We are Mysterious Like the Ocean

I've been doing this weight watching thing for almost six years; 2 years losing, 3 1/2 years maintaining, resetting my goal in August 2009, losing some more and now maintaining again for about 4 months. I've been On Program, first the Weight Watchers definition, then the Sparkpeople definition, now a hybrid combo of both plus my own definition of On Program, for this entire six years.

Sometimes I have lost. Sometimes I have gained. And I've spent the most time "staying the same". But what I'm calling staying the same is more like small waves; a little bobble up, a little bobble down, maybe a larger surge up and a larger receding back, over and over like low and high tides. What I have learned is that there is no such thing as a flat line of staying exactly the same. Unless you're dead and no one to my knowledge who is reading this is dead.

I've learned a couple of things on my long journey. One of the most useful things I've learned is that weight loss is somewhat like the ocean. I live near the coast in Northern California. I've logged a few hours walking or sitting on beaches. Sometimes, the tide creeps in incrementally and once in a while there is this thing called a sleeper wave; a wave that comes out of nowhere and crashes on the beach yards ahead of where you would expect it to. I've been on a blanket 50 feet back from the tide line and had a sleeper wave come crash on the beach and take my blanket out to sea.

Weight loss is kind of like the tides. You do the work: You declare yourself On Program, you track, you exercise, you follow your own version of the Healthy Guidelines and you lose weight. It's usually a different number every week, like the tides moving up the beach. They are not moving up in a precise increment every time. They are coming up the beach as the tide moves from low to high, but not by any equal measure and not always in forward motion. Sometimes the waves crash further back from the ones that came previously. It is not apparent, if you were to only watch the waves' endpoints, where they surge onto the beach, what caused the wave to break here and not there, back from the tide line or way past it. So if you are curious, you watch the ocean move further out. Sometimes you can see currents meeting each other 100 yards out and the waves that hit the beach from those currents that have run into each other at cross purposes, fall short. You can say, "Ah! That's why!" And sometimes, you see nothing and why the wave that just rolled onto the beach lower or higher than you expected is simply a mystery. Maybe you watch the predictable and unpredictable patterns of the waves rolling endlessly onto the beach and you are simply filled with the joy of being a part of it all and the whys don't really matter.

Sometimes you are On Program in all the above mentioned ways and you don't lose anything. Sometimes, like a sleeper wave, you lose a huge amount when you really weren't doing anything different from the week before. And sometimes, with no obvious explanation, you gain. You can pick your day or week apart, looking for something that ran at cross currents to your intentions and maybe that was "the thing" that kept your from achieving what you expected in terms of weight or inches lost, maybe this is why a new goal was not met. But if you were doing the work, maybe nothing that you imagine as the whys is the answer. Maybe the answer is that your body is simply a mystery at times; pulled by her own inner tide, her own inner ebb and flow.

The ocean is full of mystery. It has rhythms that are predictable up to a point, but then you get a sleeper wave, a tsunami, a rip tide by surprise. Sometimes you get waves that glow at night because of a certain type of plankton. All this to say, while somewhat predictable, the ocean is full of mystery. And so is your body and your body's processes around losing weight. Like the moon can pull on the tides and dance with gravity, so can it pull on us.

If you are upset that you had an inexplicable gain, I challenge you to look at what your level of judgment is around loss/gain issues and try to give yourself a break. You are as mysterious as the ocean. And as magical. Science can cut you up and try to explain you 5 million different ways, but running over, under and alongside all that "proof" and all your weighing and measuring is the mystery of your wonderful body.

Come into the mystery, keep doing the work and you will succeed. Be kind and be curious. When we can have the wonder of a child, everything becomes magic and the joy that comes without any answers to the questions of why can be a phosphorescent shimmering of something much bigger.

My 2010 Harbin Hot Springs Retreat Journal

January 11

January 11

I am here! I am moved in with my 400 lbs of stuff; food for a month, clothes for every situation from sun hiking to rain hiking to yoga to towels and my heaviest robe. I almost feel embarrassed on my own behalf for needing, or thinking I needed to bring so much with me, here; to the place I end up spending much of my time either writing, reading, eating or hiking (with clothes on) or soaking (naked).

I got here at just before 2:00 and had until 3:00 to check into my room. I unpacked all my food and went to the pools; first soaking for a little while in the warm pool, then doing 3 rounds of hot and cold. The hot pool is very hot. My guess it that it is about 111 degrees. After three rounds, I went back into the warm pool (about 100 degrees) and felt the endorphins swirling through my body for a little while until the feeling of hunger grew larger than the “ah” and I went up to Fern Kitchen to have some chips, avocado and salsa. I’m always hungry when I’m here. Maybe because to get anywhere at all requires at least 2 staircases and a large hill.

Having a spotty memory has served me well this trip. I can never remember the name of the room I like. The two buildings that have the basic rooms (bathroom is around the corner of the veranda) are called Azalea and Walnut. I can never remember which is which. They are both painted light blue with white trim. They are both 3 stories high and rickety and they are staggered up the hill adjacent to each other, with one building 1 story higher than the other. When I made my reservation I asked for my favorite room by asking which room was my favorite. “You know: it’s the one on the top floor at the top of the staircase, tucked around the corner,” I tried to explain. “Oh, you mean Azalea 31,” That sounded right: Azalea 31…at least the 31 sounded right. So I get my key at 3:30 and the guy in the office points out the room on the map. I haven’t been here in over a year, and I’m not sure it’s the right room, but it is on the top floor, tucked into the corner all by itself: No one sharing a wall on one side, no one over me.

I open the door to Azalea 31 and it is not the room I like to stay in. It is better. It has a desk and a desk chair, unlike the smaller (what must be) Walnut 31 which in comparison is a little closer to the pools, which is all it has going for it that is better than this room. I am thrilled! There are outlets on every wall; a premium in this old building. If I remember correctly, there was only 1 outlet in the other room, so I could only have one thing plugged in besides my bedside lamp. This room has wall sconces over the desk, a ceiling light AND a bedside lamp, a CLOSET, TWO chairs, the desk and FIVE pillows on the bed. FIVE. I feel a little silly for bringing not only my Tempurpedic and down head pillows, but also my favorite feather pillow that I like to hug when I’m facing it and snug up to my back when I’ve turned the other way while sleeping.

On my way out of Willits, I rented Ugly Betty, the first disc of the first season. I think it will rain for much of the time I am here and I want to spend a lot of time writing, but also need some entertainment time. I have the first two episodes of The Good Wife, downloaded from iTunes and the first 4 episodes of Ugly Betty which I have never watched. My mom loves it and she and I have similar tastes, so I thought, why not. I may or may not watch all of them, but it was part of feeling comfortable and light and happy about going away.

I’ve been thinking a lot of how in my mind, the two trips I’m taking: this one to Harbin, which is a pretty known quantity of pleasure and relaxation and freedom from the needs of others, and the other one in February to NY to celebrate my mother’s birthday, keep getting mixed up. I’ve gotten mildly confused a couple of times about which trip is which. Besides having these menopausal memory cut outs (memorypause, as someone who I can’t remember…seriously…called it), I realize that leaving home overnight stresses me out and causes me anxiety. This has been true for years now, but it has gotten more pronounced. I don’t want to be a person who never leaves their town and has their universe shrink down to a very small number of square miles or feet. I married a woman who loves to travel and she wants me to travel with her. I want to want to travel with her, but I think I have some issues that I have to work out for myself. And then I go and book a trip to NY, to that house I grew up in, to visit that mother who was so hard on me when I was young, and still has the capacity to grievously wound me, especially in her own house; the house that I was last in when my father died in January 1999.

It’s her 75^th birthday and my sentimental heart thought it would be a good idea to help her celebrate it. She’s getting frailer and expecting her to travel to see me, when I’m young and strong is getting to be an unreasonable expectation. So I’m getting over my flying issues of post 9/11 and I am going to get on a plane. In February. And I’m rather anxiety-ridden over it already. So much so that I have gotten this trip and that trip confused in my mind as the days counted down to leaving to come here.

Harbin is my “go to” place; a place I have been coming to for just shy of 25 years, for half my life. I can hike and take yoga classes. Sometimes there are events that I choose participate in like a full moon drum circle or a pipe ceremony. There is a movie house that shows videos every night, a store that sells groceries that you can then cook in the big public kitchen, a restaurant, a cyber café for me to indulge my internet Jones, a comfy warm library to hang out in during the inclement seasons and a beautiful sun deck for to lay out naked on in the warmer times. And most importantly, there are the waters; the healing, sacred waters that cleanses me inside and out.

So if I have to bring enough food for a month and enough clothes for any eventuality of weather, then so be it. That got me out of my house relatively stress free. I enjoyed the 1 ¾ hour drive to get here and now I am here. I chose these 5 days/4 nights because I figured there wouldn’t be too many people here and there are not. It is very quiet and may stay this quiet for the whole week. And then I face myself and keep my own company. I miss Tara in vague, tuggings on my psyche; more the change from the familiar, than anything bigger. I feel her loving me every minute of every day like a pulsing pearlescent cord that runs between us, sending the love back and forth no matter where we each are in our bodies.

Yesterday was our seventh anniversary since the day she came over for lunch and never left, which is the euphemistic way to say, since we became lovers. She did come over for lunch that day. She had called me, a week after our first date, upon returning to town from a trip to Arizona to pick up her new truck. She said she was heading in from the land and did I want to go out for lunch. I calculated quickly. First of all, there was no place to eat in Occidental that was going to work for me and secondly, I wasn’t stupid: I really liked this woman and had a very strong feeling about her. I figured if she liked my cooking, that would be a check mark on the plus side of my dance card, so I invited her over and she readily accepted. I remember making a couple of those Thai Kitchen packets of rice noodles with spicy soup broth, embellishing the soup with prawns, cilantro and thinly sliced carrots.

She came over and we had our lunch. I don’t remember where we sat or what we talked about. I do remember that we ended up making out on my bed. It was the first time we had kissed lying down and it was good. Both of us had something to do that afternoon; I had a Feldenkrais appointment with Patricia and she had a dentist’s appointment. I said to her, as she was getting ready to leave, “I’m not done with you. Can you come back after the dentist?” She replied that she had a prior dinner date but if she could break it without causing any bad feelings, she would and would return. We kissed goodbye and went our separate ways.

She did come back. To this day, we can’t remember who the friend was that she had the dinner date with, but upon calling that friend later, numbed out with Novocain, the friend, without any negotiation necessary said, “Oh! You probably don’t want dinner. Let’s get together another time,” and the rest, as they say, is history. She came back. We had our first, sweet, enthusiastic loving on each other. She stayed and basically, with the exception of a night or two over the next week, she pretty much moved in with me. She says that she didn’t move in, but I say she did. And yesterday was the seventh anniversary of that portal day. We were each doing our own things yesterday and neither one of us, for different reasons, wanted lunch, but I cooked up Barbecued Seitan, new potatoes with dill and asparagus, went into the garage where she was working and asked her if she would like to come over for “lunch”. It was 5:15. She said she’d love to and we proceeded to have a deeply connecting, intimate evening with each other.

And that was such a nice way to end the week leading up to this retreat; still feeling her kisses on my lips, still feeling her body pressed up against mine, feeling this great big love permeating my being. Now I am here, at Harbin. It is 5:00 so I imagine I’m not going to make it to the 5:00 yoga class. A little stretching or yoga on my own in the Stone Front building might be nice, or maybe another soak before dinner. I doubt my frozen chili or lentil soup is anything like thawed, so I may make a vegan pizza for dinner. Pizza and a salad to add to my day of breakfast, lunch and two snacks already. I told you, I’m always hungry when I’m here.

And let me say before I forget, I’m very glad I got a room instead of bringing the RV. It is bright and warm here and I won’t have to worry about charging up electronics. When the rain comes, I will be just a short, unprotected walk from the pools and the kitchen in one direction and the store, restaurant, cyber café and library in the other. I feel happy.

January 12

The rains came in the night. The staircase that comes up to my floor is the main one for both the Azalea and Walnut buildings. As I said yesterday, the buildings are old and rickety, so every person coming up the stairs sounds like a small elephant. I was falling asleep over my book and it was still pretty early, so I went to sleep with ear plugs in. I awakened many times in the night. At some point I removed the ear plugs. There is a gutter close to my window and it was overflowing with water as the rains fell. The bed is much harder than I’m used to…thank goodness I thought to bring a foam egg crate, but it was in the car. It’s on the bed now and will hopefully give me a more pleasant night’s sleep tonight.

It’s been a drizzly to rainy day today. I got up and out of bed at 6:30, went up to the Fern kitchen to make coffee and saw that I could, if I stayed on a trajectory, make it to the 8:00 yoga class. I went to the class, but it was typical “Harbin Yoga” which is not flow yoga, power yoga or anything that ever seems to feel good or work for me. After about 50 minutes, I rolled up my mat and followed my desire for food back up to the Fern kitchen. After breakfast I went in the pools, doing a few rounds of hot and cold, followed by a dreamy soak in the warm pool. I knew the temple would be done with the scheduled yoga classes by 11:30, so I went back just before 12:00 with my iPod and little speaker in hand and gave myself the gift of an Eoin Finn yoga podcast for an hour.

I am finding it harder and harder to deny that I am succumbing to a cold or more. My head and body have a persistent ache and my energy is low and small; close to my body. I’m taking dried elderberries, Jade Screen and vitamin C. I don’t like being damp and damp seems to be the prevailing reality here. It is warm and cozy in my room as it was in the kitchen, the cyber café, the temple and the library, but damp. Once again I give great gratitude for not taking the RV. As hard as it is to feel warm and dry, despite actually being warm and dry, it would only be harder in the RV. Unevenly warm and damp in a big tin can is not an appealing thought.

I find myself hoping that it doesn’t rain the whole time I’m here. I do want to walk around on the land, even if I succumb to whatever is pulling on me. I want to visit with certain trees and sacred spots and really feel the land here. There are still very few people here. Even Sunheart, my elder friend who lives here isn’t on the massage schedule until Friday, indicating that he might not even be on the land. A woman came up to me as I was leaving the Stonefront building to head up to Fern for lunch, saying I was very familiar to her. We had played charades and Pictionary together at a mutual friend’s house a few years ago. I ended up having lunch with her and her step daughter, which was very pleasant and definitely filled my “being social” needs for perhaps the rest of the day. So I find myself here, in my relatively warm and cozy room, listening to my yoga music playlist through my wonderful little Saitek speaker and flexing my writing muscles.

It’s really unrealistic (or so I say) to think that in four days I will pull a whole lot of book together. I was happy to write as much as I did yesterday just journaling, but I feel that the journaling is more about preparing the way, lubricating the gears, than it is actually writing. I am happy to be here. I am happy to have internet access to journal my food on Sparkpeople, communicate with Tara and check in with my veggie board buds. I am happy to have come so very well prepared, even if I’m a little embarrassed to pull my huge cooler out of the refrigerator when I need to get things out of it. So far today, I had my Standard Maddy Breakfast #1: Tofu veggie hash with gomasio and nutritional yeast and for lunch, leftover garlicky, gingery soup broth with lots of veggies and tofu. I am now eating pretzels. I will not eat tofu again today I think.

I am boring myself to death with this journal entry. I think that is a clear indicator that I need to stop using my time in ways that bore me and at least try to get some real work done. So off I go.

January 13

The wonders of a good night’s sleep are vast. I lay in bed with the computer last night and watched two episodes of Ugly Betty. I had never watched it before and on a whim, I rented the first seasons first 4 episodes on a disc on my way out of town. I was asleep by 11:00 pm and I slept all the way through until 5:00 and then some more until almost 6:30. I awoke to clearing skies which lifted my spirits as did realizing that I wasn’t sick. I actually felt a lot better. Either I’m suffering from mold allergies or I am fighting something and today I’m winning.

Last night, while wearing my Uggs, I tripped and missed the last step on a 3 step drop from Azalea to Walnut on my way from my room to the pools. I wrenched my ankle pretty well. I had to sit down and cry for a minute. Lillian, the woman from Ukiah just happened by at that time and I asked her for a hug. She happily gave me one. I limped on up the hill and did a nice long bake in the sauna, took a shower, took a short soak in the warm pool and sat for a while with a not quite soft ice pack on my ankle while I finished my lovely Charles de Lint novel. Eventually, I gathered my things and returned to my room where I got into bed and watched videos.

