new rhythms

As the seasons change, we find ourselves settling into a different kind of rhythm.  The whole house is opened up to the fresh air, and the breeze carries with it the promise of colder months to come.  Leaves change colors, and I pull out sweaters, slippers, and quilts.  Time seems to move more slowly, and we find renewed appreciation for late evening meals filled with the flavors that only the earthiness of fall can bring.

With all this change, our love remains simple.  A board spread over two stools, layered with vintage tablecloths, lit with candles, becomes our table tonight, and hopefully, for many nights to come.  I am grateful for the ease of knowing a partner so well that even when the seasons change, our love stays.  It is an evolving love to be sure, and it feels new at every turn, but it is also so simple.  We eat, we laugh, we savor the moments over food.  We are ourselves, together.

storytelling

A couple years ago, I read a pivotal book about different cultures of food.  Growing up in a family with great food traditions, I never really had to think much about the type of food culture I wanted for myself and for my future family when the time came for me to spread my wings and leave my immediate family’s home(s).  In our house, food was meant to be shared: it was a way of inviting others into the intimacy of your life by enjoying time, food, and drink together.  And it didn’t seem to matter what the food was–it mattered more what the story was behind the food.  The point in my family, as was also illustrated in the book I read, was that the story we tell around food informs the types of decisions we make about what to put in our bodies and what types of food we offer to others.

This week, I’ve been reading a lot about literacy, especially as it concerns the possible differences and gaps in achievement between young boys and girls.  And for some reason, I kept coming back to this idea about the culture of food, which stems ultimately from our stories of food.  As I wrestled with some of the more difficult realizations I came to regarding how gender and other cultural biases influence the ways in which we prepare children as literate citizens in our country, I thought of my own life and how this idea of storytelling seemed to permeate the ways in which Kevin and I make choices.

A few years ago, for example, Kevin and I decided we would only eat meat if we had sourced it—we wanted to know where it came from, how the animals were treated, how the animals were slaughtered, and how they came to be prepared for our bodies.  We made this decision because we wanted to be able to begin telling a different story about the food we chose to consume.  I had been vegetarian for years, but my story of food as a vegetarian seemed incomplete somehow.  Growing up in a heavy agricultural state and then moving to another one, I recognized that in not eating meat, I was not connecting with local farmers who raised meat as part of the ecosystem of their farm.  Making the choice to be an omnivore again was not easy, but I feel like for now, I am able to tell the kind of story about food that fits more with my evolving family’s culture and sense of connection to the community.

Storytelling, for me, however, is not just about the food I eat.  It’s also how I make a lot of decisions in my life.  I use storytelling to make sense of myself in relation to the larger community, and perhaps most importantly, I use storytelling to break down this complex world in which we exist so that the children with whom I work can begin to think about the stories of their short lives to this point and how they want the story to evolve as they grow up.  I may not have the intricacies of gender and other societal biases worked out.  I may not have the capacity to make the best decisions all the time, or to teach every skill to every child who comes through my door exactly in the ways in which he/she needs it.  I can, however, through the act and art of storytelling, begin thinking more intentionally about the life I am living and about the ways in which the stories I choose to tell now shape the stories of my future.  As a teacher and as an individual, the most I can offer is my story and my ears to others’ stories, and hopefully together, we can embark on this lifelong journey of community.

on simplicity

In recent weeks, I’ve learned, or perhaps rediscovered, a hard truth.  I embrace wholeheartedly the Quaker ideal of simplicity, but the truth of this ideal that a lot of Quakers don’t talk about is this: Living simply is actually quite complicated.  And I don’t mean just in terms of clearing out the massive rubbish that daily life accumulates so quickly and so easily.  I mean from the harder aspects of letting oneself off the hook, letting stuff go, and just being.

As a perfectionist, I struggle mightily with all three of these things.  I wrestle with the yin and yang of striving for perfection.  On the one hand, I am thankful never to be complacent about my life in all its many facets.  I am thankful for an incredible work ethic.  And I am thankful for my persistence in building and maintaining relationships with others and with ideas.  But on the other hand, I wish, perhaps more strongly, that I could give myself the same gentle “it’s going to be okay” talk I give to so many others so much of the day.  I wish I could let myself just be, take problems one step at a time, and deal with roadblocks I put up one brick at a time.

