nectarina

back home again

2009-12-28T15:31:00.000-08:00

I'm home again in Oakland after a week in LA, the bulk of which I spent gloriously prone on the couch, under a blanket and reading a book. Fire crackling in the fireplace, cat sprawled on the carpet, parents napping and reading magazines. I feel mellowed, in the fullest sense of the word -- gentled, relaxed, unhurried. And I'm off to Harbin Hot Springs on Wednesday for a long weekend with the chosen family, cleansing and blessing the new year together. I feel renewed, restored and thankful.

On my first day in Los Angeles I was fortunate to spend the day with Deena Metzger and her community, for their monthly Dare', or community council. Deena is a life-long healer, spiritual teacher, author, activist, and elder. She is a true witch, and I am deeply moved by her fearless and continual turning towards the heartbreak of the world, medicine in hand. There is a whole volume to be written about this day, the peacemaking work of this community, the powerful and uncanny familiarity I felt with so many people in the gathering. The deep, low, rumbling profundity of what emerged from our day-long conversation, which closed with a sharing of our dreams and their relevance to the times in which we live.

What I will say now is that watching Deena apply her magical soul-salves and weave together the threads of community into an image of the possibility of wholeness, illuminated for me some understanding of my role, as well ~ the role of medicine-bringer, through my words and through the love I give. The story of our human folly is scrawled carelessly onto the delicate parchment of every living system, but instead of dissolving into despair I am beginning to understand -- when I look at my guides like Carolyn Raffensperger, Caroline Casey, and Deena Metzger, among others -- that what I can do is give my heart over, again and again, in service of that story's transmutation.

Something about the safety of being in the bosom of my family allowed me to fully feel the extent of the sadness that I have been feeling about the state of the world. Of course Copenhagen was a farcical sham; shouldn't we all have expected that, given what we know about politics? Nonetheless, it is true that I did walk around feeling stunned and light-headed after I heard about the non-agreement that wasn't reached about the future of our shared response to the climate crisis. The despair gnawed at my heart, and as I unclenched myself with my family, the cry rose up in my throat.

I spent some time, too, wondering if there is perhaps an amorphous and free-floating hopeless despair that I carry with me, that I pin on targets like the world and my body. I've gained ten pounds this fall, and as sad as that makes me, as burdened as I feel, as removed as I become from the dance of attraction, it is true this experience feels very, very familiar. And it's also true that for the past year I have been dancing on this edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting to become fat again because I don't yet know how to live into lightness and ease inside my own physical form.

I won't get into the gory psychological details of all that here, but suffice it to say, I have been inquiring into myself about it. And in the midst of an anguished, tearful moment, I asked myself, "What would my life be about if it was devoted and dedicated to whatever it is that makes my spirit absolutely light up and shine?" What IS that thing?

Immediately, the answer came: "To love. Love is the joy, love is the richness, love is the source of everything. Love is all there is. The heart’s expansive flowing freedom to be with, to connect, to share, to delight, to marvel, to light up with possibility. That is my gift, the gift of love."

Love is the true medicine. Love is the only medicine. It is not weight loss that allows me to feel free inside my body, it is self-acceptance. It is not the flipping of some omnipotent, cosmic switch that brings order to all the world that will allow me to feel happy and useful on this earth, it is my open heart and my intention to do my work with love, for love.

In remembering this, I suddenly understand exactly what to do and how to do it. There is no complicated formula to follow, no threshold of accomplishment to be reached, no signal that will arise from the dim chaos of the world that I am free to expand, unfold, relax after biding my time for so long in a posture of contraction. There is only love, now, to be offered and to be received. Bless the food I eat, bless the water that I bathe in, bless the day and night, bless the body. Bless the moment of communion, the redwood tree outside my window, the quiet afternoon. Bless the land and the women who give all of themselves in service of its sanctity. Bless all that is not yet healed, and draw meaning from it. Bless all that has been healed, and give thanks for the unceasing miracle of change. Bless the life that stirs in me at each moment, the force that animates all that we see and share. Bless the form, bless the journey, bless the spirit that abides within. From that place, and in due time: bless the sacred Other, and bless the future generations.

So, after all this, on the plane I realized what my New Year's resolutions are. They're very simple: (1) Practice unconditional love (including of self). (2) Feel all feelings. (3) Count all blessings.

Should be a beautiful year. :)

cracks in the armor

2009-12-12T14:17:00.001-08:00

You know what's wonderful? As soon as you make even the slightest opening, the Universe comes pouring in to offer all manner of unfathomable, unconditional love and support.

That's what this week has been like. I'm finding a new gentleness with myself -- a moment here and a moment there of softness, of the heart's upwelling. Glimpses of the truth that all the ways I berate myself are just habits of mind. Choosing kindness, choosing to feel. It sounds so basic, but it's momentous. My whole life people have said to me, "You're too hard on yourself," and I've never really understood what they meant until now, as I am finding the capacity to step back and just witness my mind's ceaseless stream of judgments.

So, what happens when that starts to let up? Well, I can tell you: themes happen. On Monday, it was trust. A whole series of events unfolded, reminding me of the power and sweetness and necessity of trust. Later in the week, it was rest, and my deep desire and need for true rest.

The other big one this week? Choice. I have been weaving in and out of a sense of despair, lately, from the state of the world. It came to a head this week when I learned about the "Danish text," a draft climate agreement between the major power players at the Copenhagen climate conference. This leaked document represented the power players' attempt to circumvent the negotiations process and write an agreement that would protect all of their (our) interests, essentially leaving poor and less powerful nations to suffer the mounting burdens of climate change and poverty without recourse. The discovery of this document was an outrage, and the conference fell into disarray until somehow negotiations were able to resume.

Upon learning this news I felt an overwhelming sense of defeat. What part of "the global climate crisis affects all of us" do our leaders fail to understand? Looking around at the world and witnessing the living hell that so many people and creatures must endure, the living hell that we ourselves have created, I find myself in a depression. And I grieve, too, for simplicity -- I grieve for our disconnection from the earth, from our bodies, from each other. My disconnection. Can my work really make any difference at all, especially if I feel numb and alone while doing it?

Last night I attended the opening party for the new restaurant that my dear friends Eric and Ari just opened, called Gather. Every element of this restaurant reflects a rigorous commitment to sustainability -- from the bench seats made of recycled leather belts, to the art on the wall made from packing materials, to the local/ seasonal/ organic cuisine, Gather is a paean to possibility in business and in community.

I love these two men so much -- one of them is married to my best friend and colleague, and both of them are like my brothers. Last night, more than ever, I felt so moved to be a part of the same soul family as them. They spoke of the initial vision that sent them on this nine-year journey: the vision that Eric received, out in the desert, of a place where people would come together to share delicious food and connect with the earth. From there, their company Back to Earth catering and outdoor adventures emerged, always with the foundational dream of this restaurant. And now it's a reality.

They were both lit up, not only from the strength of this beautiful vision itself, but from the accumulated strength they have actually received from their years of continual, conscious re-alignment with the vision, despite whatever setbacks arose. Ari spoke directly to the notion of choice: he told a traditional tale, where a grandmother tells her grandchildren that there are two wolves locked in a mortal struggle inside of her and inside of everyone. One wolf represents fear, greed, anger, hatred, and negativity; the other represents love, kindness, sharing and positivity. Her grandchildren ask her, which wolf wins? And grandmother replies: the one you feed. I've heard Ari tell that story a number of times, but each time I am struck by the profundity of it. Here we are, on this mysterious planet living this mysterious life, seemingly barreling inexorably towards our self-generated doom -- so what can we do? Choose life, over and over and over again.

Ari concluded his talk with this quote, from the Lord of the Rings:

Sam: I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam: That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for.

And then we went and enjoyed a feast.

So that's what I'm left with. That Life is worth my life. More than anything, that every moment provides the opportunity for me to choose between giving up and continuing on. What would nature do? Well, just look outside your window and you'll see. Rain, then rainbows, then green life regenerating in the sun. Then rain again, on and on.

It's astounding, what arises when you start to be kind to yourself and let yourself feel your own life.

What's next, true love? ;)

en las noticias

2009-11-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

I haven't done one of these in a while! It's late at night and while there are many things happening in my world right now, most of them are personal and subterranean and might bore you. So in lieu of musings, I give you Gentleheart's Week in Review.

First, of course, is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember exactly where I was when it happened. I'm nine years old, and my mom is telling me that this is an important event in world history, that someday I'll remember where I was when this happened. And so I remembered it, and still do -- we were driving on Fountain Avenue in Hollywood, probably on the way to a piano lesson, listening to the radio. I remember feeling some upward rush of hopefulness, not really knowing why, but sensing that the world's interest was converging on something good and right, and feeling a part of it, even there in the car on a sunny November day in LA. I've enjoyed NYT's coverage, particularly this feature.

Second, equally of course, is the passage of the health care bill in the House. Can I say this? I don't understand the healthcare debate. Why is universal health care even a question? The reticence, at best, that American citizens and leadership display at the prospect of government-funded health care -- even as an option, co-existing alongside private insurance -- is apparently just one more facet to the Glenn-beck-veins-bulging belligerent individualism that is ultimately such a self-destructive force. What is so frightening to us about the prospect of ensuring that each of us is cared-for? . . . Don't answer that.

And third, of course, is the Maine gay rights defeat. I don't even know what to say about this. After the gut-punch of Prop 8, I just can't get emotionally involved. I'm so glad there are amazing people like Kate Kendell who are still so powerfully strategizing and moving on this issue.

Finally, the fork in the road in Pasadena. My favorite thing about this is that the folks who clandestinely set up this 18-foot tall silver fork statue dressed as Cal Trans workers to pass it off.

Ah, the news. Lest you despair at this world, let me leave you with something beautiful.

birthing feminine leadership

2009-10-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

I'm in the midst of getting trained as a doula. I've spent the past two days learning about child birth and the role of the doula -- the one who mothers the mother, who offers labor support -- and tomorrow I'll go back for a final day. It's been beautiful and is happening amidst, or perhaps also provoking, a couple of important realizations.

The first realization is about the similarities between my work as a doula and my work as an advocate for and with women environmental justice leaders. The doula is spoken and written about universally as an advocate for the mother in an often-rushed and confusing birth environment; the teacher of the workshop, Felicia, also emphasizes the element of collaboration. It is not the doula making choices or speaking for the mother; the doula ensures that the choices and the voice of the mother are elevated above the din, to guide the birth process.

Same with environmental justice lawyering. Luke Cole wrote frequently about the role of the environmental justice lawyer as an advocate who is not out in front, but instead occupies a "tech support" position, making sure that grassroots leaders occupy a place at the table that is equal to all the other players, and making sure the community's agenda drives the process.

Felicia spoke about the doula's crucial service of ensuring that the mother always has the opportunity to provide her informed consent to the doctor's decisions about what should come next. One of the major items on the advocacy agenda of indigenous environmental justice leaders is the principle of free, prior informed consent -- no industrial project or mining operation will take place on indigenous lands without the rightful occupants of the land understanding and freely consenting to that endeavor.

The laboring mother, the Mother Earth -- whether subject to rushed, clinical interventions during the most intimate moments of birth, or plundered for minerals or fossil fuels, the feminine body in our culture is disregarded and desecrated. Her power, her choice, her wholeness, her agency -- all are undermined by invasive procedures performed on the hospital bed or at the strip mine site.

Again and again, as I access these stark and painful understandings I am nonetheless confirmed in my purpose in the world. First in Israel in 1999, then in the Inyo Mountains in 2007, I heard it clearly: healing the feminine principle, at every level. My body, the bodies and lives of women, the earth's body. Big task, for one kind of lazy, sort of naive only-child, isn't it? Yeah. But what else do I have to do?

The second realization is about my work in the world. Everything I am called to do, from coordinating advocacy for women environmental justice leaders, to holding space for laboring women, to dreaming up an activist women's health collective, is about supporting women to heal and to rise. And when I see it laid out so clearly, I finally start to make some sense to myself. In truth I can't separate the healing of my ancestry from my forward-moving participation in the earth's healing. All this work, I will be the first to admit, is deeply rooted in my lineage: my mother's mother was such a broken woman, whose brokenness damaged my own mother. But that brokenness stops with me. I am here to restore wholeness. That's my commitment to myself, to this world, to my future children.

Eve Ensler says: "when we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us . . . happiness exists in action, in telling the truth and saying what your truth is, and in giving away what you want the most." With all my various and seemingly incongruous work, I suppose I am giving what I want the most -- healing for the Mother. Wholeness, balance, respect, love. For my mother who did not have these, but who managed to survive and even thrive, nonetheless. When I see women who need support I go towards them with my light and strength, so as to buttress their own power and magnify their own radiance, so that beauty can live.

Last weekend at the Bioneers conference, women's leadership in the environmental movement was the concept on everyone's lips (along with the imminent urgency of fixing the climate). A diverse chorus of voices spoke to the redemptive power of women's collective, collaborative, inclusive orientation in decision-making and problem-solving. Nina Simons, who graced our WEA event earlier in the week, opened the conference on Friday morning with her wisdom on the essential qualities of women's leadership. I'll try to paraphrase them here, as best I can.

After telling us that the Dalai Lama in September said that "the world will be saved by Western women" (it's true, you can Google it), Nina shared with us the following principles:

Women are learning that we already are and know enough.
Strength comes from within, informed by the power of our love and service.
Cultivating self-awareness is essential to grow beyond wounds.
Power comes from purpose and inner authority, not credentials or permission.
There is a dance between leading and following, speaking and listening.
Every system has limits, and an ebb and flow.
Reciprocity and synchronicity are essential.
Flexibility counts: leadership can come from any position.
Power is something sacred from within us all -- not power over, but power with and through.
Vulnerability can inform our strength.
We cannot do this alone -- our flourishing requires relationships of rigorous love and challenging support.
We are learning to listen to land/ people/ intuition/ sacred spiritual traditions.
We are learning to share authority and cultivate rotating leadership.
Diversity is our strength.
We are connecting and collaborating across boundaries despite our fear.

Reflecting on these, I feel relieved, buoyed and powerful. I am -- we are -- valid and valuable. Perhaps most significantly, I remember that there is something larger than me, larger than all of us individually, at work here, something to which I can and must give my life over.

Just recently a new bloom opened on my orchid plant, shining its long-awaited loveliness into the room. It was in bud for weeks and weeks. I wasn't sure if it was even going to open -- a similar bud had just shriveled and fallen off without ever blooming. But this one persisted, growing and changing from within until it was ready to reveal itself. And now it's here, and the world is a more beautiful place for it.

That's the other thing I'm learning: everything in time. All I can do is create the conditions that support life, and then allow life to do what it knows, by nature, how to do.

Come home. Write about it.

2009-10-07T23:33:00.000-07:00

My old friend, with whom I was once in love -- he and I are back in touch.

I fell in love with him one night in my freshman year of college. There were many events leading up to that night, I suppose, but I remember distinctly the circumstances of the falling. We were at his dirty fraternity house. And I don't mean "dirty" like food on the floor and unsavory bathroom conditions. I mean "dirty" like loud music, cocaine, boys fucking girls and then hurting their feelings. (That's not what happened with my friend and I, exactly, but that's the kind of company he kept. Just trying to paint the picture.)

I should rewind, too, and tell you about the day earlier in the semester when our school flooded. It was the El Nino year, year of rains so torrential that an entire college campus infrastructure was overcome by water. The libraries flooded; important materials were lost. The day after the biggest storm, to all of our great glee, classes were cancelled. So my friend and I went on an adventure. He came and found me in my dorm and then we went to visit our french teacher. The sky was gray and the air was refreshing, moist, washed. We walked around our stunned campus that day. Spending time with him made me feel tentative and delighted.

He had this effect on me. He may have had the same effect on all the girls he hung out with, in fact I'm sure he did, because he paid such close attention. I always felt a little bit on edge around him, because he was, in fact, edgy. "Edgy" like you were never sure what he was going to say next. "Edgy" like he could leap across all boundaries of appropriateness with a single utterance. But he was also immeasurably sweet. People loved him. His frat brothers loved him. He clearly came from love, if not love and struggle.

And like I said, he paid attention. When I was around him I felt myself at a kind of tenuous balance point, teetering between a painful exposure, his piercing commentary peeling back layers before I was ready, and the surprising tenderness of being seen so clearly, with such generosity.

So, he kept after me in his odd way. Eventually, of course, we ended up making out with each other. And that night that I started telling you about: I don't recall if that was the first night that we spent together, but it was most definitely the night that the doors to my heart swung open. I remember him playing with me, locking me out of the room, and I remember how much I wanted to get back in to be with him. Then, back in the room: he rolling cigarettes, sitting at his desk, smiling at me.

I forget how exactly it happened but then there it was. The long, slow tumble towards another person, the heart's bright gasp of recognition. But it wasn't meant to be -- he fell away from me almost immediately in the ensuing days, in his maddeningly edgy and inaccessible way. I wrote him a letter demanding that he show up, be with me, let me love him . . . which, as you can imagine, was the death knell. We fell out of contact almost entirely for a long time after that.

But he found me again the following year, I think, and started reaching out to me again. And since then we've re-kindled something of a friendship. I've felt him kind of tracking me all these years, staying in touch one way or another, with a kind e-mail or a random text or chat. Our contact has been frustrating, compelling, loving. In the intervening time he got married to a beautiful woman and is achieving success as a producer. He could have gone in so many directions but he has triumphed, has chosen life. I see that and I am truly proud of him. We finally got together a few weeks ago for the first time in years, over lunch with another friend of his. It felt like no time had passed at all.

Tonight we chatted a bit online, and in our chat he wrote me something of a poem, that ended up cutting straight to my heart. It surprised me, but it also didn't, how swiftly I was transported back to our brief moment together, 12 years ago. The shock of being witnessed was as electric then as it is now, as veiled and elusive as the witness may have been. I was surprised, but I also wasn't, by the tears rolling down my cheeks.

Some living quality of our contact is frozen in time and space, caught, left behind. What has survived all the time up until now is just a piece of it, held at arm's length. But words like these cast light on the ice and melt it down. They're nonsense words, elusive, cryptic; nonetheless, they reach me. In being reached I can recall what's possible: gentleness at close range, ceasing to scramble away from contact and instead breathing quietly in its sight. And that gift yields a flood of further treasures. Later in the evening, after we chatted, I went to the dance and found myself opening up right to the edges of my body. Whirling through space I remembered trust. I remembered safety, my own; and perfection, the mystery's. I smiled wide and gave my life to Life, once more.

All because of a few silly words from an old friend.

Thanks, DOC.

i'll say this.

...

put your shoes on

the same way you did

when you were still under 20

and still excited to see something brilliant

or repulsive that defined you.

Come home.

write about it. You deserve the opportunity and command.

don't be so green.

You words may emit bad carbons.

or brilliant diamonds.

and that

exactly

is why it is so trying

and hard and sad

to be brilliant.

you are like you are.

there is a violin playing in my living room.

and a man speaking.

saying, "stand up"

but he is very young

and knows nothing of the world

like you

or I

which makes him so small

and you

and I

so big

and important.

feed your stream

of consciousness

and dance.

tonight,

you will not regret anything

except for not listening to yourself more

adding lamps to your bedroom

photographs to your wall

and removing the television from your home.

and of course calling me more often,

which makes me sad

because I always believed so much

in your capacity

to change the world.

and that, my dear friend.

...

is terribly sad.

the converse...

of your smile.

it is sad to wait there

and pass the last ten minutes of your evening

in something I wish i had a long time ago.

so sister,

please

live it out.

that is what the world needs.

the black and the white

the yin

the circle

the square.

and some dumb bastard to stop typing

when he's not getting paid to do it.

service and exile

2009-09-21T16:19:00.000-07:00

A friend writes, on his blog: "the degree to which we serve is the degree to which we are no longer in exile."

This sentence resonates like the long note of a bell. Over the weekend I cooked in the discomfort of exile: after ingesting plant medicine, I found myself caught in a rushing river of thought which cascaded over all the events of my life, finding fault with each one and my role in it. Everything I've ever done is a horrible mistake, I "realized," and I am a horrible person for having done all those things.

This is not an unfamiliar experience for me, this shattering, devoid of self-kindness -- usually, however, it is a murky and subterranean unfolding, whereas I found it suddenly crystalline in the light of consciousness and my community's love. This weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and I spent several hours each day praying in synagogue with my community and then several more hours in precious moments of just being together. I found myself again and again in awe of the sweetness of sharing this life with those around me, so open-hearted and committed to growth and joy.

I'll spare you all the gory details of my personal process around this experience, and will just say that I had an experience I'd never had before in this particular go-round, which is that I felt for the first time able to share myself from within the experience and find myself received with unconditional love and positive regard by my friends. It was immeasurably healing, after having found myself guilty in the court of my own mind, to be guided back into the expansiveness of the heart by the love of my chosen family here (with a little help from Big Mama Ocean).

Today, at the Brower Center, there was a blessing ceremony for the building -- it's a new building (we all just moved in a few months ago), and today we gathered together to thank the ancestors for allowing us to be there and pray that our work for the healing of the earth would be good and successful. We stood in a circle as a beautiful Ohlone elder woman called in the directions and asked us each to speak about our work. It was a special ceremony, one that made me feel so blessed to be where I am today.

The photographer for the event was wearing a shirt with a quote from David Brower on the back: "Have fun saving the world or you are just going to depress yourself." It struck me, especially after my experience of going into my own shadow this weekend and then re-emerging into the light of love, that this is really the best thing that we can do. Love the earth, love one another, give everything. I am learning that I can heal myself when I give over all of myself -- in prayer and in action, when I offer my fullest heart, my fullest service to the need of the moment, my own experience is transformed.

I used to wonder what people meant when they say, 'the more you give, the more you have.' Wouldn't giving everything just leave me spent and empty? But I see it more clearly now, as I swim in the chaotic waters of creativity and collaboration, as I discover what it means to show up as a person in the world, being open to loving and being loved. Giving everything, having fun saving the world, is really the only way to go now. The alternative to having fun is depressing yourself. The alternative to service is exile. On this planet -- which could go up in flames soon if we don't all make profound changes, or possibly even if we do -- as scary as it is to be alive and do things and make mistakes and fumble and stumble on, what is the alternative? Safety, inertia, numbness. Exile.

It is a stark calculus for stark times, and the choice to serve requires constant sensing and re-calibration, like a baby learning to walk. But there's really no question about what choice to make, is there?

re:indigenous

2009-09-13T19:51:00.000-07:00

During my second year of law school, I took a course called Law, Markets and Culture, taught by the only tenured female African-American professor on the faculty of the school. It was a ranging examination of the intersections of economy and jurisprudence, and the struggle for human thriving amidst these often-forbidding forces.