When I saw the clearing skies this morning, I decided to see if I could get an ace bandage from Health Services and go hike up to the ridge, take pictures with my phone and call Tara. I felt so fortunate that yes, they did have an ace bandage which they gave me. I taped up my ankle, put on my rain gear and did my hike. On my way up the tea house trail, I stopped for a few moments in my favorite grove of madrone trees. I could almost see the shimmer of a much younger me, a 28 year old me, in love with Peter Hefter who was there with me at Harbin, visiting me from NY during that torrid 6 month cross country affair we had. I was stunned to think that that was almost 22 years ago. I gave thanks for this day and this me and continued up the trail.

I took pictures of a yin yang made out of rocks,

blooming Manzanita,

a silvery pine tree standing alone against the sky,

a medicine wheel.

I had a cell signal on the ridge and got to talk to Tara, albeit briefly, as she had just awakened and I didn’t want to overwhelm her.

My hike was lovely. At the top of the ridge, I saw a rainbow to the west. The trail was a running creek in places as it rained very hard last night. My ankle only twinged a few times when I stepped slightly off to the side on my foot and I returned without incident, feeling a lovely sense of well-being; the gift of endorphins. Then a shower and breakfast. I’m now sitting in the Blue Room Café with all these windows letting in the somewhat cloudy light, preparing to write. I think it is my moment. So off I go.

10:30 PM

It was my moment. I wrote something that I think is very good. It’s a few pages about the importance of breakfast. I think I wrote for over two hours. It was nice to have over 1 ½ hours of hiking to counter all that sitting, so that my body felt good. Finally, after dropping the computer off in the room, I went in the pools. No hot and cold for me today, just the warm pool, at the warmer end this afternoon and then again before dinner. I went in the sauna again too. The sauna feels like it is good for me. I napped this afternoon too. I thought I might write some more and started something called Right Relationship, but not too far into it, I was pulled down into sleep where I dove and surfaced over and over for about an hour and a half.

It was a delicious day. The rhythms of my own desires felt so present today. And I ate a lot and that felt good too. I added everything up tonight and it wasn’t a crazy day, calorie-wise, but I did allow food to be part of the deliciousness of today; this wonderful middle day of my stay here. I got here two days ago and I leave in two days, so this was the nicely cushioned center of my trip. It feels good to me to know that I got some good exercise, that even eating as part of following my bliss was balanced and appropriate to my calorie expenditures and that I got some decent work done. Now I just have to figure out how to get my writing done when I’m home so this book or these books don’t take me 25 years to write.

And with that said, I feel the need to prepare for bed. May it be another peaceful, restful night.

January 14

It is a beautiful day in paradise. I awoke after a tossy-turny night and made my way up to the Fern kitchen to make coffee just before the sun rose between the hills. With mug in hand, I walked up to the upper sun deck to watch El Sol show his face, like a lover rising from between a beloved’s knees.

After finishing my coffee, I went back to the room to dress for a run. I hiked to the meadow, where the RV parking is and started running up the mountain. The air temperature was kind, the sun was making all the moisture on the grass sparkle, the air was clean and fresh. I ran farther than I had done when I was here last year; until the road, which hadn’t been paved for quite a while, started branching off into smaller and smaller roads that were more like trails. I didn’t want to trespass and I certainly didn’t want to get lost, so at the 50 minute mark, I turned around and ran all the way down to the parking lot of the store, where I cut through to the temple path and up to the lost and found where I was not successful in finding my green travel coffee cup.

I then went to the office and asked if my room was available Friday night. It was. I took some time to think about spending another $100, as Friday starts the higher weekend rates. I emailed Tara to see if she would give me her blessing about staying another night, knowing that she will laugh at me for thinking I could just come here for four days, but after 45 minutes online, there was no reply, so I was on my own. I decided to stay. If that means I pay $100 less on my 0% interest credit card this month, then so be it. I’m paying myself first (and second, third, fourth and fifth, apparently), and I’m OK with that.

I am tired this afternoon. I took some Klonopin last night after napping so long and late yesterday afternoon. I was still tossing and turning even chemically assisted, but it is what it is. I have to keep reminding myself that there is nothing I HAVE TO do here except follow my own whims and my own bliss. One of my whims was to spend a little time with Sunheart. I came to the Blue Room to see if they would sell me some ground espresso, as that is the first food item I’ve run out of, and here he was. He asked what I was up to and I told him about the book(s). We then proceeded to totally inspire each other with thoughts and ideas, which is why I adore this person.

Yesterday, I saw a woman who looked so much like an old friend whom I hadn’t seen since she moved from Sebastopol to WA State in 1997. Her name is Dusty. The funny (odd) thing is that about a year ago, our friend Marcia, who knows that I’m a wild mushroom enthusiast, bought me a mushroom book and upon opening it and looking at the photographs, recognized my old friend who had married the author. Ever since then, thoughts of her, wondering if she’s having a happy life, have been cycling through my awareness. And here I am in Middletown, CA and this woman who looked so much like she did the last time I saw her, 12+ years ago, was her. We spent a nice chunk of time talking in the Fern Kitchen, where I had gone to make a sandwich. She and her husband are going incognito to a mushroom workshop in Sonoma County are here until Saturday, just like I am. We had so much to say to each other. We exchanged contact info so if we don’t end up spending any more time here at Harbin, we can continue to reconnect through email and telephone. It made me so happy to see her. She looks exactly the same as she did 12+ years ago, which was why I tried to tell myself yesterday that it couldn’t be her. She’s 44 now. What a wonderful connection.

Today I have

Seen a sun rise while drinking strong, sweet coffee

Run up and down a mountain

Decided to spend another day/night here

Eaten a lovely breakfast

Taken a lovely, albeit short soak

Had two wonderful conversations

And now I am writing and feeling less inspired to write and more inspired to maybe go lie down. I’m going to open the last thing I wrote yesterday about breakfasts and see about going a little further with that. I don’t need the creative spark as much as I need to create continuity which I just may have enough juice for.

There is no spinach for sale in the store. I just need to be disappointed about that as I have only about 1 cup of baby spinach left in my cooler. Oh well. When that is all a person has to be disappointed about, life if very very good.

4:00 PM

Make that FOUR really wonderful conversations. My idea of creating a diet and fitness coaching program has advanced. A women who work in the Blue Room café wants to lose weight and get more fit. I’ve offered to “guinea pig” her for free for the first month plus the set up time to get her going with a tailor made program for her own weight loss and fitness. I’m so excited at getting such a great YES response to this, another one of my inspired projects for the new year. I've been inspiring and supporting people on the Veggie board for over 5 years and I am creating a template in my mind of how to create a network of support for people who want to create the kinds of changes my online Weight Watcher friends as well as I have done and continue to do. After making this connection, the woman came back to me later and said, "You know, I'm a resident here and as a resident, I get 2 Guest Passes a month. I would happily pay you in guest passes," (Can you say, "How perfect!"?)

And Tara did get my emails and was thrilled that I’m staying until Saturday. Life is good and so am I :-)

7:00 PM

More magical exchanges and conversations. Today must be the social event and networking day at the hot springs. Tonight is the Unconditional Dance event at the conference center in about an hour. If I still feel like I can locomote down there and back, I think I will go. I love that I still get to wake here and go to sleep here again tomorrow. It is far more crowded than it’s been. I went in the pools after all my writing endeavors and the warm pool was pretty full of people. I did do my three rounds of hot and cold today. Then sat in the warm water and let the endorphins swirl around and through me.

January 15

It is another day at Harbin. I have to rant a little bit. I am so divorced from the hormone-ridden young heterosexual world that one aspect of being here crosses beyond annoying into offensive and almost hurtful, if I cared. I remember being a heavy woman in my 30’s when I was transitioning between the world of heterosexuals and the world of lesbians. In the former world, I felt invisible. I felt like an aging fat woman. In the lesbian world I felt like a goddess. I remember asking myself which world I would rather live in. This was by no means my deciding factor in my changing of teams, but it was a noticing of how differently I was treated, seen and communicated with in the world of women.

There seem to be a whole crop of youngish macho men living here on the property. And they seem to all be cruising for babes. All the time. Whatever. It is in young men’s nature to cruise, I do believe. But in my attempting to engage anyone with a question, to walk with me to the conference center last night on the way to the dance (I couldn’t see very well and didn’t have a light), and the dancing itself, the brush off I got from at least half a dozen people both straight women and men was annoying and insulting. I feel beautiful, fit and even dare I say it, sexy in this body I have worked so hard on and have worked so hard to learn how to love. And the brush off; the gaze that stops for a nanosecond and moves on, a request to walk with me back up the hill and told “I’m going (somewhere else),” but then there he is right behind me, trying to engage anyone at all to dance with me…they all acted (save one older guy who was a great dancer and he did dance with me and it was great fun. He was German or Swiss,) as if I were coming on to them or trying to pick them up. All I was really trying to do was 1) be escorted because I couldn’t see and didn’t want to fall in a ditch and 2) DANCE, not fuck them, just dance one dance.

Now I know that it is stupid to take this personally and I really am not taking it personally. Their lenses are what they see through, (them: meaning all these young guys) and their own engagement with a young babe in the same way as my attempts would be for different reasons. I want to connect. I’m just being friendly. I want a temporary dance partner. They want to find a warm body for the night. So it makes sense that they think that what they would do, are doing, is what I am doing. And I can’t help but find it insulting. I just felt the need to record this so I can let it go. Rant over.

I’m very tired today. I’m feeling more and more run down instead of more and more relaxed which is too bad. My spirits are good and I’ve had a pretty good mix of engagement with others and internal time. I wish I was a little more productive with the writing, but it is what it is and I’m happy for what I have accomplished. I met a transgendered person (F to M) today in the dressing room this morning after a soak.He is 29 and lives here. He was a totally delightful person and we had a very engaging conversation about the macho/hormone factor that is here at the Springs. I’m sure we would have spent a little more time together, but he was sick and was going back to bed.

There are a lot of sick people here. It’s the season, it seems. I wish I could just sleep and wake up feeling better, energized and healthy instead of sleeping almost all through the night last night and waking up feeling tired. Going for a hike and a run and returning feeling tired(er). I’d love to go to Peter’s yoga class at 5:00, but I may just have a nap after having a late lunch with Dusty at around 2:00.

The gas is off in the kitchen so they can repair a valve. It was on when I got up there at 6:30 to make coffee, but my breakfast timing was bad, as I had just gone up there after showering post-run, in a state of what felt like severe calorie deprivation, very much looking forward to a hot breakfast, but had to throw together a sandwich instead and buy coffee #2 at the Blue Room. Hopefully it will be back on when I go up for lunch as I think I need some soup for lunch. Something hot and gingery/garlicky sounds good to me.

Speaking of food, I think it is time to transition to “The Book”.

Til later

(Later)

OK, I have realized, after much reflection that the core of what was bothering me about the brush offs is that I was expecting to be hit on. Silly, because I would have just rejected the overture(s), but my ego was bruised that 1) I got brushed off several times and 2) not one person has hit on me or even eyed me appreciatively (that I could see) since I've been here. And that is hard to admit, but laughing (gently) at myself, I believe is good for me, so there it is. Oh the human condition of having one's ego put in its place.

January 16

So my time here draws to a close. I have an hour and ten minutes left before my parking pass expires. I’ve moved out of my room, left a towel in the dressing room for one more round of hot/cold/hot/cold (and maybe one more hot/cold)/warm soak. This has been a very good trip, despite feeling poorly for a great deal of the time. Whatever is up with me comes and goes with a persistent slightly running nose and an intermittent headache. But not today. Today I am simply tired and joyful. My time reconnecting with Dusty was so soul- and heart-filling. Her husband has already invited me up to visit them. She has too. I feel like we weren’t quite ready to be good friends a dozen years ago, but perhaps we are now. I am so joyful about that.

James and Annie from Willits were here too; arriving yesterday and just departing about an hour ago. I had some very sweet time with them too. James is the scapegoat in his family as I am in mine. It was healing for us both to share our stories. And Annie is just a gorgeous light being. I think our time together here will deepen our connections back home in Willits. I look forward to what may come of that.

I did sacrifice writing time for socializing time. And that is OK. My book; the more-or-less cookbook has given me some strong direction to its form. Now I simply have to do the work to piece it together. I didn’t do any work on the collection of essays. That is not what was calling to me during this past week. (Upon rereading the start of this paragraph, I don’t think sacrifice is the right word; trading feels better.) These past days have been deepening of the lessons I am learning, this huge piece I am unraveling around the grey area between an agenda and being with What Is. I traded parts of my agenda to Get A Lot Of Work Done to deepen my connections to three people. I feel like that is an investment in my future in a different way but no less an important investment as getting the writing done.

One thing I will declare here and commit to is that once I am at home, I will set aside time as often as I can to do work on these writings and continue taking step after step to create these books that I dearly believe people will benefit from. I want to benefit from them as well. I hereby call in an editor and a publisher. I think my teacher/ally can connect me with a person or two who might help me and/or direct me to someone who can.

Well, the time has come to walk to the car, stow my computer, drive the car up to the gazebo circle and leave it there while I take my last bath. But before that, I am going to take a few pictures of the waterfall across the driveway from the store. The elder fig trees have roots that were sunk deep down into the water table that are now exposed from erosion. There are Brian Froud-like fairy images in those roots.

I feel very clean, inside and out.

My body feels purified.

My heart is full.

My spirit is singing.

I will remember and writing this down will help me.

Blessed be.

Happy 4th Birthday, Body Tales!

Today is my blog's 4th anniversary. Because I usually spend New Year's Day collaging, I usually forget to wish my blog happy birthday until the 2nd or 3rd. But tonight I remembered.

There's a lot going on.

I have menopause mush brain and am having a hard time focusing on certain types of work, like deep thinking. One of the things on my collage, which is still in process, is FOCUS. I finally know what my book to help people find their way to right relationship with their bodies is going to look like. And I'm slowly compiling pieces that I've been writing here over the past four years and am cleaning them up, editing them and expanding some of them. My book is going to be a book of essays. Not linear and not necessarily a time-line progression of the things I have learned. I'm going to let my sense of YES determine what goes in and where things go.

I'm glad to start a new decade, and I know there are those that will argue that the new decade really starts next year, but it ain't the AUGHTS anymore, thank goodness. It is the TEENS.

And I call up the wild, fierce, passionate TEEN in all of us in her or his best aspects to

Speak Truth to Power

To Say NO

To Say YES

To push at the edges of every perceived boundary like a good teenager does.

To let ourselves try on new possibilities because how would a teenager know what they are going to "be"?

We may not be overdosing on hormones anymore, maybe even the opposite, but we can sure come to each choice, each occasion, each encounter as if it were happening for the very first time.

And then have an authentic response.

How the hell else are we going to change ourselves and change the world?

So Happy Birthday to my dear blog which has been such an amazing entity for me, a relationship I still cherish. A place I still choose to come, albeit if not as often as the early days.

Happy New Year to us all.

Let's do the work and get this thing right, OK?

The Dying Season: Some Thoughts on Seasonal Depression

The season of dying has returned. We've passed through the cross-quarter holy day of Hallowmas; the time when the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead is at its thinnest. We are now firmly in the second half of fall; the time I think of as The Descent into The Dark. For others, how they feel right now gets tagged as Seasonal Affected Disorder or Seasonal Depression, depending on how far you want to pathologize what you're going through.

For me, seasonal depression is two-fold. I am affected by the loss of the light and have been my whole life. However, I do believe, at the age of 49, having gone 50 times around the wheel through this time of year, that the reason the effect of the loss of the light brings about more than a simple melancholy in me at the passing of people I love, plans that were never actualized, the ending or death of another year or simply another year of my life, over, passed through the veil, never to be lived again, is more about our dysfunctional culture not having any room in it for inward gazing; internal house keeping, dream seeding, even grieving what has passed through the veil. And so this accounting of, and acknowledgment of the season of dying is missed or marginalized by this almost maniacal push to be happy, to be social, to eat lots of rich food, to travel long distances in bad weather. This is the cultural paradigm that I see rise as the year marches around towards Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year.

So what I have done for many years now is to try to carve out time for myself to feel some of the inherent sadness of the season; to spend some time in the garden and be with my melancholy that arises from beholding the dead plants that were vibrant and burgeoning with harvest just six weeks before. I spend time in the forest searching for edible wild mushrooms; those strange creatures that blossom like other-worldly flowers right out of the death on the forest floor. I force myself to observe the bugs that are alive and continuing or completing their own life cycles while being nourished by the mushrooms and the humous they are growing from.