So while on break the last two weeks, I’ve worked really hard to let myself be.  I’ve tried tackling projects around the house to simplify our material lives one step at a time.  I created two sanctuaries for us: one in our bedroom and one in our shared office/creative space.  And it feels good.  I still have the tendency to look at all the other projects left waiting, the piles of boxes to be recycled, the areas of the house still left to re-organize after yet another community member in our little household has moved out.  But I am trying to stop and breathe, to outline what it would take to solve the insurmountable problem step by step.

In addition to removing stuff from our lives, I’ve also tried to put in place or back in place some good “me” habits.  One of which is more reading and writing.  I have already made two trips to the public library and now have a stack of books, with more on the way, to fuel my mental fire and inspire me to simply be with a book and a cup of coffee or tea.  I’ve written down my thoughts every day for the last four days, letting myself breathe on paper or on the computer.  I even finished a piece of writing I started back in January about my paternal grandfather.  It felt so amazing to give him the gift of my words—to know as I sent the simple piece on that I was showing him a piece of my soft, inner core.

I want to hold on to this feeling that while living simply is hard, hard work, it is possible.  You just have to do it step by step, word by word, and breath by breath.

rediscovering

In the past few weeks, things have been tough around here.  Life is stressful and complicated, and it can be difficult to seek out and hold on to those moments that make it that much easier to wake up each morning.  So, in more recent days, I’ve tried capturing little snapshots of the peaceful moments of life currently: rediscovering my love of creating things and finding solace and tranquility in the simple act of making.

choices

We spent the last two weeks with my family, and many conversations came up over food—the choices we’ve made in our small partnership about what to eat and what not to eat, how we’ve come down this path, and why we’ve decided to embark on this journey in the first place.  The old adage of “ignorance is bliss” certainly has some truth to it, but knowing where one’s food comes from has much greater significance for me, and I would very willing give up any sense of bliss when eating for the sake of knowing where my food comes from, who grew it, and its “life” along the way.  Somewhere along the way we’ve lost a lot of the skills about growing and eating food that has made it so that it really isn’t much of a choice any more what we eat.  Relatively few corporations control our meat and produce production, and plastic-covered meat and shiny out of season produce is what we’ve come to expect when we go to the supermarket.  But in these conversations with my family, I realized we do have a choice.  As soon as we ask the question “where did this food come from?” we have begun to make a choice, an informed choice, about what we put in our mouths.  So we have chosen to embark on the journey of relearning all we can about food because choice is an important part of our humanity, and choice is a legacy we want for our children.

harvest dinner (or an alternative thanksgiving)

Because we’ll be traveling to Montreal this year for Thanksgiving, we decided to host a harvest dinner, or an alternative Thanksgiving feast before Thanksgiving so we could visit and eat delicious food with the other part of my family.  I spent much time at the farmers market selecting our food for the evening, and we all pitched in to set the table and cook the food.  Here was our menu: curried butternut squash soup—spinach, feta and Israeli couscous salad with red wine vinaigrette—homemade honey oatmeal bread—garlic mashed potatoes—roasted acorn squash with sage butter—steamed green beans—french silk chocolate pie—apple raspberry pie.

photos:

1 paper garland

2 place setting

3 found natural materials

4 table

5 pie crust weaving

6 couscous salad

7 full plates

in the fall

music: “the girl” by city and colour

We spent the past week in Indiana visiting my family, and although it was an adventure getting up there, we greatly appreciated the drop in temperatures, the changing colors of the leaves, and the time spent with loved ones.  After spending evenings outside on the porch drinking wine and eating delicious home-cooked, often locally produced food, I want to instill that sense of calm in our own home in the evenings: even with graduate school, working full time, and other stresses, we should strive to sit down and enjoy the cooler temperatures together, with nothing but our thoughts to keep each other company.  What is your resolution for this fall?

