Going on Vacation!

Thanks so much for joining me on this little journey so far.  I’m officially taking a break from Murmur, My Soul for the next while.  I’m working on a few other projects which include developing a more food-centered site called The Spoon and the Sword.

Check it out, and in the meantime, be well.

Cheers!

Redefine Badass: Just add Heat

Over the last two weeks I’ve spent much less time than usual writing.  I’ve been zooming through my days, through my late nights, biking all over town, welcoming new work opportunities, setting up my summer plans.  Not doing much reflection.

Basically I’m being a badass.

It’s funny because tons of folks who have met me recently, who then stumble across my blog have said to me “you seem like such a hippie when you write.”  A guy at work even flippantly called me an Earth Mother.  As in “I get that you’re like, this Earth Mother, but…”

I’m not at all put off by that.  I’ll take it.  Frankly, we could probably do to honor the Earth Mothers we’ve got.  But there’s the other side to Earth Mother, or Shiva, or what have you, that I’ve really been channeling, and to which it’s important to give voice: this is the molten core that smolders at the center of a heart full of love.

I’m into pliancy, flexibility and boundless love.  I’m also into strength and integrity and unapologetic excellence.  I think that what lava is all about: elements like iron and steel under pressure and heat.  There’s something profoundly exciting about trying to live a life that integrates these elements.

Probably this is why working at a restaurant is so appealing at the moment.  It’s demanding psychologically, physically (you try carrying 30lbs up or down stairs or balancing a tray with eight full water glasses in heels), emotionally.  It’s service work which, as I mentioned to a coworker the other day, if done well, doesn’t look like work at all.  At my core, my steel will and resolve is undergoing the heat and pressure of a million demands, and I’m loving it.  So I’m allowing my core to be fired up, while allowing my outer layers to become translucent, pliable, even sparkling.  Through pressure and heat there is that alchemy necessary for self-transformation.  It’s hard and it’s wonderful.

Flower Gathering: A Career-Seeking Methodology

Marvelous things are happening to me. I’m getting grounded and in the groove at the restaurant where I work, I’m feeling more confident in my ability to serve our guests, and also better at being a good co-worker to the other hosts, to the servers, to the kitchen, to the managers. It’s long, late hours and every shift is stressful (we’ve over booked a table in the dining room and need to find a table for a four-top, table 53 is lingering and we need to turn it, we are flooded with walk-ins who need accommodations, a glass has broken in the bar area), but I love the adrenaline and I love the need to be constantly on my toes, alert to three dozen needs at once, to problem-solve at any and every moment.

The Boston Globe came to photograph the cooking classes for which I’ve been a volunteer assistant teacher. They’re doing a piece on educating school kids about food and healthy eating (inspired by the Jamie Oliver TV series craze), and they found out about the Take Back the Kitchen program at Haley House Bakery and Café, so they came and watched us make a Tunisian Couscous dish, harissa, and “boulou” the fairly healthy North African cookie that I grew up making with my Orthodox Jewish Tunisian adopted grandmother.

There are some great possibilities that I’ll be working more regularly (and not just volunteering) at Haley House Bakery, which is terribly exciting. And I’m on the verge of confirming a summer work share at Powisset Farm in Dover, MA, which I’ve heard phenomenal things about. So yes, my desires to be immersed in the burgeoning worlds of food and cooking, community building and farming, nourishing and serving, seem to be manifesting. I’m thrilled.

In spite of my joy, I’m aware that my path continues to look bizarre and downright disappointing to some the people in my life. One parent of mine wryly threatened to charge me for all the years of expensive education that was poured into me and, to them, now seems tragically wasted. And despite my self-possession, I am occasionally filled with self-doubt when I think of old friends of mine who now own their own condos, or who are newly married with successful careers in finance, or who will approach their 30th birthday with several years of having practiced law under their belts.

