did you ever know about birthdays?

Did you ever know about birthday dread?

It feels like that a little. When you turn 30 I mean. Which I did, recently. No big deal right? Except that it did feel like a big deal, and that made me feel silly. I'm not usually a person who plays into things like existential angst, or aging phobias. But I did feel like a door closed a little harder than usual (with a little gust to follow, which came in the form of a two day snow storm....) It was more like leaving the husk of a soul-shaped skin behind and wriggling forth into raw and silvery newness. Not particularly pleasant, but bracing at least. 

So I decided I shouldn't invest in that new german eye serum or go get grown up looking lipstick. Instead I endeavored to surround myself with profundity, potency and power. Light, too, and laughter. 

These things have made all the difference:

Outrageous Openness by Tosha Silver (An actual life changer. The kind that comes when the Virgin Mary shows up in your yogurt.)

Honey From A Weed  by Patience Gray (It has been so long since I have read something so beautiful.)

Vegetable Literacy the newest by Deborah Madison. (Divided into family?! For example: the Knotweed Family and The Former Lily Family, in case you need to shriek with joy when you peruse a cookbook.)

The Round House and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse: A Novel  both by Louise Erdrich.  (Bone strippingly powerful writing. Yeesh.)

Light on Yoga  by B.K Iyengar. (In case you haven't recently been floored by a need to reform in the direction of humbleness.)

And I've been carrying around my squat little notebook and watching happily as it gets thicker and more bent and more tattered. 

So these have been blessings. The key being, I think, to relinquish the tar pits of the surface and plumb clearer, cleaner depths. Spring struggles here (as it always does,) and I am reminded that the effort to be drawn up and out of our closed-circuit cycles of self-criticism and the angst To Do Something With Ourselves is neither surefooted nor swift. Rather it is mucking about and accepting the mire as part of a larger plan, even if we don't have the right maps and scale weights. Thanks goodness.

On the blades of cold

Deep cold, narrow days. Frost alive on all the trees as the mercury fails and shudders at the bottom of the thermometer. -9, -11, -12. The cold is alive and dynamic instead of passive and heavy. Going out and all the skin on your face lays tight and your eyes smart. How articulated all the planes feel as the cold primes and hums across them. And we? Head out into it. When we can tolerate (some of us better than others!)

We will sometimes bundle and arm ourselves and head into the trembling light. Getting to the top is no colder than being down low, only leaner and fiercer.

Sometimes this relentless cold and dark time makes me feel smothered. I am lucky to have been guided by serendipity to the deep thinking and light-oriented writings of May Sarton. From her 1973 Journal of a Solitude, she wonders about the nature of this closing-up as well...

     "I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let all the riches of a season, how without grief (it  seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.....Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let is go."

                         -October 6th entry.

Such a mimicry, we could be so honored to get it even close to right. Those trees.

gaps

gaps and howling wind.

heartbreak has happened, sutures also. the light has dimmed and threatens to fail. all cold is brought close and heat pushed outwards and so. winter begins.

welcome.

 

forcing green inside. also the most beautiful reading under the eiderdown. i cannot recommend enough this novella 

on "Crunch".

having read this gem in the New Yorker recently, I decided to go out and try for myself this crazy, new fangled apple. one they invented. invented.

genetically modifying plants aside, it is a strange and thrilling thing to eat something whose every facet, character, fault, victory and blemish were decided on, altered, and then presented in all its waxy glory.

groups of people sat with sharp pencils, little lined cards and spitting cups, to bite, chew and discard many apples before the Sweetango. this one, too soft. this? too hard. what about this? too sour, too sweet, too weak, too meek, too showy, not enough confidence, a narcissist, too histrionic, not good looking enough, too fat, too thin, too heavy, too round, foreign, awkward, bitter, a victim. these kinds of things, i'm sure.

and so i took myself into the Regular Old grocery (where, it is true, I am not a frequent shopper,) pleased to find, literally glowing in a halo of halogen and carnuba wax, the Sweetangos.

lordy.



it was the biggest thing i have ever eaten. slightly mealy to the touch. but. in the mouth? as promised, so juicy it wet the chin, and crunch enough to momentarily drown out the radio. as for the taste? i can't say i remember. i was enraptured by the crunch and the juice. apparently the taste wasn't figured into the modifying equation. perhaps they knew we'd be slightly embarassed at first by now knowing how to break the skin. the surface was so wide and taut and curved. and then be so blown over by the feel of the thing we'd forget to taste it. (or perhaps i have so long snubbed conventional and oversized fruit I forget that this is a common problem with mainsteam produce.) either way, the Sweetango. stunning and forgettable and somewhat difficult to wrangle.

sea changes

 

A great deal of MFK Fisher's collective writing is devoted to sea change. Indeed her autobiographical work (The Gastronomical Me) casts those words over whole periods of her life without the use of details or qualifiers. Part of this, I suspect, is because she is traveling both with her husband and with death and two such companions must make a mess of time. Sea change then, is not just about crossing space and time through water, but about the way troubled times lump and mass themselves: squeezing the meaning out of language and  reminding us that wide water often kills detail.

"...We were ghosts, then. Our lives as normal living humans had ended in the winter, in Delaware, with           Chexbres' illness. And when we got word that we should go back to our old home in Switzerland and save what we could before war started, we went not so much for salvage, because possessions had no meaning any more to us, but because we were helpless to do anything else. We returned to the life that had been so real like fog, or smoke, caught in a current of air. We were very live ghosts, and drank and ate and saw and felt and made love better then ever before, with an intensity that seemed to detach us utterly from life. Everywhere there was a little of that feeling; the only difference was that we wree safely dead, and all the other people, that summer, were laughing and singing and drinking wine in a kind of catalepsy, or like a cancerous patient made happy with a magic combination of opiate before going into the operating theatre. We had finished with all that business, and they had it still to go through..."

(The Flaw, 1939. (The Gastronomical Me.) The Art of Eating, by MFK Fisher.)