I wrote our 24-hour final exam in that class about Burning Man, analyzing the festival, in the context of Western culture, as an "alternative for structuring relations." I dug the paper out of my files as I thought about this blog post, and read through it with glee. I'd just returned from my first time out on the playa when school started, and suddenly I thought I had discovered the secret to fixing our poor, broken civilization. It was like I was in graduate school, or something: my Marxist-inspired critiques of the market economy flowed without pause into a discussion of race, gender, and morality. The final ingredient in this intellectual goulash was a statement on Burning Man's potential to revivify our humanity as we traded in goods and services:

". . . Burning Man participants bypass modes of market-based relations and their attendant alienation, and experience interpersonal interactions as holistic sites of creativity and growth. Festival participants spend each of the seven days of the festival in pursuit of joyful experience, creative self-expression, and basic survival needs; in these simultaneously common and radically divergent pursuits, participants interact not in service of the market, but in service of one another. This departure from traditionally limited, stifled and hurried relationships in the context of the market arguably allows participants to more fully reveal themselves and more fully witness one another, thus contributing to one another’s human flourishing."

(Yes -- yes, I did just quote myself in my own blog.) My main point, couched in all this clap-trap, though, was that Burning Man is a rare and valuable opportunity for urban-bound privileged folks to taste some form of indigeneity. How do we live on the earth together? This is the question that 50,000 people work to answer each year, albeit at the world's largest party, one utterly reliant on fossil fuel, from the gasoline in the cars to the plastic wrap on the Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels.

I've been reflecting a lot on that tension in recent weeks, since returning from my own pilgrimage to the playa. Looking at other people's pictures on Facebook and remembering my own experience of all that wildness, all that tribal chic, all that effort in one great undulating paean to unpredictability, dancing with the flames of chaos -- I recognize the seed of remembrance of who we are. We go out there to lose our minds and find our way again. So many of the most magnetic Burning Man stories are stories of hearts cracking open, greeting the dawn in the arms of a friend or a lover or the mother earth herself, sobbing and rejoicing at the truth of our connection and the ultimate truth of the love that is everything. It is so easy to forget, but out on the playa, even in the midst of all the noise and excess, people can be reminded.

And that is really the project of our time -- the remembering that all of us are indigenous to this earth. We all live here, we all belong here. Martin Prechtel writes, "every human being alive today, modern or tribal, primal or over-domesticated, has a soul that is original, natural, and above all, indigenous in one way or another. And like all indigenous peoples today, that indigenous soul of the modern person has been either banished to some far reaches of the dream world or is under attack by the modern mind."

If we are to survive, we must remember.

I spent much of today lying in my cozy treehouse apartment in the rain, spending time with my mother who is visiting from Los Angeles. I was reading magazine articles by Prechtel, by an Ojibwe woman who developed www.fourdirectionsteachings.com to make indigenous teachings accessible, by Jesse Wolf Hardin of the Anima Center in New Mexico. I oscillated between these reminders of the immediacy and immensity of the challenge -- how we must utterly transform our way of being on this planet, grieve the failure of our culture, learn how to return home to the earth and to one another -- and work on the internet, punctuated by visits to Facebook.

I started to notice the difference in my physical feeling, even my own self-awareness, when I was reading Sacred Fire magazine and when I was scouring the web or looking through my friends' photographs. Connection and distraction. Remembrance and forgetting. A continuous loop.

It is no longer a question, though, in my mind, that remembering is the great task of our time. And how does this work take place? Another article I read today suggested that it ultimately requires a releasing of all thought, all preconceived notions no matter how grand and carefully-wrought, and instead allowing for listening. Listen to the earth, watch what is going on around you, and be with the web of life that will emerge before your eyes. Find your place in that sacred web by witnessing the living points spanning around you and beyond you.

Maybe the world wide web teaches us, in some way, how to think in a web -- how to intuitively track the thread leading from one node to another, how to recognize interconnection. Maybe it is our unique position at this time in history to re-indigenize even that gift, so that we can again find sight of our link to the life that exists around us, inextricably connected to us, and remember how to be with it now and into the future.

dusty and exalted.

2009-09-08T22:54:00.000-07:00

I can barely stay awake right now but I am bound and determined to keep writing on this blog, so let me provide you with just a few highlights from my week of bacchanal.

First and foremost, methinks, was the moon. We got to see her wax into fullness, then start to wane again -- one night she even wore a halo. It is rare for me to be that intimately connected with the night sky, the night wind, the night earth. I let myself feel what moon light feels like, and it is somehow reminiscent of the feeling that I had at the saltworks in Moray, Peru -- dense, quiet, intimate, snowy. The moon was a silent and unwavering beacon for me, a reminder of the place within, which brought me to centeredness again and again amidst the noise and pageantry.

Next, of course, the community. The homies, the peeps, the familia. The big, sweet love. Not to mention our camp was more tightly-organized and smoothly-run than ever, with a separate kitchen tent, shade cloth over all of our personal tents, and a separate lounge structure. The gravitational pull of home and family, especially in the heat of mid-day, was hard to resist. I remember with fondness and bemusement my first year, basically all by myself out there, when all I had was a tent and a few cans of tuna fish. The co-evolution of person, friendships and city, to be sure.

Cannot fail to mention the airplane ride. A friend of a friend was in the skydiver camp, and she got us tokens to ride up in the plane as "fireflies," or passengers. Three things to say about this, primarily. Thing one is that I had, and still have, a good deal of trouble wrapping my head around the fact that four people, seemingly otherwise sound in mind and body, leapt out of the airplane in order to hurtle towards the ground! I myself did prefer to remain IN the plane. Thing two is that immediately after the divers dove, and the door closed, the pilot turned the plane essentially on its side. Pure, adrenaline-coursing exhilaration at that, as we ourselves made a relative plummet towards the earth again. And thing three is of course just the view of the city from above -- not only the place itself, but the beautiful rift valley in which it sits and the mountains on either side. Truly breathtaking to take such a bird's eye view.

Then, the WORK. I got some good ceremonial work done out there, people! Did some healing, moved some energy, opened some doors, released some long-awaited sobs, created some alignment. As a result: shift. 'Nuff said.

And of course: the flow. Somehow, not having any expectations this year, just intentions, made it really easy to drop into the glee/ sweetness/ gravity/ juice of whatever moment I happened to be experiencing. The more I allowed it, the more it astounded me -- my favorite was on Friday night, when my original buddy and I parted ways early in the night, and I kept flowing from beautiful interaction to beautiful interaction (including a serendipitous pee-squat next to a dark RV with one of the skydivers from our experience that very day!), until finally I found four or so of my favorite people from Women's Herbal Symposium. We brought in the dawn out at the trash fence, with a visit to my friend's beautiful installation of four five-foot wooden feathers, painted black and white, in flight along the orange netting. I asked her what it meant and she, woman of few but evocative words, said, "they're finally free." Ah, yes.

On the walk back to the city, the sun newly-emerged and the full moon sinking into the cradle of the mountains, we saw two black birds in flight. My friend, the artist, found a black and white bird feather on the ground. Mind you, there's no wildlife to speak of out there.

So that was what it was, and so much more . . . I still feel a kind of lingering momentum, an explosiveness, a desire for further and ever more dizzying expansion. So much of the magic of the playa is around What Could Be. The sense of possibility we find from walking amongst evidence of unadulterated human creativity, from being free to express ourselves freely together, from touching extremes of experience and witnessing our own awe in the face of all that exposure -- that sense is unique to the playa, and the inevitable passage of this yearly ritual brings a bittersweet taste. But -- but -- it just began! We were just anticipating it, a week ago! Amazing, how it all unfurls and then retracts upon itself, with nothing but an empty, dry expanse in its wake.

But really, words can't do it justice. If you want to know more, you'll just have to experience it for yourself someday.

three seasons in one

2009-08-30T21:08:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to report that the fluctuations and vagaries of my spirit and soul have conveniently corresponded to the months on the calendar this summer.

June was all festivalia and flights of fancy. I danced on more than one huge lawn, swam naked in more than one body of water, and found myself being courted by more than one eligible bachelor. I had a peaceful, easy feeling that snowballed right up until the end of the month, when it went splat and melted in the July heat.

July saw me break up with the man I was dating (which, let's be honest, was a welcome relief), return from my herbal apprenticeship backpacking trip covered in mosquito bites, and gain back some of the weight I'd lost. Turns out I can't just cross my fingers and hope that an unhealthy pattern will somehow heal itself. The work still has to be done and I'm still the one who has to do it.

On the road home from the mountains I picked up a dead bird on the side of the highway, and once home discovered that it was a perfectly intact owl. I wouldn't have gotten a gift like that if I wasn't worthy of it . . . so essentially, I'm in trouble now. The last weekend in July I participated in a fire ceremony that spun me out into the deep recesses of my shadow: disconnected, alienated, alone.

And almost immediately across the border into August, a shift: this time, a roller-coaster ride along the spiral of life. I officiated my oldest friend's wedding; spent a week on the road with my father; served as a kind of doula at my friend's birth; and got word that another friend and teacher, a true luminary, has died. Niall and Rivka's baby dropped into this world like a sheer miracle just a few days before Frank Cook, legendary plant teacher and wisdom holder, passed out of it, well before his time. I'm still stewing in the many hard and breathtaking truths of these past few weeks, as I rest here on the cusp of a journey to the world's strangest neon desert bacchanal.

But I notice an awareness, a lightness in me that I have never known before. A sense of being quietly awe-struck, holding a reverence for the meaningful meaninglessness and the meaningless meaningfulness of life, the world and everything. Some veil has lifted and I find myself viscerally aware of my power to choose at every moment, and the possibility of landing, over and over again, in the present. I am smiling into the mystery and in so doing find a tenderness, a forgiveness for myself that is entirely new. Facing darkness enables me to allow light in, as it turns out, and this bemusing and wondrous reality is the seed of my practice now.

Onward, into the dust . . .

spoils of the weekend

2009-08-23T16:08:00.000-07:00

It's Sunday afternoon and my dining room table is overflowing with apples, blackberries, figs, tomatoes, calendula flowers, and seaweed. The apples, a bit bug-bitten and bruised, will eventually emerge as sweet and leathery rings from the dehydrator, a perfect snack. The blackberries stained my fingers purple, and there's a streak of tomato juice and seeds drying out on my cutting board. The figs are just perfect. And the seaweed was a trade for three or so hours of my enthusiastic saleswomanship at the Grand Lake farmer's market yesterday, hawking my friend and teacher Trish's mineral-rich wares from the sea.

The calendula flowers? Harvested in front of my friend David's apartment in Berkeley, before we drove up to a farm in Sebastopol this morning for a four-hour plant medicine class. We got there a bit early so I got to spend some time plucking blackberries from the bramble and picking apples off the ground.

During the class I sat with a living stand of calendula flowers for a long time. It's a simple, strong plant that wakes with the sun and sleeps with the night, a renowned topical healer. I talked with it for a while. Just open yourself to the world and shine out your light, it said. Don't question your choices. Just live, love, give your healing gift, rest when the night comes.

Over my time out there today I felt myself slowly coming into a human pace; my frenetic heartbeat smoothed out. Getting in the car and driving back to Oakland felt like a contraction.

I live in this city because this is where my life is, my community, the people I choose to experience life alongside, and who have similarly chosen me. I live here because my work is here, because I learn so much from the urban-based eco-intelligentsia's discourse on the environment, the world scene, the self and the spirit. I live here because it's fun and interesting, with great music, varied cuisine, and sexy people.

But when it comes down to it, I use that word "live" pretty loosely. When I am in the city, I do many things, I grow, I learn, I enjoy, I work and I play. When I am on the earth, though, I live. What's the difference? The best way that I can describe it is to say that when I am close to nature, my heart feels like it can open up and smile with life. Here in the city, the rushing and the fear tend to close my heart, or even break it.

That sounds dramatic, I know. But last weekend I got to witness part of a birth; I was there for about six hours while my dear friend labored, and then I was there the next day when their beautiful, miraculous baby girl was just a few hours old. The experience brought me into a visceral awareness of our fundamental embodied-ness, our fundamental animal-ness. We are mammals! We're given life by the waters and the plants and the sunshine around us. Women's bodies even cycle with the moon, which cycles with the tides, which cycle with the seaweeds, which bring nourishment to the community. We're part of this earth and when we deny that, there is always pain, however subtle.

It is when I am out on the earth that I feel the pain of this exile, when subterranean longings surface and come into sharp focus.

When am I moving to the countryside, you might ask? Not anytime soon. For now, I remain compelled to seek love and fortune within the urban grid. So I continue to eat wild foods, learn the plants, practice listening to the world, slow down every day. And give thanks for all of the abundant blessings that grace my life, including the greatest blessing of life itself, each day no matter where I am.

*In memory of and in gratitude to Frank Cook, master plant teacher, who left this world too soon*

OMG girl, where have you been?

2009-08-17T22:46:00.001-07:00

The truth is, I've been scared to write.

Lately I've spent a lot of time looking back at all my old stuff, grimacing, wondering how I could ever have thought any of it was any good at all. It's purple! It's self-important! It's predictable! All I've had for myself is a panoply of distaste.

But today I had lunch with a friend, actually an ex-lover. We sat in the sunshine and conversed in the way that only ex-lovers can converse -- sweet, ranging, full of recognition. She asked me if I've been writing and I said I hadn't, that I'd been stuck in self-critique. Snap out of it, she told me, you're a great writer. Just start writing again, so you get the hang of it.

It reminds me of being in high school at the always-dramatic Young Writer's Retreats, which took place every year up in Lake Arrowhead or some such place. Watch what happens when you get 100 high school students from L.A. with a penchant for angst together for four days of writing instruction! A pot-fueled hook-up fest, that's what. But I digress.

I'm reminded of something that one of the teachers said to us, one morning in that big bright lodge. She read to us from an essay that was actually entitled "Shitty First Drafts." Oh, were we titillated! But she pressed on because the message was important. "Don't think, write," she read. I remember feeling distinctly giddy upon hearing this, and I remember the way it affected my writing immediately: I was suddenly liberated to just put words down on the page now and worry later about how they looked, sounded or tasted. Just find your big block of stone first, and then you can carve it into whatever fanciful shape you choose. Amazing! There's no room for self-critique in such an approach; it's actually against the rules.

So I've decided to start a practice for myself of writing in this blog at least once a week. To prime the pump, keep the wheels greased, make sure the ol' hamster is running in the wheel. You know? Keep the words flowing out of the chute. And stop fretting so much about how the words land on the page, that the chute breaks down for six months at a time. Keep 'em coming.

So that's what I'm doing! That's my commitment. So please expect to hear from me a lot more often, and perhaps in more experimental forms. And if you don't, please feel free to come check on me, and even nag me a little (but only a little) if I'm gone too long. Deal? Thanks.

oh it has been such a long time

2009-06-01T22:35:00.000-07:00

What's been going on? Where have I been? Everything's changed in my world since last we spoke. I've left my job at the law firm, taken a trip to Peru, unwound. It's been a season of healing. I haven't done much writing at all, which I do regret because the insights from this time have been myriad and rich - but it feels like a deep integration rather than some kind of transformational rollercoaster. I feel like I'm getting my land legs again - trusting my intuition, practicing only kindness towards myself. Spending lots of time in the kitchen, on the couch, outside. Thank Goddess.

I'm thinking about shaving my head, just to spare myself the experience of clumps of hair coming out into my hand every time I brush my fingers through my hair. But you know what? Hair loss is the most profound catalyst for change that I could have asked for. Here's what I'm realizing:

(1) The Universe does not hate me or want me to suffer. In some ways I have been making choices all my life that have been leading up to this experience.
(2) I now know what choices I need to make for my body to experience optimum wellness, and it's up to me to make them.
(3) It's never as bad as I think it is.
(4) Complaining, crying, and feeling like a victim *don't* grow hair.

The choices (see #2) are dietary and attitudinal ~ I'll spare you the gory details regarding the former. As to the latter, it is truly a mindblowing thing to see how I have this particular experience-frame, or thought-structure, or formula, and all my life I just plug in different variables into the formula for approximately the same result. Oh, woe is me, I am suffering from (_insert physical appearance issue here_) . . . nobody will ever love me! I am doomed to remain small, unseen, and unexpressed!

Um, no. Useful though that system may have once been, it yields only diminishing returns at this point. The butterfly, all dripping wet, inevitably nudges its way out of the chrysalis. So blindly I go, making one choice at a time, with only self-love as my guide through the unfolding present moment.

Say it with me: I am ok. I am ok! Feel that. It can be difficult to really let such a radical statement of self-acceptance into your body, but when you do, it's pure medicine from the tips of your toes to the crown of your head. That's where I want to live, so that's what I'm practicing. And I'm getting stronger all the time.

Last week I went with my mother to New York City. Being there, I admit, interfered somewhat with my faith in humanity. There are just so *many* of us! And we all want to consume what we want to consume, get what we want to get, realize the dream. We all walk around Manhattan dazed from too much light, noise, heat, linearity, from too many people. It's nearly impossible to avoid the endless cycle of purchasing and throwing away things in plastic containers in New York. With all that endless speed and aggression, all that disregard for geologic time, how do people even remember themselves to be human?

On Thursday my mother and I stood in the rain at the family gravesite, out at the Flushing Cemetary in Queens. I made a small ceremony over the beautiful box containing my grandmother's ashes. We prayed, my mother and I, for her spirit to pass with lightness and grace, to go home gently. Even such a troubled soul as she should be received by the earth for her rest. Even such an embittered lineage may be sweetened with a honey offering.

Kindness. Returning to the body. It is ok, everything is ok, I am ok. These truths arise in my field of vision again and again, like curious hummingbirds. I am learning that there is nothing to heal, after all; only a life to accept and to joyfully live. It's so easy!

to turn, turn will be our delight

2009-01-20T17:27:00.000-08:00

After getting in line at 6:30 in the morning, and being, with my group of 7 dear friends, one of the very last people to make it into the sold-out showing of the inauguration at Oakland's Parkway theatre;

after watching President-Elect Obama emerge from the White House with President Bush, with just a few moments remaining of the latter's devastating possession of the title;

after squealing at Michelle's gold and the girls' vibrant blues and oranges, and at Jill Biden's Boots!;

after laughing at Rick Warren's flourish on Sasha's name, and shouting "except the gays!" every time he made some comment or another about equality and freedom;

after Aretha simply was the queen;

after Vice President Biden's swearing-in on the biggest Bible ever, thereby ending the reign of the true evil mastermind of the last eight, destructive years, now crippled and confined to a wheelchair;

and just before Michelle held out Lincoln's bible in her two gloved hands, to aid her husband Barack Hussein Obama in assuming the office of the Presidency of the United States America --

this is where I really lost it.

What came through for me, in this most beautiful adaptation of "Simple Gifts," was a sense so pure and so strong of the human heart. Rising above the joyful din of the day, the lilting music from the inaugural platform required no words to convey the simplest and most redolent of human longings -- to be good on this earth, to do good hard work and live in communion with others, to transcend separation.

Today we say goodbye to George W. Bush and the searing wounds he inflicted on the world, on our own nation and our national psyche. Our collective hemmorage would have been stanched today had Hillary taken the Oath of Office, or even, in some way, John McCain. But that Barack Obama assumes the mantle of the Presidency brings a great, earth-moving healing for us that we can only begin to grasp in our imaginations.

The first few lines of a new chapter were written today. None of us know how the story will continue to unfold, and I am personally certain that our fragmentation will persist until the masculine principle which pervades our politics, our commerce, our very way of being becomes balanced by the feminine. But I know, too, that a turning has occurred today. It is a softening, a re-membering of what has been frozen in a traumatized rift for decades and centuries. I weep today for the way that this inauguration, this President, opens the hearts of the people to one another again. We look into each other's eyes -- eyes set into brown faces, Muslim faces, queer faces -- and instead of snarling mistrust, we recognize in one another what lives within each of us. Heart, soul and spirit rising, yearning, reaching out to love. Eyes that watch the horizon, summoning in the simple gifts that are our birthright on this sacred earth.

I am so proud to be an American today.

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

registering dissent

2008-12-30T23:21:00.000-08:00

The death toll in Gaza nears 400 as I sit here, with hundreds more critically injured and something like 1,000 wounded. This is the most devastating violence that the Palestinians have seen in 40 years.

Even as I write those words, I hear my father's voice. He is there, as he always is, with his anger rising and his conclusion incontrovertible. Of course Israel has the right to bomb, strafe, kill! The Arab nations would rather see all Jews pushed out of the Middle East and Israel wiped out of existence! This tiny nation is surrounded by hostile forces! Of course it is within the bounds of normalcy for Israel to defend itself! That's what he's saying.

He's also saying, near-shouting by now, why does the international community always point its finger at Israel, when so much violence and destruction has been directed at Israel by the Arabs, since the moment of its founding? Someday the world will wake up, he says, and see how wronged the Israelis have been, and how righteously they acted.

And he shakes his head in seething disbelief at the Jewish anti-occupationists and anti-Zionists in Israel and America. Self-hating Jews -- how can they turn against their own State, their own family? How can they align themselves with neo-Nazis, racists, people who equate Israel with Jews and want to eradicate both from this earth?

My father's voice scorns the depictions of olive groves being uprooted to make way for settlements; he decries the liberal media's portrayal of the Palestinian situation as poetic, poignant, when, in his mind, Palestinians as a people must be contained to ensure the survival of the Jews. Palestinian bloodlust justifies bloodletting of Palestinians by Israelis.

This is his voice. It is strong in my mind. I have long wrestled with it.

I remember being in high school and feeling that it was very important to have a position on this issue, just like it was important to have a position about abortion, the rainforest, and the existence of God. So I took my father's position. I was Bat Mitzvah in Israel, after all, and I had family there. And how could the Jews, the intellectual Jews, the successful Jews, the contributing Jews do anything wrong!

In college I studied abroad in Israel, moving along a corridor from Beer Sheva to Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to Sinai, marvelling at the young soldiers who polished their rifles sitting next to me on the bus. My world there was mostly filled with white people, but I did meet and talk with some Israeli Arabs in a seaside town called Akko. At a music festival there, on the roof of an ancient fort, I heard Palestinian music and stood in a crowd of young men and women who called out 'aiwa' as the Greeks might call 'opah.' Mostly, though, I stayed within the contours of the myth of Israel as I had always understood it.

