crazysalad

Sowing the Seeds

My friend, Julia Dashe, has spent the last three years of her life creating the school garden at Morse High School.

Julia is one of the most passionate, engaging, hard-working, funny people I know.  She loves working with kids, planting seeds, and helping things grow.

What about you?  What inspires you?

What do you love so much that you do it willingly, lovingly, whether you get paid for it or not?

I don't mean your job.  I mean your life's work.  Your calling.

I’ve found mine. 

It’s not a job that has a name.  At least not yet. 

I’m making it up as I go along. 

That’s the best kind of job, if you ask me: the one that didn’t exist until you came along.  The one only you can create. 

Happy Birthday, Dad!

My dad would have been 67 today.

Later today, as I do every year, I will make his birthday cake, his favorite--German Chocolate.

But this morning I made biscuits.  My dad’s biscuits. 

Like many experienced cooks, my dad kept the “recipe” for biscuits in his head.  He measured with his eye and adjusted the dough as needed with his practiced hand.  When I moved out on my own, I began cooking for myself.  As a novice cook, I didn’t trust myself, didn’t have the confidence yet to work without a recipe. When I came back home once for a visit, I begged him for his biscuit recipe, he obliged me and wrote out the following:

From my mother, I learned how to make dinner.  She was a working mom, but every night she made sure we sat down together as a family around a well-balanced meal: meat, starch, and a vegetable.  When my sister and I grew older and my mom went back to school at night to earn her degree, all of us pitched in and took turns making meals.   I know my dad helped, too.  But when I think of him in the kitchen, it’s always breakfast time.   

He only made breakfast on the weekends.  During the week, with everyone rushing off to work or school, we usually ate toast or cereal.  Fast and easy.  But on Saturday and Sunday, Dad would rise, make a pot of coffee, and read The Washington Post.  Then he would make biscuits. 

Often I would wake up just as the biscuits were coming out of the oven.  Maybe it was smell that had pulled me out of my slumber and hunger that had provided the incentive to get out of bed. 

Hot biscuits.  I loved pulling them apart and watching the steam rise out from between the flaky layers.  Then came the hard part—deciding what to put on them.  Honey butter, apple butter, or jam?  I loved all three, so I usually had one with each topping.

But if I got up early, my dad would let me help him bake.  After we had shaped and cut out most of the dough with the biscuit cutter, he would give me the scraps to play with.  I would knead the scraps together and roll it into a long snake-like shape or coil it into a spiral.  Or I would experiment with new creations, filling the dough with jam or sugar or whatever I could think of and then folding it over.  Invariably, the filling would leak out during baking and burn into a sticky, black spot on the bottom of the baking sheet.  The thin snake would have to be pulled out early because it required less baking time than the thick, round biscuits.   In contrast to contrast to his high, fluffy, and identical golden rounds, the biscuits I made were small, misshapen, grey.   Tough from being overworked.

I learned a lot about baking that way. Playing.  Experimenting. Hanging out with my dad.  The best part was sitting down to eat with him afterwards. 

Knowing we had all morning together and nowhere to go. 

From my mom, I learned the fundamentals of cooking.  Shopping, planning, executing a meal.  Getting it done.  Doing it every night, because your family depends on you.  Understanding the importance of good nutrition.  All things I still use and appreciate.  A deep, deep respect for food. 

But from my dad, I learned the joy and camaraderie of the kitchen.  How to make things I love and crave to this day: bread, cinnamon rolls, biscuits.  Warm, delicious things that made the whole kitchen smell homey and sweet.

That’s how my kitchen smells this morning. 

Thanks, Dad.  I miss you.

The Real Enemy

Do you believe one person can change the world?

When that question was posed at a recent book club meeting, nearly every hand in the room went up in agreement.

Now, do you believe YOU are that person?

We all looked around.  We were in a room full of at least forty people, mostly older women, in the La Jolla Library.  We shifted in our seats.  One brave woman finally raised her hand.

I believe it. I believe that each person on this earth is capable of changing it. 

So why didn’t I raise my hand?

Was it modesty?  Was I afraid of what people would think of me?   

What were the others thinking?  (Who am I?  How can I make a difference?  Why should I bother recycling when most people don’t?  Why bother voting?  My one vote won’t change anything.  Why should I worry about someone else’s problems?  I’ve got my own problems to take care of.)

