.  

My preferred lunch is leftovers, vegetable leftovers that is.   Since having made a conscious effort to eat more plant-based foods I always prepare a lot of different vegetable dishes, and always enough so we have leftovers. And another thing, I try to keep animal protein, on those days we have some, to dinnertime.  Hence most of my lunches are vegetarian.

Whether you're packing a lunch to take to work, making school lunches for your kids (they've got to be better than school cafeteria food), or eating close to your fridge at your home office, vegetarian leftovers lunches are prepared in a jiffy, are easy on your wallet, your health, and your weight.  

your choice

"Contrast helps us to describe the nature of reality, but it's not because there is hatred that you have to chose it," Mike Dooley said at a conference I attended a few years ago.  

Life presents you with opportunities many times each day, and every one of them is a new chance to chose - beauty over ugliness, kindness over intolerance or meanness, helpfulness over aloofness, peace over war, joy over misery, or abundance over scarcity. Each experience is shaped by your feelings, and you do chose your feelings (yes, yes - nobody else in charge here, but it takes a while to realize that there is a choice - you feel, you don't get felt).  Negative feelings tend to promote victimization, while positive feelings tend to promote empowerment.  

Keep in mind what you'd like to experience when you chose next time.  

a bit of everyday magic

My life certainly doesn't only consist of wow experiences, and the mundane easily takes over if I don't look up every once in a while to smell the roses.  Actually, we need a certain amount of routine (see a previous post on that) for daily life to proceed smoothly.  But - we can make the daily grind a little less so by cultivating the beautiful and dialing everyday moments up by just a notch.  

What I mean by that is putting a bit of thoughtfulness, beauty, and quality into what I do every day.  Cloth napkins and nicely pressed clothes are such an example. Everyday dinner is a teeny bit more special by setting the table nicely and using freshly ironed cloth napkins.  I also like my clothes nicely pressed instead of the casually rumpled look.  It just feels a bit more special to put on a pressed shirt or pair of pants, and it attests to the care with which I treat myself.  It's really the little things that count - here an earlier post on it.

Fresh flowers or a few green branches bring a splash of color or a reminder of nature into the house; more so if they are displayed in a special vase.  Same goes for displaying produce that doesn't have to be stored in the fridge.  I love to display sumptuous amounts of colorful tomatoes or other fruit, or perhaps avocados and lemons in beautiful bowls.  

A breather between preparing dinner and work in the form of a glass of wine, perhaps even accompanied by soft jazz playing in the background, is a lovely interlude and gives those few moments almost a weekend feel.    And I like to start my day with lipstick and perfume, even on weekends, just because. 

How do you make everyday moments a bit more pleasurable?

the crack in the story

When I grew up things seemed certain, and most things were straightforward. The story behind our culture worked. We went to the market and grocery store to buy our food, no questions asked.  We went to the doctor for relief of whatever ailed us, no questions asked. The weather was the weather, no questions asked.   People seemed mostly content plugging away at living their life.

Those times are over.  Food has become a complicated conversation around pesticides and sustainability.  Healing has become a complicated conversation because many of our ailments don't respond predictably to standardized treatments, many of which have disconcerting side effects on top of that.  The weather is kind of crazy these days.  And people are depressed, confused, distraught, suicidal, and uneasy.  Things are changing.  The old story that upheld our culture no longer works.  The cracks are showing up everywhere because the usual standard answers and solutions have stopped working predictably.  

Life has become so unsettling that we need to begin asking some deep questions of ourselves and our culture.   Why is our story changing?  How is it changing? Are we changing the story, or are we being changed? Are we evolving, or are we being evolved?   Author Charles Eisenstein calls our in-between stage The Space Between Stories because we have one foot in the old story, the profit based story of competition and aggression that we are all tired of, and that makes us stressed and sick.  Our other foot is already in the new story, the one of a non-poisonous, healthy agriculture, the one of inexpensive and gentle healing methods, the one that leaves us energized and inspired about our work, the one where we have more leisure time, and the one that heals us emotionally.  

Along the way I have seen many cracks in my story. I went to art school and the professors tried to funnel my creativity into rigid parameters.  I felt restricted.  I was pregnant and was treated like a patient.  I felt violated.  I've watched how my children were being taught to so many tests. I feel sorry that this has taken the fun out of learning.  I cannot trust the integrity and healthfulness of grocery store foods. I feel unsafe.  