Some of my close friends are deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement. One friend is a human rights attorney in Israel who works for justice on behalf of displaced Palestinians, another is a Reconstructionist Rabbi who has developed an anti-occupation education curriculum for religious schools, another writes missives for Moveon.org.

Over the years, and because of these friends, I have read, thought about, questioned deeply, struggled with Israel's aggressive actions, its systemic dehumanization of a populace, its violation of the basic human rights to food, water, medical care, livelihood for thousands of people living in what amounts to many-hundred-square-mile ghettos that are appended to Israel proper. I have turned over and over in my mind the shattering contradictions, the impossibility of reconciling the dream of Israel with the nightmare of Palestine, the truth that Arab nations support the destruction of Israel and the truth that Israel supports the destruction of Palestine.

As deeply as this situation has pained me as I have learned more and more about it, as many movies as I have watched and articles I have read and analyses I have considered, I have never been able to betray my father by taking a non-Zionist stance. Instead, I have done the discursive equivalent of throwing up my hands: it's not a black and white situation, I can't take sides, it's just a tragic situation and me speaking out about it one way or the other won't do anything.

Whenever we discuss it, my father and I, I choose my words with the utmost care. My main concern in those moments is keeping a smile on his face, that slight satisfied upturn of the corners of his mouth when I align with his views. At home last week, my mother asked me what I think about the situation in Israel. I couldn't answer her. I was unable to speak, unable to formulate a reply that would satisfy the censors who stand watch at the gate of my own mind.

And now, faced with the unassailable truth of the situation in Gaza, I find myself still rendered silent. There is a part of me that is pleased, even, in the face of this massacre, that I am keeping the small smile on the face of my father and so many others whom I love, whose own love for Israel blinds them entirely. I find myself inside a room and leaning against a locked door, a door that I have slammed on the wailing masses outside, relieved to be safe inside the room. The show must go on. The Jews must go on, at all costs. Otherwise, what would be left of us? Were these walls to crumble, this door to come off its hinges and fall to the floor, what -- who -- would save us from annihilation? NO ONE! my father shouts. No one would save us, so we have to save ourselves. Be silent, then, and turn your face away from the horror that ensues.

But I cannot. I cannot turn my face away. I have to look, to recognize. Selfishly, for the sake of my own humanity, my own realness, I have to enter the naked truth of this sweeping destruction. I have to acknowledge what torments the Jews are inflicting on the Palestinians, and what torments the Arab establishment inflicts in return. I have to bear witness to the ways that these cousins wound themselves, over and over again, mortally.

And I have to register my own dissent to this violence; I have to speak, to say that this is not in my name, this is not the door that I want the people of my faith to pass through on our search for sanctuary in a deadly world. I cannot stand by and swallow this great misery as if it were simply a bitter medicine to precipitate healing. No. There is no healing, no peace that can come from this. I refuse to accept that this is for the good.

I say no to the massacre of Gaza.

My words here travel out into the nothingness, reaching a handful of people, bringing no salve to the bleeding wounds of the people of Gaza. Were this to reach my father, it would simply anger him. No change can be wrought from the saying of these words. I say them, nonetheless, because I must.

"I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men's hands even at the height of their arc of anger because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound" ~ Hafiz

revisiting

2008-12-27T17:32:00.000-08:00

I've been at home with my parents for the last week, in L.A. It has been, essentially, a film festival -- I think we've watched 5 or 6 (or maybe 7) videos, plus a few on cable late at night by myself (including "But I'm a Cheerleader," and boy oh boy did Clea Duvall's andro to Natasha Lyonne's femme give me a scandalous little shiver there in my parent's den). I've been sleeping hours upon hours every night, reading the paper all morning. My mom bought me a pink shirt today after we went for Japanese food. I made some fantastic latkes the other night -- Susie Bright has a recipe blog, did you know that? It's called "Suzie the Homebreaker" and I highly recommend her latke recipe.

Another thing I've been doing is sorting through all my old journals and letters. They're all still here, in the drawers of my childhood desk. I seem to have saved absolutely everything -- every note ever passed my way in pre-calculus, every errant scribbling of mine from my teens and early twenties. Paging through it all, I'm struck mainly by the state of deathly insecurity in which I have spent so many years of my life. My college scrawlings oscillate between a fear so pervasive I was almost paralyzed, and hope for a stronger self to emerge.

It is amazing to read, and so sad, too -- I grieve all of that lost time. What was I so afraid of? Why was I so full of condemnation for myself, for my every move? What's excellent, I guess, is being able to see it all in retrospect, and to see how far I've travelled since those years. But the feelings then were mostly along the scalp-tingling fear spectrum -- fearing the worst in terms of my personality, my loveability, my capacity to succeed in the world. I remember, both from reading my diary entries and from all the associated images that have come rushing back, how I would end up so many days and nights cowering away from the specter of my own terribleness. No high could erase that creeping dread.

I wish I could go back and talk to my trapped, tormented 21-year-old self. I wish I could tell her to loosen her grip a little bit; that she really is smart and talented enough to be at that big school with all those math-smart people; that it's okay to feel attracted to other girls. I wish I could somehow transmit to her that she is a precious light, a vital player in the community of life, beloved on this earth. She didn't know any of that then, but life was calling to her, however faintly it echoed in the darkness, and I wish I could have held her shoulders and whispered in her ear to listen, listen.

As I said, though, it has me marvelling at the journey. We are space travellers but we are also always reaching deeper in, brushing back the dust and debris from the essential qualities that glow through time. It is beautiful, to have a record of all my yearnings, because through it there runs a line, a thread, a vein of gold. I saw it back then, as bleak as I felt, and I wrote about it. And now I am running alongside it, faster and faster, flying along on the dream that this thin strand will take me to my place, take me home.

leap

2008-12-11T16:13:00.000-08:00

You know that old adage about "when you take a leap of faith, either the ground will rise to meet your feet or you'll sprout wings?" Well, I think it's the wings that sprouted, because I feel like I'm flying.

This past week I had another intense fear-contraction. I decided to change my mind again and talk to my boss about staying on. I got all cold and clammy last weekend, thinking 'what the fuck am I doing, quitting my cushy job during Great Depression 2.0!' So I had a panicky few days of urgently trying to claw my way back up the birth canal. I want to stay in here where it's safe!

Fortunately for me, that wasn't how it turned out.

I just had a really wonderful conversation with my boss in which he enthusiastically agreed to keep me on board, in a paid part-time contract attorney position, to work solely on the apple moth case, whenever it's necessary. (He also told me he thinks of me as a daughter and wants me to follow my calling. Yes, he did!) And my amazing women's environmental network just two days ago got a really big grant, much of which can be used to fund my work.

So, um, okay! HERE GOES NOTHIN'!!!

over the edge

2008-12-04T08:48:00.000-08:00

I'm leaving my job two weeks from Friday.

The fear claws at my solar plexus. What have I done?

I remember about a week after I had started this job, as an associate at a small public interest private law firm in downtown Oakland, that I had already started counting down the days until I was finished. At the moment, I was reading prior briefing in a California Environmental Quality Act suit, having to do with UC Berkeley's expansion plans; I was preparing to write the reply brief to the court of appeal. By all accounts, it was an important issue -- the classic town-and-gown dispute, the fate of downtown Berkeley's land use plans -- but to me it was the drudgery of the law. I thought, "I'll give it a year here."

In mid-winter and spring, my work was so dull it was physically painful. I spent about two months writing a terrible brief for a client who objected to the expansion of his neighbor, a fast food restaurant, because he was going to lose a few parking spaces. I remember being at my women's circle and asking to be held, needing the touch, the soothing. I crawled into the center of the circle, heaving a great sigh. I sobbed and sobbed. Meanwhile I was working feverishly to develop the Southwest project that just took place successfully in September. My health suffered; my hair started falling out in clumps. Through spring and summer I started cancelling my social plans, going into survival mode. I skipped all the festivals.

And then the apple moth came along. I'd heard about this issue in December or January, and brought it to the attention of my boss; it turned out that one of our clients was also interested in suing, so I was given free reign to do the research and write the complaint. It turns out that EPA actually made a pretty grievous error in purporting to exempt from normal registration processes the pesticide used for the aerial spray; I caught the error, and wrote a great complaint. After months and months, we finally filed it last Tuesday. To me, it felt like "mission accomplished!"

In June, I wrote an e-mail to a community list of which I'm a member, sharing my dilemma with them about whether or not to quit. I wrote: "there's a natural break in September, when I'll be doing some work in the Southwest for about three weeks, so it would be a full year here. When I feel into this possibility, I feel excited, scared, relieved, anxious, and doubtful. I'm not sure whether it's the right time for me to do this, I'm not sure whether I'd be making a huge mistake (i.e. my job isn't great, but it's not *that* bad, I'm getting paid, I can hang in there, I shouldn't abandon the moths, etc.) I'm secretly hoping that someone or something will tell me what I 'should' do; the deeper truth is that in my life I haven't cultivated a great deal of trust in myself to guide my life, since I've been doing (or attempting to do) what I 'should' do for such a long time."

Eventually, the quickening of the life-energy inside me moved me to decide to quit. I agonized and agonized down to the very last minute, but I finally gave notice in August, saying that I'd be working until the end of December. Pretty much immediately I went into a major fear contraction. What have I done? How could I leave my job, which isn't that bad, in the middle of a recession? What am I going to do instead?

That's the question my parents have always asked me. What would you be doing instead? I wasn't exactly forced to go to law school, but one could say that I found my father's strenuous recommendation that I go to be unopposable. And it was miserable, in a lot of ways, but I wouldn't trade it now for anything for the healing and strength and community and experience that it brought. In the midst of so much tearful suffering they said "what would you be doing instead?" And I could never answer that question with any kind of comforting specificity. There has never been anything more than a sense of the truth inside of me.

What would I be doing instead? It comes down to this: I'd be letting the life inside of me live. I'd let the truth about my life force, which is that it is not about conflict and adversariality, but instead about healing and collaboration and creativity, to emerge and be my guide. I've never done that before. I've been squelching and squashing and boxing it for a really long time; putting it aside in favor of what is the "right" thing to do. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but it is some combination of writing, advocacy, community weaving. All, ultimately, in service of the healing of the earth, our Mother Earth.

So I agonized and agonized some more. At my therapist's office I did a sand tray, and basically built an intuitive altar to the two choices I was facing. In one corner, a figurine of the goddess, in the other corner, a figurine of a postman. In the goddess' quadrant there was a red glass heart at the center of a circle of amber and green stones; there was a sand dollar, an angel, a spiraling shell. In the postman's quadrant there was a little girl riding a speedboat surrounded by paper money and fake pennies. Next to her stood a figurine of a woman doctor, an upstanding and powerful citizen. Between the two quadrants was a tree -- the driving force behind both energies -- and a roaring lion's head.

She took a polaroid of the array for me, and I called it "Confluence." I gazed into it like a crystal ball for several days, knowing that the movement of my heart and soul was towards the feminine quadrant, but feeling so much fear about stepping away from the masculine quadrant. Am I just a spoiled, lazy brat? Am I ridiculously naive for making this sort of decision? Who am I kidding?

I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but finally, several weeks ago, the fog lifted and I found peace with the decision to walk towards the feminine and to leave my job. To leave the security, the prestige, and even the excitement of working on the apple moth case. To leave this thing that's not half-bad, that's really okay, that pays a good sum of money, that gets me by. To take a leap off the edge into the absolute unknown, hoping desperately that my wings will sprout or that the ground will rise to meet my steps.

I remember that I have done this before, and it has always led to something greater: when I was supposed to be in my third year of law school I took the fall semester off. It gave me time to rest and heal, and it allowed me to have a third summer. I got an internship at NRDC that summer, which was the best law job I've probably ever had. And last summer I was offered a prestigious job clerking for the Supreme Court of Colorado, a year-long position which would have started this fall. I agonized over that one, too, but finally realized that my heart was not at all in it. And then this current job came along, which has been nothing if not a learning experience.

And I pay attention to the fact that in the few months since I've made the decision to quit, my health has been rapidly improving. I've lost about 15 pounds; my whole relationship to food has changed. A weight has, literally, lifted.

And still the fear plagues me. What have I done? Time will tell. My fervent prayer is that I will be shown what is needed of me, how I am to give my life over to the Earth's healing. My fervent prayer is that even if this quitting, this leaping is a terrible and foolhardy mistake, that I will learn from it. That life will not mete out punishment instead of blessings because I have leapt so blindly. That if this is a mistake, it will give me the wisdom that I'll need in order to leap again and soar. And my fervent prayer is that it is not a mistake, that this is not a figment of my priveleged imagination; that there really is something to this powerful, pulsing, unformed call that is so indescribable, so subtle, and so wholly irresistable.

I am in a great and painful birth canal, and when I emerge nothing will be the same. This is what I have done; I have said 'yes' to being born.

May it be so,
may it be so,
may it be so.

down to earth

2008-11-20T14:38:00.000-08:00

I've spent a lot of time with my head in the clouds.

That's not to say that there aren't a lot of good ideas floating around up there. For example, I believe in bioregionalism as a political organizing principle. This is the notion that a polity should be organized around an ecosystem, taking into account that ecosystem's natural boundaries, its resource input needs and outflow capacity, and its ability to sustain human life over time. Bioregionalism is about binding human life to the land, acknowledging not only that we need to be in relationship with the earth in order to survive, but that the relationship between the earth and people in the arid west will be completely different, and will demand completely different governance, than the relationship between earth and people in the swampy south.

It's a beautiful idea, isn't it? Makes so much sense, doesn't it?

My dad and I have had different versions of the same argument for most of my young adult and adult life, about social issues like violence, racism, poverty, environmental destruction. The particulars are different, but our positions are basically fixed: he's talking about the free market, self-reliance and the law of the jungle, I'm talking about essential human proclivity towards sharing and caring. Usually these arguments end up with him fake-conceding; "I wish it could be true, Cait." The newspaper we pore over for long mornings, when I'm home to visit, invariably reflects that it's not.

But even as I trudged through law school, getting indoctrinated into the behind-the-curtain workings of this chaotic enterprise called civil society in America, I still rejected the idea that this is it, that this is the best we can do: this backward-scrambling system that seems to generate imbalance after imbalance, injustice after injustice. There's more to it, I knew, and so even though I was playing along, I wasn't really in the game. I was holding out for the rapture, you could say, the New Age rapture when everybody would finally heal the wounds in their hearts, love each other, and magically transform this whole mess. Back to the farm, or the ashram, or something.

That is, until recently. I've experienced kind of a triple-whammy catalyst for new thought in the last several months. A perfect storm, if you will, of awakening.

(1) Tearing down the wall. Remember when I told you, a few months ago, that it was time to step back and do some heart-healing? Well, I'm doing it. It's really happening, in an almost visible way. And it's pretty deep, and entirely new.

(2) Barack Obama's election. About 45 minutes after CNN called it, I was standing with thousands of people in Oakland's Convention Center, surrounded by some very dear friends. Our collective attention was aimed towards the huge TV screen, and Barbara Lee was trying to talk to us but kept getting interrupted because the anchor kept saying that Obama was about to give his acceptance speech. I don't remember when it finally happened, but it did, which is that I finally let myself cry.

And I sobbed, under the same blue-neon lights that illuminated the room when I took the bar exam there last February. I cried because I finally felt it: yes, we can. The witch is dead! After eight years of feeling like all of our efforts for peace and justice were going absolutely nowhere, while a power-addled moron made one destructive decision after another, all of a sudden I felt this lightness where there used to be a weight.

I hadn't even realized there was a presidential-sized weight sitting on my chest. But there was, and suddenly I recognized it because of its absence. Suddenly, the energy that all the peacemakers put out into the world wasn't going to be pulverized and blown back in our faces like so many shards of broken glass. Suddenly, there's an open channel that starts on the ground and goes all the way up to the top, and then flows on down again. Really? Really?

We whirled and hollered in the streets for a long time that night.

(3) Gay marriage. How do I even talk about this one? It was a suckerpunch, a body blow. It knocked the wind out of the community, and a lot of us started spitting ignorance and hatred as soon as we got our breath back. But the leadership is pulling itself back together, the people are calming each other down and speaking truth to power, and the fight goes on. The Cal Supremes are set to hear oral argument in March on the question of whether this proposition is a constitutional revision, meaning that it effects such sweeping change to the structure of government that it should only be ratified by the legislature, or a constitutional amendment, which means that it is among the class of decisions that may be constitutionally made by the voters.

As a privileged, able-bodied, urban California white woman, albeit of the Jewish faith, I have until now been wholly unfamiliar with the set of sensations which may be termed 'minority stress,' a set of sensations which too many people in our society have experienced and continue to experience each and every day. Just this week, a group of six Long Island teen boys were charged with the hate-motivated murder of an Ecuadorean man, in an episode of "beaner hopping." And today is Transgender Remembrance Day -- that's "remembrance," not "awareness" -- when we recall the lives that have been lost (43, in the past two years) of differently-gendered individuals who were raped, maimed, and killed for deviating from the norm. Ethnic violence in the Congo rages on, and the death toll climbs upward of 5 million. Not to mention garden-variety racism and sexism which pervade our cultural relations and which can turn deadly on a moment's notice. So many of us walk around scared, and scarred.

Me? I have always mourned this, in my head-in-the-clouds way. But in mourning I've tended to throw up my hands, resigning myself to sit and wait for the big, sonorous Crystal Vision that will unite us all.

As a queer woman, though, all of a sudden it has arrived in my body. Fear, rejection, self-rejection. How can this be? Don't they see that we are human, and that we just want to love? No, they don't see. The Goddess has not yet removed the veil from before their eyes; Barack Obama's ascendancy has not yet induced Buddha-like serenity in the hearts of the many. We're all still mucking around here together; the name of God is still used to justify hatred and separation; the book that says "Adam-and-Eve-not-Adam-and-Steve" still propels bullets out of guns and into bodies, bodies which love other bodies that feel just like home. Stares, taunts, silences. Denial of rights, denial of fellowship, denial of life in a split second.

All of that is in me now.

I used to think that as I moved through my own pain, my own wounding, I would find myself less and less engaged with this messy experiment called America. That I would become more involved in the esoteric, the personal, the ethereal. Not so, as it turns out. The more I wake up to the vibrant, quickening life-force inside of me, the more I realize that we really are all the same. We all want the same things, aspire towards the same goals -- safety, freedom, peace -- even if our means are wholly divergent.

The skinheads who threw a rock through the window of a ten-year-old boy in Billings, MT in 1993, because of the menorah on his windowsill, were trying to live out a vision of safety that was borne from ignorance, and fueled by hatred and violence. But 10,000 citizens in Billings called forth a higher vision, illuminating their own windows with paper menorahs printed by the local newspaper. 10,000 households followed a truer star, held a stronger common dream, one of love and mutuality. And that higher vision prevailed. Billings, which suffered for so long from KKK violence, has not experienced a single major hate crime since then.

Similarly, suddenly, my feet are here on the ground. My life is here, my fate bound up with the fates of the humans who surround me every day, the humans I will never meet, the creatures of the land and the sea. Truth is not esoteric, and it resides on a mountaintop only to the same extent it resides in a city storm drain. As long as we're all here together, the truth is that we've got to show up for it. We've -- I've -- got to live every day with full commitment to the possibility that some day, with enough sheer will and enough eyes-open faith, we can all be who we are, love who we love, and sleep soundly through the quiet night.

I'm in.

on hate and love

2008-11-06T11:03:00.000-08:00

Can you hear that? Across the state, from south to north, they are cheering. Joyous tears stream down their faces, just like my own tears of "yes, we can" flowed on election night as I danced in the streets of downtown Oakland. They are the church-goers, the families of young men fighting in Iraq, the white people and the people of color, the concerned citizens of this state heaving sighs of relief because marriage has been codified as the province of the heterosexual.

They assure us that this amendment won't deprive anyone of any rights, but will simply affirm a longstanding definition. They say this is about love, not hate. But we know and feel otherwise. This constitutional amendment is a sharp blow to our hearts, our guts. It confirms our suspicions: all across our state and our nation, there are those who reject and fear homosexual relationships, who triumph in having defended the institution of marriage against incursion by an advancing army of sexual deviants.

And as the doors of this institution are slammed in our faces, as we hear the locks turning and the chains rattling, there is a profound sadness that arises -- a gaping and terrible vacuum where there was once energy, movement. Gays exist, they admit, but gayness must not be talked about, taught in our schools, seen in our churches, acknowledged as a protectable category by our government, or granted the same benefits and privileges as is heterosexuality with regard to state-issued marriage licenses. God says gayness is a sin, they say, and even if we can't really stop you from having all of that weird sex and perverse love, we can sure as hell make sure you're not receiving the same treatment as are we, the child-bearers, the keepers of what is sacred in our society.

This is a deeply painful message to receive. I grieve the receiving of this message as it enters my very body, this body of mine which aspires only to love and be loved. I don't feel any acceptance in their exclusion, as they claim; I feel only their fear, only their attempt at disciplining me out of my messy, dangerous desires. I feel only a sweeping of my heart under a heavy rug, so that it doesn't disturb a pretty picture.

What I want to say, though, as I move through my grief, is that it's this pretty picture with which we must contend. Any observer of nature knows that the world is a teeming, chaotic place, but a place which always manages to self-regulate in surprisingly elegant ways. And yet people, perhaps out of our fear, perhaps out of our quirky wisdom, continually attempt to impose order and organization on this wild web of interdependence. To erase the curves and draw thick lines instead. To dam the river and straighten out its banks. God wrote a book, it is said, which ought to be the instruction manual for the entire world. One book, one way, one paternalistic social structure for everyone, no matter how many people it sickens and kills from smallpox or heartbreak.

This is what we're up against. The book says that gay sex is transgressive, and that transgressors burn in hell. As such, I think we were fatally misguided in our attempt to conduct this ballot initiative fight solely according to reason and a civil rights framework. In the contest between secularly-granted rights and God's word, the believers won't be swayed by suggestions of discrimination under the law. This is about God's plan for the way all humans must live -- and rights either flow from God's word, they say, or aren't real.

And we're up against this with a massive handicap: internalized homophobia. After generations of shielding yourself against the violent screams of "you're not supposed to exist," can you muster the will to fight against God and his book? Can you even fight against such a deeply-held belief about love and its barbed-wire parameters, especially if your collective strength has been continuously, insidiously sapped? Can you rally your spirits to say, "here I am, and my existence is just as real and beautiful as yours," when you've been so "other"-ed, so alienated, so villainized?