Today, in order to continue to feel okay about my path and my decisions, I did a very helpful thing: I went to see one of my Rabbis.  Whether or not you are Jewish, I have a suggestion for you: if you are ever in a place where you find yourself stuck (emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, mentally), consider making an appointment with a rabbi before spending tons of money on psychotherapy or mood-altering drugs.  Generally speaking, rabbis tend to be incredibly smart, empathetic and kind, attuned to the turbulent nuances of life, great question askers, keen, attentive listeners, and wise.  Very wise.  They are also free.  What’s not to love?

This particular Rabbi is fabulous inside and out. With a shock of white but impeccably coiffed hair, the kindest, warmest eyes, and slender feet encased in a teal-colored patent leather wedge with a cork heel that I couldn’t help but praise, she spent the first few moments of our meeting discussing the merits of her pink sparkly toenail polish before getting down to business. (“When I told my pedicurist I wanted a layer of sparkle on my nail polish,” my Rabbi confided, “she said ‘Why would you want that?’ I said ‘Why wouldn’t you?!’   It catches the light,” she said proudly.)

I really love my Synagogue.

Anyway, I spoke briefly about my trajectory (which I summarized as an academic high from Phillips Academy to University of Chicago to UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. program from which I extracted a Master’s Degree and the keen sense that I did not want to go into academia). And then I spoke about my passions. I talked about why I loved working at this restaurant. What drew me to Haley House Café and the cooking classes there. What it is about cooking that is fundamentally linked to healing for me, how I’m becoming more comfortable with acknowledging the spiritual dimension of nourishment. How I still can’t say I’m on a recognizable career path, but that I know I love food and cooking and feeding and community and writing, and that the best way I can put my situation right now is that I’m flower gathering. Unsure of the final vision of the bouquet, but assured that all bouquets are beautiful for their own unique composition, I’m allowing myself the freedom to wander a little bit in the field: to follow my intuition to pluck these flowers and leave others be, to turn a bunch around in my hands, and examine it anew, to be open to having my ideas of goal or final product be influenced by the process of discovery and not by imposed ideals or guidelines.

My Rabbi was wonderful. She heard me and all the excitement bubbling around my interests and the first thing she asked was “do you have a resume that reflects all this work you are doing in these fields?”  (By “fields” she meant, I think, the fields of food and healing, but I’m aware of the way that it ties into the core of the flower gathering model.)

I stopped, astonished. “No!” I exclaimed, realizing that my resume still looks like someone who is pursuing a career in academia or in nonprofit management.

“You might want to think about making a resume – and I’m using this term loosely – that can speak to all the training you’ve received, but also all the work that you are doing. And the direction in which you want to grow. Think about the kinds of things you want to learn. What are the questions you have,” she suggested. I was madly scribbling this all into my red notebook. “Think of it as your vision statement,” she concluded.

My Rabbi just gave me permission – gave me an assignment – to write myself a vision statement! I was excited. More than that: I was elated. “When you have something that works for you, send it to me, and I can help you find people who would be willing to talk with you about their decisions to work in similar fields,” my Rabbi said. “You will want to have a series of these one-on-one discussions with people. I think your metaphor is a great one: you aren’t after ‘an informational meeting;’ this is a flower gathering. As you meet people who have come to work in food and in healing, and as you connect with them, it’s not about you getting to work or not work for them. Instead, you’ll see that you will become a part of their journey, and they a part of yours. This is how things work when they are complimentary, integrative. It’s a synergy.”

So I have my project for the next couple of weeks: write my vision statement for the kinds of opportunities I wish to attract. I need to make a list of skills I have that are more appropriate than “excellent multi-tasker.” I need to think of a way to talk about my ability to listen, to really listen to people. About my deep desire to share food. My ideas and curiosity about nourishment systems. My philosophy of service.

It’s good and challenging and ultimately rewarding work, this whole “making my own career up” thing. But between the communities I’m falling in love with in Boston (for the first time ever!), and the support of my Rabbis and friends, I’m finding the strength to forge ahead in the face of the occasional resentful comment from someone I’m disappointing or my own rare but crippling wave of self-deprecation.  And I’m discovering that while I can’t yet articulate where I’m headed, I am profoundly thankful for all the guides that help me illuminate each small but undeniable step forward.