Or was it peer pressure that silenced me?  No one else had their hand up so I wasn’t going to be the first to stick mine out.  I didn’t want that kind of public scrutiny.

Why not?

How can I believe I can change the world if I can’t even take that first step?

If I can’t even raise my hand to speak for myself, how can I expect others to do so?  As Isabel Allende has said, with all of the privileges we have in this country, we have an obligation to help others, especially other women, who have less than we do--less money, less education, less power.

That takes courage.

No, more than that.  It takes audaciousness:

1.    A willingness to defy the status quo, the restrictions put upon us by society in the form of laws, religion, manners or tradition.

2.    A sense of adventure.

3.    A spirited fearless daring.

That’s what it takes.

Are we so wrapped up in our own world (work, relationship, TV) that we can’t be bothered to step outside our comfortable little boxes?

Well, one person can make a difference.

One person has.

The book in question at that discussion was Three Cups of Tea, the selection for the One Book, One San Diego program this year. The idea behind the program is to get everyone in the city to read the same book.  (Talk about audaciousness.  Getting everyone in the city to read a book would be a miracle.  The same book?  That would be a revolution.)

"How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?"  Pakistani Brigadier General Bashir Baz is quoted in the book, as he and Greg Mortenson watch a live CNN feed from Baghdad in the fall of 2003 of wailing Iraqi women carrying children's bodies out of a bombed building.  "Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years."

"...Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America.  Thanks to America, Osama is in every home.  As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard.  You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength.  In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else.  The enemy is ignorance."

Greg Mortenson has dedicated his life to promote education and literacy, especially for girls, in remote, volatile regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.  He has established over 61 schools, which provide education where few education opportunities existed before.

Mortenson has gained the trust of Islamic leaders, military commanders, government officials and tribal chiefs from his tireless effort to champion education, especially for girls.

When the porcelain bowls of scalding butter tea steamed in their hands, Haji Ali spoke.  “It you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways,” Haji Ali said, blowing on his bowl.  “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger.  The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest.  The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die,” he said, laying his hand warmly on Mortenson’s own.  “Doctor Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea.  We may be uneducated.  But we are not stupid.  We have lived and survived here for a long time.”

“That day, Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I’ve ever learned in my life,” Mortenson says.  “We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly.  We’re the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills. Our leaders thought their ‘shock and awe’ campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started.  Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.  He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.”

If you want a truly amazing story of how one person can make a difference, read the book.  Even better, go hear Greg Mortenson himself.  He will be in San Diego this week, speaking at various places around town. 

I want to go to Camp Pendleton.  For one, in all my 18 years in San Diego, I have never once stepped foot on a military base.  Second, I want to hear what Mortenson has to say, especially to a room full of Marines.  Finally, I want to hear the questions that the audience has for him.  I have a lot of questions myself.  And this time, I will be there, with my hand up in the air. 

That’s the first step.

Moving at the Speed of Life

Part of the problem with modern life is the speed at which everything moves.  Fast food.  Jet travel.  High-speed internet service.  Everything comes at us in a constant stream, a barrage of stimulus. 

“Technology is a way of organizing the world so that we do not experience it.”—Max Frisch

Sometimes I think our ability to affect change in the world has moved beyond our ability to understand or control it. 

Injecting human growth hormones into animals? Cloning animals for food?  Why do we do this?  They grow faster that way.   It’s more “efficient” to “produce” animals this way.   Andrew Kimbrell calls this ethics of technology “cold evil.”

Do we know what the hell we are doing?  Do we care?

As Gandhi said: “there is more to life than increasing its speed.” 

I’ve often felt out of place, confused, disconnected from the society I live in. As though I was born in the wrong century.  Not that I am a Luddite, as some have accused me of being.  I love change and growth.  But at my own pace, not imposed upon me.  I want to taste it, experience it, digest it. 

I’m slow.   

On their Inner Work Blog,  Jerry Ruhl and Robert A. Johnson write about "Wisdom in Chaos and Confusion":  “David Bohm, a brilliant theoretical physicist, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, conceptualizes the universe as manifestation of what he calls the universal flux. Bohm asserts that everything is process and in process. There are no stable enduring phenomena. What appear to be solid objects are simply slower processes than the human process. We perceive these as static if we vibrate at a faster frequency, and we perceive these as chaotic if we move slower. Each has its own rhythmic vibratory rate, its own velocity. Faster processes are more ephemeral. Our experience of constancy is an illusion created by relative velocity.