It's a challenging task, and it's exactly the task we must undertake. In order for us to stand upon solid ground, to align ourselves with the inviolability of our constitutional right to equal treatment, we have to somehow meet this God-driven negation of our existence with a God-inspired knowing that we are here, that we do exist, and that homosexuality is neither a sin nor a lifestyle choice. There must be a shared moral vision of equality among us -- in addition to a shared legal vision -- in order for us to achieve that equality. We must have more to rely upon than our tender hearts and our political acuity and our spandex short-shorts that we wear once a year at the Pride parade. We must wholly love and believe in ourselves as individuals and as a group before we can convince other people to love and believe in us, especially people who are so angrily invested in God's decree against us. Whether we believe in God or not, we must be aware that there is love for us -- even us -- that is infinite and unconditional.

So please, begin within. Love yourself. Respect yourself. Hold fast to your inherent human dignity and equality, even as you feel the reverberations of this dizzying electoral slap in the face. Feel your innate belonging, and from that place, step forward to speak your truth.

Roses

2008-10-21T01:27:00.001-07:00

This one rose,
dressed in a pink so pale it verges on gray, juts out
at an alarming angle from the vase
on my dining room table.
The remaining flowers stand proudly,
blooming their hues and fragrances
like women outside of a nightclub,
shifting their feet and laughing
moved towards the thumping, smoky recesses
by the momentum of their hope.
I tug the odd-angled one out, slowly,
careful not to budge the arrangement.
I see that its stem has been bent in two places.
Two dark elbows through which
water cannot travel.
I twist at the fibrous stalk,
no longer a conduit,
at one of the broken places. As I do,
two sets of leaves fall to the table, starved.
I am ministering to the life that remains.
Into a small glass jar filled with water
I put this rose,
with its three remaining inches of stem.
Where is the place in my house
that can host this delicate refugee?
I think of the way
my mother does this,
places flowers in small jars on the kitchen windowsill.
Somewhere in this forgettable sequence of events
I realize, in my body, the gravity of what it is to love.
To love
is to agree to tend,
to seek to restore,
to invite what is finished
into its rightful ending.
To love is to become a sentinel,
a quiet, awake guard
at the beloved’s heart-gate.
When it comes time to enter,
when the beloved lifts the veil
and permits passage,
the witness herself
must enter as an offering.
She must act
as dry wood acts upon meeting flame.
Grateful for the chance
to be consumed
and then to rise as glowing sparks against the vast sky
and finally to disappear.

let's never go this long again

2008-10-10T18:51:00.000-07:00

Really, I don't know how the time slipped away!

Actually, yes I do.

"Tell us your top five highlights from the past, oh, four weeks or so," you say? Why, certainly! (Very kind of you to add, "because we know you don't have time to give a full report before your salsa dancing DATE tonight!" You are so considerate, dear reader.)

(1) I fully rocked the project I've been working on for the past year and a half -- more accurately, it fully rocked me. More details? See here.

(2) Rosh Hashanah dawn ceremony on top of a hill in Petroglyph National Monument outside of Albuquerque. Prayer in community on the land! I love it.

(3) I officiated my dear friend and colleague's wedding in Albuquerque; it was a blend of Buddhist, Hindu, and Apache prayers, and the bride and groom held candles to illuminate their faces in the late dusk. Part of their ceremony was sending the rings around to have them be "warmed" by each guest, so now their rings contain the blessings of everyone in their community. Beautiful!

(4) The absolute attention-getting hijinks of reiki; reiki basically tap danced for me in a top hat like that alien in Spaceballs. No less than FOUR significant events having to do with reiki took place in the course of about four days. Okay, universe! I get it. Heat. In the hands. Use it. Yes.

(5) At the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, the largest hot air balloon event in the world, watching the 6:30 a.m. dawn patrol -- in advance of the 700-balloon mass ascension that took place once the sun was fully out, twelve hot air balloons lifted off in the still-dark early morning, and once up, worked their engines so that the fire that's used to keep the hot air hot, lit up the inside of the balloon. Twelve twinkling balloons in the dark sky? A grand display of what humans can do when we're focused on making beauty and peace? Yeah, I was crying.

elegy for the felled

2008-09-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

They've started cutting down the oak trees in Memorial Grove. Just within the last hour.

It's like being punched in the gut, to witness or even imagine a tree being toppled by a chainsaw.

There's an ache to it. Yet somehow the ache is spread thin, as if any decent, silent moment the heart might seek in order to grieve the loss of such a formidable elder is drowned out by progress' tinny victory march. It's a uniquely modern ailment. Another great tree falls, another great creature is lost -- and we just sigh, shake it off as best we can and smile bravely into another day. But the loss doesn't escape us, no matter how removed we might feel; something inside us still flinches, still stumbles under the weight of every plummeting 600-year-old trunk, every newly-erected power plant belching soot, every wanton gesture of crazed consumption.

My law firm represents one of the plaintiffs in this case. We raced to assemble a Supreme Court appeal and file it on time. Attorneys were running down the hallways and the secretary was fielding press call after press call (as well as calls from one of the tree sitters, Air, whose voice was low and urgent. "They're cutting!" We know. "Did you file yet?" We will, by 4:00 p.m.). We enlisted two of the neighborhood copy shops to prepare the final versions of the documents. Four of us fanned out into the City to file at the various courts and serve the documents on opposing counsel.

At 3:45 or so I found myself in a big law firm's climate-controlled waiting room on the 20th floor of Two Embarcadero, a gleaming chrome and glass high rise in the heart of downtown San Francisco. I waited for the receptionist to return, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows framing the panorama of the Bay, flanked by two bushy potted palm trees. The industriousness in the building was palpable. I felt like such an unkempt hippie, somehow out of place, and still so thankful that my contact with the world unfolds at ground level.

The lawyers here toiled for months on this case, introducing very promising novel legal theories and waging a remarkably refined fight on behalf of the oak trees. And the tree sitters climbed up into those branches nearly two years ago. All of that work sure bought a lot of time. But despite our best efforts, here comes the machinery, once again clearing the way for taller, bigger, stronger, more.

My mom always implores me not to let things like this affect me. "It's not your pain!" she says. But it is. We're all inextricably interwoven into this community of life -- what impacts one, whether one is a mighty oak tree or a little brown moth, impacts us all.

Nonetheless, the sadness does not serve. All that can be done is to continue.

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone, therefore we must be saved by love." -- Reinhold Neibuhr

softening

2008-09-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

That was Zelig's assessment last night, while we sat and talked on his couch, before I walked out into the warm, dark evening to witness the honey-colored new moon hovering over West Oakland. "You look great," he said. "Clear." And, "softer."

(This was after five of us sat, cringing, gasping and laughing, through Sarah Palin's speech and the attendant camera-pans over the legions of rapturous, button-wearing idiots. Now, I never had very many bad things to say about Hillary; to the extent that I believe that federal government is worth the powder to blow it straight to hell, I thought Hillary was a viable and interesting candidate for the presidency. I loathed the easy and off-handed dismissals of her as a "bitch." Hillary is a tough, smart lady, with a great deal of experience and some wise ideas. In her case, behavior which, in a male colleague, might have been called "strong" or "no-nonsense," was derided as "bitchy" when coming from her. I despise that.

. . . Sarah Palin, the Killa from Wasilla? Bitch.)

Anyway, my dear friend's take on the state of my being feels, at once, totally out of left field, and wholly accurate.

Left field: because I'm up against one or two of my most persistent demons at the moment, with not a lot of breathing room, it feels like. I see the old, tired techniques I'm using to handle it, and at some moments it feels like nothin's gone nowhere.

But more than that: wholly accurate. Mainly because I'm practicing something I've never practiced before in any kind of sustained way, which is compassion for myself. Oh, compassion. I can dish it out with all the juicy mama-energy in the world. I can usually receive it from the folks I love. But self-directed compassion? Who knew it would turn out to require such a massive expenditure of energy! Nonetheless, it is a project I have undertaken, and it requires much focus, clarity and dedication. It's an effort to silence judgmental, angry, cruel voices, and in their stead, to speak to myself in tones of kindness, patience, and forgiveness.

What I find most compelling is the voice of faith: that the truths I remember about my being, which arise most clearly when I am out on the land and in deep, heartfelt connection and in moments of creation -- those truths abide, and can be like a lighthouse for me when I am feeling lost and cut adrift. Staying connected to those truths requires a leap of faith, I am finding, and it is a leap I am convincing myself to take, more and more.

It's pretty nice!

I attribute much of these shifts to the time I've spent in communion with the earth this summer. I just got back from a yoga backpacking trip in Yosemite, which was phenomenal. (Earth said to me, "you are my beloved, and I miss you when you're gone from me.") And my experiences in Mt. Shasta, and the Trinity Alps, and Mojave, and Western Shoshone land, and even the Santa Cruz mountains have all yielded new peace and awareness. Sometimes, in these happy moments of realization, I feel energy moving in my body like glaciers calving and breaking apart.

I'm about to go out of town for three weeks, to facilitate this journey in the Southwest with an amazing group of women attorneys who will connect with Native American women environmental justice leaders. Then I get to celebrate Rosh Hashanah in Albuquerque (complete with a dawn ceremony in Petroglyph National Monument), hang out with my most beloved Reiki teacher who lives in Santa Fe, and then officiate the marriage of my dear friend and colleague. A lot of powerful experiences, and I think I'm able to show up for all this -- my life -- in a way that is entirely new. The bonds of fear seem to be, well, loosening, and boy-oh-boy does that free up some space! I tell you what.

So here I am on my path, one foot in front of the other, not sure what to make of it all, but committing to practicing non-judgment every step of the way. You may not hear from me for a while, but when you do, I promise I'll have some fine stories to share.

seven things of which I cannot get enough

2008-08-21T21:43:00.000-07:00

*Ahem.*

1. Sunflower nut butter and jam sandwiches on Ezekiel's sprouted bread.

2. Kombucha. Seriously, I am like a junkie. I expect to find myself pawning jewelry soon in order to finance my $3.50-to-$4.00-a-bottle habit. Meanwhile, there is a kombucha mother (the mushroom-y material you can use to make your own brew) just languishing in the back of my fridge. It's preposterous, really.

3. 31 and Falling, by Chris Pureka. (Listen all the way through. You'll thank me!) The rest of her material is pretty awesome, too.

4. Craigslist. In the past week I've made friends with a Uruguayan aspiring public interest lawyer (the dating moratorium is still in effect, I'm just trolling for new friends), lined up a cool writing gig for when I go part-time at my job in October, and found the apartment of my dreams.

5. Red-leaf lettuce lettuce tossed with feta, fresh fennel, grapes, and balsamic vinaigrette.

6. Exuberantly singing songs with my pals.

7. Downtown Oakland. Pretty much the coolest place ever! Basically, and this is a proven fact, it has the highest concentration of hidden culture-y and restaurant-y gems per square block of any city in America. Maybe the world. I don't know. I just know that if loving downtown Oakland is wrong, I don't want to be right.

So TELL me, my pretties, what is one thing YOU find yourself unable to live without during these waning days of summer?

some shimmering precipice

2008-08-11T18:52:00.001-07:00

Everything still looks the same. There are soft shadows stretching across the floor and flickering on the wall. My stomach is empty and I need to eat, but not as much as I need to write. No matter that everything looks the same; it is different now.

Over the weekend I went up to Mt. Shasta, to a beautiful place called Headwaters Outdoors School. I was invited there by the president of a personal development group here in San Francisco, a group of folks I've recently been admiring from the periphery. I started meeting many of them in May after that course I mentioned, Arete; a few of the people involved in ASF took the course with me, and I got to know them pretty well during those three days.

After I had my Arete experience, I wrote a letter to the online listserv for course graduates to share a bit about my life and ask for advice. I shared with them that I was frustrated with my job, but scared to quit; as much as I felt the deeper pull of unformed passions, I also felt the fear of leaving the safety and prestige that this job afforded me. For the most part, I wasn't feeling inspired, but I was feeling safe. Even as I felt the edges of stress bearing in on me in a multitude of ways, I was surviving, supporting myself, going along.

So I asked for advice, and I got a few extraordinary e-mails in return. One of those began with what is perhaps the finest first line of any e-mail I could hope to receive: "I've been liking you!" That was from the president of the group I mentioned earlier. In his e-mail, then over lunch, he told me about his vision for growing the work of his organization, which now includes a focus on dating and relationship dynamics, to include a focus on the ways in which healthy human-human relationships lead to sustainable human-earth relationships.

We had a great lunch. He invited me to be on the board of the organization, and to join them for their staff retreat up on the land at Shasta. Say no more, right? I'm in.

It was a phenomenal weekend. We spent time with Tim, the director of the school, and a wise old bear of a man. He guided us to climb a huge Doug Fir, blindfolded, and then to find our way into connection with the tree. He spoke to us about earth medicine, about how to ask a rock a question and then receive the answer.

And he led us in two sweat lodges. I've probably done about 5 or 6 sweats in my life, but none so intense as I experienced this weekend, and certainly never twice in a day. We completed a four-round sweat on Saturday morning, and the same on Saturday evening. The rounds lasted 10 or 15 minutes; the door was opened between the first and the second, and then between the third and the fourth. Between the second and third rounds, we all got out.

I hadn't before had such a focused experience of, literally, cooking in my discomfort. Tim runs a hot sweat lodge. We chanted with him as he beat his frame drum and poured water on the glowing, glittering stones, huge mother stones which had been culled from the mountain and heated in the searing fire. We breathed deeply, made low animal noises as wave after wave of heat met us. Welcome steam, we called. Welcome heat. Welcome, fluttering panic. Now, now, now. Only now, in the sweat lodge.

By the fourth round of the morning sweat we were all lying down, seeking some relief from the intense heat against our skin. I survived by knowing that death wasn't going to come, even though it felt that way during some moments, and meeting the moment over and over again. Rubbing mud on my face. Breathing deep and crying out. Holding a rutilated crystal against my heart, feeling my heart-space expanding outwards. There was no escape, so I stopped seeking it.

Exiting the sweat with a bow, sinking into the cold creek water, Shasta's sweet snowmelt, I didn't know anything beyond the animal shudders and coos coming from within me. The crystal, in my lap under the water, caught the light and cast rainbows on my skin. Sunlight glanced off the water. My heart broke, and I began to cry. I could hear the creek rushing and as some heart-chasm in me began to widen to meet life, the rushing became a little louder and a little faster. I felt the widening and the resistance. The tears were quiet and stilted, and I felt myself to be so held there, by the others around me and by life's gentle invitation.

This -- here -- now -- yes.

It was a quickening within and without. It ended soon. I emerged from the creek and stood shivering by the fire, opened.

The sweat in the evening was easy and sweet, compared to the morning sweat. I found myself welcoming the heat, revelling in the opportunity to be washed through. During the last round, when the pain on my skin was like bandages being ripped off, I remembered that it wasn't too long ago that women were burned alive for being powerful, for knowing secrets, for loving each other. In remembering it I could open to the heat, somehow connecting to the power of that lineage. And I felt the blessings of being alive in this time when Tim shouted, "Open up!" and we all crawled out, safe and intact.

There were so many sweetnesses this weekend.

And I knew that today was going to be the day that I would tell my boss that I was leaving. I had planned for a long time to give him one month's notice until I'd end my full-time employment with him. Feeling that, out on the land, I knew it was right, and yet I was terrified. And today I was terrified. What if this is a terrible, foolhardy decision? What if there's nothing on the other side? What if none of these feelings are real? What if I'm just taking advantage of my privilege? What if I'm just a lazy, compulsive, useless person?

These questions flooded me today. But then my friends sent messages of support, reminding me of what I know inside my being. And so finally, at 4:54 p.m. I walked into my boss's office and told him in a gentle voice that it's time for me to follow the increasingly-insistent inner compass, which has been guiding me towards indigenous environmental justice work, toxics and women's health, healing arts. In so many words I told him that I need to see about it, to say 'yes' in whatever way I can to all the medicine that has called to me so mightily.

He understood, and agreed. With sadness he told me that he honored my choice and my passion, and that he knew on some level that it was coming. We agreed that I will stay on through the end of 2008, after I return from the Southwest, on a part-time basis. We agreed to stay in contact, to explore whatever points of collaboration might arise, which may be few but will undoubtedly be fruitful.

On the phone afterwards, my father asked me what my Plan is. I told him a few things I've been thinking. I could feel his concern: "you have to get back into the swing of things at some point, you know." Oh Dad, you'll never know what things are swinging for me, will you? And still, little by little, I feel myself letting go of the constant quest to appease him. It is an unfolding dance.

And here I sit, alone in my sweet apartment, broken open, heartbeat like bird's wings. What will become of me? What will the world ask of me? How will I give, how will I learn, whom will I meet? I can only take one step after another, and go forward to discover the answer. There is no longer any way to be told what I should do.

A quickening. An affirmation. An agreement, a surrender, a commitment. No choice but to say yes.

R.W. Emerson says:

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Accept the place the divine Providence has found for you; the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men [and women] have always done so and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being."

Only yes.

the mysteries of love

2008-07-25T00:16:00.000-07:00

Seriously, though.

It is one hell of a mystery!

Rumi says: "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you built against it." That's so true for me. In my particular worldview, which defies categorization but is perhaps something along the lines of technopagantribaljewishurbangypsyearthmama, maybe, um . . . oh yes! In my worldview, love is the very fabric of the universe. Love is the animating force for the first exhale of God, a breath that imbued life into all of creation in a millionth of an instant. Love is what we are. It is not something we do, or something outside of us, it is something we are unfolding as, continually.

Love is the aliveness in every cell of our being. It is what motivates our lives, what drives us to create and expand and explore. "Work is love made manifest," said Kahlil Gibran.

And of course, love is what impels us to seek our Other. I suspect, although I certainly don't know, that 'true love' is what happens when two people come together and their hearts come open into the realization and reality of who and what they truly are -- which is Love. Together, two people in love and in partnership -- two people who are truly compatible, who may even have been destined for one another -- can reflect to one another the divinity that is enfolded into every aspect of their humanity.

So, okay, this is all perfectly cool by me. The universal love stuff? No problem whatsoever. It makes sense, I get it, I seriously dig it, I feel psyched to be able to access the amazing experience of being connected to all hearts and to earth's heart, all that good stuff.

But interpersonal love? Another story entirely, friends. Una otra historia. In this arena, I am certifiably an imbecile. If you are the betting type, I'd say a good 85% of the time the odds are in your favor that intimate partnership is not what's happening for your homegirl here. That other wildcard 15%? You'll find me either leaving a trail of broken hearts in my hapless wake, or pining hopelessly after love-misers who deign to toss me a crumb now and then. Precisely 0% of the time am I happily and healthfully dating one person who is kind, sexy, down to earth, passionate, and smart, not to mention who lives within a 15-mile radius of me.

You know what, though? I am giving up something major. I am sacrificing upon the altar of truth, any notion that I've been coyly hanging on to for all these years that "there's something wrong with me." That people just don't *like* me or don't *notice* me because I'm physically unacceptable or emotionally inferior or in any way non-viable as a warm-bodied human being. Because that attitude is B.S., my friends and neighbors. It is just a cute little way for me to not take responsibility for the walls I myself am putting up.

Yeah, I got a wall in front of my heart. I know it, I feel it. Who doesn't, at least now and then? What I'm realizing is that I have to take a look at this wall. Sit with it for a bit. Leave the dynamite and the sledgehammer and the spraypaint at home, and just go on over and lean against this wall for a while. What's it made of? What are its contours, its textures? How long has it been there and who were its stonemasons?

Good old inquiry, y'all. Not denying it, not railing against it, not condemning it. Taking a real, curious, compassionate look at the thing, and maybe even coming to understand it.

Because until I do that, it's just plain irresponsible of me to act like I'm ready to engage in intimate relationship with anyone. Because as beautiful as my words may come across to a potential lover about how open and ready I am, and as well-oiled as my steely intellectual machinations may be when the going gets tough, my heart is still yearning to be free but this heart-wall is still standing strong. And what all that means is that the love energy leaks out in all kinds of unconscious ways, which just can't attract anything good and wholesome.

*Sigh.* They're the bitterest medicine, these ill-fated love affairs. But medicine is medicine, and after this most recent bout of watching another weird stilted heartbreak play out in front of me, I am realizing that it's high time that I have a little meeting with myself. A meeting that may last several months. A meeting in which I am sequestered with myself and only myself, and all these tempting tantalizing people who keep popping up will just. have. to. wait. A meeting in which I ask myself some probing questions, to which I shall reply honestly and to the best of my ability. A meeting which may involve power-point presentations and/ or shamanic journeys, as the situation calls.

My hope is that once the meeting is adjourned, I can re-emerge from that stuffy boardroom (just kidding - we're going on retreat!) into the wild and wonderful world of turning-towards-love, but this time with confidence and with integrity, knowing full well who I am, where I am at, what I am offering, and most importantly, what *I* want. I look forward to a time of standing with two feet fully planted into the earth, spine in balance, awareness centered in my belly and my heart, so my outstretched arms can embrace Love without me toppling forwards or collapsing backwards.

All of this, so that one day it shall come to pass in my life that, finally, there are no words for the gift that arrives: "Although I may try to write about Love I am rendered helpless; my pen breaks and the paper slips away at the ineffable place where Love, Loving and Loved are one." ~Rumi.

How July is (so far)

2008-07-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

Believe me, dear readers, I did not mean to leave you here alone for all these many weeks!

It's just that I went backpacking deep into the Trinity Alps, where we could see the reflections of the planets in the glossy black surface of Caribou lake, and the exhilarating explosion of cold water in the morning followed by my back on the warm rocks brought me close to earth again...

and then I fell into a torrid two-week romance, which, as you might imagine, ended torridly...

and then I drove through grey-brown distant-mountained deserts to the glittering green hills of Ruby Valley, NV for the Indigenous Environmental Network conference, and the original people of our lands spoke about the many devastations that add up to the great disaster we are visiting upon ourselves, we who are so cut adrift from the anchor of reverence...

and in between, there were of course dazzling blown-glass exhibits and inspired lunch meetings and dinner delivery to new parents and women's circles. And all the mundane and awesome moments that make a life.

These weeks of summer are so full, and bring so much, and fly so quick.

I haven't forgotten, I've just been testing you to see if you're paying attention

2008-06-29T22:10:00.000-07:00

Dear reader, by now you may be a bit perplexed. "Um," you are saying. "What about the food?"

At the beginning of this blog I had my chest all puffed out about my new identity as a food blogger, yes indeed. And trust me when I tell you that the puffery was sincere. I had every intention of developing this space as a cohesive tribute to my experimentations and epiphanies in all things epicurean, from procuring my food (oh, those sweet bicycle-rides down to the farmer's market) to cheery ventures in front of the stove, to revelations in flavor.