While there is no sea voyage in my own future I do feel that the visual cues of autumn's descending will similarly blur detail leaving me with that same wavering feeling of beginning a new way, slow and watery. Not for any tactile reason, no concrete loss, life change, solid event. Rather just the sense of continuing in the natural world. I feel this way when the ground gets soft before getting very hard.

ayurveda, wabi-sabi, naturalist writers and peaches. summer ho!

as usual the mountainous summer inspires quiet in routine. this quiet, gauzy and easily stirred by changes in light and evening heat lightning seems to impose a deliberateness in how one chooses to surround themselves, both in stimuli (hopefully diminished) and in food medicine.

 ayurveda would say this is part of the natural rhythm of the world: to be entering the time of year when we are most sensitive to heat, to abrasion, to erratic behavior and light. in short Pitta time of year. and so, as with individuals who are out of balance with their pitta point of the dosha triangle as a matter of constitution, the earth and all living in it benefit from gentler routines at the moment- exerting themselves only in the cool of the morning, eating an early evening meal (no later than 7 o'clock) and bedding down fairly early. too, we should ingest cooling food (lighter or more soothing depending on who and how we are).

i like this philosophy as it is a deep-seated bone wisdom kind of thing. how frequently, if we were to put our ear against the resonance of our most grounded self, would we choose to pursue barbecued brisket with hot sauce in the middle of a July day? or a stew heavy with sweet potato, cream and warming spices? likely we would wrinkle our nose at the suggestion. instead we seek out clean, clear, ringing food. snapping pea pods and sweet corn in the finest cloak of coconut oil. fish baked in parchment with citrus; soft herbs stirred into cool cucumbers and rice; dark fruit stewed in its own juices and spooned on drift of yogurt, unadorned but brilliant. this old wisdom is so good.

what has been the largest change as i undertake to implement a little ayurveda at a time is the concept of eating a large meal in the middle of the day and a smaller one later on. sleeping is less like slogging into a swamp or blinking on and off through an electrical storm. anxieties are quelled towards the evening, set intently instead upon digestion. this kind of thing.

a lovely salad with some bracing color, implements that are sturdy and simple (lots of attention newly paid to the world around me with the new poring over of this gem) and some new reading, this is a good way to sit with summer, instead of in it.

(new acquisitions)

Hal Borland is a previously-unknown delight that has been gifted to me by a dear friend. Like Aldo Leopold (and even my favorite writer of annuals) he has broken the year down into what are called the Twelve Moons. This is not an uncommon gesture, one made by many native peoples to describe the year by each month's moon and doling twelve different names for each. Borland assigns each day of the year a different and keen observation about its natural changes and it is a lovely way to begin the day, with coffee, or with the quiet end of the day meal...

and speaking of Nigel Slater...as usual, the above is adapted from his lovely Tender Vol. II.

I made it mostly because of his ode-like writing on peaches:

"When a peach is at its most sublime, it needs a plate to catch the juice, though I invariably forget. Or is that I can never quite believe I will need one? Either way, it is usually followed by that embarrassing little noise that comes from the corner of your mouth as you try to catch the escaping trickle of juice...I like the fact that the stone of a peach contains a little cyanide, though not as much as its sister, the bitter almond. The far-off hint of danger seems only to add to the peach's exotic and sensual qualities...."

and

"A peach in the kitchen...I rarely cook a peach. They are seen in my kitchen nestling next to the crisp skin of a roast chicken salad or perhaps cold gammon or hot roast guinea fowl; stuffed with mascarpone or ricotta or amaretti; or simply nudging a few slices of Parma ham and a fistful of spiky-leaved rocket. I will grill them, stuffed with cream cheese and glazed with molten sugar, bake them with almonds and honey and poach them with honey and a drop of rosewater. Occasionally (very occasionally), I will tuck them into the cream filling of meringue with passion fruit of raspberries or add them to a salad of wine-dark cherries."

and so, wanting a salad nudged by a peach as I'm quite sure I've never had the pleasure I embarked on the dish in question with lovely results...

Roast chicken with arugula, peaches and fresh mozzarella

(adapted from Tender Volume II's: 'A Salad of Chicken, Mint and Peaches')

1 chicken breast; bone in and skin on

marinated with....

about half a lemon's worth of lemon juice

as much as you feel like zesting of a lemon

a zigzag of olive oil

a pinch salt

a grind or two of black pepper

a handful of chopped up herbs (i used rosemary, oregano, dittany, thyme)

roast at 350 for 20-45 minutes depending on the size of the breast. check, as usual, for a burnished and crackling skin, clear juices running from the knife-prick and a creamy interior (no redness or pinkness unless you are very near the bone) let this guy sit about 10 minutes on the counter to tempt anyone around with its fragrance, dogs especially. then shred with a fork.

into a bowl shower some arugula and a few torn up rounds of nasturtium leaves and blossoms if you have any about. 

add to it half a round of fresh mozzarella torn into pleasing bits (not too big, not too small)

one peach shocked in a bit of boiling water, skin removed. cut this into fine wedges and then each wedge crosswise.

a cupful (approximately) of steamed israeli couscous (likely soft cooked barley would be an excellent substitute)

a palmful of shredded mint and basil leaves

and perhaps a quarter cup of finely chopped and fiercely bright red onion.

dress this with an squeeze of lemon (perhaps the other half from the chicken) and whisk with a pinch of black pepper and salt, pour in a trickle of olive oil at a time until a lovely unctuous emulsion forms, toss with the salad bowl and eat somewhere with a lovely view, a lovely lunch partner, or a lovely length of well-written anything to make you appreciate how clean and light eating with the season makes a person feel.

cheers!

and do read as much Nigel Slater as you can, you will never feel more lovingly towards the plant-world than after reading him...

hair raising

"I read once about a mysterious event of the night that is never far from my mind. Edwin Way Teale described an occurrence so absurd that it vaults out of the world of strange facts and into that startling realm where power and beauty hold sovereign sway.

     The sentence in Teale is simple: 'On cool autumn nights, eels hurrying to the sea sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water.' These are adults eels, silver eels, and this decent that slid down my mind is the fall from a long spring ascent the eels made years ago. As one-inch elvers they wriggled and heaved their way from the salt sea up the coastal rivers of America and Europe, upstream always, into "the quiet upper reaches of rivers and brooks, in lakes and ponds- sometimes as high as 8,00 feet above sea level." There they had lived without breeding "for at least eight years." In the late summer of the year they reached maturity, they stopped eating, and their dark color vanished. They turned silver; now they they are heading to the sea. Down streams to rivers, down rivers to the sea, south in the North Atlantic where they meet and pass billions of north-bound elvers, they are returning to the Sargasso Sea, where, in floating sargassum weed in the deepest waters of the Atlantic, they will mate, release their eggs, and die. This, the whole story of eels at which I have only just hinted, is extravagant in the extreme, and food for another kind of thought, a thought about the meaning of such wild, incomprehensible gestures. Bust I it was feeling with which I was concerned under the walnut tree by the side of the Lucas cottage and dam. My mind was on that meadow.'