from the week

I thought a lot this week about simplicity.  Given the recent stresses at work, I’ve tried my best to return to the small things in life that make each day memorable rather than another source of exasperation.  In a world surrounded by the new, the “must haves,” and the ever growing temptation to surround oneself with things, it can be difficult to wade in the sea and come up with a single, smooth rock, a piece of polished glass, or a white, unadorned shell.  And yet, in spite of all those voices seen and unseen encouraging me to give in to my desires for more, I find myself seeking the simplest things in life.  I look forward to those mornings when it’s time to start the next batch of bread: when I fit mixing the simple ingredients of salt, sugar, flour, yeast, and ice water into a bowl into my daily morning routine.

or when I find the tiniest tomato just ready to be plucked from the vine, after returning home from a busy day at work.

And then there are the amazingly beautiful things discovered, built by nature, that never cease to inspire: have you ever thought just how simple it is to build one’s home where you currently are, as the spider does, rather than moving along some imagined trajectory of success? As someone who moved nearly every 3 years growing up, I am finding the quiet joy in living in a place and letting myself settle into this life.

But I have found that no matter what each day brings, at the end of the day, there’s always a good book to curl up to, and that is just enough for me.

small hurdles

These past few weeks have been really difficult at work.  There are so many hurdles in the public school system, that it’s hard to remember sometimes how much we teachers make a difference in the lives of the children we teach, especially when many are in a state of mind where teachers are the villains perpetuating a broken system.  I try not to fall into the trap of pessimism, but after weeks of feeling like you’re not making any progress, it can be tough to see any change at all.  So to try and work through these feelings of being stuck, I spent this past week documenting things in my life for which I am grateful, and for which I don’t have to explain myself or justify why I do it.  Like going to the farmers market today—this is how food is meant to be bought and consumed—with a simple greeting to a local farmer, a conversation about slaughtering practices, about a pig’s diet and life on the farm, and by a conscious choice of what your money buys and which you subsequently put in your mouth.

I have been a vegetarian for years, but over the summer, I decided I needed to learn all the things I could about meat, which included eating it.  As I like to know where my food comes from in general, and I am deeply concerned about slaughtering and other practices related to the meat industry, my exploration into all things meat has consisted of only one actual eating experience.  Today, however, I moved that count up to two after an in-depth conversation with a local farmer about raising pigs for meat.  Kevin and I ended up buying a sea-salt and celery cured German sausage, which I cut up later that morning and sauteed in a little olive oil for breakfast.  We paired the sausage with poached eggs topped with parmesan and slices of Arkansas Black apples, picked that morning.  Food grown with care, cooked with love, and eaten with vigor: this is something I am grateful for.

Week 4 or 5 (I can’t remember) of not buying bread but making our own: this is something I am grateful for.

Good, hard rain in intermittent spurts throughout an entire week so our weary plants can finally not have to work so hard to get the water they need: this is something I am grateful for.

Hours on the city bus and curled under a blanket in the mornings reading a book about a love of farming, of life, and of relearning all those forgotten skills—it helps to know that even though we are not yet able to live on our own parcel of land, that we will some day.  We can have chickens and bees, pigs and goats, and all those other wonderful aspects of simple life spent growing that I spend just about every moment dreaming and thinking of.  Oh how beautiful words can make everything right again, and how a single memoir can reinvigorate you to rethink and rethink: this is something I am grateful for.

And while we might not yet be able to grow the kind of life we want to in our apartment, we have evidence everywhere of things growing: from the little succulent garden transplanted earlier in the week, to the hot peppers that prolifically fill their containers, to the homemade food that graces our table almost every night of the week.  I look forward every day after work to coming home, where we have created such a peaceful and welcoming space: for this, I am grateful.

a weekend away

We spent this past weekend in the rural community of David, Kentucky, visiting my mom, who just moved there to work at an alternative high school.  The high school is modeled after Berea College, and includes a work/study component.  It was a very peaceful weekend tucked away in the foothills of Appalachia.