So, yeah, best laid plans, and all that. It turns out that I still love to blather on at length about Deep Life Topics like right livelihood and pesticides and health care and such things. And oh, how I *love* to write about my many feeeeeeelings. They are dark and angst-ridden; they must be recorded!

(I ask myself, just like Angela asked Jordan Catalano in the boiler room, "why are you like this?" ["Like what?" "Like, how you are." Ladies? Can I get an amen.] Not sure. Would love to know. Parents would also love to know. But that's another story. I digress.)

Anyway, so, this blog has undergone a kind of de facto expansion in its range, which is pretty fun for me, and I hope you are having a good time too. Dear reader, I just want you to be happy! And I haven't forgotten about food, you know. I've been buying it and cooking it and eating it pretty consistently since I started this blog, and expect to continue within those general parameters for quite some time.

As does all things, food goes in waves. Sometimes I enjoy periods of all home-cooked and home-prepared meals using the finest, local organic ingredients; sometimes I am buying breakfast from the Bagel Street Cafe and lunch from the Golden Lotus and dinner from Mitama Sushi. Not all the time, I promise (mom), but sometimes. I recently purchased a breakfast crepe from a place called Metro Cafe, where all of the crepes are named after cities. I.e. the Mill Valley has eggs, tomatoes, and cheese, while the Barcelona has turkey and pesto. I swear to you that there is an item on the menu called the Las Vegas: "any crepe and a spanking." $25. Would I lie about such a thing? No.

This weekend I ate some Indian food which just didn't agree with me, and I was depressed for about 36 hours. The connection between food and mood is amazing. So now my fridge is stockpiled with leafy greens and radishes and other cleansing vegetables. Oh, the body knows, the body knows.

Really, though, the reason I'm writing all of this is because I wanted to share two bona fide food blog items with you.

Thing One:

I think that the executive chef at this restaurant just moved into the studio apartment downstairs from me. I enjoyed a fine dish of tender duck meat and savory potatoes there in January with my beloved Cuz, and it was perhaps one of the most flavorful meals I have ever experienced. And now the dude is my downstairs neighbor?

AWESOME.

Thing Two:

Could there be a more compelling package for a loaf of pumpernickel bread?

I think not, dear readers. I think not.

a world of we

2008-06-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching "Sicko," Michael Moore's documentary about the health care system in America. Have you seen this movie? It came out a while ago, but I didn't see it because I so rarely make it to the movie theatre, even though every friend who'd seen it implored the rest of us to go. (But I really would like to see "Mongol" on the big screen -- anybody want to see that one with me?) Zelig even brought it up when we were in the high desert back country on our vision quest last summer.

So, I recently acquired a TV/ DVD player (which I keep tucked behind the couch most of the time, thankyouverymuch) and have signed up for Netflix. I ordered Sicko out of a sense of obligation, really, like it was part of my civic duty to check out this film about health care. How bad could it be, really? The health care situation can't be as bad as, say, the 9/11 situation, or the gun situation (which, incidentally, got a lot worse today, thanks to the Supremes), both of which Moore exposed so masterfully.

I am engaged to an extent with western medicine because of a condition I have, that requires doctor visits and pharmaceuticals and such. I've always had health coverage, and I've always been able to afford the prescriptions. Yes, it's a bummer to shell out a $40 co-pay and $50 at the pharmacist, but in the context of my privileged lifestyle, it isn't a major concern of mine. There has always been a cushion between me and any kind of real, pit-in-the-stomach fear about medical care, so I get to spend my time and resources on things like stopping aerial pesticide spray and transformational workshops. Other than my personal health situation, concerns about healthcare -- mine, or the overall state of the system -- don't really penetrate my reality.

Um, I mean, until I finished watching "Sicko". If you haven't seen it, it's an intense and unflinching expose of our deeply broken health-care system. People suffer debilitating illness for years on end because they can't afford to pay the exorbitant costs for simple treatment that could help them; toddlers die because they are turned away from emergency rooms which don't accept the type of coverage that their parents possess; families go bankrupt because of unexpected health conditions; members of Al Qaeda imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay receive free, highly-advanced medical care while one American man had to choose between having the joint on his fourth finger re-attached for $12,000, or the one on his third finger for $60,000 after an accident with a saw.

The worst part, though, the most embarrassing part of this whole movie was the fact that Moore, as he does, told the story of other nations in order to contextualize the American story. And, as usual, those comparisons end up illustrating just how profoundly alienated, mistrustful, and selfishly-motivated we are here in the U.S. He went to France, Canada, England, and Cuba, all of which have extremely low-cost or free prescription medicines, entirely free medical coverage, and even house-call doctors. All paid for by the government. Moore repeatedly asked people in all of these places: how much did you pay for procedure X or surgery Y or doctor's visit Z? And the answer was always: nothing. With a chuckle! None of the people he spoke to could fathom the possibility of paying out-of-pocket, much less paying the astronomical costs that we pay, for any goods or services related to healthcare.

At the end of the film, Moore took a group of individuals who were ill from exposure to 9/11 chemicals to Cuba, where they not only received medical attention of the highest caliber (just like everyone else in Cuba) for free (just like the Cubans), and where they could purchase medications that cost $120 in the U.S. for $0.05, but where they received friendly and even loving attention from the providers, the pharmacists, and receptionists.

Mind-boggling.

Now, yes, I'm sure that this is an idealized look at things to some extent. If Moore had gone, for example, to the Parisian ghettos where all the Algerian immigrants live, I'm sure that it wouldn't have been as tidy of a picture. But the gist of it is that we in America just do not take care of our own the way that most other places in the world do.

As I was watching this movie I started inquiring into my own stereotypes about caring for others, because they started to enter my thoughts as the movie went on. Things like, poor people and privileged people naturally receive different standards of treatment; that's just the way it is. There are too many people and not enough resources to adequately care for everyone. I started to notice in my head a context of: everyone is basically on their own when it comes to health and well-being. People don't take care of each other, really, and that's just how it is.

And I thought about all the friends I've known over the years who work as social workers, or who run struggling non-profits that do things like provide childcare for low-income women. These friends were all striving to do the basic work of caring for fellow citizens. This is poorly-compensated work, mostly done by women. Government funding for social services is sparse, and lately what has been coming down the pike is being funneled towards religious institutions. (Remember that whole debacle?)

All of this just makes me realize, viscerally, that our ethic in this American society is really "every person for him or her self." Especially people of color, immigrants, poor people, people who are sick or weak or disfigured or otherwise not living out the dream of being wealthy and sexy. Even here, in our bubble of beauty and consciousness which I wouldn't trade for anything -- even here, notice how many people spend years of therapy and go through boxes of tissues in workshops because they (we) don't know how to ask for help? Like asking our friends and community for physical or emotional assistance would be placing this inordinate burden, this inconvenience, on their lives, because everyone's supposed to be just cruising along in their little self-contained unit of I've-already-figured-it-all-out. And yet, for me at least, I can't think of anything that makes me happier than helping people with their life cycle events: birthdays, weddings, births, career transitions.

You know what I mean? What greater joy is there, really, as a human, than building a marriage altar or bringing dinner to new parents or reflecting a friend's beauty and brilliance to them on their birthday?

It is remarkable and tragic how isolated we are from one another and from the earth. And our government encourages that, the print media encourages that, schools encourage that, the workplace encourages that, the legal system certainly encourages that, even our family structures encourage that. Why? I don't know. Because there's profit to be gained from fear-based consumption habits, from ignorance, from hopelessness.

We live in a world of "me," Moore said, and we suffer immensely from it, and the earth suffers. The most frustrating part is that there are nations all around us, right next door to us in fact, who live in a world of "we," and not because they're better humans than us or somehow different, but just because they made a choice to live that way. Somehow the collective wisdom in those other places hewed to the natural human impulse towards community and communal well-being as the highest value. We missed that memo, I guess, or maybe we're still just being swept along mindlessly by the sheer momentum of corporate dominance and its corresponding cultural malaise.

There are so many of us who want a different life. And we haven't yet figured out a way to achieve critical mass towards the radical changes we want to see implemented. What good is the federal government if it's not overseeing a national system of care-taking? But for all our prayer and meditation and cleansing, for all the hard and breathtakingly beautiful work we do here to support personal and planetary transformation, we can't overthrow the government. I mean, have you *met* the federal government? I read an article in SF Chron today about how the Bush administration actually told EPA that if EPA sent the White House documents revealing the truth about climate change, the White House WOULD NOT OPEN THE E-MAIL. Dubya is literally up in there with his fingers stuck in his ears going "la la la, I can't hear you!"

What gives me any hope at all is that all those people in Tuscaloosa and Des Moines and wherever the hell they are, just *waiting* for the hand of God to smite San Francisco and all these unholy homos getting MARRIED, those people actually do go to church, and do bring meatloaf to their ailing neighbors, and do just want to do right by the Lord and their families and stuff. And for them, maybe right now that means driving an SUV to Costco, an SUV that has a yellow ribbon sticker on the back because their 19 year old sons are over there in Sadr City, and hating gays and hating abortion and hating treesitters. But maybe at some point, if gas prices keep ballooning and the rivers keep rising and the sons keep dying, maybe those people too might notice that Something Is Wrong and we need to Come Together if we want to have any chance at all of living out our natural days on this precious planet.

I hope that when that time arrives, we're all ready to meet them with gentleness and kind language, just like the Cuban firefighters received the 9/11 volunteer EMTs, with a salute.

En Las Noticias

2008-06-20T10:15:00.001-07:00

I used to write a different blog.

Yes! It's true. It's not my first time. Do you still love me? *sniff*

The old blog was anonymous, and mostly private, in the sense that I didn't share it with my friends here in the way that I share this one. It was much more of a "Dear Diary" sort of place than this is, and through my experience of writing it I discovered the distinct, 21st century cathartic satisfaction of pouring one's heart out to a circle of (mostly) far-flung strangers.

At some point, though, that sense of satisfaction wore thin and I realized that all the covert disclosure, all the connecting-under-the-cover-of-darkness made me feel, well, shrouded, like I was telling all these truths but the telling was somehow inappropriate or unwelcome in polite company.

So at some point I just said fuck it. I love to write more than most other activities, I have this bizarre compulsion to share the truths and the discoveries and the meanings that occur to me every day as I stroll through my funny little life, and I have an incredible community of people who I love and who also love me more than I've ever been loved before by people who were not my parents.

I declared (to all 5 people who were reading my old blog): I'm gonna write, and I'm gonna tell people about it!

And so here we are.

Perhaps by now you are a bit titillated, sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for me to tell you some intimate, heart-wrenching, vividly-detailed story about my life. Oh, dear reader, I can spin those yarns anytime. For whatever reason, I just *love* doing that. Maybe someday I'll write a whole book. And normally, just for you, because I want you to be happy, I would oblige.

But not today.

No, today I am interested in resurrecting a feature of the old blog that I particularly enjoyed. It wasn't a regular occurrence, but the need for it would arise every so often, when enough juicy tidbits had accumulated from my obsessive cruising of online news sources. (Hi, my name is Caitlin, and I'm cracked out on current events.) And so every so often, my five fabulous readers would be regaled with all the obscure, off-color, momentous-to-somebody-somewhere stuff that caught my attention.

Lately, a lot of stuff has caught my attention, folks. And so, without further ado, I give you:

IN THE NEWS, 2.o!

*Ahem*

First, we have a story that is near and dear to my heart: suddenly, without much advance warning, the state announced yesterday their plan to halt all spraying of urban areas, at any time, for the light brown apple moth!

This is simultaneously a hugely fabulous piece of news, and also just another sneaky tactic by the government to dispel activist energies. While it is *totally awesome* that we don't have to fight against the risk of having BHT and TMAC land on our homes and bodies and babies this autumn, the state and federal governments still plan on doing aerial spray of forested areas (meaning all that nasty stuff lands on rivers, lakes, animals, trees, insects -- even after we saw that last fall, hundreds of birds and pets up and died after the sprayings in Monterey and Santa Cruz), and are still planning to do ground treatments using incredibly toxic chemicals like permethrin. All because of a little moth that's not even a threat to agriculture!

And even though this is a victory, we're still living in the context of a regulatory system in which the profits of big ag and big chem are valued above human and ecological health. In my months of research on this issue (I have taken to calling myself "moth lawyer") I have looked into the very heart of the pesticide behemoth, and let me tell you, dear readers, it is a dark, dark heart. Our federal pesticide governance regime is probably one of the most corrupt, secretive, and undemocratic systems of rules in the entire federal government. It boggles my mind, the extent to which decision-makers value profit above health, and even above life itself, as so much of this stuff is endocrine-disruptive and causes infertility.

So our work is very much still cut out for us. But for now, yes indeed, there is cause for celebration! I wonder if I should leave the "Stop the Spray" bumper sticker on my car, though.

Next on our news docket: gay marriage! Yep, gay and lesbian couples all over California (excepting Kern County) have been able to tie the knot since Tuesday morning. I have been jubilant about this major progressive step towards equality and justice for all in our great state, but what's been the most enjoyable to see are the pictures.

There are so many wonderful shots in all the newspapers of people who are so clearly in love with each other, so pleased to finally have validation of that love from the community (and all the attendant healthcare and legal benefits), and just so cute! I tell ya, nothing brings a tear to my eye like seeing images of people who are totally head over heels for each other, and who can finally choose to affirm their love with a legal bond, just like everyone else.

The funniest part has been reading all the arguments against gay marriage, which mostly boil down to: it's not traditional, it's not historical, it's not in the bible. Oh GAWD. That's all you got? Blah blah blah, insert usual litany of responses to such allegations (i.e. if we were still acting all biblical we'd be keeping slaves, stoning people to death, et cetera). It's such a curious phenomenon, this way in which some people need to harass other people about "morality" and lifestyle choices. What's the big fear? Let me assure you all, The Gay is not actually contagious.

Anyway, yeah, lots of joy about that one.

And finally, I could certainly insert here a nod to the various crises of the day: skyrocketing oil prices, water shortages, worldwide hunger as food prices spike, escalating brutality and misery in the war without end, devastating floods in the midwest, China's attempt to rebuild from the earthquake, and all of the various, quiet atrocities that may never even get picked up by the AP.

But you can scan NYT or LAT or SFChron and find out about all that stuff for yourself.

So instead, I will leave you with this exemplary piece of journalism, a veritable model of the kind of intrepid reporting that makes the world a better, or at least more interesting, place.

And that's that. Stay tuned!

little big word

2008-06-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

SO.

What a word, huh? Two rounded-edged letters, nestled next to one another so naturally and unassumingly, just as you might find a couple of skinny garter snakes lounging in the sunshine or a piece of seaweed coiled around a sand dollar at the beach.

So. I like that word. It often comes in very handy.

"So," just like that, at the beginning of a sentence, can alert a listener or a reader that a juicy bit of honesty is imminent. "So, to tell you the truth," or "So, what really happened is..." It's a highly efficient attention-grabber: somebody's about to cut the bullshit! (Usually me. I am honest to a fault when I write, much to the bemusement, I am certain, of more than a few recipients of letters from me.

...So.)

"So" can also signal -- or better yet, invite -- a conclusion, a bringing-back-around of the truth after a long, circuitous journey through a story. "So what I realized was," or "So, what are you trying to tell me?" In such an instance, "so" is a potent catalyst for culmination and closure.

And of course, "so" is one of the simplest yet most opulent adverbs of our lexicon.

"It's so hot out!"

"This sunset is so beautiful!"

"I love you SO much!"

"So," in such instances, can become "soooooo" or "*so*" or any number of emphatic variations on its emphasis-expressive theme. Sometimes there aren't enough o's or enough stars or big-enough capital letters to tell someone how very SO something is. I love it when that happens, when language fails us and renders us mute, positively unable to cram the grandness of the moment into these two curvy little letters.

In any event.

I wanted to tell you that I have been learning and growing so much lately. My heart has been opening so wide. I have been so showered with blessings. I feel so inspired. I am so ready for and receptive to the shifts that I am experiencing.

And

have been

eating

well!

That's all, really.

And so to sleep.

P.S. Goat cheese on a ripe apricot? SO GOOD!

slow prayer

2008-06-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, in my head, I write the story of this time in my life from a few years in the future.

From my cozy vantage point in the future, I'll look back with compassion at the over-scheduled, under-rested pace of my life. I'll remember with some melancholy the way that my exhaustion was so clearly mirrored in my health challenges -- the clumps of hair in my comb, the broken-out skin, the discomfort of excess flesh, the quickened-by-pharmaceuticals rhythm of my heart. I'll recall how I trudged forward, pushing myself to achieve and produce, and how my relationships -- to my friends, to the earth, to God, to myself -- grew thin and brittle. I'll marvel at the misguided ways in which I attempted to nourish myself.

Mostly, I know that I'll be smiling, because I'll be able to see from that place how powerfully the Universe was holding out its astounding and infinite bounty for me, just waiting for me to receive it. I'll smile, because I'll remember the way that the din of my life drowned out Spirit's voice as it implored me: "no matter what you do or what happens to you, you are my beloved!"

From here, though, in this moment, it's hard to imagine the shift. From here, I grieve for my health, for the feeling of endlessness that is so inherent in these challenges. And it is with much trepidation that I consider releasing these burdens of time and pace, for though they cause me to suffer, they are also my safety. I am safe inside the world of overwork, even though I am also withering there.

And yet, improbably, this is also a time of utter transformation, of quantum leap, of breakthrough. Simple, visceral realizations effect tectonic shifts within the landscape of my life.

And the messages from the other side are so powerful, so clear. This morning at Ecstatic Dance I sat in front of Rivka's beautiful altar, kneeled and bowed before the graceful deep-hued creation of water and light that she'd assembled. At the base of the altar was a set of Osho's Zen Tarot. I sat for a long time holding the deck, asking for guidance for the road ahead, and feeling deep in my body that from this moment forward, I was opening to the shift. The words formed clear and resonant in my mind: "I'm ready to go with the flow." I felt the heat pouring from my hands into the deck, knowing that whatever card I pulled would contain such perfect guidance

And then I pulled this card.

Laughing out loud, I read the meaning of this card in the deck's book:

The figure in this card is completely relaxed and at ease in the water, letting it take him where it will. He has mastered the art of being passive and receptive without being dull or sleepy. He is just available to the currents of life, with never a thought of saying "I don't like that," or "I prefer to go the other way." Every moment in life we have a choice whether to enter life's waters and float, or to try to swim upstream. When this card appears in a reading it is an indication that you are able to float now, trusting that life will support you in your relaxation and take you exactly where it wants you to go. Allow this feeling of trust and relaxation to grow more and more; everything is happening exactly as it should.

Everything is happening exactly as it should.

Trust.

Surrender.

I know that trust and surrender form the golden key, which unlocks the door to a future of health, of energy, of vibrance and radiance. Trust and surrender, instead of push, control, stay separate.

I live inside a remarkable, beautiful life. But in many ways it is a life that I have carefully fabricated so that I can be good, and so that I can be loved. And now those seams, so expertly crafted out of my quiet desperation, are beginning to unravel, as a deeper truth strains to free itself. The current becomes irresistible; though the banks of the river have been carved and shaped, the wild water will always find and follow its true course.

Osho says: "What is the movement of water? or of a river? The movement has a few beautiful things about it. One, it always moves towards depth, it always searches for the lowest ground. It is non-ambitious; it never hankers to be the first, it wants to be the last."

The very mention of "non-ambitious" is truly frightening to me. And yet I know that it is this towards which I must now turn. As I am beginning to sense it, non-ambition is not a release of passion or creativity. No, just the opposite -- ambition, as I have known it, is powered at its core by the question and the doubt of self-worth. Performing to make myself good.

I am certain that this kind of ambition blocks the upwelling of my deepest gifts. When I am always running after approval and, ultimately, love, I do not stand at the center of myself, and so I cannot offer the world the realest bounty of my heart. When I am running like this, I cannot construct my life around the central axis of spiritual practice, cannot take time to lovingly prepare and enthusiastically enjoy delicious, nourishing foods, cannot feel enough energy to be in the flow of giving and receiving with the people I love, cannot devote myself to breathing with my experience. And I run so fast that my body becomes injured, debilitated.

For what?

This is my life. Why would I make choices that are anything less than life-affirming, life-supporting, life-giving?

The shift is coming. Life has extended its hand to me, and there is only one simple word I must utter -- "yes" -- before the music begins and I step forward to join the swirling, sweating, exalted dance.

entrevista

2008-05-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

So, Nicole over at Go Nicole Yourself! has been rocking an interview series for a while now, wherein friends and blog buddies of hers ask her interview questions, which she answers candidly and beautifully. She recently turned the tables and interviewed her friends.

So in lieu of a post about what is happening in my life right now (a lot is happening), I present to you my replies to her questions. May you be entertained.

What are your three most disgusting habits?

I am a paragon of ladylike virtue and have no disgusting habits.

What quality of mine do you wish you had? What quality of yours do you wish I had?

I wish I knew you well enough to answer this question. If I could bestow one of my qualities onto you, or onto anyone really, I think it would have to be the dimple. It is such a good conversation starter! Everyone's life would be more interesting with a dimple in their cheek.

Whose heart did you break the worst? What happened?

This is cheesy, but as far as I know the worst broken heart resulted from a summer camp romance. Matt and I had been flirting all summer out on Catalina Island at our little camp. On the night of the camp dance, one of the last nights, we sat together on the blue plastic picnic table and held hands. And on the boat ride back to the mainland, he fell for me. He said all the right 14-year-old-boy sweet nothings, and I swooned. But he went back to Phoenix, and I went back to LA, and I thought that was that. Matt, however, did not.

He commenced to sending me Hemingway-esque one page stories about love and loneliness; usually the envelopes were taped shut with duct tape. We would have these long, tearful late night conversations, him trying to convince me to love him, me feeling no such stirrings in my heart but not knowing how to extricate myself from the drama. (OK, sure, maybe I enjoyed all the attention, just a little bit.) The last straw was when he pledged to come to the same beach in Mexico that my family was going to over winter break, to give me diamond earrings. I called it off (whatever "it" was) pretty firmly at that point, although I was still nervous that I'd find him skulking around every corner on my vacation that year.

Anyway, I don't think I really broke his heart, truly -- I think he invented me in his mind, and fell in love with the girl he'd invented. Either way, somebody broke his heart.

Of course we found each other about ten years later on Friendster, and I think we're cool now.