What cracks have appeared in your story?

food joys

We learn best by doing, and that can be through either joyful or painful experiences. Both have their merits, although the former is of course a whole lot more pleasant than the latter.  

Eating my way through Europe as a child I experienced food as exciting - that each meal is a discovery, and that the best times can be had while sitting around a table, tasting, chatting, musing, and discussing.  First I learned by watching my parents - shopping, cooking (my mom more than my dad), baking (my dad more than my mom), putting menus together (my mom), selecting wines (my dad), and entertaining (both together).  As a teenager I began to cook and bake on my own.  Later I became interested in finding out where my food came from - in what soil it was grown, how it was raised or in what waters it swam, with what care, or lack thereof, it was prepared, and the French notion of terroir (here a post on that).  In more recent years I have come to realize that food can heal you (let food be thy medicine, an earlier post), but also make you sick.   Food is one of the most important aspects of my life because it nourishes both the cells of my physical body as well as my soul.  

My positive experiences around food have informed my life enormously and food is one of my favorite forms of pastime and entertainment.  From dysfunctional food experiences, on the other hand, you learn "how not to," which in turn can motivate you to find out "how to." Perhaps you experienced food as a reward system.  "No dessert until you finish what's on your plate," teaches that dessert is the best part, and to want that the most (hint, hint - sugar craving).   Perhaps you experienced food as a substitute for something else.  The quintessential American movie scene of drowning your sorrows in a tub of ice cream, alone in front of the television, shows the displacement of the need for love and connection to something sweet (more sugar cravings here).   The same goes for comfort foods, which also fill a need other than hunger.  Maybe there wasn't enough food to go around when you were younger, and the experience of lack caused you to overeat later on and wanting more than enough.  Casually dropped parent comments on clothing and food, especially towards girls, and reinforced by the advertising industry, have twisted girls' body images for decades.  This in turn created an obsessive dieting culture and produced guilt feelings around food.  "That'll make me fat."  A lot of misinformation around cholesterol, fat, sugar, dairy, meat, eggs, and salt, much of it deliberately spread over the past half century, has caused an enormous amount of confusion around what is healthy and what is not.

Once you are aware of how your beliefs around food play out in your life you can begin to dig deeper.  The healing process begins by replacing the false or dysfunctional beliefs with positive ones one by one so that those eventually crowd out the counterproductive ones.  Let the food joy begin! 

a new time culture

In order to be creative, productive, effective, enthusiastic, and inspired we need downtime or me-time in between all the tasking we have become so accustomed to.  Whether meditation time, gardening time, family time, beach time, hiking time, art time, poetry time - it doesn't matter.  But it's better if it's right-brain time to balance all the left-brain thinking we do so much of.            

This country has not been terribly supportive of the need for personal time because we believe that time is money, time is scarce, time is of the essence, time is precious, and time should not be wasted.  Hence companies don't invest much in their employees' well-being through increased vacation time, and a culture of guilt has formed around taking time off to the detriment of our mental health  (here an earlier related post - enjoy your weekend, really).

In contrast, most Europeans receive between four and six weeks of vacation time on top of all those long religious holiday weekends they have, while we have to scrape by with two lousy weeks unless you have built up serious seniority.  But all these underlying beliefs depend on your perspective.  My husband's company employed a young man for a few months who, before quitting, inquired if he could work part-time instead of full-time because he needed more me-time.  He was willing to take a substantial pay cut in exchange.  I think the younger generation is ready to take their time back.  There is an actual organization, TakeBackYourTime.org, that promotes cultural change to that effect.  Take note, it's coming.

If you are an employer you are in the enviable position of being able to experiment with allowing more time off and experiencing for yourself if it makes your staff more creative, more enthusiastic, more balanced and relaxed, and ultimately more productive.  I believe that two weeks vacation with productivity at half-mast is a bigger waste of time than offering more time off and seeing your staff work at full throttle. 

your gift to the world

Imagine receiving a beautifully wrapped present.  You are undoubtedly delighted, full of hopeful and curious anticipation of what's in the package.  And when you open your beautifully wrapped present, and it's just the right thing, your eyes light up in joy and you break out in a big smile.  Wow!  You feel so grateful and fortunate.  What a wonderful surprise!