Starting around 11/1, this shift happens in me like clockwork, whether I welcome it or not. There is, I believe, an inherent sadness to this time of year that begs to be acknowledged. And so many of us don't do this. We try to push through what we imagine to be something "wrong" with ourselves and we flog ourselves like we are simultaneously some poor undernourished carriage horse trying to pull too much weight up a hill and the driver of that carriage who futilely uses the whip. So I have stopped trying to "fix" it or myself and make what has proven to be a futile quest to be "happy". It feels a lot more right to do it this way. And this thing that feels right is not by any means easy. But I'm old enough and thankfully wise enough to know that I have to be my authentic self even if it is painful and uncomfortable. I have no "disorder". There is nothing that needs to be fixed or medicated.

My grief is a veil. And as I pass through it, between early November and mid December, I find my new ideas, new hopes, new dream seeds to be planted in the new spring. Making this my ritual helps me come through this Season of Sadness, this Descent into the Dark. As the year darkens towards the Winter Solstice, I try to take a week for myself to do the deep inner naval gazing to find my dream seeds and gather them for spring planting. I take a personal retreat. And I take it right at the frenetic pinnacle of holiday season. It is my reward for letting myself be where I am as I pass through my sadness.

And what I know to be true is that the sun returns, the new leaves unfurl and spring will come again. For now, like the Goddess Innana, I make my descent through the seven gates, leaving vital parts of myself behind at each one; as the price to pass, and trusting, that as I pass through that last gate, naked and vulnerable, that I too, like the Earth turning her face towards the sun, will be reborn with the return of the light.

It's All in My Mind

On August 13th I weighed in at 152 lbs. That was 2 lbs over my red line and the last month of calendar summer was about to begin, which has empirically been the time of the year that is the easiest for me to lose weight.

Because being slim and fit is so important to me, I had to look at what I was doing. What I was doing was playing with raw food and making things out of Bryant Terry's book Vegan Soul Kitchen. While I found both these endeavors to be delicious and interesting, and I do highly recommend Vegan Soul Kitchen for occasional rich indulgences, I also noticed on my food tracking software that my calories were creeping up into the realm of 1700-1800 a day and my fat grams were between 70-80 a day. No wonder I had gained a couple of pounds! My maintenance range, despite my caloric burn during exercise is about 1500-1650 calories and my gall bladder is really happier staying at or under 60 grams of fat a day.

Coconut oil and butter, lots of avocado, more than usual, raw cashews, raw cacao confections (made with coconut oil) was starting to stick to my behind. And my aging tired gall bladder was starting to complain.

I realized that I was on the edge of a slippery slope, greased with coconut oil and that I really didn't want to go down that path. Back to the library went Bryant Terry. I set a boundary with myself. I was no longer going to buy jars of Cacao Bliss. I was going to cut back on the parts of eating raw that included oodles of raw cashews and other fats; in short I was going to rein in my calories and my fat grams. I was going to focus on those two components of my diet because everything else in my nutritional profile was good.

I deeply believe that the foundation of my success at maintaining a large weight loss has been accountability. The cornerstones of accountability are tracking and journaling everything I eat by using the free software on sparkpeople.com and participating on the Weight Watchers Vegetarian Message Board for the support and witnessing that doing that affords. So on August 13th, I started a thread that has become a daily endeavor called Today We Do Declare Ourselves (any version of) OP. (OP meaning On Program/Plan/Points) I'm On Program, but I don't do Weight Watchers anymore. I realized that I was accountable about my exercise activity and what I ate to this support community, but I was only being accountable to myself for how much I was eating. And so the course altering began. Others have joined me and this has become a daily thread for about 10-12 people. We don't always succeed at being On Program, but we set an intention one day at a time.

Right about the same time, I started upping my strength training and my running. I was burning more calories while also dialing in my calories and fat grams, and I started losing weight. The 2 lbs over my redline disappeared pretty quickly. It felt so easy that I started thinking about the power of my mind. I started thinking about how I had this thought form set in my mind that 150 was a fairly easy weight for me to maintain and that 145 had (in my first year at goal) required me to eat less and I wasn't willing to do that and so let 145 go.

As the pounds starting slipping off me, all of a sudden 145 seemed not only doable but reasonably doable. After the first week of dialing in my food intake, I wasn't feeling restricted. I wasn't feeling hungry. All the parts of me were easy with what I was doing. I started thinking about this weight number and about how I had set a goal all the way back in 2004; an arbitrary goal to some extent, but a reasonable one. I was almost 200 pounds and I wanted to get down to 150, which is in the normal weight range for my height. From the perspective of an obese person, normal seemed like some Valhalla; something "over there". But I took the journey and two years later, I arrived. I lost down to 145 that first summer maintaining, but I wasn't able to keep it. My love of food helped me come to a decision that I was good with 150 and that at 150 and the activity level that I had at the time, I could eat normally, splurge occasionally and maintain. And I did. For 3 1/2 years. Until this summer when I realized that my holding 150 was a construct. It was all in my mind. And that I could change my mind.

And then my son started talking to me about P90X and something else happened in my mind. I took a long, slow look at my fitness program. I had added the very amusing Yoga Booty Ballet DVDs to the Core Fusion DVDs and the lovely Janet Stone Yoga DVDs to my fitness program. These were in addition to my running 3-4X a week. I felt fit and strong. But I had one of my inner people tugging at my sleeve. This inner voice was becoming a persistent whisper in my ear saying, "We're almost 50. How many more years do we get to increase our fitness and have the strongest body of our life? How much longer do we get before exercise becomes a necessity of maintaining flexibility and strength instead of building it? How far can we go?"

P90X is an extreme fitness program Performance 90 (Days) eXtreme. That's P90X. Tony Horton promises you the best fitness of your life in 90 days. My son, who is 27 is doing it and in his first month, he lost over 25 lbs and started getting very buff looking. Daniel is 27 and male. I'm 49 and female and I certainly didn't expect those kind of results, but I wanted the push. So he loaned me the first month's discs for the Classic program and I started. Within a week I was totally hooked. After just a few days of P90X people started asking me what I was doing because my arms were looking fantastic. So I bought my own set of 13 DVDs, returned Daniel's DVDs to him and I have just started my fourth week.

During the first two weeks, my body, confused by all these new things I was throwing at her, rallied to the cause and I lost three pounds. That took me down to 144 pounds, exceeding my new goal of 145. I'm riding between 144ish and 145ish, committing every day to being On Program, which is holding a goal of 1500-1600 calories and 60 grams of fat or less a day. I think I scared myself with the rapid weigh loss after 3 1/2 years of bobbling up and down in maintenance. I did gain one pound back from that low of 144. And that is OK. There are a lot of parts of self that have to come into alignment with all the other parts to make body changes. That has always been true for me on this journey and I don't see that changing. I am 7 pounds less than when I started changing my mind on August 13th.

This is my "recovery week" in the P90X program, meaning I get the week off of weights and the more intense strength and cardio programs, but there is still booty kicking yoga, core work, cardio and stretching; something every day with the seventh day as an optional stretch or rest day. . Tony Horton is a good trainer. He motivates me and keeps me safe. I work as hard as I can and after three complete weeks injury free, I'm trusting this guy; this guy on a series of DVDs. He's playful and goofy. He's my age. And he's ripped crazy fit. If he can do this, then so can I. And holding that thought of success is all in my mind. And then it's in my body.

And then the whole world changes.

I've reset my goal again down to 140. I may get there. I may not. But one thing I've learned about myself is that I need goals so that I keep striving. And setting goals is the vehicle by which I keep redefining my Personal Best. Personal Best starts out as a picture, a longing, an idea. And then I walk towards it.

(Dreya Webber: Poster Woman for P90X)

12 Pears in Every Jar

It was going to be Caramel Spiced Pear Butter.

But we were very short on 1/2 pt jars.

The hardware store was sold out of them and Tara had only had time for one quick stop, so she didn't bring anything home.

We have six large paper grocery bags on the floor of the dining room, filled with Bartlett pears from our two beautiful, older trees.

Tara peeled and cored and cooked a whole batch of pear sauce on Saturday from start to jar.

We make pear sauce like apple sauce, but smoother.

Sunday's batch cooked all day and was left out all night.

I cooked it all day today; slowly, letting it thicken more and more.

At about 5:00 I zipped it to a velvet smoothness with the Braun.

Tara came home without jars.

We have LOTS of widemouth pint jars.

LOTS of bands and lids for widemouth jars.

So I made a decision.

The pears are so damn good that I was loathe to add anything at all to them.

Not caramelized sugar.

Nor any spices.

So I didn't.

And it's smooth and thick.

Virgin pear butter.

Perfect, just like that.

60 pears.

That's 12 pears in every jar.

Finding My Inner Athlete Part 1: She is a Big White Horse

(painting credit: Lipizzaner - Elizabeth Silk)

I was never athletic as a kid in the mainstream, team sport, competitive athlete way. I was an active kid who loved to play outdoor imagination games like getting a group of kids together to pretend we were wranglers capturing wild horses, or do more purely physical things like play one of many varieties of tag, ride my bike, swim and later ride real horses, but I never excelled at or much enjoyed playing team sports or running track and field or any of the other types of school-oriented fitness endeavors. In Elementary school, I wanted to do gymnastics, but the petite, wiry gym teacher wouldn't let me be on the gymnastic team because I was "too big". I remember being so ashamed of my size and how my size prohibited me from exploring something that I was drawn to. I never did do gymnastics beyond the normal "gymnastics" a playing child does. From an early age, I was already internalizing that I was "too big" and "too slow." I really believe that those poison roots took hold somewhere deep down inside of me and contributed to me becoming the sedentary adult that I was for over a decade.

I've done a fair amount of personal inventory taking over these years to discover the whys of it all: Why I lived in my head more than my body and that was pretty clear: I was praised for the fastness and brightness of my mind and teased and harassed for the roundness and relative slowness of my body and I chose to live where the praise was, but this piece about deeply internalizing that I wasn't capable of being athletic is still revealing itself as I dispel it with my every increasing fitness. To call up my inner Warrior and say, "No! I will no longer succumb to these old and poisonous messages!" is one of the major components of why I say that putting my fitness and diet front and center is literally me saving my own life.

Once my weight gain began in my early 30's, I became a more and more sedentary adult. This lasted until I started Weight Watchers at age 42. I was 205 lbs at my highest weight the year my father died. I've been maintaining my 50 +/- pound weight loss for several years now, and I've fiercely embodied new messages and new "truths" that have liberated my body and truly set me free to live inside this dear body for the first time since I was a child.

My Fierce Message for a Healthy Body and Mind

Having a regular exercise program is the cup with which to drink from The Fountain of Youth. I have learned that I would never find the Fountain of Youth from taking a pill, a supplement or from my diet. But I would find it and continue to find it through exercise. I now have the empirical knowledge that a regular cardio vascular program will regulate my blood sugar, blood pressure, promote digestive health, lower my resting heart rate, strengthen my cardio-vascular system, pulmonary system, my reflexes and balance. A regular strength training program (yoga, pilates, weights) strengthens my muscle body and bones, makes me more agile and has given me the core of my dreams. Both cardio and strength training contribute to better mental health and deepen the connections between my head and my body. A regular exercise program has helped me both lose weight and inches and maintain those losses.

If we could all believed this is true, have it empirically and scientifically proven to us and that anyone can have it, why wouldn't we all make it the highest priority in our lives? For myself, I "knew" these things were true, but just didn't believe that I could have them. Why? Because of the poisonous messages rooted into my young psyche. After years of telling myself I was deserving of a happy body to live inside of and doing the work step by sometimes painful step, I finally did make it my highest priority and now I'm younger at 49 than I was at 32. I can run up mountains, do 2 hours of yoga, dance all night and I have the body of my dreams; the body that was waiting for me all this time.

But how did I get here?

I realized early on in the game on Weight Watchers that the more I exercised, the more I could eat. And since I love to eat, that was a powerful motivator! I never liked gyms much and walking or running on treadmills wasn't fun for me, so I started hiking the hills and trails in my neighborhood. At first, I stoically conquered those hills, hating every second of "up" and feeling relieved when it was finally over. There was a sense of accomplishment insofar as I knew that the activity points I had "earned" meant I could eat more that day without sabotaging my weight loss program. That was the reward. As my body got used to being hoisted up big hills and I started getting more fit, an interesting thing began happening.

When I was a kid, I rode horses. I loved horses but never had one of my own. My father couldn't afford the board and upkeep of a horse on his teacher's salary. But I was a girl of great imagination. If I couldn't have a real horse, I would be my own horse. I would set up jumps on the side of my house with anything I could find: garbage cans turned on their sides with a broom handle across them, milk crates stacked three high with a shakily constructed 2x4 "gate"and then I would pretend that the top of me was the rider and the bottom of me was the horse. The "horse" was usually a bay quarter horse/thoroughbred cross; the quarter horse was built like I was; powerful, large hindquarters, deep chested with shorter legs than the long, lanky thoroughbreds that I loved to ride. I was a practical if whimsical child and my imaginary horse that cantered around my yard was a creation of how I saw myself merged with my deeper desires.

I would canter around the "ring" and jump over the jumps. This was a big part of my late childhood "athleticism"; this interweaving of body play and mind play. I was using my imagination and my body simultaneously. I can remember how hours would just disappear and that I had a sense of total engagement in this play. And I wasn't a little kid. I was doing this into my early teens. The love of horses and the longing to have what my family could not afford manifested into this unleashing of my imagination.

So one day, early on during my beginnings of becoming A Person Who Exercises, I began to feel that "inner horse" rise in me when I was hiking, and the next thing I knew I was that horse trotting and cantering down the trail. With much joy and no small surprise, I was accessing that very same marriage of the physical and the mental bodies as I imagined my lower body being a white horse and my upper body being me, the rider. Why was she a white horse? I'll leave that to the psychologists. This is the imagery that has consistently come to me in my athletic renaissance. She's a muscular, yet graceful white horse. I suspect she is a Lipizzaner, the horses of the Royal School of Vienna, old enough to have turned from dark grey to white. When she rises inside of me I can feel the muscles in her rump bunching and working to trot down the rocky, slippery trail. I could see the her white neck arched, head perpendicular to the ground as she uses her body to maintain her balance coming down the mountain. In no time, I am at the bottom of the 1.3 mile trail, happily sweating and breathing deeply, literally tingling all over from the endorphins of trotting my horse down the mountain.

By remembering my child-self's love for horses and how re-accessing my childhood imaginary horse and by listening to this "inner horse" I found this visceral joy in moving my body, being out in the woods, running down the hills, sweating and breathing hard. Exercise, which started out being a means to an end has gradually become both a joy and something I crave.

When did I lose the connection between my imagination and my body? I suspect that the lack of infrastructure to nurture this connection is responsible. When I watch children play, from the youngest ages it is there; this fusion of imagination and physical play. And then the children we were got older and if we were lucky, there was a physical education program in school that offered team sports, or there was a program in our community through which we could play softball, baseball, football, basketball or soccer. The common thread in all these offerings was competition. Being the best team, the best player, winning, getting a higher score. It’s all very linear and it is completely divorced from imagination.

Because I was never even close to the best at any of these offerings like I was with my grades and my creativity, I started internalizing that this was not me. I was not a competitive kid and I did not find a sense of fun in beating another kid or team at an activity. It was an alien landscape that did not feed my spirit. And I never thought about this in words, rather, I saw it that being “athletic” meant being competitive and since I didn’t like being competitive, I couldn’t possibly be an athlete.

But now I am an athlete. And I didn’t find my way here through running races or any other outward type of competition. I became an athlete by regaining the connection between my imagination and my physical body. I found my way here by re-membering what it was like to be a child at play. For me, exercise is almost never a chore. Rather it is something I do that is fun, that pulls a little of my rich inner landscape out into the physical world. And I have a big white horse to thank for helping me find her and by doing so re-member a vital missing piece of myself.

Recipe Time! Butternut Squash Enchiladas With Rice and Beans

It's been a long time since I've shared a recipe. There's a great backstory to this one and I am prompted to share the recipe because the backstory is such a vegan victory; the victory of growing my own protein.

For any of you who follow my blog regularly, you know I grow a big garden every year. I know big is relative. We have a double lot that has a prime sunny piece that is about 1/8 of an acre. That's what's fenced in. Over the almost 6 years we've been here, we've been transforming the rock, clay and fill into rich, friable mulch by adding straw and horse manure layers 2x a year. The rains break down the manure and straw and we now have between 6-12 inches of lovely mulch in the main part of the garden.