What were the circumstances of your first real kiss?

I was maybe 15 or 16, and my boyfriend E was visiting me from Irvine, where he lived. (The first in a fruitless series of long distance relationships.) He was a surfer, his eyes were perpetually bloodshot, and he made fun of me because I used big words. But he was cute. And, I kinda stole him from my arch-nemesis at the time. (Well, not really stole him. But she was obviously crushing on him, and he liked me. And I felt just fine about that.)

So there we were on my bed, rolling around, doing God knows what. I knew it was about to happen. I was so excited, so nervous, so ... very unprepared for the slimy appendage that began probing my tonsils. I think I actually pulled back in shock and disbelief. We kept going for a while, but I couldn't wait for it to be over.

And that was the last time we hung out.

Do you feel strongly about the election this year? How has that changed from years prior and why are you voting for the candidate you support?

I voted for Obama in the primaries. I also, however, am deeply annoyed at what seems to be the fundamental basis for most people's aversion to Hillary: "she's a bitch," or other variations on that theme. Hillary is a strong, empowered, smart, tough woman. I don't know about you all, but those are the qualities I want in my president (to the extent that I believe that a national president is even a viable or useful office, which to tell you the truth, isn't that much).

I thought Obama's speech on race was one of the finest orations ever delivered in modern political discourse, and I admire him very much. However, the Jewish shtetl instinct in me is recoiling at the Jeremiah Wright/ Louis Farrakahn situation. I know Obama is distancing himself from that relationship, but still, lately I have been feeling uneasy about it. Moreover, I haven't heard any of the candidates say anything that actually moves me regarding environmental policy. 'Cause if we're all burnt to a crisp in 20 years, none of the other stuff matters much.

So, yes, I feel strongly about the election, in all kinds of ways. Obvs I'm not voting for McCain, but who knows; I might write in Bill Richardson, who was my candidate of choice to begin with.

Is there a moment in your life you'd like to take back or do over? What about it would you change?

Not one moment, really, but there are so many things I've said "no" to because of fear of failure. I'd like to go back to every single one of those moments -- whether it was a game of volleyball on the beach, or the time my college rabbi asked me to read from the Torah during Rosh Hashanah services, or any number of beautiful people who've wanted to get close to me -- and really assess the situation from a place of strength and courage. If I said no, I'd want the no to be coming from a place of confidence and belief that it was truly the right, healthy choice to say no. From that standpoint, I hope I would have said "yes" to a lot more moments.

Is there anyone in your past you wish you could say something to? Who would it be and why?

One time when I lived in New York, I got on the subway into a pretty empty traincar. I think it was in Brooklyn. I was wearing a long purple skirt and a black hoodie. You know how right when you walk into the train, there are two sets of seats that face the center of the train, while the rest of the seats are in rows? Ok, well, I sat down at the first seat in rows and put my feet up on the empty seat that was facing center. Can you picture it? I was kind of tucked into a corner.

There was a dude sitting in the center-facing seat across the way. He might have been the only other person in the car, or there might have been some other people at the far end. I don't remember. Anyway, this guy was wearing a black baseball cap and grey sweatpants. I didn't really pay too much attention to him, 'cause I was looking out the window (the train runs above-ground in Brooklyn sometimes). But soon enough I caught his reflection in the window, and I saw that he had his hand down his pants, and he was looking at me and masturbating.

I was horrified, so I got up and walked to the next car. I kind of looked at him disapprovingly, but I think I was too shocked to say anything. Actually, the feeling I felt was something like shame. As if it was my fault that this guy was basically violating my space. Classic victim mentality, right?

Well, I wish that I would have walked up to this guy, let myself feel some righteous rage, and said "FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE."

Why I would have said that? I would have said it to reclaim my space, to let this kid know that he can't disrespect women this way. But mostly, I would have said it so that I could hear my own voice, protecting me, knowing that what he was doing wasn't right and saying something about it.

I like to think that I'd have the strength to do that now.

What blogs do you read regularly and why?

I actually have about 30 blogs on Google Reader that I get excited to read. Nicole's, of course! And I've also become a regular reader of the other ladies on your list like Lori (way to get published!), Abby, Greenie, Amy, and Samantha. I can't get enough HippieChyck. I love to read about my oldest friend the Girly Auditor, when she posts. Simon Metz makes me laugh out loud. And of course, I wait for news from my dear high school homegirl who brought me into this bloggy universe, my darling Meeks.

I also read a lot of food blogs and a lot of enviro blogs.

Probably my favorite blog of all, though, is Gluten Free Girl. I wrote about that blog in my first post of this blog:

Shauna Ahern's Gluten-Free Girl is a paean to the overflowing deliciousness of existence. She discovered that she has celiac disease in 2005, and since that discovery her life has undergone an utter transformation -- as soon as she removed gluten from her diet, she gained a level of health and vitality previously unbeknownst to her. Since that pivotal moment, she has gone on to write a book (which I am about to read), connect with the love of her life, and continue to help and inspire thousands of people to find their own equilibrium through food.

I love reading Shauna, because Shauna loves. She adores the taste of food, and describes her culinary adventures with mouth-watering specificity. With her words, she brings each bite to life, conjuring up so vividly the mosaic of sensate delights which makes up her days. She also adores her husband Danny, "The Chef" -- the openness of their hearts, the freedom with which they utterly relish one another, the clarity of their twin souls together, is breathtaking. She adores her community, her craft, her world, her life, and that love is woven through every essay she composes and is evident in every photograph she takes. Shauna, to put it in a nutshell, says YES, and her blog has inspired me greatly.

What television shows do you watch that you won't admit to your friends?

I'm one of those obnoxious hippie-types without a television. Favorite television show of all time would have to be My So-Called Life.

What celebs are on your "list"?

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie come to mind.

Have you ever internet stalked? Who were you looking for and how did you do it?

Now that every single person I have ever known in my entire life is my friend on Facebook, internet stalking has really lost its magic.

If you're a blogger, what do you think is the best post you've ever written?

I just wrote one that, in a roundabout way, is on toxics in cosmetics, and I'm pretty proud of that one. The connections between reproductive health and environmental justice are starting to become more and more compelling to me, so my words on that topic are very passionate.

Fin!

it would have been enough

2008-05-19T10:06:00.001-07:00

Each year on Passover, Jews worldwide partake in a millenia-old ceremony called a seder. In Hebrew, seder means "order," which is an apt moniker for this lengthy dinner that centers around the ritualized re-telling of the exodus from Egypt. We use earthy, tactile symbols to represent each of the aspects of our bondage and liberation -- parsley and saltwater for the bitterness and tears of slavery, horseradish and sweet charoset for the mortar we used to build the structures we were compelled to build by the Egyptians, dry matzah representing our hurried departure from Egypt -- as we fled, we didn't have time to allow the dough to rise.

We touch and taste these talismans to evoke, viscerally, year after year, the dark times through which we have passed. Yet there is another element that is powerfully present at the seder, that dances a balanced dance with our ritual re-entry into and through enslavement: freedom, of course.

Freedom is the sweet, miraculous promise already fulfilled, the fullness of being -- unfettered energy coursing through us, shimmering, even, just past our skin -- that we know is our home, that guides us and has always guided us through the narrow places. Freedom, the seder reminds us, is inherent, and our yearning for freedom can take us on astounding journeys which our minds never expect but to which our hearts quiver excitedly, knowingly, full of yes.

At the seder table we sing many songs, encapsulating our fears and our joys into melodies we release into the world and into one another. One of the songs we sing is called "Daiyenu," which means, roughly, it would have been enough. In this song, we sing out our appreciation and gratitude for the abundance of the gifts we've received. Daiyenu, it would have been enough if God had only brought us out of Egypt! Had God only given us the Torah, it would have been enough! Had God only given us the sabbath, it would have been enough! And so on.

The sky showers us with cooling, golden rain and the sun dances feathery flickers of light in our path, and our eyes widen -- this, too! We stand in awe. One blessing, any blessing, by itself would have been enough, but we learn again and again that life loves us too much to withhold any morsel of its love.

And so, after a three-day course last weekend called Arete and a retreat this past week at Mount Madonna called Reflections and Revelations, I am moved to say: had I just been able to come to the Bay Area five years ago, and make my life in this beautiful place with all of these people striving playfully towards personal and planetary transformation, it would have been enough.

Had mindfulness meditation only introduced itself to me during law school, once a week on Tuesday evenings at the school's meditation society, it would have been enough.

Had I only realized the peace and invigoration of walking deep into the forests and mountains of this region, it would have been enough.

Had I only have had the time and resources to crack through one or two of the frozen, painful places in my being, it would have been enough.

Had my community of friends only loved me so joyfully and unconditionally, it would have been enough.

Had I only discovered, through dance and yoga and play, the pleasure of inhabiting my body, it would have been enough.

And had I only been blessed to be in the same place at the same time as masterful, brilliant people who have answered Life's call and devoted their lives to serving the healing and transformation of others . . . oh, it would have been enough.

And yet here I am, and all of these blessings have converged, and I feel myself to be alive in a way that I have not felt before. I think I've said "oh!" a thousand times about a thousand different remembrances that bubbled up to the surface during the past ten days, but I tell you this: really, it is so very simple. None of it is outside of me. Freedom, it seems, is simply a matter of gently turning towards myself, of occupying my own belly, my own heart.

Nothing foreign or esoteric, just a clear and resonant yes, this too is welcome, this too can be. This, too, is me, and so belongs to life; and so is beloved on this earth.

All of these things would have been enough; and yet, at 9 p.m. last night in a quick pass through the grocery store, I gasped at the unmistakable yellow streaks and the gourd-like irregularities of a small pile of organic California heirloom tomatoes. Could it be? Is summer here? Does the earth gladden at our burbles of joy when this sweet, savory, multi-hued fruit-vegetable graces our mealtimes once again?

I am in such gratitude for this existence.

even the tiniest bit

2008-05-06T22:30:00.000-07:00

My mom visited me over the weekend to celebrate mother's day a week early, since I'm going to be out of town for about 10 days starting this Friday. As has been true for us for some time now, we had an absolutely marvelous time together, savoring every moment and showering one another with love. The adventures, of course, were myriad. A craft fair, a trip through the parallel universe that is Neiman Marcus in Union Square -- would you, dear reader, ever think of paying $2,500 for a green sweater, even if it was cashmere? I wouldn't -- a walk through Rockridge, a visit to my synagogue. She even gamely abided the unseasonal chill in my apartment. (Heater's fixed now, ma!)

And we ate very, very well together. Each of us has her own journey with food, but this weekend we revelled wholly in the abundance and variety available to us. Saturday morning I went around the corner to the bakery, La Farine. Per my mother, who grew up partly in France, a true French boulangerie would simply never be entitled "the flour;" but this very gauche moniker didn't stop us from heartily enjoying a fine spread of raisin loaf, raspberry-walnut scones, and baguette, plus my first-ever tub of soy margarine (about which I can only advise, don't make the same mistake I did, gentle reader), Straus plain yogurt and organic strawberries. We laughed, our mouths full, as we tried to get most of each morsel into our mouths, despite the drips and the crumbs we lost along the way.

From there we went to the Ferry Building farmer's market. Those of you who have been to San Francisco, or who live here, are smiling knowingly right now; for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of visiting this most beautiful of cities, I'll tell you that the Ferry Building is like an amusement park for foodies. High, rounded ceilings shelter an airy hall filled with light, once surely filled with the shouts and chatter of thousands of travellers, and now lined with tantalizing, gourmet specialty shops. A caviar bar! A wine merchant! A purveyor of local, wild-harvested mushrooms! (When I asked the clear-eyed young man behind the mushroom counter if he had any kombucha mothers available, he told me he didn't but offered to bring me some if we wanted to make an appointment. Can you imagine the calendar entry for that day: "10:00 a.m., meeting; 12:00 noon, lunch with friend; 3:00 p.m., retrieve fungus for effervescent tea beverage." It's a good life.) You can buy extraordinary local cheese, tantalizing local produce, savory local olive oil, and of course, fresh-caught local fish.

My mom and I bounced from store to store, turning cheeses over in our hands, drawing in long, awestruck breaths of fragrance from bars of oatmeal-cinnamon soap, gawking at elaborately-decorated pastries. The salty bayfront air wafted in now and then, tickling our senses and tempting us with thoughts of the sea.

Later we walked through a craft fair, and then onto Union Square where we marvelled at a different kind of array of wares. We paused in one of my favorite hideouts, Cafe Bellini, enjoying its black laquered tables and red walls. We spent some time and some dollars in Sephora, a store I hadn't been into in years but wanted to visit, to spice up my cosmetics collection.

And then we made our way to Millenium. Touted as one of the best vegetarian restaurants in California, if not the U.S., we were both excited to enjoy a fine dinner -- especially my mother, who has been a strict vegetarian for most of my life. (But she has been known to eat an anchovy once or twice a decade. Don't tell her I told you.) So we were a bit surprised, and had to do a double-take or two, when we saw its unassuming yellow awning beneath the Best Western Hotel on Geary Street -- in an area bordering the Tenderloin, no less, which is not the best of neighborhoods.

But all of our bewilderment was put to rest when we entered the restaurant, and even more so when we tasted our meal. Oh, the food at this restaurant. It is the sort of food whose flavor causes each bite to elicit an involuntary groan of pleasure. And those groans traverse a couple of octaves over the course of the meal. My mom had an Ethiopian-inspired dish of teff injera, garbanzo wot, and sauteed green vegetables.

I ate a stuffed, truffled roulade, made of french lentils and black chanterelle ragu, roasted chestnuts, black truffle butter, smoked pimenton cream, and a host of other unimaginably delicious components. And we washed it down with some fine, dry red wine, which was, of course, biodynamically farmed.

For dessert? Fresh lime and strawberry sorbet. A perfect ending to a perfectly delicious, perfectly local, perfectly organic meal.

Oh, how I wish I could end the story here.

How I wish I could just wrap up the story of my mother's visit, her love-filled generosity on Sunday when she helped me clean my apartment and stock my bachelor-pad-esque refrigerator with the best that Whole Foods Market has to offer. How I wish I could describe to you the way we devoured the falafel on Sunday night at Holy Land restaurant, and the way my mom beseeched the sparkling-eyed Israeli owner to take good care of me. (He agreed.) How I wish I could tell you that after our tearful goodbye on Monday morning, I went off to work and all was simply well.

But I can't.

Don't worry -- nothing bad happened. We really did have a wonderful, precious, priceless time together. I really did drop her off Monday morning and she really did make it safely back to LA; I saw the hawk, our totem animal together, making lazy circles over I-880 on my drive back from the airport to my office.

Instead, I have to break the sweet spell of this story with BHT.

(Three little letters! Couldn't be that bad, right?)

BHT is butylated hydroxytoluene. Wikipedia tells us it's commonly used in jet fuels, rubber, and embalming fluid. It has been shown to have carcinogenic, mutagenic, and endocrine-disruptive effects. BHT, in fact, is one of the ingredients in CheckMate, which is the semiochemical that our state and federal governments want to spray on us here in the Bay Area, to combat the supposed threat of the light brown apple moth.

When BHT, along with 10 other so-called "inert" ingredients, plus the two active, pheromone ingredients in CheckMate, were sprayed onto Monterey and Santa Cruz last fall (pursuant to no environmental or toxicological review whatsoever), over 600 people reported illness -- respiratory impairment, skin irritation, loss of energy, digestive trouble -- symptoms which are consonant with classic pesticide poisoning profiles.

Long-term effects of these chemicals haven't been tested by either of the governmental agencies involved in the spraying, but there is an abundance of peer-reviewed scientific literature about each of the spray ingredients suggesting that they are simply not safe for human populations, much less for fetuses, developing children, the elderly, and other sensitive populations.

So many of the studies I've seen and that have been cited show that these chemicals, including BHT, can cause severe damage even in the smallest amounts. 1, 10, 20 parts per billion of some of these substances can throw our exquisitely sensitive hormonal and neurological systems out of balance. Have you noticed that autism has been in the news a lot lately? It's one of the many childhood neurodevelopmental disorders that is on the rise in the past couple of decades. And, with increasing frequency, the medical community is starting to connect the dots between the 80,000 chemicals present in our ambient environment, and the health issues that we are facing as a society.

I have an endocrine disorder. Did my mother or my father, simply by the act of breathing or drinking water, ingest some tiny bit of foreign substance that was somehow transmitted to me, and that sent the wrong information to my rapidly-dividing cells? I will never know.

What's worse, I have no choice, nor do any of us, about the toxic substances that I take into my body on a daily basis, substances that abound in the environment because of the way we have chosen to treat our planet, our home. I breathe city air, I drink city water, I walk through wireless signals. I am part of a food system which involves the use of pesticides, which pays people from other countries very few dollars to apply pesticides on crops in Californian fields. People who become sick, whose babies are sometimes born disfigured.

I also take many actions about which I do have choice. I eat food in restaurants, often meat. I wash my hair and body, I buy and use cookware, I launder my clothing. And I put on makeup.

Disclosure: one of the unfortunate symptoms of my health situation is that I have had acne for most of my life. That's really its own story, one I don't know if I'll share in this space. If you've had skin problems, you know what it's like; the rest of you are fortunate, but you may be able to imagine. Suffice it to say, I'm an avid consumer of foundation and concealer. So at Sephora on Saturday, I purchased a few new products -- one from a cosmetics line called Tarte, and one called Amazing Cosmetics.

I tried the Amazing Cosmetics concealer in the store and was surprised to see how well it worked -- it went on thick but blended in, just like magic. I was excited about it, so much so that I decided just to buy it, without looking at the ingredients list. So as you can imagine, dear reader, I was a bit taken aback on Monday morning when I did finally read the ingredients and discovered BHT featured prominently.

As it turns out, BHT is a common cosmetics ingredient and food additive. In fact, that's one of the ways in which our government justifies its presence in the CheckMate formulation -- it's perfectly safe! We eat it and wear it! But BHT has also been banned by the US as an ingredient in baby food; many European countries have banned its use entirely in consumer products. We know what it is, but we just don't want to admit it.

Maybe I've been putting BHT on my face for years, now, with all my drugstore-bought makeup. But now that I know about it, I can choose whether or not I want to use it, and I choose to reduce my body burden by returning that product to the store. And I'll probably pay a visit to Elephant Pharmacy pretty soon, to pick up some mineral make-up by Zia cosmetics or Dr. Hauschka.

It's true that one way we learn is through our mistakes. That's a good thing. But this is one lesson we can't keep bungling, if we want to keep being alive, to keep tasting delicious food and gasping at the brilliant sunset and walking in the forest and loving each other. If we want seeds to still take root and new life to still grow, inside of our bodies.

I really, really want all of that to keep happening here.

So it might be just a few microns, a few molecules that I'm sparing myself. But I'm coming to learn more and more that even in the most infinitesmal amounts, a toxic chemical is still a toxic chemical. And in a toxic world, it is still my choice to avoid eating chicken of unknown origin from the lunch-rush cafe close to my office, or to stop transporting water in my old hard-plastic bottle, or to get rid of my old Teflon pans even though stainless steel is more difficult to clean. It is still my choice to decide what I put on my face. This is my body; these are my reproductive organs; this is my life.

We have a long way to go, as a polity, towards a sane, sound, coordinated policy around sustainable agriculture, toxic chemicals and public health. Me, I'm trained as a lawyer, and called as a healer, so I'll do what I can to help us move in that direction. But in the meantime I can make tiny choices, and so can you. We just can't underestimate, anymore, the great impacts of the tiniest things.

******

For more information on what's in your makeup and other products:

http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/
http://www.safecosmetics.org/
http://www.ewg.org/

blessing

2008-04-28T23:01:00.000-07:00

Here is a great blessing: a desert landscape in raucous, radiant bloom. Cactus needles glowing in the new day sun like a halo around succulent limbs.

And another: leaning, wholly held, into the wind.

And: being in the one heart, the love that encompasses, the love that is everything -- the sky, the great boulders silently witnessing, the smell of the moist and many-hued soil beneath the juniper tree. Crow, snake, and spider. Humans enfolding one another in tenderness and sacred song.

In the Jewish tradition, every time we bless any thing or any action, we start with the same six words: baruch atah adonai, elohainu melech ha'olam -- blessed are you God, ruler of the universe. Then the blessing goes on to become more specific about a particular holy occurence. Sunrise, bodily health, a morsel of food. There is something so powerful in blessing practice, in the sanctification of what could otherwise be overlooked as mundane, routine, or even burdensome.

I read a quote from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck today. This man, considered to be the founder of quantum theory, said after a lifetime of intellectual exploration that "there is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together . . . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind."

Call it Mind, call it Spirit, call it Adonai or Jesus or Allah or Buddah or the Universe. To bless something is to peer into that infinite and unimaginable force which animates all of life. To bless is to pull back the curtain and say yes, I see you, divinity. I know you, I recognize you. To bless is to give God a sly wink -- here we are on this jewel of a planet, so often lost in our machinations and struggles, and yet we can still take time to witness and to sanctify the red wine of the sabbath, or the smooth green skin of the apple, or the steaming pink flesh of the salmon. Because it is all me, and I am all of it, and my heart, unbounded, is as vast as the universe.

And so we 45 or so city slickers, we who spent 9 hours in the car on Friday and another 9 on Sunday to travel into the unknown quiet, we found our way together into the one great heart as we travelled this landscape of blessing.

Our time together was most auspicious, as it was the coincidence of two holidays: Passover, when the Jews celebrate exodus from Egypt, and Shabbat, which, although it comes each week, is considered the holiest of holidays in the tradition because it is a time of deep renewal and connection. In some ways, the sabbath is at the center of the tradition; each week it brings an opportunity to restore the peace within ourselves and in our families and communities that allows us to know we are flowing in a divine river.

Stop for a moment, and listen: can you hear it? We are a part of an ineffable love. A harmony so complete that it returns to silence.

So we said prayers on Saturday, Shabbat morning. We said the traditional prayers, and we also turned out to the landscape and received the blessing of the rocks and plants that flowed towards us. We said the shechecheyanu, the prayer that is said any time something new arises; we give thanks to God for bringing us to this holy moment. This holy moment, one pearl on an endless strand.

On Saturday evening, we created together a seder, the traditional Passover ceremony, which retells the story of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and into the promised land. Each group of four or five people brought forth one of the elements of the seder in unexpected and moving ways; using earth elements and simple rituals, the seder came alive for me as a story of the human journey towards freedom in a way that it has never been before.