Sourcing Abundance

Those of us who are Jewish are thinking this week about the path from bondage (mitzrayim — literally a tight or narrow place, referring to being slaves in Egypt) to liberation and ultimately, redemption.

I’ve been thinking and talking with many friends about how to self-release from the bound or tight feeling that comes with a sense of scarcity.  There are lots of things we feel we might not have enough of.  Time, money, and love are usually at the top of the list of things we feel are too scarce.  ”Where did it go?” we ask ourselves, stupefied at the disappearance of one or more of these three.

I’ve been gathering tricks and tools that help undo that sense of scarcity, that rewrite our perception to see that we have enough.  More than enough: because what I want is to come to every day and every interaction from a place of abundance.  In other words: it’s not enough to feel like there’s enough.  I want to always have enough to share.

I want to start with a little story that I read, way back in eighth or ninth grade while studying the Holocaust in school.  We went to the Holocaust memorial in downtown Boston.  There are six glass towers (one for every million Jews killed in the camps) which have etchings on them.  There are also brief quotes on each tower, and you walk through the towers to read them.  This one story, recalled by survivor Gerda Weissman Klein, has always stuck with me.

Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf…

Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry, and you give it to your friend.

I can’t think of a more stark example of turning desperate scarcity into a radical act of coming from abundance.

Abundance means you have enough to give away.  Ultimately, it’s not about how many things you have, how much money, how many admirers, how much free time.  Abundance means that no matter what the amount of things in your life, you have enough.  More than enough: abundance means you share what you have.

My theology is that, at the base of all things, the foundation of all life and everything in existence, is boundless love.  Really, like love that goes on forever.  Love that is so deep and expansive we can’t fathom it.  Love that reaches back an eternity and forward forever.  That’s where I choose to source my abundance.

There are little tricks that help me realign my thoughts to a place of abundance from a place of constriction or scarcity.  One is to give change (or hey, even a whole dollar!) to people who ask me.  The more I do that, the more I am reminded that even when my money is “tight,” I have money.  I am provided for.

For people who struggle with feeling the scarcity of time, I have heard that saying “no” to more people helps.  Decline invitations.  Cancel all your plans on a Saturday night and spend an evening reading, meditating, being still.  Do less for a month: you’ll soon find that you have “time” again.

If you feel a scarcity of love… this is tough, but very necessary: start with learning to love yourself.  One of the most important relationships that I am working on right now, besides my relationship to the Divine, is the relationship of me to myself.  There are ways in which sometimes I am my own best enemy.  How do you treat yourself?  Would you treat your most beloved that way?  Act toward yourself as you would act to your most beloved.  Become your most beloved.  In the end, it doesn’t matter how many people love you.  You can be loved by millions or just by a dozen.  But if you don’t become your own beloved you won’t be able to live in the true promise of abundant love.

So we see that sourcing abundance isn’t about getting more money to have a shopping spree, or more time to pack in with plans, or more people who just adore you.  Sourcing abundance is the ability to see where you are clearly, to find space and generosity and even grace just as things are.

If a young girl can have a nothing but raspberry and can give it away, then surely we can all see in our lives the time, money, love, that we can share.  It’s in the sharing, not in the owning, that the blessing lies.

We found your dollar

Neighborhood Lost and Found

Rushing to work the other day I ran past this.  Even though I was late I had to back track and take a quick photo.  The note was taped two and a half feet from the ground — just in arm’s length of, say, a five year-old.

I wondered: who is Alexander?  Whose dollar did he find?  What is to become of him, of the dollar, and of the person who might have, at the local coffee shop later that day, reached into their pants pocket only to find the money they had distractedly slipped in earlier that day, had mysteriously disappeared?  Would owner and finder ever meet?

The next day, still thinking about the sign, which had come down or been washed away in the first of a three-day relentless rainstorm, the questions evoked by the sign evolved, magnified. How do we choose to look out for one another?  What do we do with the objects we find in our daily lives?  Who takes care to provide orphaned objects homes or return them to their rightful owners?  Is a dollar an object?  Is a dollar owned?