You find out the most interesting things from places you don't expect. About six months ago I was getting my car repaired and my mechanic, who gardens and knows that I do too, shared with me that he grows pinto beans. I didn't know that we could grow shelling beans in our climate. He said they have been growing a modest patch of them every year and end up with about a gallon jar of dried beans. That's a fair amount of beans!

I was pretty excited at the idea of being able to grow more of my own protein rich foods, so this year I sprouted and planted just plain old organic pinto beans that I had in my pantry. Like most beans, they sprouted and grew vigorously. I didn't know when to harvest them: Wait until the pods were dry? Pick them when I could feel beans in the pods, but the pods were still green? I wasn't sure. I tried calling my mechanic, but he was out test driving.

I guess the Universe really wanted me to get my answer, because that very day I received my San Francisco Chronicle Food and Wine weekly email. There was a whole article about fresh beans. Because not just from my garden, but from grower's all over N. CA, it is shelling bean season at the Farmers' Markets.

Here is what I learned:

SEASON'S INGREDIENTS

Shelling Beans

By Georgeanne Brennan, Chronicle Contributor

To look at shelling beans in the market, you might say, "Oh, those beans look terrible, with those shriveled, damp looking pods." But that's what the Phaseolus cognoscenti look for. The shriveled pod indicates that the bean inside is swollen and plump, full of rich bean flavor, and the dampness indicates the bean is still tender and ready to eat.

A shelling bean is any bean that is grown primarily for the edible seed inside. The pod is not eaten, because it is tough and stringy, unlike snap beans, which are eaten for the pod, with the bean inside barely developed, and sometimes not even visible, as in the meaty haricot vert.

Most of the shelling bean crops are harvested when the pods and beans inside are dry, just before the pod shatters. After harvest, they are stored and sold throughout the year as dry beans. However, in late summer, some of these beans make it to the market in their fresh state — that is, when the edible seed is still moist, and can easily be bitten through. At this point the beans take only minutes to cook, not the hour or more needed for dried beans.

There are hundreds of varieties of shelling beans, many of them heirlooms that have been dropped from the large-scale commercial market. Their names, which are wonderfully romantic, often reflect their place of origin, history or historical event — 'Jacob's Cattle,' 'Hopi Yellow,' 'Seafarer, ' 'Nez Perce,' 'Soissons,' 'Cranberry' and 'Soldier.'

Almost any bean destined to be eaten dried can also be eaten fresh, but usually only five or six shelling bean varieties make it to the fresh market, and they are not always easy to find. The best sources for fresh shelling beans are local farmers' markets and markets that focus on local vegetables and fruits.

Fava beans, English peas, garbanzos, black-eyed peas and crowder peas, are, like shelling beans, eaten for the edible pea or bean inside, not the pod, and can also be used fresh in salads and soups, or to simply saute with herbs. Fresh garbanzos, black-eyed peas and crowder peas have a short window, and that is now.

If you haven't tried cooking fresh shelling beans and their kin, this forthcoming month is the time to get started. As a friend in the produce business said the other day, "What's funny about these shelling beans is that they're so simple to make taste good — all the work is in getting them out of their shell!"

The shelling process, however, is an ideal time to keep your family and friends in the kitchen, sipping a glass of wine, and all shelling together. It goes quickly that way.

Varieties:

Black-eyed peas. Pale green- to buff-colored beans, with a black eye at the helix. Pods are green to pale yellow. The flavor is earthy.

Butter beans. Round, plump beans in a pale yellow pod. Dense with a rich bean flavor.

Cannellini beans. White kidney-shaped beans, with a pale green to pale yellow pod that may be moist. Delicate bean flavor, not too dense.

Cranberry beans. Buff with dark red or magenta striping. Pods are pale yellow, with striping ranging from scarlet to burgundy, depending upon variety, and may be slightly moist. Dense, meaty bean flavor. Beans turn beige to brown on cooking.

Garbanzo beans. Pale green- to pale buff-colored beans. Pods pale green and hairy to buff. For best results fresh, choose the pale green pods. Slightly waxy, crunchy and nutty tasting.

Lima beans. Plump, flat, pale-green kidney-shaped beans. Pods green to buff, and should show bumps indicating the beans are formed inside. For best results fresh, choose the pale green pods.

How to select: Look for bright, fresh-looking pods, avoiding yellowing or withered ones. Gently squeeze the pods to make sure the beans inside are plump and good-sized. A pound of beans in the pod equals approximately 1 cup of shelled beans.

How to store: Refrigerate pods and use within a few days. Once shelled, wrap beans in plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator for up to two days before cooking.

How to cook: You will need to judge the time needed to cook the beans based on how mature they are. To do this, bite one of the shelled beans. If it is already quite tender, it will need only about 5 minutes of cooking. If it offers resistance, you may need up to 20-25 minutes of cooking.

There was more information that I had even thought of. So two days ago, I went to check the pods and found enough that were dried out that once shelled, I had about 1/2 a cup. I know: That's a very modest amount, but there are still many more out there. I doubt I'll fill a gallon jar, but since this was an experiment, I am happy with how well they did.

When shelled, the beans are white with little pinkish brown speckles all over them. Because they are fresh, the needed no soaking. I employed Donna Klein's "Beans in a Bottle" method to cook them.

Beans in a Bottle

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

Put the beans, 1 clove chopped garlic, 3 chopped fresh sage leaves, 2 chopped Roma tomatoes and about 2 tsp olive oil in a casserole dish. Cover the beans with hot water by about 1/2". Cover casserole dish with foil and poke about 4-6 slits in the foil. Bake for about 2 hours until beans are soft and creamy in texture. Since these are pinto beans, the liquid will darken quite a bit. That's normal. Once cooked you can use them for whatever you usually do with pinto beans, or you can make my Butternut Squash Enchiladas.

I love this time of year. For this dish the beans, the squash, the tomatoes, onions, garlic and sage all came out of my own garden! All the ingredients in this recipe can come from a store: fresh, frozen or from a can if you don't have a garden. But consider having a garden. Growing my own food is one of them most empowering things I do.

Enjoy!

Butternut Squash Enchiladas with Rice and Beans

Ingredients

1 cup cooked and mashed butternut squash
3/4 cup cooked pinto beans, seasoned with salt, garlic and tomatoes
1/2 cup Spanish rice (from a mix or homemade)
16 large black olives, 12 chopped, 4 kept whole
1/4 cup corn kernels, fresh, frozen (thawed) or canned
1 tsp cumin
4 one oz corn tortillas
1/2 cup tomato sauce, any kind mixed with
1/4 cup Salsa Verde, fresh or from a jar (Trader Jose's makes a nice one in a jar)
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1 oz shredded vegan cheese (optional)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees
Have at hand:
beans
rice mixed with corn and chopped olives
butternut squash mashed with cumin and cilantro
4 corn tortillas, heated in microwave, wrapped in a damp paper towel
tomato sauce mixed with Salsa Verde

To Assemble:
In a small casserole dish, ladle a little bit of sauce to cover the bottom.
Put 1/4 of the beans, rice mixture, squash mixture on a tortilla and roll up, placing seam side down in the baking dish.
Repeat until you've made four enchiladas.
Generously ladle sauce over the enchiladas. If you are using vegan cheese, sprinkle it on top. Garnish each enchilada with one whole black olive.
Cover and bake for 30 minutes or until hot and bubbly all the way through.

Serve with Guacamole, salsa and extra chopped cilantro.

Nutritional Info

• Servings Per Recipe: 4
• Amount Per Serving
• Calories: 210.1

• Total Fat: 5.1 g
• Cholesterol: 0.0 mg
• Sodium: 355.3 mg
• Total Carbs: 31.6 g
• Dietary Fiber: 6.4 g
• Protein: 6.3 g

Julie and Julia

I just got home from finally seeing Julie and Julia. I have to confess that I was like a leaky faucet through most of the movie and had to actually borrow and then totally soaked Tara's hanky during about the last hour of it.

Both stories touched my spirit and heart in ways too fresh and unanalyzed for me to put down into words. I just want to record that this happened. That I felt like I wasn't alone in my quest to write, to blog, to cook, to want to share how I transformed my own life and by doing that help others transform their lives.

I feel the muse. She is still coy and hasn't come into the house, but I feel her out there.

I pray she sticks around for a while.

It's been a dry summer.

The Runners To Whom I Give Great Gratitude

On the Fitness Challenge Thread on the Veggieboard, someone who is older than me lamented about wishing she had started working on getting fit when she was younger. I know the feeling of regret of wishing I had lived more in my body during all those years I didn't live there easily or happily, but one thing I have learned is that as long as I'm living, breathing and ambulatory, I can work on my fitness and it's never too late to start.

I'm 49. When I was about 28 I worked in an office that was less than 1 mile from the junior college which had a track. I wasn't a runner, in the official sense and while I did go exercise, I didn't have any sense of urgency about it like I do now. Having said that, I went to that track about 3x a week before work and did about 3 miles: 1/2 mile walk, 2 mile jog, 1/2 mile walk. There were two people who regularly came to the track who have become my role models and whose images are branded on my mind's eye.

One was a woman who was in her 80s. She wore neat matching top/bottom track suits. And she ran 2 miles. It was more of a shuffle than a run. I wasn't a fast runner, but I would easily lap her. If I was fast walking, I could lap her, but she was running and she was there just about every time I was there. She was slim and healthy and 80 years old if she was a day. It was obvious to me even then that she was doing this for her health, for herself and she didn't care about anyone else's business but her own.

The other person was a man in his late 50s or early 60s. He ran in running shorts with no shirt. His skin showed his age and with the arrogance of youth I wondered how he had the nerve to run without a shirt. But he ran. I could see that he'd been a fit person for many years and I could see age changing the tone of his body. But he looked fit and healthy. And he still ran.

There was one more person who influenced me: She was a relatively heavy woman who ran on this road that had a huge, long hill. I drove on this road often and watched her progress over time. At first, she'd run the beginning of the hill and would walk up the rest. Over time she began conquering more and more of that hill until she was running the whole thing. Her face would be beet red, the fat on her legs jiggled up and down as she ran and again, with the arrogance of youth, I wondered how she had the nerve to bare so much of her body and have people in cars see her exerting herself to such a degree.

I have remembered all three of these people as I've become A Person Who Exercises and A Person Who Is No Longer Young. My point of view has radically changed and I've forgiven myself the arrogance and snarkiness of my youthful judgments of these three people, their bodies, their age. As that younger woman, I hated my body and didn't do a hell of a lot towards her healthy upkeep.

The Universe gives a person her lessons in a sly way sometimes, as I have realized that all three of these strangers have become my role models. And even more, I've become all three of these people. When I run up the mountain, I can see the old woman running the track. I can see the heavy woman pushing herself to finally get to the top. When I'm running in the summer with bare arms, I can see how time is changing the texture of my skin as it moves up and down my arms with the concussion of my footfalls and I can see the aging man.

And I'm not young anymore nor anywhere near as arrogant about beauty and bodies. I'm just very glad I have one and that I have the drive and discipline to get out there and just do it as this gift I give to myself, to my now, to my future. And to my past, I give thanks for these three unwitting role models who, if they are even still breathing on the planet, will never know how they positively influenced me and the course of my life.

And of course this is one of the Great Mysteries of this life: positively influencing others and not necessarily ever getting to know that you did so. And it happens by just doing our lives and living our principles. It happens by not preaching about it, but by just doing it. And so, where ever these three souls are, I send my Great Gratitude for how you three have influenced my life in such a profound and positive way. May I be graced with the ability to pay it forward.

Stop Hating the Way You Look RIGHT NOW!

(My veggieboard readers will hopefully forgive me for reposting this piece that I wrote today on the Weight Watchers site. I don't want it to get lost in the wash of time. If it's here, it stays here.)

I am grief-stricken over some few small words I saw several people write today. They were, "I hate the way I look." Maybe I'm being triggered by my own self-hating behavior of yore. I found myself in tears reading some of the comments on a new person's body image thread this morning.

I'm grief-stricken that it's the year 2009 and girls are still becoming women who hate their bodies and hate the way they look.

I'm grief-stricken because I was one of those girls who became a woman who hated my body.

Why?
I didn't have the classic WASP body. (And how could I? I was a Jew of Eastern European descent.) I had a big butt and thick ankles, small breasts and big thighs.I was mercilessly teased about these parts of my body. I was stalked over these parts of my body. I was told by my obese mother as a child that I was fat. My slender grandmother called me a "Skinny Minnie". I was confused to say the least.

When I was 20 my measurements were (about) 33-24-36. I was fucking gorgeous and I HATED my body.

I had long, curly, lustrous hair. I had perfect skin and big blue eyes. I wore normal sized clothes, I had a perfect hourglass shape and a flat belly. I could do so many things, all my parts worked and I HATED MY BODY.

Was it programmed in?

Was it learned from never seeing myself on billboards or TV or magazines?

Was it because I was as sucked into the machine with all the other teenaged girls that I'd get the right boy or be prettier if I used this or that product or wore this or that brand in this or that size?

I have no freaking idea as to the why of it. Just that I did.

And at the age of 42 1/2 when I started this Weight Watcher journey, I finally started listening to my body and giving her the respect that she deserved. I have cried rivers over all those years, the most vibrant years of my life that were wasted because I hated my body so much. My dear, beautiful, wise, strong, healthy body.

I am crying right now over the waste of it all to see that young women are still going through this.

If I may be so bold to just reach through this cyber reality and just SHAKE you and say STOP IT! STOP IT RIGHT NOW!

Your body is how you get to be alive.

Your body is how your spirit and intellect and heart get to have a vehicle to experience all that you experience.

Your body does millions of things every day that you don't even have to know about or pay attention to.

Your body is a miracle.

No matter what you look like or what you THINK you look like, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL!

YOU ARE A MIRACLE!

So do it for the next generation if you can't yet do it for yourself.

STOP HATING THE WAY YOU LOOK.

It will maybe be a long journey, but it is so worth it to get to the other side. And I'm here to tell you that losing weight isn't going to get you there. It's deeper than that. Remember? So many of us hated the way we looked when we were young and dewy and thin, or at least thinner than we became. Losing the weight is good for you on so many levels, but it isn't going to fix or completely fix this broken place. There is some old, arcing wiring that has to be cut and a new pathway has to be wired in its place.

Don't waste the most vibrant years of your life!

And it starts with the first step: Dump the hatred. Just dump it. You don't need it and it's not serving anything. If you can just get to neutral, that's a great place to be. Love your body for what it does if you can't love it for how it looks. Over time, if you want to be in love with your outer casing, you will get there. The prize of self love on all levels is priceless. There is a whole lot of peace and self esteem that comes with it. That's more precious than gold. I know. I'm there. And I used to be a self-hater.

Can you hear this?

For the sake of your one precious life, for the sake of the next generation of women and all the generations of women to follow, I dearly hope so.

Was it All a Dream?

Was being a fat grrl all a dream? Was being 50 lbs overweight simply due to the rebound my body did after I let go of a drug and tobacco habit?

I started gaining weight when I was 29. Until then, for about a decade, minus the time I was pregnant with my son until he was about three months old, I was between 135 (at 19) and 150 (3 months post childbirth) lbs. The smoking started at about 30. The drugs, a year after that. I was in an emotionally abusive relationship from 29-32 and the speedier metabolism of my extreme youth was starting to slow down.

I was quite sure the slow gain that began at 29 was my ineffectual attempts at protecting myself from my abuser. But in getting really real, I had started gaining before that. I had bad eating habits; more about volume than content, although I was a fast food eater at times. I always loved to cook, so I did eat good, whole foods, although I'm sure I used too much butter and oil, ate too many Pepperidge Farm cookies and ice cream.

But why I ask, was it all a dream, is because for 3 1/2 years, I've been the size I was in my 20's. And despite taking breaks from tracking, despite watching my calorie count go from 1350ish post Weight Watchers, to about 1700 a day, I'm not gaining weight. I'm staying right about at goal: 150 lbs +/- a pound or two.

I know it's because I exercise every day and burn about 4000 calories a week doing so. I know that my muscle body has sped up my metabolism from the years I was a sedentary, heavy person. It surely isn't because I've "cured" my overeating and night time eating habits. That piece is still there. The exercise and the very sensible eating during the day often feel like "damage control" for the night time snacking, the vast affection for chocolate and my need to not feel caged and restricted.

Sure, I've done years of work now to heal the broken parts of self; to give them different and healthier "jobs" than to sabotage me or get me in trouble or lead me down thorny paths that are best not taken, but my body feels like it was all a dream. My body is forgetting what it was like to be heavy, in pain all the time, unhappy, disconnected from the rest of me. And my head is happy to comply with that forgetting.