     Imagine a chilly night and a meadow; balls of dew droop from the curved blades of grass. All right; the grass at the edge of the meadow beings to tremble and sway. Here come the eels. They largest are five feet long. All are silver. They stream into the meadow, sift between grasses and clover, veer from your path. There are too many to count. All you see is a silver slither, like twisted ropes of water falling roughly, a one-way milling and mingling over the meadow and the slide to the creek. Silver eels in the night: a barely-made-out seething as far as you can squint, a squirming, jostling torrent of silver eels in the grass. If I saw that sight, would I live? If I stumbled across it, would I ever set foot from my door again? Or would I be seized to join that compelling rush, would I cease eating, and pale, and abandon all to start walking?"

-Nightwatch, Annie Dillard

oh. glory. all my hairs stood up when i read it.

saturdays

most Saturdays this house is filled with lounging. dogs in sunbeams. men with crossed ankles poring over monthlies. plants drinking quietly out the windows. most everyone but myself. i have an official, potentially clinical, deficit in Sitting Around skills, my body just won't let me. and it is due to this wiggly impetus that Saturdays are also days when baking abounds, the oven is full, the stove is snapping and the kitchen fills the building with proper Breakfast smells.

below is an adaptation from Marion Cunningham's Fanny Farmer Cookbook which a go-to tome for all the basics. (i was schooled in this by a Maine farm wife who was advising me on beginning my cookbook collection. she said "if you need to make a chicken pie or a vodka gimlet this is the cookbook for you." chicken pies and gimlets aside she was right (who are these people having dire, frequent needs for vodka gimlet recipes?), it is a kind of rustic mirror of The Joy of Cooking, which of course everyone's cookbook collection needs, but without the insistence on aspics, milk toast and anatomical drawings of the tastiest bits of a butchered raccoons...) Marion Cunningham also has a no nonsense cookbook called The Breakfast Book  out of which I would certainly glean more mileage, likely. Fanny Farmer and I don't have much of a dialogue past baked goods and kitchen basics. But. the point is that she has good things to say about baking a proper biscuit- an airy one with loft and crust. one that can be tamed and softened with buttermilk. one rolled maniacally in butter, sugar and cinnamon. some fashioned with cream and entitled (squeamishly) Lady Cream Bread Fingers. and this particular adaptation which sought to use up the fistful of marjoram and many dry knuckles of cheddar cheese lurking in the fridge turned out to be one hundred percent great. one of the men of the house happily misheard me suggest "herb and cheese biscuits" and, upon breaking them open said, "what's so urban about these again?" thus:

 

 

Urban Cheese biscuits

(adapted from Fanny Farmer)

2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

2 tablespoons chopped fresh herbs (rosemary, tarragon, marjoram, thyme, sage, etc.)

1/4 cup shredded or crumbled sharp cheddar cheese

1 teaspoon coarse black pepper

1/2 cup butter or shortening

2/3 cup buttermilk (or 2/3 cup sweet milk + 1 tablespoon white vinegar)

in a food processor combine all the dry ingredients. drop in the fat (i think butter makes for a tastier biscuit while shortening makes for a flakier one) and pulse a few times until the mixture looks like rough sand. tip in the cheese and pulse only a few more times. turn into a bowl,  add the buttermilk and deftly and firmly bring together into a loose mass. turn onto a floured counter top bringing the dough together with as little handling as you can manager. i like use a bench scraper to help with this. pat into a disk and cut into triangles or cut with a biscuit cutter. this dough, which relies on chemical raising agents, will produce the tallest and loftiest biscuits if cut with a sharp blade/biscuit cutter.

bake these guys at 425 for 15 - 20 minutes. 

cheers!

decrees

 

courtesy of school, forty six students and four adults were funneled into the salt lake valley to visit this gem. such a maniacal collection of fussy cataloguing, bone chips, various bits of easily-overlook-able debris labeled with the neat proclamations of age and worth make me giddy at any rate. but this. this floored me.

thanks to thoughtful grant writing and a turn out of chad punching Salt Lake Locals (who do, as it turns out, have opinions about the health of local museums) the natural history museum was moved from a stuffy mausoleum of a place to a new beautiful location that was built to blend in almost perfectly with the sand stone bluffs of the foothills.

the above photograph is an aerial view of a simulated sandstorm. it whirls, day in and day out, the sand below changing and drifting in a tiny mimicry of the real and roaring thing. the plexiglass window, perfect for squashing a nose against, is roughly three feet across and lit from above. of all the muddy, slimy, tactile, shiny and speaking exhibits the small ones visited (they are at the oldest six) the blowing sand enthralled them the very most.

to try to assign any mouthful to the visual order and impact of a natural history museum -- that of sandwiching eons of time into neatly labeled glass cubes-- and this natural history museum in particular, is somewhat bootless. but to try to reign in the gesture of such a place is more manageable.

there is, i think, a reason humans of all ages ogle and become giddy in these buildings that house physical records of dirt, slime, bones, rocks and mud. perhaps it is the relief of knowing that some white-coated and sagely collection of scientists have made visual order of our natural world when that task is otherwise so hugely daunting. or maybe it is our preoccupation with condensation and distillation; that the novelty of such a compression of time and space thrill the pleasure nerves we are such slaves to.

for me it is, as usual, the exaltation of the mundane. for only very infrequently does a case containing neatly numbered and labeled rocks of all the same size, shape and color lift the hair on anyone's neck. but somehow, a museum demands that we evaluate the placement of the exhibit. it is the age old question asked of artists and art critics- Duchamp most famously- why does an object become suddenly important when it is on stage? the exhibition space and the object have a babbling silent dialogue with one another as to who bolsters the existence of the other and it is over this dialogue that we, the viewers, float to ask ourselves why we are looking at a case of rocks with anything other than a flitting gaze. this is the magic of museums! and surely clenching a fist around any cupful of dirt in the outside world should kindle a similar luminous light if only we knew where the pullstrings were.

this kind of ranting make one hungry to go load up arms in the library with the opinions of various people on the subject

Edwin Teale (any, all) on the intimate lives of quiet things (mainly insects, trees and rocks)

Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood) on the epiphanies of the wild (silver eels migrations across meadows, the new found sight of previously blind cataract patients, etc.)