What are the lessons here?

Spring Murmurs, Spring Cleaning

It is officially spring!

I’ve been thinking about the rituals we have to welcome this season.  In Jewish homes for example, we are cleaning out our cupboards and preparing for our eight-day Passover holiday, a major yearly event which commemorates one of the most epic of human transitions: from slavery to liberation.  To prepare, we are eating up and tossing out all foods that have wheat in them, as well as anything else that isn’t Kosher for Pesach.

But there are many ways to do cupboard clearing.  A non-Jewish friend of mine has challenged herself to not doing any grocery shopping for a week — she made herself use up all the ingredients in her pantry.  Check out her culinary successes!

In this spirit, I decided to take a pause and do some work clearing out my emotional cupboards this week.  There’s really no better time.  Here we are, coming to the end of our first quarter of 2010.  What that I seeded in the first days of this year is working?  What do I need to sweep out or let go of?  What are the growth patterns that are working for me?  What do I need to do more of?

I’m pretty clear I need to do more work with kids and more work cooking with others.  I’m fairly sure I need to get my hands in some dirt more regularly and more permanently.  I’m looking into farm and garden volunteer opportunities, and I am planning to start turning my own backyard into a little garden.  As for new ways to grow, I’m super-excited by this medicine making workshop organized through the Urban Homesteader’s League.

What about you?  What habits are you making sure to nurture this spring?  What is on your “spring clean out” list?  Take a moment, if you have one, to jot down a few intentions for yourself.

Nourishment Lesson of the Week: How You Eat Matters

I learned something important this week about how you feel when you eat.  On Tuesday, I got into a big fight with someone over a small thing.  I was furious and frustrated, and then doubly frustrated with myself for getting that angry, for allowing my anger to literally make my stomach smolder (especially when I knew that, in the end, what we were fighting about was the definition of No Big Deal).  I was also pressed for time: I needed to eat something before going to work, where I would be on my feet from 4:00pm until at least 11:30, possibly midnight.

I counted to 10, took a few big breaths, but could still feel how wound up and angry I was.  The anger had actually killed my appetite, but it was my last chance to have a bite for at least eight hours, so I dished myself some leftover quinoa and delicata/acorn squash and sat down.  ”I need to take care of myself,” I thought.  ”It’s important that I eat now.”

Although the night before the meal had been delicious, with smoked paprika giving a heat and sultriness to the dish, I couldn’t taste any flavor as I sullenly sat, polishing off a bowl of leftovers.  ”That’s odd,” I remember thinking.  ”It was so good yesterday.”

I shrugged it off, put the empty bowl in the sink, grabbed my coat, and dashed out the door, still chewing my last bite.

Work was fine: I remember starting the evening with lots of energy.  Somehow the drive had helped me dispel almost all the rest of my anger, and keeping busy was certainly helping.

Close to 11:00PM, however, I began to feel sick.  I wasn’t sure what was coming over me: I felt a little sweaty and a little bit dizzy.  And nauseated?  No, impossible!  ”I can’t feel sick to my stomach,” I thought.  ”I haven’t been ill since high school.”  It’s true:  not even in college or after did I ever have a stomach flu, nor drink so much that I needed to be sick.  I have a natural aversion to vomiting: if I feel like I’m going to be sick I’d rather drink some water and go lie down till the feeling passes.

But this feeling of nausea persisted.  On my drive home I felt so awful I had to lean back against the headrest and close one eye.  I contemplated pulling over.  ”No, no, no,” I recited to myself.  ”Just make it home, just make it home.”

When I got home, shortly after midnight, my father was up at the dining room table.  ”How was work?” he asked.

“I think I might throw up,” I answered, and went straight up to my floor.

I was still determined not to be ill, so I undressed, took a shower, and got into bed.  My head was reeling.  ”Just breathe, just sleep,” I repeated.  And I did.