So I'm here to say: No. It was not a dream. I was 205 lbs at my top weight. I have worked damn hard to get to where I am and finally where I am is a very happy in my body place. Yes. My thyroid is an issue, but I'm dealing with it. Yes. I'm aging and I can see it and I'm dealing with it. I'm dealing with it with love and admiration as I witness this aging body continue to thrive and shimmer.

Some people tell me I'm too skinny. I can't wrap my head around that at all. But I am happy here in this body place that is familiar from my youth when I didn't have to try.

I think the trick is realizing that, while newer and healthier patterns have been rooted and are working, this state of grace of not feeling like I'm working so very hard at this all the time is because the habits have become more automatic and NOT because I'm not working hard. I still work hard. It's just become the way I do my life.

And the losing path was really sexy. I think I'm finally in the place where staying right where I'm at is sexy too. Another state of grace.

It wasn't a dream.

My body thinks it was a dream.

I can live with that paradox.

I Seem to Have Some 'Splainin' To Do

(This is for Karen who nudged me. Thanks.)

I did it! I went to Born To Drum Women's Drum Camp for the third year in a row. This year camp was for 4 days and 3 nights; one night more than previous years. At the Walker Creek Ranch in West Marin County you are totally off line. No cell phone reception, no wireless. It was actually a blessed relief to be disconnected for a few days. It also meant that I didn't track my food after tracking Thursday's breakfast, until I began again with Monday's breakfast. 96 hours of no tracking, being totally out of my normal routine, having others feed me most of what I ate (I cooked my own breakfasts in the RV), and I didn't gain all my weight back. I gained a phantom pound that fell of within two days.

It is funny to me that I still get nervous about not tracking. That I still don't trust myself to stay within caloric boundaries necessary to maintain my weight. And the truth is, that whenever I do return to tracking after taking just a few days off, that first day of food journaling has me feeling a little restricted. And if I can feel restricted with eating 1600-1700 calories after just four days, that means I was eating more than that while not tracking. Another truth is, and I have said it before, after a lifetime of overeating and bad eating habits, 5 1/2 short years doesn't totally counteract that deep, deep hardwiring; that tracking is one of the cornerstones of my success and if I have to do it for the rest of my life to keep this slimmer, healthier, happier body, then so be it. It is truly a very small price to pay. Especially when you consider the alternatives. Like Bariatric Surgery.

So, yes. I ate my head off at camp. Not for no reason though. During class time, we were sitting in chairs or standing at our drums, but beyond class time we were walking all over the compound from RV to dining hall to class rooms to other class rooms to RV to the pond, etc. It was such a sharp contrast to my sitting in front of the computer for most of the day normal reality. Lots of movement. Lots of interactions with other people. Far more than I am used to. And all of that burned more of what I consider "non-exercise calories".

I got a new Polar Heart Rate Monitor for my birthday a few weeks ago. An F11. The F11 is more sophisticated than my F4, which I gave to Tara. Tara's a bit tachycardic. She strapped on the F4 for a whole waking day to see how many calories she burns in a normal day and she burned about 2400. That was without exercising, but she is a locksmith with a mobile shop and when she's not driving or running codes on her computer, she is getting in and out of her truck, and basically moving through space a lot more than I am.

In my normal day, with my very slow resting heartbeat, I burn less than 100 calories an hour. If I have a heavy cardio workout, my F11 says I burned far more calories than the less subjective F4, usually between 850-1025. So let's say 925. If I'm burning an average of 85 calories an hour during the other part of the waking day and 925 for 80 minutes of cardio exercise and I'm awake for about 17 hours, that's 1360 for the 16 hours I'm not exercising plus 925 for the 80 minutes that I am, for a total of about 2285 during the waking day. If I have a strength training or yoga session as my exercise for the day, I can subtract about 650 calories from that daily total, leaving me about 1635 burned for the waking part of my day.

I am quite sure that while at camp, my calories burned were way up from that average of 85 per hour. And that is why I was able to eat so much and not really gain anything. But I will confess that it was a relief, in a way, to return to the safety of my own day to day reality and to my tracking tools.

I've been struggling with my thyroid and adrenals these past months. I've been getting regular blood tests to see where my thyroid and other hormone levels are, but recently did a saliva test where I spit in a tube four times over the course of the day and had my cortisol levels tested. The results showed adrenal exhaustion. My hormone doc put me on something that whacked me pretty badly within just five days. I stopped taking it, but it's taken me over 2 months to recover from those five days. If camp had been six weeks earlier, I don't know if I could have done much of it at all, so I know I'm much recovered from the Cortef debacle of early May, but not totally back on my game.

Knowing that I was going to camp less energetic and able than last year had me make some agreements with myself before going. I would follow my energy levels and not regret what I didn't feel able to do. And since my top priority was the classes at camp and since I am so much more of a morning person than a night person; a reality that is so much more evident during these months of adrenal exhaustion and thyroid struggles, this is what camp looked like for me this year:

• I got up every morning between 6:00-7:00 and was outside or in some quiet classroom by 7:30 doing 45-60 minutes of yoga, using an audio recording or podcast on my iPhone. This was to counteract all the sitting on hard plastic chairs in the classes and benches in the dining hall.
• Breakfast
• I went to 1 or both of the morning classes on Friday/Saturday, the full days and took a hike during the first session on Sunday then went to the second session class.
• Lunch
• During the afternoon session, I either took the session (on Saturday) or went for a hike (on Friday) to move my body, sweat a little and recharge myself from all the interactions of being at camp and around so many people.
• This year there was a "Free Time" session during which I took a short nap or rest of some kind
• Dinner
• Evening events: Each evening had 2 things happening. This is where my body was so very clear about her needs and I did what I said I would do which was honor those needs without regrets. Each of the three nights I did the first evening event, but skipped the second one to go to bed. This meant that I missed the drum jam on the first night, the Healing Drum Circle with Vickie Noble on the second night and the 2nd set of the teachers' performances which went until 2:30 am.
• I took a total of 7 out of 10 class offerings. The reason I didn't take the three sessions that I skipped was more about there not being an offering I was interested in than anything else. I took 4 Afro-Cuban classes, 1 West African, 1 Venezuelan and one Ghanaian class. The four Afro-Cuban conga classes were taught by my own teacher and another teacher I love who is from NY. This is the kind of drumming I do most and what I teach. I did play my conga drum in the Venezuelan and the Ghanaian class and played an African Dundun during the West African class.

And even with all that self-care, I came home Sunday night, slept for nine hours the sleep of the exhausted and it is now Thursday and I finally feel like I've mostly recovered. This fragility is sobering to me and also evokes a small thread of grief. My drum teacher is 61 years old and she goes all night long. It's not about age necessarily. I have always been a strong and sturdy person with a good immune system and a strong body. Even when I was sick and out of shape, my body was strong. And now I've become a person who takes 2 kinds of thyroid and has weakness in my energy body. And I do feel grief about that. I haven't been the party all night grrl for a very long time, but I seem to have entered a new level of where my body is at. So the Pollyanna in me says, "Work with what you've got and you've got a lot!" but my inner critic and judge (who, by the way, have undergone a rigorous retraining program so they stop being toxic to me) say, "You aren't the grrl you used to be. The contrast is pretty obvious. Take good care so you can do more of what you want to and need to do!"

And this is my excuse for not blogging since May 11th. I blame it on my adrenals and my thyroid. I've let go of my writing group for the rest of the summer. The Muse hasn't been hanging around me like she does during the darker seasons when I don't have a garden calling on me every day, beautiful weather to be out exercising in or a desire to connect more with people and spend less time in my own inner landscape; the fertile ground where the Muse and I do most of our dancing.

I do trust that this ebb of creative inspiration is about the filling of the well with real life engagement and experiences and interactions with others so that when the Muse does return to grace me, the ebb returns to flow and I can express in written words the things that I feel send that ripple of healing and insight and Good/Right/Beautiful out into the world once again.

I Have Bad Days and Times Too

If all you knew of me was what I wrote in my blog, you might assume that I've healed my body hatred and self-loathing, "fixed" most of my bad habits that made and kept me a fat person for so many years and am just waltzing through this new life, in this new body, happy with what I have and have accomplished and free of all past poisons. 

And you'd be wrong. 

These last 10 days or so, I've been feeling very mortal and somewhat betrayed by my body. And when my emotional body feels betrayed, by my body or anyone else, there's usually some kind of hell to pay. About 10 days ago, I started developing a rash. It looked and itched like poison oak but after a few days, I started wondering if it wasn't something else. It was something else. It was a fungal or yeast infection on my skin. My groins were the worst, then my armpits, the elbow crease of one arm and one corner of my mouth. 

Finally, last Friday, I went to see my osteopath/hormone doc. He confirmed that it was fungal. He wanted to put me on a Naturopathic regime that was going to take up to two weeks to turn the tide, but I wasn't willing to wait. I weighed the liver stress of taking Diflucan against itching for another 2 weeks and I asked for the Big Bug Bomb. He wrote me a prescription and told me to use a topical athlete's foot cream for as long as the rash remained plus two extra days. I did the big loading dose of Diflucan on Friday afternoon, then did two days of a much smaller dose 2x a day. After three days my ears were ringing pretty loudly and I found that my heart rate was erratic and way too high upon any major exertion. I could feel a real body anxiety that is very different from emotional anxiety, which is not something I often experience, but I am very clear on the difference. I stopped the Diflucan and the rash is almost gone. 

I find it curious that right during the five days that I was taking a new hormone to support my adrenals, I broke out in this rash. I hadn't felt comfortable with this one: Cortef. It was prescribed by the aforementioned doctor after my cortisol panel showed adrenal exhaustion. I got the medicine and saw with no small concern that it was a version of hydrocortisone. I had been prescribed a steroid for HRT. It was a horrible five days. My body is very clear when she is distressed by something I put in her and this stuff was poison to me. Over five days, my exhaustion didn't improve, rather I was needing to actually nap in the afternoon and if that opportunity didn't present itself, I would be fighting to stay upright. When I was napping, I started having nightmares that increased in intensity over these five day. Nightmares that I couldn't move and couldn't breathe. So I stopped taking the drug. During these five days is when I got the rash. In my mind, as a fairly intelligent person, I felt pretty certain that there was a connection between taking a steroid, having my immune system crash, allowing an imbalance of yeast to occur and manifest as this awful rash. 

Yeast/fungus is a weak spot in my immune system. I know this because I have danced with athlete's foot on one foot for over 20 years. I treat it and it goes away, but it never stays gone. My doctor had told me that people of East European Jewish descent have issues with what he called "molds".  This most awful rash I've ever had that wasn't poison oak left me feeling so vulnerable to the whole eat and be eaten condition of the life experience. The spot in the corner of my mouth grossed me out the most. Thrush. Yuck. And this whole last 10 days that have been capped off with crappy sleep for three nights now has left me feeling very mortal. And because my emotional body somehow feels somewhat betrayed by my physical body, that voice is right back on my shoulder, whispering nasty things about my body to me in my ears, like she had never been sent to the back of the bus to play her endless games of chess. 

Saturday, when alone in the woods, every time I tried to run, my heart rate jumped immediately up to the 160s. Too fast! That created some anxiety that had me jumping at squirrels and birds. "You better not have a heart attack out here all by yourself. You'll die out here and get eaten by crows. Maybe it's too dangerous to go out in the woods alone, hmm?" 

Luckily, I ran into Patrick, Sally and their two dogs and we all came off the trail together. And I was fine. I didn't have a heart attack. But I did have those minutes of feeling fragile, vulnerable and mortal which kicked in the mean, parental voice that still lives in my psyche, still forgets about chess once in a while to come whisper poison into my ear. Going out in the woods alone is what I do. I do what I can do to make my experiences safe and happy, but the vagaries of life happen. I know I've been lucky. I am empowered by going out by myself. I've had to dis-spell a lot of "survivor" fear to do it. Going out in nature, being in my body in nature is healing to parts of me that were long broken.

I have felt like there has been a battle going on in my body these past 10 days. My emotions are erratic, I've felt like I have cooties and these past nights I've not been sleeping. Last night was only about four hours of broken sleep that has left me feeling like crap-on-toast. I decided on a moderately vigorous yoga practice for my exercise this morning. I bring in a mirror and check my poses out for good alignment. I'll admit, I like seeing how strong I am too, but today I just saw the fat girl. I look no different than I did yesterday and yesterday I had a weigh-in under 150 lbs for the first time in about two months. Yesterday I was feeling and thinking I was looking "skinny" but today I thought I was looking "fat".  The critic was driving the bus to such a degree today that I even changed my yoga pants 10 minutes into my practice today because I thought I looked too fat in the pair I had put on. Fat seems to be the default self-hater that still lives somewhere in my psyche. If I perceive myself as fat then I am deserving of loathing. That pattern is so old and so toxic, I'm realizing that it is one of the hardwired in patterns, possibly pre-verbal that has been part of my operating system for most of my life. 

But it is different now. In the before, I wouldn't have even been aware of what I was doing in the continuum of my days. With my somewhat amazing ability to screen out what I don't want to face and deal with in my inner landscape, I would have just done what I had always done, which was to screen out the mean voices. This never kept me from taking the poison; it was in the very air I breathed, but the difference was that unless someone who cared about me pointed out how mean I was to myself, I was oblivious to it. It was part of the way I operated. 

Today, during yoga, I was aware that I was having negative feelings about how my lower body looked in pants while I was exercising. I was excruciatingly aware that my dear body was moving with grace and exhibiting glorious levels of strength at the same time I was grappling with this inner critic, this misdirection of one aspect of my emotional body's voice which was bigger and louder and much, much older than the newer, healthier voice that was noticing and appreciating my strength and grace and was being of my body rather than separate from her. 

I think that having my body's flora get so unbalanced affected my emotional connection with my world. I think bombing the building with Diflucan escalated a battle that was already occurring, and added another layer of feeling out of my emotional and physical center. And all of this was in addition to my emotional reaction to feeling mortal and being in a body that was struggling instead of mostly glowing.  

When I finished my yoga practice with shavasana, the sunlight came in the window and began warmly shining on my face. Instead of rolling on my side and pushing myself up to sitting, facing the sun, making mudras with my hands and saying in words in my head all the things I was grateful for, I rolled onto my side, allowing the beam of sunlight to shine fully on my face, but I didn't get up. My hands found each other in Namaste at my heart and I just let myself feel. The feeling was Good: No laundry list of gratitudes, just the feeling of Good. For a few precious moments, I was a baby, before language, without any unattended needs, just me, on my side, hands in prayer, sunlight in my face, my body feeling the life force pulsing through. 

And I reset myself again. Again, I lead myself back into this newer reality of self-love and care, holding that part of self that still hates me and still having something like faith, or maybe it's just stubborn determination that all the parts of me will continue to heal. That I will continue to be quicker at seeing the old, destructive patterns when they get triggered and start trying to assert themselves. That I continue to face my Critic towards positive tasks when I need her and send her to the back of the bus for endless games of chess with the Judge when I don't need her. 

Because I like this life, this body, this degree of inner peace that I have attained over these past 5 1/2 years. And a person just has to keep rolling up her sleeves, because the alternative is a landscape I don't want to live in any more. 

Maddy's Obsessive/Compulsive Parts Speak: On Counting Calories Burned and Fitness Minutes

I've confessed this before, but here it is again: I have a certain component of obsessive/compulsiveness in my personality. In holding to my commitment of working with who I am instead of against who I am, the o/c part of me is thrilled with the job of recording fitness minutes and calories burned during those minutes. 

Joining SparkAmerica last year and seeing my fitness minutes add up has been, well, thrilling to me. For the first time that I can remember, I set a linear goal that went one whole year out. And then I exceeded that goal by hundreds of minutes. So this year I set a higher goal. And here, in the beginning of May, I'm ahead of par for this new goal for this new year. Breaking the minutes down into months is the driver for the Fitness Challenge thread that I post to every day on the veggie board. This month is the twelfth month that I've been participating in this challenge. It is really rewarding to see my fitness minutes add up over the course of the month. My o/c parts get to constantly calculate and recalculate par and how far I have to go to make my goal.

Getting my humble Polar F4 Heart Rate Monitor last year, which calculates calories burned was like the Best.Birthday.Present.Ever for that part of me. While I'm running, I'm figuring, in 10 minute blocks what my average calories burned per minute are. I'm figuring out how many minutes it takes me to run a mile uphill, run a mile downhill and less often, run a mile on a flat course.  I'm doing arithmetic in my head all the time. But the truth is, I have always done arithmetic in my head. The blessing/curse of having a math teacher for a father? Not sure. 