James Putnam (Art and Artifact) on the question of museum and display as art object

Candy Jernigan (Evidence) on showcasing the every day

France Morin (Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Songs) on the economy of the visual in the metaphorical and literal sense

Anne Carson (Nox, Plainwater, Autobiography of Red, Decreation,)  on the saintliness of any and all things

Gregory Blackstock (any collections) the autistic visual cataloguer who draws, from memory, collections of various kinds

i could go on and on. but it is important to be steeped in these variations on the plain. it is this kind of ritual for the sacred that has sustained humanity since the beginning. we could be so lucky to learn to fine tune our eyes to the every day, even in the smallest ways.

 

or the overlapping rollers

from Elizabeth Bishop's Crusoe in England

Well, I had fifty-two
miserable, small volcanoes I could climb
with a few slithery strides–
volcanoes dead as ash heaps.
I used to sit on the edge of the highest one
and count the others standing up,
naked and leaden, with their heads blown off.
I'd think that if they were the size
I thought volcanoes should be, then I had
become a giant;
and if I had become a giant,
I couldn't bear to think what size
the goats and turtles were,
or the gulls, or the overlapping rollers–
a glittering hexagon of rollers
closing and closing in, but never quite,
glittering and glittering, though the sky
was mostly overcast.

A nice thought, "if had become a giant..." for what if we all were? What would we made of the small cracks in the sidewalks? The viscous spread of an egg white in a hot pan? Of rainstorms, squalls and sun cups?

slow fermentation

"...though the 'sound of crust' sounds similar to the Zen koan "the sound of one hand clapping," there is also an importance difference. the attainment of the sound of the crust is like the culmination of a pilgrimage. that there is a sound that accompanies perfection is, in itself, a wonderful realization. such a sound is cathartic in that it lets escape, if even for a moment, the remembrance of the perfection that lies at the core of each of us. beauty evokes beauty, love evokes love, and the sound of crust evokes an image of our being in the process of becoming. the sound of crust is what we hear when everything comes together in those brief and too infrequent moments of pure love, pure beauty, and pure stillness. the sound of crust, then, is not quite the same as the sound of one hand clapping because crust is an outer sound, entirely of this world, the outer world. its connection with something inner is grace. the sound of crust is like an icon, not painted but baked, in which a window is briefly opened onto greater understanding..." --Peter Reinhart, Brother Juniper's Bread Book (this and other fancy titles to be found HERE! don't buy your books from amazon if you don't have to...)

Peter Reinhart, famed author of the Breadbaker's Apprentice among other myriad publications, began his work with bread as a monk in a monastery in Massachusetts decades ago. he writes about the link between bread and the Divine that was made apparent to him in his early baking days. obviously, much time and thought has gone into fleshing this out, as you can see above, but biases about theology and mainstream religion aside, his point is a well taken. that we can find the Divine (or the Universe, or the Major Plan, or God, or Whomever's name you'd like to add in) in the simplest rituals -such as bread baking- means that there is always the potential for illumination and revelation in any of the tasks to which we are truly connected. Reinhart and others emphasize the word "craft" which is a favorite word among some of my favorite people, and to this word i believe he subscribes the attitudes of tender dedication applied to a task that lights one up from the inside. this 'sound of crust' treatise seemingly can be applied to most anything one sits down to get up to their elbows in with love and tirelessness.

needing a dose of serious Illumination myself I applied myself to Chad Robertson's new(ish) book Tartine Bread which is an offshoot from the famed Tartine a bay area bakery we could all be so lucky to live near. Robertson's approach to bread, like Reinhart's, seeks to bring back the rituals of the slow rise, or slow fermentation. taking cues on the shortcomings of commercial yeast (its finished loaves tendency towards swift staleness, a flavor and crust that seem to be lacking) and the finicky schedules imposed on us by more medieval traditions that demand many hours of fermentation and bulky dough loads he has sought to bring about a renaissance of what French baker's call "the golden age" of bread baking. that is, bread made with the innovation of baker's yeast (versus the more traditional brewer's yeast leftover from beer brewing) and the slow, cool fermentation that results in a loaf with a burnished and singing crust, a creamy crumb and incomparable flavor. indeed, Robertson is wary of adding baker's yeast in at all, save for enriched doughs like brioche and croissant. the yeasts derived for the homemaker's version of country bakery bread is harnessed from the air. wild yeasts! especially those who delight in grape musk which one presents in the form of white wine that has been haunting the back of the refrigerator for a few too many weeks.

this slow fermentation demands absolute attentiveness, presence and patience. it also requires the baker to be responsive, intuitive and to use their instincts. following a bread recipes is never straightforward as we all live in places at different altitudes, with different water and different humidity. but with slow rise bread especially we are asked to respond to the bread dough as a living thing (which indeed it is) that has likes, dislikes and needs. the result, after many hours and slight oven burns does in fact give one a moment's pause, to listen to the singing of the crust and reflect on what can be done with flour, water, yeasts from the air, and patience.

in that same vein, more experiments with laminate dough are on their way, stay tuned.

architects of the deep chest

much sniffling today despite some warm breezes that have come up from somewhere. many contrails slicing up the sky and a lead weight keeping me from starting anything properly. a small headache, i think, is beginning to fringe along the backs of my eyebrows in a way that makes me think i should retire to bed, or at least to the couch, wrapped in a quilt and scalding my tongue on a hot toddy. but alas,  Progress must be made.

it's not that i don't have enough ideas. (i am trying to put all of my best writing bones on to construct a convincing paper for the Perusal of school.) it's that once i unravel the skein into manageable ideas i cannot put the first words down. (but i can put many other words in many other places, no problem.)

instead i am feeling mostly seized up.