Until about 2:00AM, when I bolted awake, already in the process of heaving up whatever remains had been in my stomach from the afternoon before.  It was awful, it was like a scene from The Exorcist or something: I had absolutely no control over my body.  I’ll spare you the details and just give you the coda: there I was, lying on the floor of my bedroom next to a plastic trash bin, feeling both more awful than I have in years and also ironically relieved.

The scene repeated itself a few hours later.  In the morning, my parents, horrified that I hadn’t woken them up, were miraculously attentive. My mother asserted I had contracted a 24-hour stomach virus.  My father asserted I’d eaten something which didn’t agree with me. They made sure I had access to essential fluids: warm water, ginger ale, and later: saltines, vegetable broth, Italian ice.  I was, however, still to sick to eat anything and spent the entire day sleeping or blearily staring at the ceiling.

The following day I was better, if still rather tired.  I was able to go for a walk in the Forest Hills Cemetery and even pick up a shift at work at night.  Finally, this morning, I woke up feeling pretty much at 100% and so I had my first proper meal since Tuesday: two pieces of toast drizzled in olive oil dusted with Celtic sea salt, turmeric (to aid with digestion and general internal repairs), and smoked black pepper, a six-minute egg (local, free range, the perfect brilliant yellow, still half-runny yoke), and a big cup of green chai tea.  I chewed slowly; I relished every bite; I felt thankful for a new understanding of the privilege to eat.

What’s the lesson here?  The lesson is not really reducible to “if you eat out of anger, you’ll be sick to your stomach.”  I probably did catch some kind of mild 24-hour virus.  Or maybe the leftovers had gone bad, who knows?  In any case, my experiences this week have given me a chance to appreciate the possible links between our eating patterns and our feeling patterns, and how those links are expressed somatically.  Maybe if I’d been in a different headspace and if the leftovers really had turned, I would have noticed that they tasted off, rather than not being able to gauge any taste at all.

Regardless, I am certainly not going to take chances for the next bit: I’m going to take extra time to focus on the emotional background to mealtime.  If I can’t eat with joy, with gratitude, with sensuous pleasure, then perhaps it makes sense to postpone a meal.  So that’s our lesson this week at Murmur, My Soul: bring awareness to how you eat.  Add some juicy adverbs to mealtime.  Replace angrily, sadly, frantically, worriedly with wholly, fully, slowly, radiantly.  Appreciatively.  Maybe even lovingly.

Nourish Thyself: Some Thoughts, Some Practices

Those of you who know me know that I love talking about food and energy.  What, then, are my thoughts on nutrition, you ask?

I am pro-nourishment, but staunchly against classical nutritional advice (i.e. the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid, or diets that espouse things like calorie or carbohydrate counts).  My food philosophy is one that is based on an ethics of nourishment, not the principles of classical nutrition.

After living in the Bay Area for nearly three years, eating (yes) much, much fresh local produce, but also artisanal croissants and drinking a Blue Bottle latte whenever the fancy struck me, I really can’t say I’ve ever felt or looked better.  This is because for the last several years, I’ve learned to attune myself to how I am being nourished, not what the nutritional profile is of a given food or dish.

I don’t want to imply that nutritional advice is entirely irrelevant.  I just mean to say that it is mostly irrelevant.  Or, more to the point, it is grossly myopic.  When we look at food in terms of how many grams of fat it has, typically we isolate that food from frankly, what counts more than a calorie.

There are two branches of this ethics of nourishment that dovetail in food consumption.  The first has to do with how we nourish ourselves.  The second concerns what larger patterns of business and behavior are nourished when we purchase or consume food. (Just as Jonathan Safran Foer noted in Eating Animals, “we are all farmers by proxy.”  Whenever you take a bite of a turkey sandwich, you are doing more than simply giving caloric fuel to your cells: you are also promoting and feeding the chain of events that brought that sandwich to your plate.)

For most of us, it is easier to reform our eating behaviors by starting with ourselves.  I’ve come up with a three-step process to start attuning yourself to basic eating attitudes.

