crazysalad

The House of Belonging

THE HOUSE OF BELONGING

by David Whyte

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,

this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,

the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

 

Arty Choke

Pappus (from Greek, pappos, meaning grandfather or old man): the down or ring of fine feathery hairs surrounding the seed on a thistle or dandelion.

The First Artichoke

by Diane Lockward

Though everyone said no one could grow
artichokes in New Jersey, my father
planted the seeds and they grew one magnificent
artichoke, late-season, long after the squash,
tomatoes, and zucchini.

It was the derelict in my father's garden,
little Buddha of a vegetable, pinecone gone awry.
It was as strange as a bony-plated armadillo.

My mother prepared the artichoke as if preparing
a miracle. She snipped the bronzy winter-kissed tips
mashed breadcrumbs, oregano, parmesan, garlic,
and lemon, stuffed the mush between the leaves,
baked, then placed the artichoke on the table.
This, she said, was food we could eat with our fingers.

When I hesitated, my father spoke of beautiful Cynara,
who'd loved her mother more than she'd loved Zeus.
In anger, the god transformed her
into an artichoke. And in 1949 Marilyn Monroe
had been crowned California's first Artichoke Queen.

I peeled off a leaf like my father did,
dipped it in melted butter, and with my teeth
scraped and sucked the nut-flavored slimy stuff.
We piled up the inedible parts, skeletons
of leaves and purple prickles.

Piece by piece, the artichoke came apart,
the way we would in 1959, the year the flowerbuds
of the artichokes in my father's garden bloomed
without him, their blossoms seven inches wide
and violet-blue as bruises.

But first we had that miracle on our table.
We peeled and peeled, a vegetable striptease,
and worked our way deeper and deeper,
down to the small filet of delectable heart.

October Sunrise

Cafe Influx

Influx (from medieval Latin, influxus, and Latin, influere) - a flowing in (in-fluence), a continuous coming, esp. of individuals in large numbers. 

Influx Cafe, a local cafe in Golden Hill in San Diego (Broadway at 20th) which has a lot of customers continuously coming in to get delicious homemade pastries and cupcakes. 

I like to sit in the seat by the window and watch the cyclist cruise down the hill, under the freeway overpass, and into downtown San Diego.

When the sun gets to be too bright and blinding, the staff will kindly come and lower the shades. 

 

Sunflowers

“Did you see the sunrise this morning?”
the old woman on Dale Street
who gardens with the parrot on her shoulder
asked me as I was walking home from Grant’s Deli
with a baguette under one arm and a cup of boiling Italian roast
burning my palm.

“And did you see the sunset last night?” I asked her.
Under a summer peach and apricot sky
my daughters and I had gone out to our front-yard garden to gather tomatoes—
bagfuls of yellow, roma, green zebra, cherry, heirloom—
and more to share with the neighbors
and handfuls of fragrant basil for our pasta dinner with fresh, no-cook sauce.

The parrot woman smiled.  “We are blessed.”

Recipe for (Almost) No-Cook Tomato Sauce

3-4 tomatoes
A handful of basil
2 cloves of garlic
Olive oil
Pasta

Boil water for pasta.  Cook pasta.  (I like farfalle ("butterfly") pasta with this sauce because the wings in the pasta hold the sauce nicely. 

While pasta is cooking, chop tomatoes.  Tear or chop basil into small pieces.  Slice garlic.  Heat olive oil in a saucepan and add garlic.  Cook until soft, but not brown.  Add chopped tomatoes.  Cook for a few minutes, just long enough to reduce the water (juice) from the tomatoes a little.  Turn off heat. 

Drain pasta and add to saucepan with tomatoes.  Add chopped basil.  Stir and serve.

The Sun
by Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen

anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Rainy lights

Happy Halloween!

Looking forward to going trick-or-treating with my daughter in our new North Park neighborhood.  I hear Halloween is quite a big deal around here.  One estimate put the number of trick-or-treaters at 400!  

Our house is covered with spiderwebs and pumpkin luminarias light the way to our door.  We had a couple of jack-o'-lanterns on the front porch until the 90 degree Santa Ana weather this week turned them into rotting, fly-infested corpses.  And if I really wanted to scare the neighbors I could have put a McCain/Palin sign in the yard!<g>  (This is definitely Obama territory around here.)  

While out walking on 30th Street my kids and I spotted these fabulous jack-o'-lanterns in the window of Vagabond Restaurant.  (Look carefully and you can see owner Jerome Gombert reflected in the lower right-hand corner.)

Happy Halloween! 

May all your fears be exorcised and the coming year be a sweet one.

What Kids Eat

Kids Photograph the Food They Eat Over One Day

If you get the chance, check out What Kids Eat, a new exhibit currently being shown at several locations around San Diego.  One hundred kids from 10 schools in San Diego County were given disposable cameras and asked to document what they ate over the course of one day. 

It’s fascinating to see not only what the kids ate, but also what they chose to document.  They are many shots of school lunch
trays, fast food, and junk food (cheetos, soda, candy), but just as many shots of fruit and salads, too. 

The kids (age 8) also answered questionnaires about what they had eaten: “Did you enjoy eating your food today?”  “How did the food make you feel?”

 

My favorite question was “If you could have eaten anything else today what would it have been?”
One answer: “it would be spegtey (spaghetti).”  Another: “it would of been brokly (broccoli).”

Not all of the photos are particularly of great quality (many of the images are blurry, partly the limitations of the small lenses on the disposable cameras and sometimes the result of the camera being close to the object being photographed), but there are some images of striking beauty:

Of equal or, perhaps, even more interest than what the kids ate is what is behind the food: glimpses of people and backgrounds in the photos.  There are shots of siblings, parents, classmates, kitchens, dining rooms, the inside of refrigerators: 

 

I’m fascinated by these photos for the same reason I love Peter Menzel’s books Material World and Hungry Planet. 

They offer a brief glimpse into how others live and eat—but this time the subjects control the camera and choose how they are portrayed, an idea employed so effectively by Zana Briski’s Kids With Cameras in their Oscar-winning documentary film Born into Brothels. 

This exhibit, sponsored by the Sugar Musuem, runs through October 31st at the following venues around the county:

Chula Vista Civic Center Library
City Heights/Weingart Branch Library
City Heights Wellness Center
College-Rolando Library
Grants Market, South Park
Mission Hills Branch Library
North Park Branch Library
Pacific Beach/Taylor Library

If you can, visit the City Heights locations—the Wellness Center and Library are on the same block of Wightman Street (at Fairmont, one block south of University).  If you go on a Saturday morning you can also check out the nearby City Heights Farmers’ Market—a culturally diverse, affordable market that is the first in the city to accept EBT (food stamps) and WIC vouchers. 

Oh, and while you’re there, don’t forget the broccoli.

What Comes After

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

        fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

       beauty     .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
        (but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

        thou answerest

them only with

            spring)

--ee cummings

Rain in San Diego

As the rain began to fall this morning, I was reading Ko Un.  I couldn't help but notice this pine tree outside my window.

One day
there was no one I could ask the way
so I set off
where a long pine branch was pointing

and found that the right direction

*

A thousand drops
hanging from a dead branch

The rain did not fall for nothing

--Ko Un
from Flowers of a Moment