on a slightly different note i have been enjoying Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars, a book describing case studies of patients with various neurological deficits. in his book Sacks seeks to illuminate the space where such patients (a colorblind painter, a Tourettic surgeon, a man newly gifted the ability to see following a cataract couching, an autistic savant child with immense graphic ability,) excel rather than focusing on their limitations or problems. most recently Sacks discusses Temple Grandin, a well-known high-functioning autist who has gone on to receive a Ph.D in animal sciences, to design feedlots and animal holding pens and, more strangely, to develop a (becoming more and more well-known and implemented) device known as the Hug Machine. (these folks will give you the transcripts from her interview with them as well as links to her websites.) the Hug Machine was developed by Grandin to provide a space where she could get physical contact she required (and longed for) without compromising her sense of well-being or causing a flare up of anxiety she associates with being held. the machine allows the user to exert exact pressure with an array of adjustments to simulate the gesture of being embraced without the need for physical contact. while this may, of course, be strange for a person who has no issue with the idea of being touched it has proven to be massively therapeutic to other autists or other similarly socially inhibited users. in keeping with the previously mentioned goal of understanding before wrinkling my nose i was glad to have thought it out deeply before judging. for aren't well all often hungry for a sense of touch and pressure at times when we are lonely? and further, if a person can construct a space that simulates affection and intimacy what other kinds of emotional architecture has yet to be built?

certainly a Hug Machine of any kind (wooden, flesh, down) could cure my inertia.

variations on visual hermitude

"the visibetics of this world have to learn the visual language; it does not speak for itself."

this word switched on and glowed for me this morning (which i could use, since the banks, the sky and the horizon were only variations of the same dull gray that seemed to pull light into instead of pouring it over us.)

that text (found here) comes from a paper aptly titled Icons: Support or Substitute? in which a larger question is addressed: are we visually literate? this is a difficult question, not because the answer is written in some kind of inaccessible nomenclature, but because it is asked by so many interested parties from so many disciplines. 

the questions of visual literacy have plagued the aesthetic and design world for quite some time, demanding prototypes and models from which a consensus could be reached regarding efficacy and potency in visual communication. but outside any formal sector, visual literacy now pertains to the education of a younger generation and perhaps a revision of sensory prowess for the generation that is trying to deal with more visual stimuli than ever before.

 definitions for the term visual literacy are as varied as the genres in which the eye is used. indeed contributions come from fields ranging from archaeology to museology and from anthropology to video game design. one writer has defined it as "a set of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing...and integrating other sensory experiences... [and that] enable a visually literate person to discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made, that he encounter in his environment."

so, more succinctly, what makes a person effectively visually literate? (versus, of course, literate in written language in a more traditional sense.) tomes have been written on this (Johanna Drucker, James Elkin, Paul Gee,) and what they are all asking is how we can refine our visual sensibility to be as comfortable dissecting a painting as we are in, say, breaking down abstract poetry.

Peter Felten suggests we are living in the 'pictorial age', that is, one where we communicate with each other predominantly through the use of image. photographs, icons, internet browsers, video uploads, we don't think twice about navigating through these means of communication and yet when the majority of us are placed in a formal aesthetic setting- museum, gallery, film screening, we renounce participation by saying "i don't get this," or "this is so arty and out there." why is this? where was the line drawn? why is there a kind of atrophy in our ability to exude confidence when viewing dada performance art or Ad Reinhardt's black on black paintings?

it seems there is a disparity between our ease with implementing technological advances in design (anyone interested in the efficacy of one Steve Jobs should certainly read this (possibly for a good laugh as much as anything)) and our capacity for analytical observation in visual world.

all this technical writing aside, i think the push of this concept is asking oneself to disengage from the technological auto-pilot we have switched on for ourselves to try to critically evaluate our natural and visual world. this doesn't mean to opine academically and immerse oneself in art critical theory per se, but rather putting one's nose to the glass to see what moves outside, to admiring a sunbeam traversing a wall, stopping everything and put all of one's attention on a bowl of soup and engage all the senses in the ritual of eating. anything loose and without a correct answer. 

i am trying for a small gesture like that every hour, or, at the very least, to look for some gesture of humanity in every situation where i wrinkle my nose in distaste.

cheers

turning the mattresses

it is time to turn the mattresses, heap on another featherbed, soak the tea towels in lemon juice until they ring with whiteness and purge the freezer and larder of all the accumulated bags of bulk goods from the grocery.

our current inventory includes a fistful of goji berries, a clutch of dried sour cherries lacquered and shining in their own sticky sugars, several well-intentioned but nevertheless fairly full bags of raw almonds (but far less than half of what we brought home in our nutty craze), a few twists of medjool dates who will likely never separate from their paper dividers and some stale wild rice sticks that even the birds won't get after. we can (grudgingly) bake these off into rainforest bars. (ugh). sneak them into trail mix (it'll never work.) or try to fold them into something absurdly heavy in butter and muscavado sugar and hope for the best. fingers crossed.
(i'll keep you posted.)

temperature hunkering down close to the bottom of the thermometer today. ice shifting like early morning bones, the gutters gleaming and glutted with it. we are not a place inhabited by ice except in the early winter, when snow melts galvanizes all the walks and steps. the dogs skate over it, their bulk and heave unfazed by loose footing. i clamber over it decidedly ungracefully, arms out, back curled, head down. as usual this is the season to model oneself after the dogs- whose warmth is built in and whose excitement is not snuffed out by windhowls.

still doing deep thinking on language and ways of seeing. and speaking of which, have you ever seen these?

guess!

...

no.

...

no.

...

no!
they are 'investigation of worn-out fryingpans' (other guesses include the many moons of Jupiter, aerial photographs of the earth over major cities and cells.)
an incredible project by christopher jonassen called 'devour'. sourced by the ever inspiring online curatorial skills of these folks.

i was seized in the chest when the understanding of these clicked, a lead warmth (much like that of a hot skillet?) that throbbed pleasantly in my cheeks. how lucky we are that deep thought and clever visions are still being hung out to look at despite the influx of digital-everything, white silicone cords and i_____'s.

it is decidedly good for hearts of all kind.

an actual epiphany.

we went walking early yesterday. it was a proper desert sunrise- heavy clouds with the crimped white edges, like molten metal, that promised soporific afternoon thunderstorms. red sand rolled everywhere with the tracks of birds, snakes, moose, rabbits, marmots...there was a buoyant coolness, one that was certain to sink and cloak the ground as soon as the sun razed the horizon. often these walks happen after a pot of coffee and stoop breakfast, so in some ways, this familiar winding trail felt new if only because the light was unfamiliar.