For what it's worth, here's why I like counting fitness minutes: 
I count both fitness minutes and calories burned and have a weekly goal for both. My exercise week resets on Sunday. I've completed this week with 610 fitness minutes. (My SparkPeople goal is 525). Regarding calories burned, I set that goal based on how much I like to eat vs how much I want to stay right here at this weight. My goal is 3400 calories burned per week. 

This is what I did this week: 
290 minutes of yoga 
115 minutes of Core Fusion (Pilates based strength training)
total: 405 minutes of strength and flexibility work 
205 minutes of cardio 
Total calories burned: 3175, leaving me 225 calories short of my calories burned goal. 

Prior week: 
135 minutes yoga 
45 minutes Core Fusion 
total strength training 180 minutes 
415 minutes of cardio 
total: 590 Fitness minutes 
Total calories burned 3750, exceeding goal by 350 calories burned. 

Both weeks I exceeded my minutes goal. Both weeks I exercised every day, a couple of days doing two different things, usually one thing in the morning and another in the afternoon. 

If I only looked at calories burned, I'd probably be much slacker on my strength training because it doesn't burn nearly as many calories as cardio. But the truth is, I need the strength training to stay strong and flexible and actually undo the "damage" I do by running. These are two extreme weeks in terms of the balance between the cardio and the strength training. But just like you don't need to eat all your essential nutrients in one day, more like over one week, you can mix and match what you do for exercise. The place where my o/c tendencies get sent to the back of the bus is when my body clearly wants to follow a different path than my head's agenda. Then all bets are off and I follow my wise body's lead. I believe that it's good to follow what you feel up to, or feel like doing and in the end, it is all good. 

I wanted to share this with people newer to the wide and vast world of exercise and I hope my ridiculous numbers don't put you off. It has taken me over five years to get here. I think of my prioritization of my fitness program as a crucial part of the mission to "save my own life". It is just as crucial and deserving of high priority to me as journaling my food and eating a healthy diet. 

All kinds of exercise are good; serious and playful, intense and leisurely. What I've learned is that the more I move, the better I feel and the more confident I feel in my body. And feeling confident and good in my body, after almost an entire adult life of feeling the opposite, is a gift that I both work hard for and never take for granted.

Taking a Moment to Record Being Happy (or) "The Simple Ecstasy of Breathing"

I was starting to really feel good this past weekend: I went to Sonoma County and had the blessed privilege to see Patricia, my Feldenkrais Goddess for a treatment. From there, I went to my old home town of Occidental, picked up y friend Mar and drove through Monte Rio and along the Russian River to the coast where it was a splendidly beautiful day. We had a picnic at Goat Rock, my favorite little piece of CA coastline, saw the Harbor seal mamas and their babies at the mouth of the river and had a chance meet up with Mar's grown children, daughter in law and her granddaughter who is just past five months old. I spent the night at a friend's house who was not home, woke up to a gorgeous Sebastopol dawn, drank coffee, packed myself up and went for a run for over an hour on the lovely, relatively flat and level Joe Rodota trail. Running on a well groomed, relatively flat trail is a real treat for me, since where I run here in Willits there are no flat, well groomed places, more like mountains and rocky trails or steeply hilled streets.

After the run, I went all the way into Sebastopol, which I have to admit is my favorite town on this planet and was the center of my world for 23 years before moving from Sonoma to Mendocino County. Daniel, my son, met me at The Slice of Life for breakfast. It was joyful to be with him, joyful to go to a vegetarian restaurant where I didn't have to negotiate my food and joyful to be flying on the endorphins from my run and the caffeine from my coffee.

After breakfast, we spent a long time across the street at the Sebastopol Farmers' market, which is a vibrant, weekly community event. After shopping, we sat on a bench, people watched and talked. Eventually, it was time for me to start heading back towards home, as I am teaching my African brother Dian Sewo to read.

While I was down in Sonoma County, my heart was filled to bursting with the beauty of my former home in her most glorious season. I felt some grieving and regret at not living there any more. I really owned all of my feelings and tried not to be hard on myself for having the grief/sadness/regret be in front of the joy and delight at being there. I spoke it aloud to both Tara on the phone Saturday night and to Daniel while we were together on Sunday.

I was pretty tired when I got home, but Dian Sewo was coming in a few minutes, so I just rallied. This was our second lesson. Dian Sewo speaks seven languages but has never learned to read and write, which is a very difficult handicap to run with here in America. I am his sponsor. I take my sponsorship of him seriously. He is family to me, to us. And I want him to be strong in this world here so he can contribute what is needed to his wife, my friend Fanny, and their beautiful 8 month old daughter Sahdjoo. We ended up spending our entire time together working on arithmetic: adding, subtracting, multiplying and making a budget. After teaching how to write it out by hand, I taught him how to use the calculator on his iPhone. I know that every lesson leaves him a little more empowered.

Sunday night I told Tara that I felt so fortunate: I really like my child, my wife and my mother. I have never had all three together like I do now and I spoke to that and took a moment to really feel the blessing of that. Right now, I'm feeling the love all around me and am not really in struggle with anyone at all. Life without draining drama is so liberating!

Monday was a tough day making a living, but at 3:30 I got a nice wine sale right before my meeting with Steve, the creative writing teacher whose class I wrote about in January. The class ended up not working out for me or him and he offered to meet with me for one hour 1 on 1 for 3 sessions instead to help me really get my book moving forward. We had a very good meeting yesterday and I think we both left the encounter flying high. I know I was. I had a few "aha!" moments about form and structure that I believe will help me greatly. I felt this great gratitude for both of us staying open through the difficulties that we had with each other and having this creative solution be presented and implemented. I felt gratitude in the moment of our encounter yesterday, for his creative input and his graciousness.

That night Tara and I shared our days and both of us had had really positive interactions with other people that left us feeling good about ourselves and the great good fortune we both had in our lives. I felt a richness all around me that had nothing to do with material wealth.

Today is a beautiful day too and I had an appointment with my osteopath down in Redwood Valley, about 15 miles south of Willits. As I was driving, sun roof open, drinking in all the new green, the California poppies blooming, the old, gnarled valley oaks with their maidenly heads of newly unfurled leaves, warm wind blowing in the open windows, warm sun on my head through the sunroof, I felt happy. Happy, like I was unfurling my new growth too. Happy in my body, in my spirit, in my heart, creatively engaged, feeling blessings all around me with all my senses.

These past days of warm, green, growing, burgeoning Spring I feel my own greening, my own growing, my own burgeoning, my own warming, . And today it's easy to believe that the flower growing towards the warm sun and the hundred year old oak branch unfurling those delicate, light green leaves feel the same joy at being alive that I do. Tara often says a blessing in Arapaho. The literal translation is "It is enough" Nenéé nehínee is the closest translation I could find. And today; these past few warming days, I have felt this deep in my core.

This was today's Note From the Universe:

"Ohhhh, to be alive in time and space, Maddy! If only those now living could recall what such a prospect once meant to them before their life began. And what it still means to multitudes in the unseen now awaiting their own initiations who, try as they may, can't even imagine the simple ecstasy of breathing.

To them, you already "have it all,"

The Universe"

"The simple ecstasy of breathing."

It is enough.

And the Truth Will Set Me Free

So much happened this weekend at the Wild Women's Weekend. I'm still digesting most of it. But something happened between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon that is begging to be shared. I've written here recently and probably farther back in this blog about putting your goodness out into the universe and trusting that some of it will help some people or creatures or causes along their journey. And that you didn't necessarily get to know how much you affect the world around you. 

In the learning to love myself, I have focused a lot of attention on "catching myself doing something right," and seeing how and if I can see how it manifests around me. Today I got to dance with the shadow of this dynamic. 

On Saturday night a woman named Kym was playing. Kym is a singer songwriter, an event producer, a single mother of two children about 6 and 11 and a denizen of Sonoma County, my former home. She's brazen and tells it as she sees it. Sort of like me. And I remember that there was something that had happened with the two of us, that I had gotten really mad at her about something, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was. It happened "a long time ago" (6 years) and the encounter or event had been absorbed into the spongey place in my mind where my memory tries to be.

Kym performs. Her 11? year old daughter does a rap bit complete with dancing and she's breathtaking. She's a complete embodiment of the No-No Grrl we had called in as the Maiden Aspect of the Goddess the night before. Kym's daughter is beguiling. Kym's performance is moving and wonderful. I see her beauty. I see her beating heart. And she tells a story of being fired from a once a year event that she had been running the stage and hiring the entertainment for. Why? Because she spoke truth to power to a group of people, several of them women from the same life style and community that she lives in. She probably made them (rightfully) uncomfortable, and they fired her. 

And I really saw her. And I saw that she was hurting around this. I saw that as a "real" feminist (a woman questioning why women performers made so much less than their male counterparts at a certain festival), and a heterosexual woman who most likely has so many more opportunities to raises her sword to colonization and its insidious daggers and barbs than a pretty separatist and far more reclusive person like me has to and I knew I had to make some kind of contact with her and hopefully it would feel right so I could find the place to tell her that I saw her, that it was colonization and that she was Good and Right and Beautiful. 

I believe that part of the reason I love myself and my life as much as I do is because when Tara and I got together, she started saying that to me: "Maddy. You are Good and Right and Beautiful," and the parts of me that felt Bad and Wrong and Ugly would start another layer of healing. And there were many layers. There still are, but there are so many less layers than when she started saying this to me. 

This was Saturday  night. It's now Sunday afternoon and we're coming into our closing circle. I put my arm around Kym's shoulders and say, "There was some stuff between me and you. But I can't remember what it was and I release it," She bursts out laughing, but I'm thinking she doesn't recognize me from that long ago event that I can't remember. No doubt. I am 50 lbs lighter, my hair is much shorter and I've aged a bit. But it's not time to tell her what I want to tell her so I wait. 

After the closing circle there is a Bye Tea. We all have tea and pick at snacks, exchange phone numbers and start saying goodbye. I get Kym aside for a minute and I tell her. All three things: That I see her; that the way the women from the festival committee turned on her is a symptom of colonization; that she is Good and Right and Beautiful. I watched the pores of her skin receive being seen. She hadn't considered the colonization bit. And she got tears in her eyes as she tried to absorb the Good and Right and Beautiful. But my goodness and magic aren't why I'm relaying this tale. 

We started talking. Really talking. And Kym says to me after about 15 minutes, that she is envisioning a women's music festival held at a beautiful ranch in Sonoma County called Ocean Song.  She had produced an event there before called Baring Witness She produced this event; an anti-war protest during which over 100 women laid out naked on a hill with their bodies shaped into the word TRUTH. She pulled it together with a week's notice and with a nursing baby in her arms. You can read about it here. I exclaimed that I had been there! I had been part of the middle T in TRUTH. 

She lamented that the straight and lesbian women's communities still had a lot of healing to do with each other and proceeded to relate a story about how this was supposed to be a women-only event; that many women had voiced that they would only felt safe taking their clothes off if there were no men present. Kym had called the local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and requested a woman photographer. They said they only had a man available. She made a judgment call and in the name of getting the story in a major regional paper, she agreed. So she's telling me this story and I'm remembering this part, because I was there. And then she says, "And this woman Maddy got really mad at me for letting this man in to take photos. She and a couple of other women said some things to me that were so hard for me. I was doing my best on a week's notice with a baby in my arms. I didn't know it would be such a big deal."

I burst out, "That was me! I am that Maddy!" I saw the recognition bloom in her face and we both started to laugh. Then we were hugging and crying and laughing all at the same time. The words we exchanged to bring this circle to closure were affirming and kind. 

And I now remember why I had been so angry at her. And I laughed with some degree of discomfort at the me that I was then. I laughed as I forgave myself for that forgotten transgression of using my words like knives. Maybe I laughed because it was so way past time to forgive Kym for making a unilateral decision that caused many older, separatist lesbians to get angry and perhaps feel unsafe which fueled some need of mine to be their champion or their voice. Or maybe my own. And maybe it was also way past time to forgive the knee jerk standoff that so often has people who were trying to be allies, forget that they were if something that seems "other" raises its head between them. 

And I laughed at the humbling lesson that was the most prized gift of the weekend: This strong, get-things-done, powerful woman said to me, about the anger she received as she pulling off this amazing feat, "It was like a piece of sardine stuck to the can," and I got it that this interaction that I had forgotten was a splinter that had been embedded in this woman's psyche for over six years. And I gave her this splinter. 

I think that splinter was pulled out and given back to the Earth today. With laughter. With grace. With two women seeing each other as the amazing allies they could be. With both of us seeing each other with the veils fallen away for the first time. And what I learned today was that all our words have power. That, yes, we can surely heal with them, but we can also wound and scar. Like a surgeon's blade, my words can harm or they can start a healing process. And I find that this knowing today makes me feel humble. The truth isn't always easy to dance with, but I feel that I must. And in doing so, with this Truth, something in me was set free.

Welcome Spring!

There's this event going on in Willits this weekend: Wild Women's Weekend. My friends Ileya and Mana are hosting it at their wonderful art, music, ritual space downtown. I was asked to do an invocation of Spring. I asked three of my drum students to help me. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to say. Or more accurately, I asked over a period of about a week who wanted to be called in? And the answer came pretty clearly:

Spring is the maiden aspect of the goddess. The maiden is one of the sacred trinity of Maiden, Mother and Crone. In modern times, much talk has happened about a fourth aspect which years ago we dubbed the Amazon Artist. Since women live so much longer than in times of yore, there was a big gap between the milky, creative Mother years and the post menopausal Crone years and hence the Amazon Artist; woman walking into her full power as creatrix, as knowing her own self and having more of herself to actually devote to self-growth and empowerment. And it is the aspect of the goddess that I have been embodying for many years now as I stand on the precipice of cronedom. 

But it was the first day of Spring yesterday and that is the time of the Maiden. And when I opened to who wanted to be invoked to help us in these strange times, a girl child was not the aspect that wanted, no, demanded to come it. The Maiden for 2009 (in my world) is the Teenager: the No-No Grrl; She who pokes at the edges of everything and asks "Why?" and says "No!"  to whatever doesn't make sense to her; She who is each of our own personal scouts that finds the boundaries and pushes at them, stands up with no fear and says, "This is not the way I want it to be!" and changes it. She's the rebel, the fierce one who lives in every woman, only waiting to be given the out-ward facing job of being the edge and boundary pusher. 

And we called, sang, drummed and danced her in last night. 

It was a short ritual, more of just an invocation, and it took everything I had. Embodying my inner teenager for 30 minutes was exhausting. But it needed to be done and it is done. A group of women from age 20 to age 99 (seriously; there was a woman there who will turn 100 on 9/11) called in the No-No Grrl and the room was buzzing with joy and laughter, energy and attitude by the time I left to come home. 

And today, for the first time since January 16th, my very peri-menopausal body started a period.  Blessed Bleed. 

And Welcome Spring!

May our sap rise fiercely to empower us to do the important work that is to be done. And may every woman find her inner No-No Grrl and face her outward to change the world. 

Recipe Time! Creamy Sweet Potato, Red Lentil Soup

I'm getting over my first cold in about a million years. I must say it's been rather a relief to be five days in and realize that this is a "cold" and not bronchitis or pneumonia. I've been staying down and doing a fair amount of soup and tea making and consuming. This soup was born of my desire for Vegan Penicillin. In my mind, miso based soups and lentil based soups are good for what ails me. This is, of course, a lentil version. 

Creamy Sweet Potato, Red Lentil Soup

This is a creamy, filling, spicy, beautifully colored, comfort soup. 