And of course, we blessed our food. As you can imagine, it was simple fare -- plenty of matzah (despite the bizarre Bay Area matzah shortage), plenty of hard-boiled eggs, fruit, nut butters, cabbage, bell peppers, quinoa. Hearty, hardy food that offered up bursting flavor and robust nourishment despite the desert heat. And there were some surprises, too; charoset made of dates and blueberries, goat cheese and roasted red peppers, spinach salad. Each meal was prepared communally, and, though simple, each was was suffused with a sense of unrestrained abundance. Miles away from restaurants and refrigeration, the colors and flavors of the food vibrated in our bodies like the deep, sweet tones of a bell.

For three days we filled a small, blooming piece of land -- only two hours by car from Las Vegas -- with our song and yearning and laughter. With our roots plunging into the earth and our arms reaching out to gather in the beloveds, new and old. The canyon wren sang out its slow trill, perhaps even joyful at our rejoicing.

And now we are gone from there, with the blessings of that place inside of us, becoming a part of the structure of our being, just like the food we ate and the intention with which we ate it formed our being. The place, I assure you, has returned to quiet without so many two-legged creatures and their stuff, their bustlings and fumblings. And yet the holy songs still resonate on the land. With our witnessing, with our most intimate love we blessed and sanctified the place, and so it is a part of us and we are a part of it, connected inextricably inside the great, hilarious yes that is what moves everything.

The book of Deuteronomy instructs us: v'achlat, v'shabbat, v'brachat. You shall eat, you shall be satisfied, and you shall bless God.

Or even just: nourishment, awareness, love.

Simple.

i get by with a little help from my friends

2008-04-22T21:20:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I ate a piece of baked chicken breast stuffed with ricotta, olives and tomatoes. "Mmmm," you say! (I can hear you, you know.) "Delicious! What's the recipe?" you might be inquiring. Dear reader, I wish I could tell you, but you'll have to ask Trader Joe himself if you'd really like to know the answer to that question.

It's a busy week this week.

That is why today, April 22, 2008 (which is, incidentally, Earth Day) my refrigerator looks like this:

I'm not proud.

But let me explain. As I've shared here before, it is becoming abundantly clear to me that the joys of procuring, cooking and eating wholesome, high quality and preferably local foods are largely unparalleled -- and in fact, such pleasures are like an epicenter, from which radiate seismic waves of joy into many other areas of life. When I allow myself to slow down, know my food, taste it, I begin to inhabit all the moments of my life in an awestruck kind of new way. Living this way, time is less of a jealous lover; time, instead, graciously unfurls its velvety petals for me and I can bathe in the abundance of the simplest of sensory experiences.

However, florid prose or no florid prose, it's also true that I'm a busy woman, living a life that is packed-to-the-gills full these days. By day I'm an environmental attorney, and right now my practice has never been more exciting or more demanding -- all because of a little moth. By evening, weekend, and lunch-hour, I work with an incredible women's environmental network, a labor of passion and joy for its all-volunteer staff. I also exercise as often as I can, attempt to sleep enough, and document my adventures on this site on something of a regular basis.

Then there's spending time with my beloved community, the chosen family with whom I'm lucky enough to share this incredible adventure that is life in the Bay Area. This weekend a bunch of us are making a pilgrimage to the desert together to celebrate the end of Passover (details, I assure you, shall follow).

Between all of these things, as well as regularly-scheduled Glamour-on-the-couch or Netflix-in-bed sessions, and even the occasional date, sometimes I just up and run out of time.

Okay, yes, time is an illusion and all of that. There is only the eternal now. Indeed. Well, kids, I'm no bodhisattva; I've got shit to do. And in my time of need, when 6:00 rolls around and I get that funny feeling, you know, the one you get when you realize it's probably going to be nori strips and peanuts for dinner, God bless it, there's only one thing to do: stop at Trader Joe's.

So I did, and so that's why there's such a quantity of #2 plastic and cellophane in my fridge.

(Did you notice, though, the bottle of milk in the back? Yeah, that's raw whole milk. I'm now a member of the very clandestine East Bay Raw Milk Co-op; once a week we take our pre-ordered bottles from a cooler tucked discreetly by the side of someone's house. Have you ever tasted raw milk? Someday I'll write an entry about it. It's astounding. It's like arriving at a dairy oasis after years of wandering the endless windswept dunes of rBGH. But I digress.)

Like I said, I'm not proud. But I'll tell you, the chicken was delicious. And so although he's no environmentalist, and certainly not a locavore, I feel secure knowing I can always count on old Trader Joe in times like these.

first tries

2008-04-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

All along, I’ve made good soup.

I think the first time I actually, legitimately cooked a meal for people unrelated to me by blood was in college, when I lived in a co-op. Each term, every one of the 55 of us who lived together (our co-op was called the Enchanted Broccoli Forest, after the eponymous Mollie Katzen cookbook) was responsible for designing and executing dinner for the house.

At the tender age of 19 or 20, I had only ever lived at home, or had eaten iceberg lettuce and chewy lasagna from the buffet in the dorm. Now, faced with the monumental task of creating a menu and bringing it into fruition with the help of three other kids in corduroy pants and funny haircuts, I went with the safest of flavors, the flavor most likely to succeed: sweet. I think we had a grated carrot salad with raisins and a creamy dressing, couscous, and squash soup. The meal turned out to be very tasty, uniformly soft, and almost entirely orange. The soup, if I recall, was especially flavorful. I was pleased. My housemates were pleased. No one contracted scurvy that week.

Buoyed by my early, beta-carotene-infused success, I continued over the years to try my hand at soups and stews, experimenting with beans, noodles, and other root vegetables. During that irritating week when I ate only raw food, I blended up a delicious cold avocado gazpacho, which I returned to again and again in order to avoid eating any more kale.

All winter this past year, the sunburst zucchinis, parsley bunches and celery stalks that were just about to cross that limp, squishy threshold towards the great compost heap in the sky would instead get diced up and tossed into the crockpot, gaining a new lease on life as a hearty stew. (Oh, how I love my crockpot! Rest assured, dear reader, the crockpot gets its own entry one of these days.) I impressed myself on more than one occasion with a very quick vegetarian split-pea soup recipe. And I have continued to perfect my squash soup. Even though it is a lengthy and labor-intensive process, the steaming bowls of creamy orange liquid never fail to delight my taste buds and those of my tablemates.

With all of this accumulated soup confidence, I felt ready to step into the uncharted landscape of matzoh ball soup.

I am home with my parents this weekend for Passover, and my mom and I spent much of the day in the kitchen. After a morning trip to the farmer’s market for last-minute supplies (and a few samples of sheep’s milk cheddar), we returned home to prepare what turned out to be quite a feast.

My mom, though she wouldn’t say it herself, is quite the chef. While her upbringing in France was not without its trials, the French and their gastronomic fixations surely bestowed upon my mother a sensitive and sophisticated palate. Without ever really having been taught, she has an innate knack for concocting flavorful, hearty, healthy fare. Her simple red-leaf lettuce salad with homemade balsamic vinaigrette disappears quickly from our old green plastic salad bowl. Her wine-poached white fish is light and sumptuous. I can think of no food more comforting than the rice-peas-chicken-cheese concoction she used to stir up on rainy evenings.

And today, for the first time ever in her storied life, my dear mother made a brisket.

Let me clarify that. She did not just “make a brisket.” Do you know that old fable about Michelangelo, wherein someone asks him how he constructed the masterpiece of David from a formless chunk of marble, and ol’ Mike says “I just cut away everything that was not David”? Well, with the assistance of a decent recipe, a few organic prunes and baby carrots, my mom worked a similar magic on that long, flat hunk of cow meat that she began with. Her brisket melted in our mouths; it was tender; it burst with flavor. Truly, a work of art.

While mom was effecting miracles in the oven, I was over at the stove, tinkering with my humble veggie broth and dropping sticky, doughy balls made of egg and matzoh meal into boiling water. This, too, was a first-time effort. As it turns out, it was very simple – I whipped up the aforementioned dough balls and dropped them in to simmer for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, I used carrots, onions, a cube of bouillon, roasted garlic, salt and pepper to make a very tasty broth. Just before the meal started I added the matzoh balls to the broth.

Dear reader, I kid you not: it was an unqualified success. All three of us happily slurped it up. The matzoh balls were light and fluffy, not too dense; the broth was savory yet not overpowering. How can I say this? It tasted authentic. My soup record remains untarnished.

I also made charoset, the delicious chopped-fruit mixture that’s the integral ingredient in the Hillel sandwich. It’s a mélange of very small pieces of red apple and green pears, plus walnuts, currants, raisins, cinnamon, honey, and a splash of wine. A small dish of it rested resplendently on our seder plate, next to the piece of ginger root that was standing in for the shank bone, and across from the tiny quail egg that we used because we’d run out of chicken eggs. (Somehow, it works. And our seder table was beautiful.)

But that’s not so much news. Charoset is easy, it’s fabulous, I’ve done it before. In fact it has been my signature dish at Passover seders past.

But today I feel like I took the whole enterprise to a new level. I’m in the big leagues now, y’all. With matzoh ball soup under my belt, I’ve truly entered a new phase of training to become a good Jewish grandmother.

Who knows? Maybe next year, my mom will even teach me how to make a brisket.

somehow, indeed

2008-04-15T20:53:00.000-07:00

I've had that funny card on my fridge for almost three years, since a man in suspenders and a loincloth walked up to me in Center Camp at Burning Man -- I think it was right before a dust storm, or right after one -- and handed it to me.

(You may never have been to Burning Man; perhaps you've never heard of it. Suffice it to say, "somehow it works" is a good motto for a gathering of 40,000 revelers, all of whom are intent on a week of bachannal, in a dustblown ancient lakebed in the Nevada desert. Somehow, most likely in heavy reliance on duct tape, we got our shade structure to stay upright and functional the whole time. Somehow, event producers manage to set a 40-foot effigy to blazes without anyone getting hurt. Somehow, our neighbors served up a cold, crunchy spinach and cranberry salad five days into the event. I'm not sure how, but somehow. But I digress.)

The leftovers from yesterday evening's heavenly sundried tomato-pumpkin seed mixture made it into my scrambled eggs this morning, and I started out full of buoyancy. But I sat next to a group of young men on the bus whose sole and enthusiastic topic of conversation was guns -- what sizes and styles were preferable, who had guns for sale and for how much, how many each of the boys planned to have. I stepped off the bus with an ache in the pit of my stomach. There must be other ways for boys to become warriors, in our time.

And the air at work was heavy, too; though my boss is on vacation, he spent much of the day in a telephonic screaming match with the legal secretaries as they struggled to file a series of documents. I was shielded to some degree from the conflict, but it penetrated my experience nonetheless. I was only too happy to get out of there this evening.

On my way home I stopped at the meat market, Ver Brugges. I am fortunate to live right around the corner from a wonderful stretch of College Avenue that is home to a meat market, a wine shop, a florist, an independent pharmacy, a family-owned grocer, a bakery, a tea house, and the Wood Tavern, just a year old and utterly outstanding. All in the same block! (I think there's also a bridal shop, but I haven't stopped in there yet.)

Walking into Ver Brugges, I feel like I've entered something of an alternate universe. There are about ten men who work there, all with grease-stained aprons, many with subtle overtones of Jersey in their voices. They sell all kinds of meat and fish, plus cheese, pickles from a glass barrel in regal repose on the metal counter, and mesquite wood chips. When I asked the man who sold me my swordfish (wild, Hawaiian) why the wild Alaskan salmon was so inexpensive -- let us not forget that salmon season has been cancelled, dear reader -- he shrugged and said, "'cause it doesn't taste very good." Can't argue with that.

He also told me that the only way he'd prepare that salmon would be to cure it with sugar. I perked up my ears. I eat low-sugar, but that's beside the point; he'd just revealed to me a bit of insider information! Aha, I thought to myself: this man works in a meat shop, he'll probably have some good advice about how to prepare meat! This, friends, is somewhat of a revelation. The people from whom I buy my food can do more than pass said food over a laser scanner and hand it to me in bags? These people can give me tips? These people might, in fact, be considered experts, since they are literally up to their elbows in the stuff all day?

It boggles the mind.

So, anyway, I left the shop with a little spring in my step (and a little parmigiano-reggiano in the bag with my fish; watch me branch out!) and headed home. But not before I picked a couple of rosemary sprigs from the bush on the corner, and not before I left a little note for my three-houses-down neighbors, the ones with the lemon tree that is absolutely drooping with lemons. This tree is glutted with lemons. Lemons abounding, lemons multiplying, lemons to the left and the right. If this tree were a cow, and the lemons were its milk, it would be baying in displeasure. So I left them a note: "I would willingly receive any lemons you can't use!" It appears that they haven't been using any of their lemons whatsoever, so I might be about to hit the jackpot. I'll keep you posted.

And once at home, it was time for a snack before I hit the trail -- so I slathered a few thick tomato slices with my homemade hummus, topping them off with slivers of parmigiano and a pinch of salt. YUM! Yum, dear reader. While this snack did confirm my hypothesis that one should really not bother buying tomatoes 'til they are in season, because why eat a tomato that's not green and yellow, and called a "green zebra," it was still delicious, and filled me up to head out onto my favorite after-work trail up in Strawberry Canyon.

The birds up in the hills said "tureeee!" and "tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk" and "carrooor," and the sunset was a resplendent golden rose color through the redwoods, and the small pains of the day faded.

I returned home to put the marinating swordfish in the broiler, and dropped five miniature artichokes in the steamer. Thinking creatively I decided to try to make a tahini dipping sauce for the artichoke. I'm embarassed to even tell you about this, but we both know I'm in a learning process, so I shall disclose that I mixed tahini, olive oil, water, lemon, and canola mayonnaise together in a skillet. Well-intentioned, yes; edible, not so much.

But somehow it worked; I elicited my own groans of joy from dipping the soft, earthy artichoke hearts in the left-over olive oil/ fennel seed/ orange-rosemary vinaigrette from the prior evening's salad.

And, much to my dismay, because I'd hoped I was going to be able to report to you that I BROILED SOMETHING for the first time ever, it appears that the broiler doesn't work. Or maybe I didn't give it the proper secret hand signal, or something. (Seriously, gentle readers -- am I supposed to do something to start the broiler other than turn the oven knob to "broil"?)

Either way, no space-aged infrared rays penetrated my poor swordfish down there in the little drawer, so I had to admit defeat and move it up to the the oven. Well, somehow it worked, because about 12 minutes later, I thoroughly enjoyed a fine, light, garlic-citrus-rosemary-flavored swordfish feast.

Look at how well it all works. I am nourished, I am alive, my heart is open. And somehow -- just like this, each day a cacophony of glass-breaking near misses and a symphony of heavenly synchronicities, and I in its midst, fumbling and dancing -- I am learning.

the simplest of pleasures

2008-04-14T21:34:00.000-07:00

It is not often that a yoga teacher will start class with a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Usually, after an opening "om" or two, the lithe and glowing woman at the front of the room will share a kernel of wisdom from the likes of Sri Nisargadatta, or someone of his ilk. The Buddha, even. But tonight, she began by describing a Nathaniel Hawthorne story called "The Birthmark." I myself have never read this story, but apparently it's the tale of a brilliant scientist with a beautiful wife. The wife was physically perfect in every way. . . except for the big, round, red birthmark on her left cheek. This anomalous marking drove the scientist crazy, so he worked and he worked until he devised a special potion that would remove it. He applied the potion, the birthmark fell away, and shortly thereafter his wife died.

And the teacher, whose class I had never taken before, wove that theme of perfection throughout the hour and a half that we spent together. As she directed us to bring our right feet forward into lunges, and windmill our arms up into warrior pose, she spoke of the yogic wisdom that we are all already perfect, exactly as we are. That this form, this life, is not a mistake.

She reminded us that of all of the myriad, untold forms that Life could have assumed here in this grand drama of existence, of all of the gorgeous ways that previously-unassociated molecules could have assembled themselves into functioning organisms, Life chose to manifest itself as each one of us. So each of us is a piece of Life's perfection.

I chuckled to myself. Good evening, universe. Yes, I got it. Mm-hmm. Thanks.

I sat in the back of the bus today, on the way home from work. I was listening to my mp3 player, but even over the music I could hear the muffled din of my mind. What was it saying? Oh, I couldn't tell you precisely, but I know that it was just a variation on a theme I know so well, that so many of us know so well here in these modern times: there's something wrong with you. You didn't work hard enough today, you don't look good enough, you should've done this, you shouldn't have done that. On, and on, and on.

But I remembered what the incredible Buddhist teacher Cheri Huber said, when I heard her speak last night at a church in Berkeley -- if you can be there, actually be there, to meet your conditioned mind, you can choose to be present instead of falling victim to a story about your limitations.

So, there on the bus, hours before any surprising literary references were made, I relaxed. I decided to practice unconditional self-love, radical acceptance, by saying to myself, "I am perfect." Just as I am, just as I appear and feel and be, I am a perfect creation on this earth.

The thought made me smile. My heart softened; the stern, judgmental voices quieted down. I felt a spreading warmth in my limbs. And then I looked outside at the people walking down the street and beamed at them, because they were perfect too. And I noticed that if I angled my body a certain way, as I sat tucked there in the very back row of the bus, that I could feel the 6 o'clock sunlight on my face through the bus' big back window. So I closed my eyes and let the setting sun warm my cheeks. It felt so good.

And soon enough, I was home.

In the bluish evening light suffusing my kitchen, I blended up some sundried tomatoes that I had soaked all day on a whim (might that make them re-constituted tomatoes?), dark green pumpkin seeds, and olive oil. I layered this delicious spread onto a thin cracker with some goat feta. (Note to self: as much fun as it is to have one kind of cheese in the house, it's surely more fun to have more cheese.) It tasted nutty and pungent. It tasted red. Its boldness, its fortitude surprised me. And all I had to do to experience this unlikely blessing was to mix three ingredients together in the cuisinart.

Food is a miracle! Food is eager to please, to offer up an undulating and ever-expanding spectrum of sensory experience. When approached with care and received with consciousness, food -- like the slow sweep of a lover's fingertips across the collarbone, like the foaming rush of sea tide around bare ankles, like sunlight caressing a cheek through the scratchy bus window -- does not hew to any abstract standards of perfection.

The pleasure of food is its unexpectedness, its newness, its flavors like light through a prism; mutable, slowly turning. To impose arbitrary standards of "perfection" -- upon one's food, one's world or one's self -- is to close a door on life's opulence, spread out like a banquet here in this moment.

I think we haven't learned that too well yet, here in America. I mean, I know I certainly missed the memo. So we make discoveries for ourselves, make mistakes, and teach each other. We light the way for the companions around us. The brighter your heart is glowing, the easier it is for me to see the path -- so please, friends, for my sake as well as yours, go on and glow.

Namaste.

I don't know.

2008-04-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

My friend Dara is a master chef. She is one of those individuals for whom food and cuisine are second nature, one who must have been marked before birth by some benevolent goddess wielding a long wooden spoon and wearing a stained apron.

Watching Dara move around her kitchen is like watching a dancer occupy space -- fluid and effortless. I've sighed with pleasure at her curry and coconut chutney, proclaimed my love for her onion torte, and invoked the deity after a bite of her chocolate cake.

Last night we went together to our friend's birthday party, a celebration both of her birth and of the new life growing inside her. Dara and I sat on the couch together, savoring cake and the sweetness of community, talking about food, and about my recent, tottering first footsteps on this path which she's been walking her whole life.

Having read my blog for a few moments before we left her house to come to the party, she'd noticed that I had previously distinguished between the "stalk kind" of red onions and the "round kind." Dara gently disabused me of my ignorance, explaining the miraculous life cycle of the simple onion.

Apparently, said onion gets bigger and rounder over the course of seasons! Those stalks of onions we see now, as well as the thin stalks of garlic that look like green onions, those are actually onions and garlic at the height of freshness, in season! And the round onions available year-round in the store? Those are actually preserved from a few seasons ago! Dara asked, "have you ever noticed how, when you squeeze a round onion, it's not hard? It has a bit of give?" Yes, I replied, incredulous.

She informed me that that's because those onions are months old. When stored well, they are perfectly proper to eat, but the bald truth about those round, plump, ubiquitous onions upon which I have relied so heavily throughout my humble cooking life, is that they are old.

Well, as you can imagine, this changes everything. This new revelation means, of course, that the role of onions in one's culinary stylings is meant to change over the course of a year. When onions are the way they are now, light and crisp, juicy and sharp, they can add a flavor to cooking that is, for lack of a better word, springy. However, when onions have swollen to their spherical maturity, they bring a mellower, sweeter, dare I say autumnal quality to one's dishes.

And I simply had no idea.

There is so much I don't know, dear reader. I don't know how to combine herbs for flavors that pop and saturate one's senses, instead of simply tasting jumbled and overpowering. I don't know what makes a good marinade. I don't know how long things should boil, or simmer, or roast such that they pass into that slim window of perfection, just a few moments shy of limp or burned. I don't know how to store herbs in my fridge so that they don't shrivel so quickly. I certainly don't know the lexicon of food, the way that adjectives and qualifiers nestled next to simple words like "salt," "oil," and "mustard" can suggest a profuse variation of tastes. Apparently, I barely know what an onion is!

Yet this outright ignorance causes me no chagrin, dear reader; instead, it gives me the giggles. I like it. I am excited about it. I rub my hands together with an avid glee at my own lack of knowledge.

Why is that, you ask? Well, first of all, because it means that there is a whole encyclopedia of gastronomical information and experience that awaits me. From here, I can see a whole new horizon of learning, playing, growing. I can anticipate exalted successes and instructive mistakes (where the ratio of exaltation to instruction is perhaps best left unquantified for now).

And second of all, I feel gladness because there is much that I do know.

I know that I love the earthy flavor and astounding hue of purple potatoes.

I know that I love sweet, savory flavors like carrot soup made with rye, fennel and caraway. I know that I feel in myself a bright green energy after eating an especially tasty salad. I know that I feel nourished by warm foods, stewy foods, ratatouille foods.

I know that it's a beautiful act of honoring myself, not a forlorn deprivation, when I remove sugar from my diet. (And I also know, like I know my own name, that it's crucial to keep a bar of 85% dark chocolate in the house.)

I know that I love to crumble feta over sliced olives, diced pickles, sundried tomatoes, and chives, and then scramble it all up with free range brown-shelled eggs.

I know that my body knows what it needs. My rumbly hunger signals contains valuable information, and if I just listen, I can discern exactly how to respond. My body is capable of boundless radiance, pleasure, openness; it is capable of a profound happiness arising from flavors and words and flowers and people, and from simply being still.