we were flanked with debris as we mounted the first rise. strangely localized, it littered only our immediate way, didn't flake like confetti in the fields or groves. here and there neatly shorn boughs off young aspen saplings, a fringe of crushed sage fronds, heady with scent, and the chunky paws off conifers. its precision was disarming until, of course, it registered that the trail maintenance crews must have forged ahead in the dimmer hours and neatened the scraggle and scruff of these manicured wild places. my heart fell a little- somehow a dimension of wholesomeness always present in these expeditions had been pared off; to think that everything was kept up with shear or blade and not because of the eager traveling of sandaled ladies or beasts.

but one thing the clipping crew had unlocked with their well intentioned savagery proved to be somewhat of a revelation: in the wake of the cuttings was an undeniably transcendent fragrance. its force and pungency stalled me to the very lobes of my heart. it rose and hovered, almost viscous in its presence and filled every of my eager cells with an electric snap. my hair stood on end, light rang behind my eyes. i reeled.  later i learned the tree was a subalpine fir.abies lasiocarpa. a common conifer after all, prevalent on all our walks, abutting neighborhood streets, lined up in the dull polished cultivated yards of most everyone here. and so it was not that the tree itself leached all common sense momentarily from me, but its intimate inner workings. all its blood vessels, secrets, histories, sleep, dreams and essences utterly exposed. what kind of dreams do trees have?

it is useless to try to fasten words to the smell. clumsy, foolhardy. it was yes, as you can likely imagine, wincingly piney. but also unlike the smell of other pines or firs. lemony, or like the smell of wet terra cotta. it was a smell i had no right to Name, no right even to smell. when trees die and topple, or when lightning sears the the water into steamy departure, a tree's death has a familiar smell. sweet, like rot. one to which we are accustomed as we walk through any place with shade and water. and when a tree is cut down and the pulsing coin of its stump throbs, that smell too, is different. a defeat smell, a cauterized smell, heated over by the friction of a blade. this smell was different, it was the exact, tangible smell of secrets which will forever crackle in the foreparts of my brain when i summon the word. this tree's very living sluices seeped into the air and poured. even the dogs lifted their noses, froze, arched their necks hungrily. i picked up a piece of the neatening that laid in the path. kept it. felt a kind of green spread of gravelly pins and needles echo in my bones. i looked up at the tree, as one might look into the eyes of a lover, searching for an answer as to why, exactly, those eyes made one's heart leap and gallop so fiercely. and the tree. sighed. it sighed upwards. it arched back and filled the spaces between its branches. it most certainly sighed, took in air (or is it the other way around?) and, as if on some sort of hugely rolling cosmic cue, a breeze was stirred from the lowlands. the trees boughs shuffled and straightened. if i had ears enough to tip forward, tip they would. the tree sighed. i looked up in a swoon, and the tree sighed at me. a kind of resinous romance.

the walk home is absent for me. a block of something white. i spent some time admiring the appendage of the tree i had laid among the little nesting trinkets i have recently been reassembling. it is a kind of reliquary, i suppose. something profound but utterly recognizable. that windowsill hums.

after recovering i tried to line up my thoughts like paperclips in a saucer. after all it was a matter of the optics, probably. the swimming light, the moving wind, the height and spread of the tree. not so mysteriously it only water and hydraulics that hold up plants. even the diminutive among their species excel at drawing water tightly into their cells so they might hold their heads high. conifers drink an especially astounding amount of water, even for their slightly smaller stature. it is because their growth is so slow, so dense. Annie Dillard seems to have pinpointed the awesome quantitative data on the exceptional strengths of plants:

"There's real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower. Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Ever year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day." --Pilgrim at Tinker Crink.

Every day! Unabashedly and for the benefit of no admiring audience. The sighing tree and I in a kind of camaraderie, in agreement about undertaking to live like that weasel. With quiet and ferocious purpose. To do potently for the sake of the task. I undertook to lapse tree-like into the most regal silence I could muster. Cloaked myself in it like crimson and ermine. Moved little, listened and watched openly, took every opportunity to sigh upward, straining with all my electrified cells to adhere to whatever daunting mechanism moved the wind through the pine's needles and changed everything with the smallest effort.

asphalt pilgrims

it is uncommon for a desert to lack light. but here we are, cloaked in a damp kind of low shade. it is not surprising for these things to happen for those who live on the coasts, or who live in the Eastern parts of the country. but here we rely on the light; it is a pouring that informs time, change, ritual, sleep, exploration. without it we are disoriented, torpid; we seek to be low to the ground. we are suspicious. it is, maybe, because the wide open spaces are so inexhaustible that the thought of cloud cover enough to keep the whole stretch of day snuffed and diffused is mind boggling.

there is no rain- only the shocking tendrils of the smell of ambient water. we brace ourselves, let our skin lift slightly from our bones with the expectation of being sprinkled by rain. none comes. if you clamber high enough and stay your feet against wind, you can see that the sky dips and smudges towards other horizons, evidence that water is downward sighing somewhere. enough thirst of any kind (mind, body, bone, brain) kindles exasperation. you can combat it by reaching past your arms and waiting or you can put your ear to the ground and source the refuge of deep drinking elsewhere.


Toll canyon is a refuge of many kinds. for those trapped in suburbia it offers refuge from the grinding sound of perpetual highway traffic, for those of domesticated four legs it is a tonic for long naps and close quarters, for the wilder creatures (those displaced and divested of pure homestretches and tender greens) it provides shade, quiet and water. all kinds of living things manage to share this deep place despite its proximity to bulldozers, mobile home park spaces, five car garages and those tiny mechanisms installed to emit sounds terrifying to deer, elk and other garden-browsing creatures. in fact, the proximity to the lives of others requires the pilgrim to plod down the long and exquisitely manicured driveways of private homeowners, lambasted by barking dogs and eyed suspiciously by the gardening help. it is a feat of bravery to reach the head of the trail looking likely suspect: uncombed, slicked in spf, brandishing water jars, leaving trails of granola from a backpack that's seen better days...

but! after proceeding down a slight grade, here and there paved and tufted with eager penstemon, milk vetch, lupine and wild rose the road and the hillcuts give way (with relief) to a narrow canyon fringed with conifers, buffered with trembling aspen groves and grooved everywhere with moving water.