Ingredients

2 tsp olive oil 2 tsp cumin seed one large onion, chopped 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 Tbsp ginger micro-planed or very finely minced 1 small jalepeno pepper, minced (optional) 1 tsp turmeric 3 cups peeled, cubed sweet potatoes (garnet is the best for this because of its dark color) 1 cup red lentils 6 cups water with 3 cubes no-salt-added vegetable boullion or 6 cups vegetable broth  juice of 1 large or 2 small lemons chopped cilantro for garnish (optional)

Directions

Heat the olive oil in a heavy bottomed 2 qt or larger saucepan. Add cumin seeds and saute until they start popping. Add onion, garlic and jalapeno pepper. Saute for about 5 minutes, stirring often over medium heat. Sprinkle turmeric over the onions and saute another minute to thoroughly coat everything.  Add broth, ginger, sweet potatoes and lentils, stirring occasionally until it reaches a boil  to keep lentils from clumping. When it reaches a boil, reduce heat to simmer and simmer partially covered until sweet potatoes and lentils are very tender, about 30 minutes.  Stand an immersion blender straight up and down in the pot so bottom of blender is flush with the pot and blend soup until it is thick and creamy. There should still be some chunks of sweet potatoes and pieces of onion that you can see. If you don't have a stick/immersion blender, then puree 3/4 of the soup in a blender and stir back into the pot with remaining 1/4 of soup.  Stir in lemon juice to taste Garnish with cilantro if desired.  Nutritional Info Servings Per Recipe: 6 Amount Per Serving Calories: 212.9 Total Fat: 3.8 g Cholesterol: 0.0 mg Sodium: 557.0 mg Total Carbs: 36.8 g Dietary Fiber: 10.4 g Protein: 7.5 g

Something Food Related That I Was Thinking About While Cooking Last Night

Last night I was making a Thai curry with light coconut milk and green curry paste. I've been looking at this bowl on my counter for months now. It has been filled with a slowly-decreasing number of winter squash: Spaghetti squash and Delicatas from my garden and one sugar pie pumpkin and acorn squash that I had bought at the Willits farmer's market in, oh, I think November. Last night I was inspired to use the littlest of the Delicatas. In my mind's eye I saw thin, arched slices, tender from being simmered in broth and coconut milk, in the company of carrots, green beans and cilantro, cashews and seitan sausage, served over Jasmine rice.

It was a quick, cheater's broth: a cup of water with a packet of Trader Joe's vegetable broth concentrate diluted into it. First I cut the squash the long way, cut off the ends and scooped out the seeds and minimal pulp. Then I cut the squash halves in half again the long way, then cross cut in 1/4" thick slices. I simmered the squash in the broth for about 10 minutes, then added thinly sliced carrot, my own frozen green beans and a few ounces of light coconut milk. The green beans got me thinking: I remembered the work of picking, prepping, blanching and freezing. It's not a lot of work. Green beans are one of my favorite things to grow and if the harvest is good, I will usually have beans in my freezer until the next summer. This was not to be this last year, as the very short growing season and the fires in June/July conspired to create a rather scanty harvest of many things in the garden this last year. And so, as I portioned out a cup of beans from the last bag in the freezer, I got to thinking about eating locally.

The price of gas is rising again and I don't trust anything about or connected to the price of gas. The prices of everything went soaring when gas went up to $4.50 a gallon last spring and summer and those prices haven't really come down. For a person like me who is committed to eating organic, it can get very expensive to buy organic green beans (probably from Mexico) in February. Right now I have chard in my garden. The ubiquitous chard that happily grows through heat and frost, downpourings in winter and scanty watering in the summer. I have chard. I have some onion greens. That is what "eating local in season" would look like if I were to rely on what was growing right now in February. And if I needed to rely on my own garden, the chard would be all eaten up pretty quickly. But I do have electricity and a freezer. I do know how to dry or can things and preserve them in clean glass jars, so it is possible to have "summer in a jar" around our house.

I haven't bought tomato sauce or canned tomatoes in years. We do the work and very little goes to waste with the tomatoes. I braided up all the garlic last summer and ate my own garlic all the way through to the end of December. There are about 14 spaghetti squashes in the garage and I have a freezer full of completely prepped fava beans. And one bag of green beans. The last one. The one I used a cup out of last night. And while I was cooking, I thought about what the flow would have looked like if I had used fresh beans. Not much different, but I would have had to take the time to prep them and they would have gone into the pan to simmer much sooner than was needed for the prepped, blanched, frozen green beans.

The word "convenient" flitted across the screen of my mind. And I had to smile. At the back end of all this planning, digging, planting, watering, feeding, protecting from raccoons, harvesting, prepping, blanching and freezing, it was a pretty simple thing to measure out a cup of beans and scatter them into a simmering saute pan. It was convenient. Just like deciding that last night would be the night to eat the second of three delicata squash that I was able to harvest from a plant that started late, was uprooted again and again by the damn raccoons that plagued my garden last year and survived to give me three squash that landed in the large ceramic bowl that has been sitting on the penninsula, filled with one bounty or another since about August. There it was; a perfect two serving sized squash that only needed to be cut, deseeded, peeled and sliced to be turned into a componant of a delicious curry.

Gardening is not convenient. Sometimes it's downright frustrating and heartbreaking. But something in me has me face the challenges and the work and grow food. And then harvest and preserve food. As the price of gas follows its strange, incomprehensible path and we as a country fall further and further into a recession/depression, I'm glad for the space that we've nurtured and built to grow food. I'm glad for the things I've learned along the way about how to grow it. I was glad to eat my curry last night and know for sure that two of the ingredients in it required no gasoline to get to me and onto my plate. And that the luxury of fresh tomatoes in January may become a thing of the past, replaced by what I put in a jar or dried in September. But not yet. Right now, the convenience of just driving to town for chocolate, for coffee, for coconut milk, for vanilla beans, for agave syrup, for vital wheat gluten, for all the other things that come to me with the price tag of the true cost of gasoline, are still an option. And maybe I'm just an alarmist and they always will be an option.

But I can't help but try to think of what our lives would look like, what our table and pantry would look like if it wasn't.

Working Out at Home: How Much Space Do You Think You Need?

Behold the odd, diagonal space that I use to burn at least 1/3 of my weekly calories: My house is not very big, total square footage is less than 1100, and when we remodeled three years ago, we sacrificed many square feet of "living room" to create a larger, workable kitchen. What you see in the picture is:
On the right: the end of my couch.
On the left: the penninsula of the kitchen.
Space between the short, flattened corner of penninsula and couch: 6'
Our TV is on a cart with wheels. It sits flush against the wall when not in use and is swung around at about a 45 degree angle for exercise and a full 90 degrees to be facing the couch when we want to watch TV, vs interact with TV for exercise.
Space from the bottom of the picture frame (end of yoga mat), to the edge of the rolled up carpet: 9'
What I have to do to exercise with the TV in the living room:
I have to take the coffee table and turn it perpendicular to the couch and push it flush with the wood stove hearth. I then roll up the carpet. Then I sweep the floor; basically the entire field of the photo and all the way off the bottom and bottom left of the photo field.
Once I've done that, I'm good to go. In terms of "free wall space" for yoga or Core Fusion Body Sculpting, I don't have any that is standing height. I have the office door. On the occasions when I want to do inversions like handstands or headstands, I go totally out of the picture field and use the closed office door. For Core Fusion abdominal work, I use the long side of the penninsula that you see in the photo, as it only needs to be as high as I am while sitting on the floor and putting my feet and legs up into a V shape.

It's a small space. I hear people talk on the message boards about having a very small living space and not being able to make the room to exercise. And I know from doing this for several years now, that the 6' spot in my own space is sometimes restricting. Sometimes it forces me to turn my mat and orient 90 degrees away from the DVD I'm using, so as to not hit the penninsula or edge of the couch, usually with my feet when I'm doing some yoga thing that has me fully extended. With my arms over my head and feet fully extended, I'm well over 6' in length.

Yet the fact of the matter is that a space that is an oddly shaped 6' x 9' at its narrowest is far larger than my yoga mat, which measures in at 2'x70", or 2' x 5'10". Unless I'm dancing or doing some creative, flowy Shiva Rea lying down something, my mat is the world upon which my calories are getting burned and my body is getting stronger and more toned.

Perspective is everything: When I was doing a combination of yoga classes in the big studio at the gym and doing DVDs at home, my home space felt very small and somewhat restrictive. Now, not only do I not go to classes at the gym, but the entire gym is closing at the end of the month. This makes my sixish by ninish foot space seem quite adequate, for it is surely larger than no space at all. Also, I've adapted: I know when I have to turn that 90 degrees on my mat to avoid kicking the penninsula or the couch or hit the rolled up portion of the carpet. I've learned in an empirical way that my space is adequate. In fact the area of my yoga mat is adequate for doing most of what I do for exercise here in my living room. I've been exploring a dance DVD called Soul Sweat. I don't use a mat for that. I'm moving around the space dancing and even with two steps forward and four steps back, my space is adequate. I've learned to move "on a bias". I've learned to utilize what I have.

I think it all comes down to what motivates you. Times are tricky for many people right now and when the money gets scarce, things like gym memberships seem to float to the top of the list of the slash budget. If you do things like yoga, body sculpting, free weight lifting or other exercise that requires the minimal space of a yoga mat, do you have that 2' x 6'? Can you make it with a little rearranging? Yes. It's a pain in the ass to have to move furniture, roll up carpets and sweep the floor every time I want to exercise at home. But it's about priorities. I want to be fit. I want to be strong. I want the "feel good" that yoga, weight training, body sculpting, etc gives me and I've organized it all in my head that the housecleaning and furniture moving are worthy prices to pay to have those things. And the end result is that that modest yoga mat; that modest 6' x 9' space has become an entire universe in which transformation continues to happen.

"Gotta Have it Now": An Idea Whose Time is Over

I read the other day through a link on Huffpost that Starbucks is ceasing their "every 30 minutes no matter what" policy of freshly brewing pots of decaffeinated coffee after 12:00. They say this is part of how they'll save $400 MILLION by September by doing this, among other things relating to reducing "labor and production expenses". When I related this to Tara, her first response was to shake her head and shudder that this policy of brewing fresh pots of coffee every 30 minutes has been creating hideous excess and waste for years. She spoke to the land and water and labor used to grow this coffee that went literally down the drain.

However, this was not the first thing that I thought about. The first thing I thought about was why Starbucks brews fresh coffee every 30 minutes. My first thought was that it is us in our high speed quest for instant gratification, instant response, that has driven businesses in a highly competitive culture to be the fastest, the cheapest, the most convenient so we will patronize their business or employ their services. So first I thought it was us. But the more I thought about it, I realized that we've been trained to want things immediately. This may be an idea created on many Madison Avenue drawing boards for corporate strategies, but my deeper sense says no, it's more than that. It feels more like an agreement we've made in this digital age of wondrous new technology, the point of it all which seems to have created a dynamic by which we are both instantly accessible to anyone or thing in the world as well as have other people and things be instantly accessible to us; to click on a webpage and be transported there in a moment; to push the button on the answering machine and get the message with no more than a second delay; to put the DVD or CD in, advance it instantly, take it out when it's done with no rewind; to cook our food in microwave ovens or buy fast "food"; to rarely have to stand on a line for any length of time; to not stand for having to wait long for much of anything.

But back to coffee: When I mentioned our conditioning to want our coffee fresh, Tara's reply was, "What's so bad or wrong with coffee that is more than 30 minutes old?" Now this is the grrl who sometimes gets the acid swill at the gas station and grew up with camp coffee. This is not to say that she doesn't appreciate the difference in a fine and fresh cup of coffee, but her way of seeing this was to posit that we are way too spoiled as a culture if we are tossing 30.1 minute old coffee for fresh based on a rarified and conditioned expectation. And I do agree that this is part of a much larger problem. Upon Googling "Starbucks to stop brewing decaf after 12:00", I was dismayed at the blog posts and news headlines that came up, like this one: Sad News For Starbucks Decaf Lovers. The company has said that it takes FOUR MINUTES to brew a cup of decaf fresh. FOUR MINUTES. So please tell me what is sad here? The death of thousands of oak trees in CA: That is sad news. The loss of tens of thousands of American jobs: That is sad news. Having to waif for FOUR MINUTES for a cup of decaf? That is not sad. That is, in my opinion, the turning of a tide.

Before this headline appeared, I had espied a new Starbucks ad on TV. It's an "Obama campaign-like" TV ad with digital, soy-based ink-like colored animation that is encouraging and touting all of us rolling up our sleeves and pitching in for America. Sign up for a certain amount of community service through your local Starbucks and they'll give you a free coffee. This had a greasy, corporate feel on the cynical part of my psyche, yet the Pollyanna in me got all choked up watching the commercial. They also gave out free coffee to everyone who came in and said "I voted" on Election Day and I admit: I went into my local Starbucks for my free coffee after voting. So maybe this could be what "corporate responsibility" looks like in the 21st century, in a hemorrhaging economy. I am choosing to see these hints at a turning as good things unless they are proved otherwise. I'm so tired of "yeah, but" punditry, so I'll take this one at face value.

Getting back to Tara's horror at all the waste that has been a matter of corporate policy: Once I was finished with following my threads of the why of it all, I came back around to the waste issue and realized that I as an individual can do my best to make a smaller footprint. There is a (somewhat flawed) test you can take here that shows you, based on the results of a quiz you take, that if everyone in the world lived like you do, it would take X number of planets to support us all living that way. By the sheer virtue of driving a car and living in a single family house with electricity and running water, I can't seem to get below 2+ planets on this test. I lower my footprint by being vegan, by working at home, by driving less than 1000 miles a month and by recycling, but it is a sobering thought to think that most of America lives in a way that would use up over 5 planets if everyone lived that way. (Flying on airplanes and eating meat were two of the bigger markers for needing more planets.) Yet in the light of my footprint, vs corporate footprints, there is no comparison.

And all of these things are indicators or bright red pointing arrows that can show us why we as a nation, as a culture are in the terrible mess that we're in. If we eat the whole world, where will we live? If the cost of having whatever-it-is right NOW results in waste that is literally unrecoverable, then can we think about changing our relationship with our consumerism? Can we just slow down a little and wait a mere four minutes for a cup of decaf? This won't heal the problems of our systems, but I dearly believe we have to start somewhere. Why not trust that it can start in that space of four minutes? Maybe in that four minutes of stillness we'll get an idea, an inspiration, a creative kiss. Maybe the solution to a problem will enter through the space we make by taking our time. Maybe in those four minutes we'll actually feel ourselves just being. And I see the possibility of an entire universe of value in that.

What is a "Day of Rest"?

For me, a day of rest doesn't mean that I'm only doing my normal cleaning, cooking and moving my body pretty gently through space with my heart rate staying at or near resting rhythm. It doesn't mean that I spend the day inert. A day of rest doesn't mean I don't get out of my pajamas or that I just sit in a chair or on a couch and/or take a nap for a couple of hours in the afternoon. That's what it meant at one time.

Now, what it means to me is determined by a qualitative feeling I have during and after moving. I may have walked for an hour, but the operative word was "walk". Usually I "hike" or "run". To walk implies moving relatively gently through space and maybe somewhat elevating my heart rate, but in no way feel like I'm stressing my body, pushing her edges. The same is true with yoga: I can do a 60 minute practice that is more about stretching and releasing than strengthening. Strengthening means that I'm tearing and rebuilding muscle, stressing my muscles so they grow stronger. I can do the lunar type of a yoga practice and that feels, to me in the qualitative feeling of it like restore-ation, and I would include that in what I call a day of rest.

Something I've learned is that a fit body likes to move, loves to move, craves it, gets cranky without it. And my first 1-2 years exercising, when I started my Weight Watchers journey in March of 2004, I did it because I "had to" to attain my goals of weight loss and health. I endured months of muscles talking to me for the rest of the day and night for what I'd asked of them during exercise. Soon, it felt good after I stopped and that was a nice reward for the efforting. And eventually, in not really a very long time, it started feeling good through all the phases of doing it. Except maybe the first five minutes. The first five minutes of running don't feel so great, but after that....flying! Joy! Centered, breathing, Maddy-in-harmony-with-the-Earth...I happily endure those first minutes for what comes after.

I find it near miraculous to me that I am this person. And that a 50 minute ior a 90 minute walk can constitute part of a rest day. Pat had this to add to this discussion, "Fitness gurus describe lighter movement not geared toward defined increases in muscle strength/endurance or cardiovascular fitness as Active Recovery. Active Recovery is especially important for helping newbies and those sore from trying a new routine. I find it especially valuable for retaining an attitude of joy in movement, not always pressing, pushing, striving. Kick back a little and find happiness in movement from time to time. "

Mavis referred to it as "active rest" and I really like that phrase. It captures this newish Way of Maddy just right.

In Search of The Sweet Spot

I figured I'd get here sooner or later, as from the path I walk, I could see this on the horizon. It is a meeting, a crossroads if you will of several "messages" from outside sources; none of them critical, none of them that cause me to feel bad about who I am and how I do my life, but simply messengers.

The first is The Universe, who says, "Thoughts become things... choose the good ones! ®". In my quest to be the happiest person I can be, I really hang my hat on this one. I have gotten, over the past 5 years, more and more comfortable with noticing my thoughts and how they affect my outcomes, my body, my spirit. And I know that my mind is a very powerful entity; shaping the way I see and interact with the world.