Step One: Identify your hunger.  Is it big or small?  Do you want a full meal or a snack?  Think about all the qualities of food and figure out which qualities would be most satisfying to you.  Are you needing dense food or something lighter, airy? Do you want something hot or cold? Do you want something crunchy like carrots or toast, or something soft and smooth like cream of wheat or a banana?  Sweet like ice cream or salty like a pretzel?

Step Two: Eat whatever it is that you’ve figured will most nourish and satisfy your needs.

Step Three: Wait half an hour or so, then check back in with yourself to see how you’re feeling about what you’ve eaten.  Is there some hunger or craving still lingering?  How’s your energy level?  How are you emotionally?  Notice if there are any negative feelings that are judging what you ate, or any feelings of egoism or pride that have been inaugurated by your having eaten.  Just notice the feelings: don’t try to change them.

Personally, I have found that I need to know a great deal of where my food came from.  I need to know who prepared it almost always.  I like preparing myself whenever possible.  I also like being creative.  This morning, I found deep satisfaction in a couple slices of toasted challah baked by my neighbor, Salty Femme, slathered with a thick, fluffy layer of Naragansett Creamery Ricotta, drizzled with raw blue agave nectar, washed down with some hot yerba maté.  It’s a few hours after breakfast, and the creaminess and sweetness of my breakfast is still with me, bolstering me against the incessant, torrential rains that Boston has endured since Saturday.

Over time, the more you do this, the more you can experiment and play with your hunger.  Think of your hungers as opportunities to enrich a practice of self-nourishment, rather than enforce principles that come from someone else.  Own your hungers, own your process of self-discovery and self-expression through food.  Own the right to call the shots with how and what you eat.  If there’s no such thing as one religion or spiritual practice that works for every human, how is there a correct and an incorrect way to eat?

New Gigs

I’m pleased to report I’ve started working at a great ‘lil Cambridge restaurant, (working there is the closest thing I can come to being immersed in the kinds of establishments that I left behind in the Bay Area).  I am learning lots by watching the bustling kitchen; am beginning to cultivate a deeper awareness of the complexities of the restaurant industry.  It will, I hope, be a good place for me to make inquiries about the rhizomatic tangle of food and aesthetics that so fascinates me.

Also, I’m starting to volunteer as an assistant to the cooking classes at Haley House Café’s Take Back the Kitchen Program.  I anticipate many stories about these new kitchen experiences: insights about what else gets nourished every time we set out to make a meal, what else is fed when we feed ourselves.

As a backdrop to all this, I’m still mulling over how health care and healing discourses fit into my newly unfolding daily routine: how to formally make the food and healing both more explicit and more integrated in my writing.  M.F.K. Fisher is helping, but I’m also looking to pull in other voices…

Finding Grace in Tragedy

So much can happen in one week.  I flew to Seattle unexpectedly at the end of a quick trip to San Francisco because my grandfather was not doing well.  As it turned out, I was able to be by his bedside for the last few hours of his life — he passed away shortly after 7:00pm last Tuesday.  It was the first time I had ever seen a body that has just had it’s soul depart.  At first I tried to make sense of the event, but death is precisely that part of life that resists a production of meaning that is calcified, hardened, final.  And it is because we live in a state of mystery that the meanings of our lives and of our deaths can be continually re-signified.  It is this state of mystery that seems to both come from and produce grace.

The earthquake in Chile bears much the same lesson for me.  For all the toil we put into building up and dominating this earth, it takes just a moment for the hills to shrug their shoulders and undo our work.  In that moment, we are rendered powerless, we are put out of our homes, our cars strewn across roads like toys on the nursery floor, we are laid out on the ground, ever vulnerable, ever humbled.  It is amazing.

Creation and decreation, life and death, happening all around us all the time.  Grace is what links these two elements of the cycle: it is because of grace that they are entwined and continue to give over, one to the other.  And grace preserves the mystery of the cycle, even as we determine to pull out meaning after meaning, like rabbits from the magician’s hat.