it is often a startlingly still place. this is likely because, due to small claims of private ownership, menacing (if unfounded) signs and that dreadful approach, few people venture into the canyon from its midpoint, choosing instead to access it  lower down the Big canyon. usually, it is hard to pinpoint the direction from which bird calls reach come, so tucked away in the steep branches are they. butterflies are attracted to the bluebells and the flax flowers and they serve as a kind of wobbling yellow atmosphere at shoulder height as one walks along. but birds and butterflies aside, water muffles both ambient sound and movement and it is more like swimming among coral formations than like tracking along forest trails. this pleasant kind of disorientation anchors me in the familiar natural world in an unusual way. here, i am mostly guided along by smell and the sensation of plants and breezes moving across my bare arms rather than by sight and sound. resplendent in blooms, buttercup, wild raspberry and young willows emit such a potent fragrance it is as if you can smell their burgeoning.

i wonder if this is how dogs move through the world: with their noses aloft, eyes closed to a slit, rushing at full speed through bracken and bush.

i am most cheered by the bravery of the wild strawberry. everywhere, it seems, the sprawling spiderlike leaves, with their red trailing stems, punctuate the topography of the little canyon. bright and modest, the little five petal flowers nod agreeably as the little winds jag and bloom in the canyon.

so? jam. and also because it is time to confront my relationship with rhubarb. that is, to cultivate a relationship with rhubarb. specifically. to me, its rigid red stalks are reminiscent of celery or chard, with their minerally woodiness and ungamely strings. but i was fortunate to be served something rhubarby, warm and baked in butter that immediately kindled excitement, and was further spurred on by a rather stoic pile of the stalks at last weekend's market.

somewhat overwhelmed by the esteemed Christine Ferber's recipe for strawberry rhubarb preserve (from her famous Mes Confitures) and put off by Alice Waters' adaptation in her Chez Panisse cookbooks, both of which call for a process involving three days of boiling, simmering, cooling, I took to Liana Krissoff's recipe (from her new, articulate, beautifully photographed, deliciously composed Canning for a New Generation which I can't recommend enough!) and am pleased to report that her traditional one-day escapade had glorious results.also, my clothes smell delicious, as a result of stove-vigilance.

it is humble thing, to melt down the complications of a plant's life. it is less humble to drag it across a thick piece of warm bread, velvety with a cloaking of soft butter. this gesture- toast and jam - heralds the integrity of those things that bloom in the uncomplicated bastions of quiet and shade, and who can find a refuge in the most unlikely of places.

old growth

it is true that if there were enough time and daylight, a person could become acquainted with all the secrets of the natural world.

in this little natural world, just a scrape above the 40th parallel, where virgin forests have long since given way to new growth pines and aspen groves still wet behind the ears, the hunger of the developing world has not allowed for much wildness to remain.

i have been reading John McPhee's "In Virgin Forest", an essay that describes the remaining, bristling places seen from aerial photographs where virgin forests still stand in our country. it is daunting to see maps that reflect how the presence of these places has dwindled since it was colonized.

(clockwise from upper left, the images reflect the placement and size of old growth forests from 1620, 1920,currently, and 1950 respectively.)

And I long to see them, these places where there has been a currency of stillness and utter acceptance of fate.

Of a particular forest, preserved by Rutger's University, McPhee notes:

  "A few years ago, gypsy moths tore off the canopy and sunlight sprayed the floor.The understory thickened, as shrubs and saplings responded with a flush of growth. "The canopy is now closing over again," Stiles said [the director of the preserve.] "This summer there will be a lot of death." In 1950 a hurricane left huge gaps in the canopy. "Once every three hundred years you can expect a hurricane that will knock down damn near everything," Stiles went on. "There's a real patchwork of nature in an old forest, in the way it is always undergoing replacement." He stopped to admire a small white ash standing alone beneath open sky. "That's going to take the canopy," he said. ""It's going to to go all the way. It's been released. It will fill the gap." 

Succinctly; the value of these forests, those standing for thousands of years, lies in their utter untidiness, their lack of order or cleanliness. What makes these deep and uneven places so important is that they are furred over with decay, chaos, death, accident, trauma and defeat. But in the wake of all of that is gloriously fertile soil, and its consequence is untamed fecundity. 

"...a toppled hull fruited with orange-and-cream fungus, which devour the wood, metabolize it, cause it literally to disappear. In virgin forest, the classic symbol of virginity is a fallen uprooted trunk decaying in a bed of herbs..." 

So despite my own rigidity and height, toppled by winds beyond my control I am undertaking this phenomenon of primeval forest as a meditiaton on how to proceed.

: :

More especially, I am interested in foraging- not only conceptually (unpacking, repacking my thoughts, assembling a piecework of plans,) but literally, in the disturbed and cool soils of the mountainous tangle which is my home. 

So. 

Nettles! Urtica Dioica. A plant that generally causes discomfort to those calves bared in woodland travel. This is due their stinging hairs, actually hollow hypodermic needles, filled with a topical poison. Upon being broken, say by a wildlife enthusiast, the hairs break and their chemical compound is literally injected into the skin. (This is different than exposure to other poisonous plants, for example poison ivy, whose irritant is present on the entire surface of the plant in the form of poisonous oils.) But not to worry! The juice in the stem of the nettle plant contains a compound which neutralizes the irritant, so if you are unlucky enough to get stung, snipping off the central stem and applying the juice to the area of contact will promptly relieve the sting. 

Nettles have been touted as a  upremely nourishing and powerful form of herbal medicine. The resume is extensive and impressive:
-nettles are high in vitamins and minerals including: sulphur, silicon, beta-carotene, chlorophyll, vitamins A, C and D and iron (which make it especially good for pregnant and menstruating women.)
-in that category, nettle is a useful treatment for anaemia especially if it caused by heavy menstrual periods.
-its combination of phenols and vitamin compounds alleviate PMS symptoms including breast tenderness and bloating
-nettles are a diuretic and help detoxify the kidneys, liver, circulatory and respiratory systems
-this makes them an excellent and powerful medicine against hayfever and seasonal allergies
-nettles, when taken daily, can help lessen the severity and frequency of asthma attacks
-additionally, nettles detoxify joint fluid and are beneficial when taken for arthritis, bursitis or tendonitis
-nettles are also an effective remedy for thinning hair due to malnourishment, excess of synthetic hormones or antibiotics, etc. benefits can be derived by taking the herb internally or using the tea as a rinse for hair.