How might you appear to a redwood tree? Like wind or rain, people might be perceived as fleeting and intangible. To hummingbirds we are sluggish and clumsy, almost tree-like in our movements.

Modern science explains that we do not see the swirl of atoms or the hectic race of galaxies — our narrow sensory perceptions trap us. We imagine the world to be semi-static and filled with enduring things. Yet the truth is more fluid. We are ripples in a flowing ocean of changing life. We are waves breaking against some mysterious shore.

Life is constantly in flux, yet in our culture confusion is generally held to be a mistake or even a pathology. Confusion is not inherently a problem to be solved. It reminds us that life is always in transition, that everything we think is permanent is actually only temporary.

To be confused is to be in the swirling midst of what is. A basic spiritual principle is learning to accept what is instead of insisting that life be a certain way.”

Off the Shelf

“What’s that?”

My daughter, Siena, age 9, pointed to a small grey blob.  I  paused in our bedtime reading of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to examine the stain in the right margin of page 56.  “A tiny spider? Silverfish?"

“No, looks more like chocolate,” I guessed. 

She, the youngest in a household of readers, nodded in understanding.  While dinners are strictly social (cherished family conversation time, no TV or books), most solo eating in our house is done in the company of books. 

Mornings Siena props a Katie Kazoo behind her cereal bowl and steadies it with her left hand.  Head bent forward, her right hand travels a slow, circular path from milk to mouth, stopping only to rest the spoon in the bowl as she turns the page, her eyes never leaving the book.

Crumbs, stains, and watermark are an inevitable part of our library--and not just in the cookbook section.   So I am grateful for the latest Center for Ecoliteracy newsletter alerting me to a link combining two of my favorite things: Books and Food! 

Philip H. Howard, an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, has compiled this searchable online bibliography of books and films related to community, food, and agriculture.   A quick search revealed that several of my recent favorites like Full Moon Feast and Food Not Lawns haven’t made the list yet, but several older classics and must-reads like Fast Food Nation, Fatal Harvest, and Wendell Berry did. 

Professor Howard created the database as a resource for his Community, Food and Agricultural Systems course.  So far the list only has 200 items, but Howard plans to keep updating the site, so kudos to him creating it and making it available online.  Great start!

Be sure to check out the rest of the site as well, especially his graphs on the consolidation of the organic food industry.  (One that surprised me was learning that Hershey’s owns Dagoba chocolate.)

Co-op America’s Responsible Shopper site is another great resource for finding out who the major players in agribusiness (Cargill, Monsanto, ADM) and the food industry (Nestlè) are and what they are up to. 

As consumers, we have a lot of power.  The choices that we make every day determine the world we live in.  This year we will elect a new president.  But we don't have to wait 4 years to vote.  As Michael Pollan has said: "you can simply stop participating in a system that abuses animals or poisons the water or squanders jet fuel flying asparagus around the world. You can vote with your fork, in other words, and you can do it three times a day."

And here's who is behind the names on my shelf (in the picture at the top of this entry):
Muir Glen, Bearitos & Spectrum: Heinz
Seeds of Change: M&M Mars
Annie's: Solera Capital

Skeletons in the Attic

Q: Have you noticed all these new nonfiction books on "happiness"? It's an industry.

Charles Simic: It's really frightening.  People need to read a book on how to be happy?  It's completely an American thing.  Can you imagine people in Naples sitting on a bus or in a trattoria reading a book about happiness?

Q: What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?

Simic: For starters, learn how to cook.

--Interviewed by Deborah Solomon in the New York TImes

Eyes Fastened With Pins       
by Charles Simic

How much death works,

No one knows what a long

Day he puts in. The little

Wife always alone

Ironing death's laundry.

The beautiful daughters

Setting death's supper table.

The neighbors playing

Pinochle in the backyard

Or just sitting on the steps

Drinking beer. Death,

Meanwhile, in a strange

Part of town looking for

Someone with a bad cough,

But the address somehow wrong,

Even death can't figure it out

Among all the locked doors...

And the rain beginning to fall.

Long windy night ahead.

Death with not even a newspaper

To cover his head, not even

A dime to call the one pining away,

Undressing slowly, sleepily,

And stretching naked

On death's side of the bed.

From Charon's Cosmology, by Charles Simic. Braziller Series of Poetry, © 1977.