What if you saw your life as a gift? A fabulous chance, a miracle, an opportunity to experience this beautiful world.  Then your life couldn't possibly be drudgery, or hard, because it would be sacred and wonderful and miraculous, and full of sparkly "what ifs." 

What if you saw yourself as a gift to the world and to others.  In the form of who you are, how you are, how you do things in your own unique ways. 

What if you saw everyone you interact with as a gift to you?  In what they show you, the insights they offer you, the opportunities they bring to you, how they are and who they are through what they do in their interactions with you.

Then life becomes an endless succession of fabulous encounters and opportunities, full of meaning and magic and curiosity about what's next.  What are your particular qualities that make you a gift to the world?

my personal junkyard

Not all blog posts are about pretty pictures.  My son said that my trunk looks like a junkyard, and he is right (and I cleaned it up for this picture).  

There are the egg cartons to return to the farmer where I buy my eggs.   Batteries to return for recycling to Best Buy.  Plastic flower pot to return to the nursery where I bought some perennials recently.  A whole big pile of reusable cloth bags, a wine carrier, and two cooler bags for my shopping trips.   Cardboard boxes and gently used packaging material to be dropped off at my local shipping center.   A plastic bag stuffed full with recyclable plastic bags to be dropped off in the supermarket plastic bag recycling bin.  Another bag with a few cans and beer bottles to be redeemed at the supermarket bottle center.

I am passionate about reducing my pile of true trash, true trash being the residual cast-off items that go to the landfill because they can't be recycled or reused.  I can't stand waste.  Everything that's put into the garbage increases our overfilled landfills, my personal carbon footprint, and requires more manufacturing - of egg cartons, plastic flower pots, plastic bags, and packaging material.  Take a look here at some reflection worthy recycling and trash facts; and here an earlier post on reducing your trash contribution.    Please mind your trash.

dizzying complexity

Our qi gong practice this past Sunday was memorable in so many ways that it couldn't possibly be illustrated with a photo.  Even if I had been able to take a video it wouldn't have captured half of the experience. It stimulated my senses so completely that I was only able to be in the moment, being and experiencing, and feeling and seeing and smelling and hearing.

Experiences are always fleeting - here now, then gone and replaced by another here now.  We try to capture many with photographs.  But they only convey what we see with our eyes.  A video adds sound.  However, this included so many other impressions.

We practiced outside in the shade under big old trees, a gentle breeze wooshing through the trees that gently caressed my skin, the perfect temperature barely making an impression, neither too cold, nor too warm.  The many garden flowers and grasses gently stimulated my sense of smell in a complex symphony of scents.  Two baby squirrels scampered back and forth along the fence ahead of me.  A deer appeared in the bog below, while the teacher's voice guiding us through the qi gong movements mingled with nature's sounds.  I felt the slightly uneven terrain under my soft soled shoes and repositioned my feet for better balance.  The complexity of the experience was almost dizzying, and words can never convey it all.         

Life becomes so amazing and precious when we manage to experience it in all its glorious complexity, if only for a fleeting moment.  It's a meditation in and of itself to stop and take it all in, and it's way more interesting than counting from one to ten and starting over.  Try it sometime and be awed.

a fish out of water

By now we are all familiar with the benefits of shopping locally.  When you purchase what you can in your own community you support people, your local merchants directly, instead of the corporations of the big box stores, and strengthen the fabric of your downtown.  Shopping locally for produce puts money directly into your local farmers' pockets, not the supermarket corporation.  Here a post on localism and a related post of voting with your $. 

Permaculture (here a post on that), a fairly new agricultural system, has always worked with native plants.  Now we are beginning to expand our awareness to the benefits of using native plants in our gardens - gardening localism.   

Plants that naturally evolved in a particular habitat are inherently hardier, which means more resistant to weather extremes and more resilient to pests.  Native plants have stronger genetic material than hybrids, and are biologically more diverse.  Perhaps you have heard that Peru's staple, the potato, comes in almost four thousand different varieties!  Now that is biodiversity.  Each potato variable developed within its own little ecosystem of weather and soil conditions, and thrives in that particular small patch of land.  A hybrid, on the other hand, was developed in a research facility, out of context of particular local soil and weather conditions.  When such a hybrid is introduced into an out-of-context garden ecosystem that plant is like a fish out of water.