This body will always tell me how to care for it. And it's my joyful journey to learn the art of doing just that.

Chickpea Potato Salad

I'm not sure what proportion of ingredients to use, so just play with it, to your liking.

cubes of cooked purple potatoes
chickpeas
sliced fennel bulb
parsley
tomato
feta

dressing:

fennel seeds
olive oil
brown rice vinegar
lemon
salt

Sweet Saturdays

2008-04-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

Mornings at this time of year, as I mentioned earlier, are pretty enchanting. Normally, though, I'm just taking it all in as I hustle out to catch the 8:12 bus to downtown Oakland. Then, after being inside all day, I make it home in time to catch the resplendent evening light.

Witness:

Morning.

Evening.

Not bad.

Weekends are, of course, a different matter. While some of the weekend is usually reserved for work on my amazing women's environmental network project, I do my fair share of enjoying life around town or out on the trail. Sometimes it's a real practice for me to slow down and loll about after a week of going-going-going, but I know I need to do it in order to avoid crashing ('cause it ain't pretty when that happens).

I've found that the rhythm of the Jewish sabbath can beautifully support that time-out-of-time resting experience that my body and spirit so deeply need, so I try to honor Shabbat in my own way. Sometimes it's going 24 hours without the computer (I'm amazed and perhaps a bit unsettled at how challenging that is), sometimes it's a day in the woods, sometimes it's just staying in bed til noon, reading with the windows open.

One of my favorite places to spend the early part of Saturday is the Berkeley farmer's market. Oh, how I love a good farmer's market. These transformed parking lots or blocked-off streets are bastions of community, relationship and simplicity, pockets of gentleness in our buzzing, flickering, networked-yet-alienated lives. Even five or six years ago, long before I had any awareness of how or, indeed, why to cook excellent food for myself, I remember waiting in eager anticipation for Sunday to come around again so I could visit the Hollywood farmer's market.

Stretching for several blocks, it was not only a dizzying cornucopia of fresh produce and other assorted delicious foods, it was also a true melting pot. Hung-over hipsters hiding bleary eyes behind big sunglasses wait in line for coffee, while short Salvadoran women haggle over corn cobs at the booth next door. The same African-American man, every week for years and years, plays his drum and sings with the enraptured crowd of bouncing children gathered near him. Gay and lesbian couples push strollers. Celebrities try to look inconspicuous. The blind guitarist plays his mournful melodies. The big-bellied lavender salesman: "who wants lavender, talk to me, talk to me! Who wants lavender, work with me, work with me!" I can still hear his song. Truly, the best of L.A.

The best of any town, really -- no matter where you are, you know you're certain to share sweet conversation and delight your tastebuds when you visit the weekend market.

So, back to today -- I biked to Center Street in downtown Berkeley around 11:00 and spent a glorious couple of hours examining beautiful produce, listening to bluegrass at one end of the market and blues at the other, enjoying an organic buckwheat crepe filled with chicken, cheddar cheese, sundried tomatoes, and spinach, and walking around with a goofy smile on my face, happy to be surrounded by earth's abundance and peaceful people.

Because I'm cultivating a more daring sensibility for trying unusual (well, unusual for me) foods, I came back from the market today with quite an array of goodies that have heretofore never entered my kitchen.

I got some raw fennel (which was served in a salad at a potluck last weekend, with sliced kumquats no less), arugula flowers, miniature artichokes, fresh chives, goat feta, and orange-rosemary vinegar! (About the latter, I can only say WOW.)

Of course, I also got some staples: fresh eggs, plump strawberries, asparagus, leeks, onions. And after a trip to the local grocery and the local meatmarket, I have all the ingredients for some serious playtime in the kitchen this week.

Lunch was an experiment in salad. Small, crunchy hearts of butter lettuce, avocado, sliced fennel bulb, arugula flowers, dressed with olive oil, orange-rosemary vinegar, fennel tips, salt, and a squeeze of lemon. The result was sweet, bitter, tangy, tart, and light. I ate it on my porch, on the purple chair, in the dappled afternoon sunlight.

As you might imagine, I enjoyed every bite.

When food bloggers fast

2008-04-11T17:53:00.000-07:00

"Food blogger," huh? I know, it may be a little presumptuous to call myself that, here at the outset of post #3. I'm just getting my sea legs with this thing, learning how to navigate the waters of this new and exciting project. And yet, much has already opened up, I am happy to report.

When I used to think of myself as a writer, back in late high school when I felt like I knew everything, I would walk through my life conceptualizing my experiences as stories to be told. I would meet someone, or learn some bit of history, and imagine the one-act play or the short story that could be spun from it. The landscape of life was strewn with sparkling gems of stories, just waiting for me to tell them.

Throughout college and beyond, my love of writing (and also of photography) faded as I worked to make my way through the intellectual and emotional challenges of young adulthood. I've never stopped writing poetry, and I've never stopped journalling, but writing became less about a creative outlet and more about self-exploration and healing. In the past 6 or 7 years I've filled many a journal with my musings on anguish and redemption.

And there was the creative writing class I took, third quarter of my senior year in college. I remember distinctly feeling like I had been, somehow of my own volition, wandering through a dry desert for the past 3 and 2/3 years, and suddenly I was allowed to slake my thirst. As you can imagine, it felt pretty good to encourage those sluggish creative juices to start flowing again. Incidentally, that was the same quarter I started working on the organic farm at my college, which was similary epiphanic. Mustard flowers! Warm, sun-ripened peaches right from the tree! The miracle of planting, tending, and growing! It was my own little Renaissance.

Well, then I moved to NYC, and stepped onto this legal career path which I've been treading for the past seven or so years. It has certainly had its ups and downs, sometimes a source of misery and sometimes a source of empowerment, excitement, fascination, and (in fact) miracles beyond my wildest imagination, but it certainly hasn't allowed me much downtime. So writing as a sustained discipline, again, took a back seat.

Because of all that, this blog is truly a return -- coming full circle to a point on the cycle I know so well, yet one that is so full of promise and newness.

When I was in high school I had the following Pablo Neruda quotation stuck on the wall above the door to my bedroom:

"You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend . . . I bow to them . . . I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down . . . I love words so much . . . "

I felt that so deeply. Re-reading that quote returns me to the flushed, thunderous passions of my writing-focused teenage years. Writing was my haven, my power place.

Just now, in looking it up on the internet, I found that the rest of the quote reads:

"I love words so much. . . The unexpected ones . . . The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop . . . Vowels I love . . . They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew . . . I run after certain words . . . They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem . . . I catch them in midflight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives . . . And I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go . . . I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves . . . Everything exists in the word . . . "

They are so beautiful I want to fit them all into my poem. That resonates so strongly now. What a blessing.

Anywaaaaaaaaay. So, Miz Food Blogger, what about the food? Very astute question, my dear reader. The funny part is, here I am, three posts into my bloggy foray into the world of food, and today was all about not eating.

Yes, today was a pretty rough day, as I had a blood test at 4:00 p.m. that required 12 hours of fasting prior. Since I wasn't up having a delicious meal at 3:45 a.m., that meant that I woke up hungry and was hungry all day. Grumpy, light-headed, slow. Why such a rigorous blood test, you ask?

Well. This time around on planet Earth, for my special journey of learning, I have been endowed with a constellation of symptoms that together comprise a syndrome, called PCOS -- polycystic ovary syndrome. It's a largely mysterious, insulin-driven condition in which a woman's ovaries are over-active in terms of the amount of male hormones they produce. It's relatively common in the Eastern-European Jewish crowd; we of the knishes and challah and kugel. I'll spare you the gory details, but in essence, PCOS and insulin resistance -- which is the root of diabetes -- go hand in hand. Since diabetes runs in my family, it's especially incumbent upon me to manage my insulin levels. And, as you might have guessed, the best way to do that is through mindful eating.

I have learned a lot about PCOS and insulin resistance over the years, mostly by gleaning bits of information from other people, and a few key books. What's repeated throughout the literature are a few simple eating guidelines: always pair carbs with protein and/ or fiber, and always make sure that the carb to protein ratio is no greater than 2:1. That's because carbs by themselves cause an insulin spike (i.e., the sugar rush), whereas somehow proteins and fibers tend to mellow out the body's reaction to carbs. So, for example, eating a little almond butter with your apple is a good idea; spreading hummus on your crackers is a good idea; some tahini in the oatmeal is a good idea. You get the picture. When insulin is kept in balance, ovaries calm down, and body is happy.

I tell you all of this as background information. These health concerns, and their corrollary eating principles, will surely shape and spark my kitchen witchery as I become more adept at cooking and eating. And so, in turn, they will become one of the glittery strands of story that I will weave throughout this blog, as I chronicle my own personal food odyssey.

Ultimately, it all comes around again to pleasure. Good health just feels so damn good. Eating well feels so good. Eating food that is sumptuous, and that also has a literally healing effect on my body, feels terrific. It feels like I'm spreading my arms wide in the warm, scented night air and lifting my face to the moon, in gratitude for the aliveness in my heart.

And that feeling? That's the one I'm aiming for.

Rise and shine

2008-04-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

I love springtime mornings in North Oakland.

First of all, you should know that I live in what can best be described as a treehouse. It's a light-filled, upstairs in-law unit (these types of apartments, usually little cottages that people build at the back of their property or above their garages, are wildly popular in Berkeley and Oakland) that is absolutely ensconced in greenery.

Directly outside my living room window is an immense and vibrant redwood. I love to sit and watch the squirrels and birds doing their daily rituals and frolics in the swaying branches. When I leave the door open in the evenings, the doorway becomes a picture frame for evening light catching on the bright green leaves of the trees in the neighbor's yard.

So when I wake up, and walk into my living room/ kitchen, the house is filled with morning light filtered through leaves and branches. Short of waking up in, say, a yurt, and opening the flap to greet wild nature, this is a pretty good way to start things off. Today it made me holler "hello, day!" to no-one in particular.

And the action doesn't stop there. As soon as I leave my house, I'm met with wafts of fragrance emanating from the neighbors' jasmine bushes and crawling wisteria vines, as well as other unknown species of swoony-scented flowers. There are some gardens in my neighborhood that are just riotous. Flowers of every color of the rainbow! Extravagant, droopy vegetable leaves! Blossoming vines snaking their way over trellises! Burbling fountains! You know, sometimes I miss my parents a lot, and I entertain the notion of moving back to L.A. . . . but then I walk down my street.

Not to mention, the morning bustle on College Avenue -- the many people (presumably members of that lucky breed, freelancers) savoring their coffee and newspapers and conversations at Royal Grounds' outside tables, the florist setting out her refulgent wares, the family owners of Yasai market arranging pears and apples to entice passers-by.

But wait. Let me back up. Before I take you out of my wee sanctuary, dear reader, I have to tell you about breakfast. (This being my proclaimed attempt at writing a food blog, perhaps you were wondering where the food went.) I love springtime mornings in North Oakland, but rain or sun, the height of blooming spring or the depths of gloomy winter ("depths" being a relative term, of course), I love to eat breakfast.

There are some people in this world who don't like breakfast. These poor souls say things like, "I'm just not hungry in the morning," or "I can't face food before 10 a.m." Perhaps most perplexing: "I forgot to eat." (You forgot to eat? Do you have to write post-its to remind yourself to breathe and sleep, too? So strange, so unfathomable. But I digress.) I am not one of these people! I wake up in the morning excited to get going with my first meal of the day. One of the reasons I loved living with my dear friend M was that she, too, was a ravenous breakfast-eater. She told me that as a child, her mother would say, "I love to watch you eat breakfast, because you're like a hungry animal at the table." That's the way I feel, too. It's morning! I'm alive! Bring on the fuel! Yes.

For most of my life it's been cereal and milk, cereal and milk, cereal and milk. Of course there was the occasional detour to eggs and waffles, or a scoot down the vacation hotel buffet (canned cherries in syrup? no thanks). And of course, cereal choices slowly evolved over time as I learned about things like flax and buckwheat, and as boxes of milk were replaced with boxes of soy, almond, and -- lately -- hemp milk. And I did go through a phase of eating quinoa, coconut oil, stevia, and almonds every morning. But the song has largely remained the same: I pour some stuff out of one box, then pour some more stuff out of another box, and go for it. A quick scrub of the bowl, and I'm out the door.

Then, about two winters ago, I took myself to Mexico for an ill-fated yoga retreat preceded by a very sweet adventure, complete with a trip to the Monarch butterfly sanctuary in the state of Michoacan (walking through thrumming clouds of orange butterflies: a distinct highlight of my life). One morning in the tiny town of Tepoztlan, prior to hiking up to the very tall top of a mountain to visit a very lackluster temple, I sat by an open window at a table covered with a green tablecloth, in an upstairs cafe, and ordered a typical Mexican breakfast. Black beans, warm corn tortillas, huevos revueltos (that's "scrambled," not "revolting"), queso fresco, salsa de tomate, and a couple of lime wedges. Maybe there was a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, too.

And I said mmmmm-MMMM! I had forgotten how fabulous this particular breakfast arrangement was. (When I was growing up, my folks and I travelled extensively in Mexico, the three of us cramped into a rental car, my dad careening us over crumbling mountain roads. That's another story, but thanks to those adventures I grew to love Mexican food.) So light, yet so substantial. So simple, yet so flavorful! My love of the Mexican breakfast was re-ignited, and every now and again upon returning Stateside, I would make it for myself.

For the last year or so, though, it's been back to the old staple in the a.m. It's true, I have ventured into the world of hot cereal -- oatmeal, or cream of rice or buckwheat, plus a few almonds and raisins and cinnamon. Requires a little more clean-up, but it's delicious, and best of all it sticks to the gut till lunchtime. Merrily I rolled along, morning after morning, stirring up some steaming, grainy mush or another. Nothing challenged my hot-cereal paradigm, and I was content.

Until. Until! Yes, again breakfast is evolving. A couple of weekends ago, my dear friend R and I spent two nights in an absolutely adorable cabin in Big Sur, for my birthday. This place has a clawfoot bathtub on the porch, so you can sit in a blissfully hot bubble bath as you look out over the misty woods. Incredible. We went on glorious hikes, rested by the fake fireplace (flip the switch, and boom! Cavemen could never have imagined it) and cooked. Well, really, she cooked, while I watched.

R is a natural in the kitchen. In fact, just in being her friend and watching her eat I've learned a lot about enjoying one's food. This woman relishes her meals. She somehow resembles a squirrel, in that she takes her food in her hands as she eats it; she uses her little fingers and then gives her fingertips a satisfied slurp. She's a true gourmand, and her delight provokes mine.

Anyway, back at the cabin, she whipped up an amazing chicken curry for dinner one night, and both mornings for breakfast she made this amazing egg-soy-vegetable scramble. It was very quick, but involved sauteeing vegetables, pouring the sauteed vegetables into a bowl, mixing them with eggs and soy sausage, and then pouring the whole mixture back into the pan to scramble it up. And I was moved to say mmmmm-MMMMM! Delicious. Much to my delight, as well, this concoction stuck to the gut til lunchtime! Even after our hikes! I was inspired.

So since then I've bought a couple of half-dozen cartons of eggs, and I've been experimenting. Eggs and small, sweet peppers and olives! Eggs, onions, and chicken sausage! And today, I rocked this fabulous combination: sauteed red spring onion, parsley, eggs and a generous dollop of Muhamarra roasted red pepper and walnut spread (which is delicious), scrambled up and then piled on top of a warm, organic corn tortilla with melted raw goat cheddar.

Pure genius, if I may say so.

And so tasty.

And that's the ever-unfolding story of breakfast. What do you like to eat in the morning?

And so it begins.

2008-04-08T17:36:00.000-07:00

Hi, my name is Caitlin, and I love blogs.

I have about 15 or 20 that I read on a regular basis -- some are light, some are profound; some are political, some personal. I love these blogs because I love the connective power of writing. Writing, I believe, is among the most intimate of human activities. When we write we can speak our truest voice -- in putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, we translate the secret and inimitable symbols of our being into shared language, so that others can glimpse our unique inner terrain. Writing is a way for us to show others what this teeming profusion of life on earth looks like from where we stand.

(Poets know, too, that writing fans the flames of love and revolution.)

And so I read the words of others to understand more about this world, about what it is to be alive and embodied and thinking and feeling and learning. I read to gain knowledge, to be inspired, to be challenged, to see farther. It delights me, to read someone else's words and think, "wow, I've never looked at ____________ like that before!" Fill in the blank with anything, really: life, relationships, music, politics, education, travel, food.

Ah, food. The food blogs! If you've not yet toured the universe of online diaries dedicated to all things culinary, let me assure you it is an infinite one. There are blogs about food and cooking in general, about specific types of cuisine, about the use of particular ingredients, and about health-related dietary restrictions. A member of the latter category is one of my most favorite blogs, although the word "restriction" isn't exactly what comes to mind upon reading this woman's tales of abundant joy, love and flavor.

No, Shauna Ahern's Gluten-Free Girl is a paean to the overflowing deliciousness of existence. She discovered that she has celiac disease in 2005, and since that discovery her life has undergone an utter transformation -- as soon as she removed gluten from her diet, she gained a level of health and vitality previously unbeknownst to her. Since that pivotal moment, she has gone on to write a book (which I am about to read), connect with the love of her life, and continue to help and inspire thousands of people to find their own equilibrium through food.

I love reading Shauna, because Shauna loves. She adores the taste of food, and describes her culinary adventures with mouth-watering specificity. With her words, she brings each bite to life, conjuring up so vividly the mosaic of sensate delights which makes up her days. She also adores her husband Danny, "The Chef" -- the openness of their hearts, the freedom with which they utterly relish one another, the clarity of their twin souls together, is breathtaking. She adores her community, her craft, her world, her life, and that love is woven through every essay she composes and is evident in every photograph she takes. Shauna, to put it in a nutshell, says YES, and her blog has inspired me greatly.

Through Shauna's blog I've started reading other food blogs (I've even reconnected with a friend-of-a-friend from college, Orangette, who's become a renowned food blogger and a soon-to-be published author!). It's a fascinating and multi-hued world, and I feel like I'm on an odyssey of discovery. A whole world of people out there, whose days and nights are dedicated to the enjoyment of food, of life, of each other, and the recording and sharing of that enjoyment!

And so I come to the purpose, the reason for being, of this nascent blog.

For me, food has been a source of some angst throughout most of my life. My lineage is hardy, of the meat-and-potatoes ilk: Russian-Jewish, Polish, Irish . . . none of whom are particularly known for their willowy figures. So while I am a strong, healthy woman, there has always been the sense that I have some pounds to lose, especially growing up in image-conscious Los Angeles. I also have congenital health issues, the management of which would be much simpler without the physical complications of excess weight.

Suffice it to say, food often feels like the enemy. Something to be restricted and carefully apportioned; something that ought to be low in fat, low in cholesterol, low in sugar, low in carbohydrates. The "right" food ought to make one thin, and the "wrong" food can catalyze catastrophe. Food is, in a word, problematic.

As you can imagine, since I am human, I am wont to crash through the meticulous parameters I create for myself around food. I indulge in all of the most oft-denied victuals when that righteous path becomes impossible. A day's worth of eating can trace a wild oscillation between buttoned-up control and utter disregard for any semblance of guidelines.

And enjoyment? Forget about enjoyment. Food is either bitter medicine, choked down for my own good, or fleeting, forbidden pleasure crammed in hastily and without mindful sensory experience. I sneak behind my own back.

Yet there have always been moments of savoring, of sensory delight, of true satisfaction. I was fortunate enough to travel to South Africa with my parents in 2001, and we visited an organic farm where lunch was composed from the produce grown on the premises. I remember sitting in the grass with my father, astounded at the flavors so vivid they were almost like colors in my mouth.

In 2003 I lived on a small organic farm in Arizona, and joyfully began each day by climbing the grapefruit tree to retrieve my breakfast. I remember sitting on a sun-warmed, handcrafted wooden bench with my fellow farmers, savoring the tart sweetness of each grapefruit wedge covered in soft pith.

Throughout law school, friends and I sampled the best that the East Bay's thriving restaurant scene has to offer: warm, fluffy naan dipped in spicy curry at Breads of India; spongy, savory fingerfuls of teff injera and chickpeas at Cafe Colucci; the high artistry of seasonal fare at Chez Panisse; the rustic, dramatic flavors of Wood Tavern; and of course the utterly vitalizing raw creations at Cafe Gratitude. Not to mention the loving handiwork of those self-same friends, two of whom run a highly successful organic catering company and soon-to-be restaurant, and one of whom is a personal chef and cooking teacher. Many a time I've tasted with amazement the hearty, aromatic stews that my skilled friends prepare, seemingly from thin air, on camping trips into the wilderness.

I've been on a journey for the past five or six years, one of literally coming to my senses. Emerging from the safe confines of my mind to explore the world of feeling, of movement, of play. It hasn't always been easy; in fact, it's been astoundingly challenging throughout, but it is no less than the journey of a lifetime: arriving home in my body. There is so very much abundance in my life: so much love, so much possibility, so much richness. After years of pained resistance, I am waking to see and savor the life that is my own.

And I've realized, more and more, that learning how to enjoy delicious, healthy food is utterly central to this beautiful, surprising voyage of mine. Coming to know the hunger and satiation signals of my body, and responding to those signals with love and attention by providing myself with wonderful and nutritious food, are very important keys that unlock the door of presence.

Not to mention, as I am discovering, that food is fun! Food words are exotic, particular, sonorous. Buying food from farmer's markets is an exercise in imagination and visual stimulation -- oooh, look at this! I wonder what I could do with that? And playing with flavors, discovering which combinations of ingredients and seasonings fall flat, and which ones light fireworks of joy in my mouth, is like learning a new and endlessly engaging art form.

So I've been paying attention to my food, more and more -- letting my mind play with possibilities, branching out, and spending much more time in the kitchen. And the beautiful food blogs that I've discovered have awakened in me the long-dormant twin loves of writing and photography, which used to be so much a part of the fabric of my life but which have given way in recent years to the constraints of time.

And so I find myself here, beginning a new blog. It is a food blog, of sorts, but just as food is a gateway into pleasure, mindfulness, and healing, this blog is also a blog about my journey into the present moment. The road home to here and now is a lush and living road; while it's possible to fall in a pothole, I also find the ground rising up to meet my feet, the wind at my back, the sun warming my face and the moon illuminating my way through the dark. I invite you to join me on this journey, to share some of my experiences as I learn about coming alive in my life, to say yes to your own life as I am practicing saying yes to mine.

In the meantime, thank you for reading my inaugural post. I hope you'll be back for seconds.