**(be sensible when reading this. i am, of course, not a certified practitioner of herbal medicine. documentation of nettles is widespread and positive  but research thoroughly before undertaking treatment with nettles or other herbs. nettles can also cause uncommon histamine reaction in some individuals so consult a physician if you are prone to allergies.)


As luck would have it, Park City's reluctance to let go of the evening frosts has started us out pretty late in nettle harvest. Referring to wild plant guides in the region I set off with some four-legged friends, a pair of japanese plant shears, some heavy leather gloves and a rucksack to collect the bounty of the back hills. 

Nettles are easy to identify and aren't easily confused with other poisonous plants that grow in their area. If you are foraging for nettles you can use the following characteristics as a guide:

Nettles grow in shady soil, well-drained and often close to creeks or streams. They are usually ready to harvest by late May in temperate climates or in late June, as Utah would have it. 
-The plant grows 2 - 4' tall, but is best picked when the plant is young/small as they become tough and bitter as they age. If using fresh nettles to make tea, snip off only the 'tips' of the plant, that is the paler green, topmost shoot where the new leaves are forming. Lower, older parts of the plant will cause fresh-nettle tea to taste bitter and astringent.
-They are characterized by their rather stout, hollow ribbed, opaque stems.
-They have dark green, oval leaves growing opposite to on another
-The leaves are papery in texture and have deep, coarse teeth
-The leaves come to points at the tips and are heartshaped at the base
-Easily recognizable by prominence of small, hair-like needles on the stalks and undersides of their leaves


As I mentioned, nettles do not mimic other poisonous plants as means of defense. They do, however, grow among other, benign, plants with similar characteristics. A common imposter is Clearweed (pilea pumila) which is a non-poisonous but also non-edible (not particularly tasty or nutritious) plant. Clearweed can be discerned from nettles in three main ways: The first is that they have a conspicuous set of 'side-veins'. This means that the leaf, instead of being bisected vertically by one central vein, is divided into fourths vertically with one main and two lesser central veins. The second is that the stem of a clearweed plant is transparent. Lastly, a clearweed plant will not be covered in stinging hairs. 


A second imposter is the common Catnip (nepeta cataria), a plant which shares its preference for shady soils with proximity to water. catnip is a delicious herb that can be brewed with nettle for an herbal tisane but is of course a different plant entirely. Like clearweed, catnip will not be covered in stinging hair. A catnip plant will also be a lighter shady of green, with duller, softer teeth, and will release a lemony minty fragrance when rubbed between the fingers. It is also considerably thicker and more 'downy' to the touch than a nettle plant.

The (somewhat blurry) photograph above shows three plants that grew with one another on my foraging walk. On the left is a plant that grew low to the ground, with toothed edges, papery leaves and fine hairs on its underside. It is a wild strawberry plant, however, not a nettle. Upon inspecting the plant, the strawberry was dotted with small white flowers (nettle flowers hang in long clusters from the leaf bracts), and its leaves always presented in groups of three. Easy to cross it off the list.


The central plant is a nettle plant, with opposite leaves that are easy to recognize, many stinging hairs, and coarse, deep-set teeth.


The right hand plant is a catnip plant. This picture gives a good comparison between the difference in teeth on the plants. While a catnip plant presents with opposite leaves, its teeth are duller and softer and it has a velvety sheen when seen in the sun.


Below is a picture of a nettle plant with its stinging hairs evident:

Compare that to a catnip plant which has an absence of hairs:

Easy yeah? 

So we took to the trail and collected a rucksack of nettles, with a minimal amount of a stinging and a liberal application of stem-juice to get us through.

And then...

Nettles stings are combatted in one of two ways. The first is by starving the hairs of moisture thus causing the needles to shrivel. This is accomplished by drying the plant either in the sun or hung to dry inside. The second way is to neutralize the poison by immersing the plant in boiling water. This, of course, is accomplished by taking the nettle as a tea, or by steaming/blanching the greens as you spinach or kale.


Nettle tea with fresh leaves can be made by chopping the greens coarsely and covering them with boiling water. Nettle tea with fresh leaves must be boiled for at least 10 minutes to remove the stings. Otherwise, well...you'd be in bad shape.


Nettle tea with dried leave can be made by covering one to two teaspoons of dry nettles with boiling water. Dried nettles need only be steeped for 5 minutes. The hairs have dried posing no threat of ingesting the poison, but adequate medicinal benefits are only derived if the dry leaves are soaked for a minimum of five minutes. Of course, stronger tea is indicative that more of the plant compounds are present but it is, at this point, only a matter of taste. Lemon is often a good partner in nettle tea as its acids are also a diuretic and it is a stimulant of the kidney and liver but, it is interesting, the stark difference in pH when added to the dark green tea will cause it to turn bright pink! (But who doesn't love that?)

 Additionally, as dried nettles will lose their strength over time, and because fresh nettles are not always available a tincture can be made. This distills the compounds in the plant which are soluble in alcohol and preserves more of their potency.

A tincture can be made with fresh or dry nettles. As with tea, more fresh material will be needed than dried as the plant reduces in volume considerably when dried. Cover the plant material with vodka or brandy at a ratio of two parts nettle for fresh and one part nettle for dried with 1 part alcohol. Let the mixture steep for two weeks, agitating daily. Make sure to store this mixture out of the sun as UV rays will weaken the plant compounds. After two weeks, strain the tincture into a dark colored bottle and store out of sunlight. The general recommended dose is 2ml 3 times a day for adults. (Again, please don't self medicate with nettles purely with information gleaned from this blog. There are many many sources for information on nettles. Look for websites promoted by certified practitioners of herbal medicine or by companies who provide herbal medicine commercially, and/or consult with your naturopath or physician.)

What bounty exists underfoot in all the natural places we travel? I am interested in what sorts of instinctive abilities we, as humans,  retained from our eons of hunting and gathering. The dogs seem to graze confidently, avoiding nettle and poison ivy but dining instead on dock weed, timothy, and shoots of wild onion. In what small pebbles of our smallest bones is the wisdom stored that enables us to take only as much as we need to be sated from a world blanketed with only ravishing appetites? It is humbling, certainly, to sip tea on the porch this morning and to nurse the velvety, flourishing patch of crimson itching on my forearm knowing that nettle can take the initiative to live with purpose. I will keep my eyes to the growing places, low and in shadow, dusty and in disarray, and hope that I can be so lucky, soon.