So with that as my alluring introduction to this process, I'd like to step back a little bit and look over the past 4 3/4 years. My 5 year Weight Watcher anniversary is March 7th. I followed the program, became a person who exercises, lost the weight I wanted to lose and began maintenance. I've admitted here that it has taken me a long time to feel like I was succeeding at maintaining my weight. It took the turnings of two years; of coming to my goal weight anniversary date of March 1st for the second time in 2008, and actually still being at or under my goal weight before I believed that I was succeeding at maintaining.


Why did it take me 2 years to believe it? I think this was partly due to knowing that only 5% of people who lose a significant amount of weight keep it off for more than 2 years. I think I still had some demons flitting around in my head that said I wasn't worthy, wasn't working hard enough, didn't deserve to succeed. But the truth is that I've worked harder at this than just about anything I've ever done and I deserve my continued success.

And a curious thing in all of this for me is that I've actually gotten pretty relaxed about the food intake part of this grand equation. I still track just about everything I eat every day. I use Sparkpeople's food journal program and recipe building program with great success. Doing this has become a normal part of my day. I make the time for it. It is, for the most part, a non-negotiable for me. If I'm going out of town and not cooking any of my own food and not really having good internet access, I'll take a few days off, like I did for drum camp. And I've even gotten comfortable taking those occasional days off from tracking. But my mind (this very strong creater of my reality) really believes that tracking and food journaling is a major cornerstone of how I maintain. So I happily comply with my mind's equation and so far so good.

And then there is exercise. Another part of my mind's equation for success is my exercise program. The Sparkpeople calorie allowance is based on what you weigh, what you'd like to lose and how quickly you'd like to do that, mathematically transmogrified by the number of calories you burn exercising each week. I am still doing the SparkAmerica, count your fitness minutes challenge and the monthly Fitness Challenge on the Weight Watcher's message board. So I do set a minutes goal for the month, for the week. And in order to be able to eat more, I set a pretty stiff exercise goal. I commit each week to burning between 3,200 and 3,400 calories in exercise; right now mostly a combination of hiking, running, treadmill and yoga. My mind's equation says, "If I track all my food, exercise every day my body says YES (which is most every day) and burn those 3,200-3,400 calories a week, I will maintain this happy weight of right over/under 150 lbs."

I believe the Universe is full of love and compassion and really wants to accomodate my visions; my versions of how the world is, so I continue to spend hours every day tracking, journaling and exercising. And lo and behold! I am coming up on my 3 year Maintenance anniversary and I'm still right around where I want to be with my weight, with my physical health, my strength, my cardio/pulminary fitness. And yet, I see the obsessive/compulsive aspects of myself and worry about all this focus making me a boring person, obscuring beauty and magic that I would possibly see if I weren't so deeply focused on my "program". And as The Universe (A.K.A. Mike Dooley) reminds me daily that Thoughts become things...choose the good ones, I've recently gotten two other messages.

The first is from my own body. About a month or so ago, I started getting a debilitating pain upon certain movments in my right arm where the deltoid and the tricep meet. Many trips to the osteopath have not resolved this issue and I've been referred to physical therapy which starts this week. This has greatly impinged on my yoga practice. I've modified or omitted all weight bearing asanas on my arms, which is a lot of what I do. I completely stopped lifting free weights. For the past week, my neck on the same side has been out and again, two trips to the osteopath have not resolved the issue. I go again tomorrow to see the wife of the couple. I think her treatments are better for me than her husband's, but for something that is moving from acute to chronic, we shall see. I hope for the best and am prepared to try other options.

It seems clear to me that my body is trying to give me a message. It's confusing because the parts of my body that are healthy are so in love with all the activities that I do and they don't want to stop or change or modify anything. And yet, I see this injury as being a huge, as well as compassionate teacher because it is holding up the mirror for me to see how my O/C tendency of adding up my minutes and my calories burned are possibly not serving me here. So why don't I just take a break? Why don't I take a week off where all I do is walk? I don't do it because I'm uncovering that that O/C drive to keep accruing minutes and calories burned is being generated from fear: Fear of losing my momentum and starting down the slippery slope of gaining all my weight back as I reacquaint myself with my old habits of overeating and not exercising.

So right when I'm facing, with compassion and love, but facing this uncomfortable personal truth, Mavis, one of my Weight Watcher friends posts this on the Fitness Challenge thread:

"Physical movement is a form of creative expression for me. I truly [find] vitality and connection through it."

That's why I like to create my own routines. It's a way to do a "live journal" of how I'm feeling on any given day. That's why it's so important to move beyond the mechanics (calories burned, specific routines, time frames, etc.) Those are measurements, which are fine in their place. But for me, true power came when I integrated fitness as part of how I live. I can accept fluctuations, setbacks, bumps, whatever, because I know it's always available, and I don't need one specific situation or circumstance to keep my momentum."

I no longer require perfection or certainty in my practice. I've done 20-minute ad hoc yoga practices on a towel in a hotel room, took month-long hiatuses in 2007 when I was in a car accident and my Dad was terminally ill, and I'm still here. My routines may change, but I know I'll do something. I trust that there are seasons for everything. It's a wonderful thing indeed! "

May you all find your expression and fitness 'sweet spot.'"

Indeed. And so I expose to the light my iron grip on all of this and with a large exhale, loosen my fingers. Just enough to care for my injury. Just enough to take a deep inhale. Just enough to step out into the void. Just enough to feel the grand expanse of self, within which lies today's "sweet spot".

Happy Three Year Anniversary, Body Tales!

Once again, I'm wishing myself and my blog a happy anniversary one day late because I spent most of yesterday working on my manifestation collage for 2009. It's not quite done, but I'm getting close. My collage is about what I want to continue to nurture and what I want to begin to cultivate in 2009. If I want to have a book to try to get published, I really have to get serious about writing it. So far I have over 100 recipes collected but not edited or tested. I have a whole bunch of my online vegetarian, omnivore and vegan friends who want to be testers. The trickier part of the book is all that "how to" regarding getting and staying fit and healthy, creating new habits and priorities around food and healing broken parts of self. I really have all green lights on this, so the only thing standing in my way is me. In this new year, I want to see this book come together and be ready to shop around.

(This is why I love my life: Just as I wrote those last words, this post came through on my online bulletin board. Since I'm the list owner, I am the one who approves new posts and here's what just came through:

DATE: Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:56:56 -0000
SUBJECT: Creative Writing Class
Do you like to write, feel you have something important to share and would enjoy having a forum to express your ideas and experiences? Consider joining the Journalism 180 class, Writing for Publication, at the Mendocino College--Willits Center for the Spring 2009 semester. The class is taught by journalist and fiction writer Steven Hellman and is suitable for adults and teens, and all genres. The class meets Mondays, 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.. For info, 459-6224.
------------------------
It seems that I might want to call that number and see what happens. It couldn't get any easier to do than to have a college extension class here in Willits, as the main campus is in Ukiah, 25 miles away. )

This is also posting number 201. I am amazed anew at my stick-to-itiveness at keeping this writing thing going for three whole years. My number of postings have definitely slowed from that first year when I was having so many epiphanies and healings, but they still come and I still try to write them down and post them here. For that, I am grateful to have this format to archive my life as I'm living it.





Blessings to us all in 2009. May our new president make large and crucial inroads towards a better direction that we can all follow for our collective and individual good. May we find the sweetness in our lives moment by moment. May we heal parts of both self and our own world that are broken. May our courage and our joy always rise to the top.

Happy New Year

32,160 Fitness Minutes: A Reflection on Goal Setting

In the end of 2007, Sparkpeople created and begain the SparkAmerica Challenge. The concept was about acruing fitness minutes to collectively reach 1,000,000,000 minutes for 2008. As a world-wide group, we've fallen short, by more than half, but 1 billion is a very large number.

On a personal note, I blew my goal totally out of the water. I had committed to something that felt challenging but doable: 27,000 minutes. That was 75 minutes a day, 360 days of the year. I had never set a long-range goal like this before in quite this way. I've set sales goals before. I actually had to when I worked for the corporate winery, but this was personal. It was uncoerced and it was all mine.

It would have been empowering to make my goal of 27,000 minutes, but to end the year with a total number of fitness minutes of 32,160 is more empowering that I can even express. That is very close to 90 minutes a day for 360 days. And I'm sure I only took about 6 (remember, this was a leap year) days off with no focused activity all year. My qualitative goal was to exercise every day my body said "Yes" and that was most every day. To realize how few days I did no exercise is a testament to how healthy and strong and happy this dear body is and for that I am profoundly grateful, as I still remember those years of illness and body suffering. To realize that a "day of rest" now means an hour of a gentle yoga practice is immensely gratifying. To look at the most recent yoga pictures that Tara took of me today and see my strength showing through from top to bottom is a manifestation of all this hard and loving work.

And I took this idea from SparkAmerica and created it in a slightly different form on the Weight Watchers Veggie Board. We call it the 30/31 Days of (whatever month) Fitness Challenge and we count our fitness minutes and track them day by day. We cheer each other on and I am a witness to constant greatness and success. And the success of others, the enthusiasm of others feeds my own. Sometimes I think about what it would take to create something like this in real life: a weekly meeting to talk about health/fitness/weightloss topics, inspire each other and know that you will have something to report the next week....sort of like a Weight Watcher meeting but without the corporate crap or the junk food. I wonder what it would take.....I think I'll write my book first.

So to name them in public, here are my short term goals:

• 2250 fitness minutes for the month of January
• Back under 150 lbs
• Get the recipe section of the book edited and dispersed to testers
• Continue to gather, transcribe and edit the posts from this blog that want to be in the book

So may it be. And so it is.

Scatter Your Seeds and Let Go

Since it is almost Winter Solstice, my thoughts keep coming back to seeds. Metaphorical seeds: Dream Seeds, Love Seeds, Seeds of Transformation. And I've been thinking a lot about the Solstice, the Dream Time and what it means to be a being in a body in this life, in this world.

I had a series of thoughts that I want to plant right here. If you can get on board with the premise that when we put love and care out in the world, we are casting metaphorical seeds, then follow me here: These seeds, blown on the winds, carried by streams and rivers, transported on the coats of animals or our own socks, sometimes burned in fires that remove their outer casings which allows them to grow, need fertile or welcoming or just the right kind of soil to take hold, root and sprout.

I think one of the Great Mysteries is that we don't always or even often get to know where our seeds of love, hope, inspiration and care go, or if they sprout or not. Maybe they rest deep in the heart of someone for years and when the magic of alchemy of Divine Right Timing happens and that seed sprouts, they might not even know where it came from, just that they are inspired to change, to grow, to heal.


I have faith that as I walk my life in all the layers of my being, that these seeds I scatter on the winds, that stick on my socks, burn in the fire, or drift downstream on the river will go where they are needed when their time is ripe. I don't get to say when and I don't always get to know how. What I do know is that I have faith that scattering the seeds matters.


And that is what I wanted to share: We are all Good Right and Beautiful and sometimes we just have to scatter our seeds and let go.

Rest In Peace, Christy Molnar

I got word yesterday that a woman that I worked with for many years, many years ago had died. We worked together from 1986 through the early 90's. I was a newbie wine sales person and she was a seasoned veteran. She taught me a lot. She was tenacious. She was seductive. She knew how to find a YES right up there with the best of them. Her phone name was Christy Love.

She was also a morbidly obese chain smoker. And this was in the 80's. From what I've learned from mutual friends, she maintained her obesity and her smoking habit all the way until the end. About a year or so ago, a mutual friend said she had become nonabulatory. She died alone in her home on Monday night. Her housekeeper found her Tuesday morning.

On Christmas Day she would have been 59.
Rest in Peace, Christy. May you be free of suffering, free of pain.

And yes. This is a cautionary tale.

The Wheel Of The Year Turns to Solstice and The Peak of The Dream Time

The wheel of the year has turned a complete turn since my retreat at Harbin Springs last Winter Solstice. Phiona, our 1986 Toyota Dolphin is packed to go. The intention today is to take her to the KOA and flush her grey and black water systems, then go to Chevron to fill the propane tank and finally to the gas station to fill her up and check the air in her tires. The only possible problem with my plan to leave tomorrow for up to 6 nights at the springs is the weather. I'm gazing out at a garden and meadow covered in a few inches of snow. The top of my hottub is dusted with some new snow that fell last night. We may not be able to get Phiona down our ski slope of a street to get her to town to do all that we intended. The weather report is for snow and rain and then some more of the same with some breaks in between all the way through Monday. I'm supposed to leave tomorrow, Thursday. Harbin Springs is at about the same elevation as I am here at home, but 90 miles away and further inland. (Yes, many things I love dearly in this world are 90 miles away from where I live....in different directions even!) That's a long way to drive an old RV in bad weather, loaded to the gills. I'm challenged enough driving this mini behemoth on a sunny day.



I have to gently laugh at myself for all the obstacles my brain throws up around leaving town for overnights. I call it mild agoraphobia and I am sorry that I have to go through this every time I want or need to go out of town, but I am also grateful it isn't worse than it is. I can push through it. Usually I feel like I'm getting sick a few days or the day before I'm supposed to leave. This time, the Universe threw me a real sickness as I've witnessed Tara come down with and suffer from and still be recovering from a nasty respiratory illness that had her down from last Thursday night through yesterday, Tuesday morning. She went to work yesterday, but came home totally exhausted and went to bed at 10:00. I have been taking immunity boosters several times a day and so far, so good. I had felt invaded by this virus right around the same time as Tara had, but my rock solid immune system seems to have fended it off. I'm still on yellow alert, but I'm not feeling invaded any more. This is good, as while the RV has heat, it is too noisy to run it while sleeping, and the very scanty insulation lets all the heat leach out pretty quickly.



Last year it was very cold at the springs; down in the teens and 20s at night. I slept in double layers, under a quilt and 2 sleeping bags, wearing a hat. I would get up in the morning to about 35 degrees in the RV, jump down from the bed, flip on the heater and the stove to make my coffee, leap back up into the bed and wait. By the time my kaffe maker was done making my coffee, it would be an almost civilized 50 degrees in there: warm enough to get up and start my day.



It's totally dry/self-contained camping at Harbin, but not too far away from the RV parking is a second overflow lot that is available for RV and car camping if there is nothing happening in the workshop space next to this lot. The reason I'm bringing this up is that there is an outside electrical outlet on the side of this building. This is where I would charge my cell phone and laptop last year. I did this on the sly. No one used this workshop space the entire time I was there and if that is true again this year, I am going to bring a 100' heavy guage extension cord and see about plugging in at night so I can use my electric heater for warmth, as well as charge my electronics. I'll have to unplug early in the morning and only plug back in after dark. I'll probably get my hand slapped if I get caught, but I'm willing to take the chance for my comfort and ease. If it doesn't work out, I know what it will look like and that is fine.



So this is what the agoraphobe (me) has to do before feeling safe enough to leave town: I have to visualize my possibilities, make contingency plans and visualize what each plan might look like. The rough sketch view is that I will be there for six nights. I will follow my own bliss path like I did last year: eat, sleep, hike, do yoga, soak, write, read, be internal, be external all on my own time, following my own desires and rhythms. I want to work on my book and get a big hunk done. Last year I mostly worked on the How I Did The Work To Lose The Weight part and this time I want to begin with starting to create subsections for the cookbook and see where the big holes are. I also want to put some major effort in what I feel is the crux of the book: How I Keep the Weight Off Year After Year. I have a couple of books to read including the last remaining unread Kay Kenyon book that I bought from Amazon last spring and have been saving for this trip. I'm going to do a bunch of cooking today so I can bring food that is already made and not have to spend a whole lot of time cooking dinners. I didn't do this last year. I'm going to make seitan this morning. Later I think I'll make a batch of my black bean, sweet potato chili, some salad dressing and a batch of a new lentil soup that I created while Tara was sick.



The waters at Harbin are so wonderful and sometimes, especially when I'm there for a few days or more, just being around them is enough and I only go in the pools maybe 1 or 2 times a day. The hot pool is less hot in the deep cold; probably only 110 degrees. The cold plunge is almost heart stoppingly cold at about 55-60 degrees. It takes fortitude and courage to do rounds of that. Mostly I stay in the warm pool, a pretty tepid 102 degrees, except where the hot pool feeds into the warm pool at the far end where there is a hole in the concrete. I call it the hot hole. The water right in the vicinity of the hole is more to my liking: about 104 degrees. I always feel deeply healed by these waters, even if my soaking sessions are short.



In the year that has transpired, much has happened, much has changed. I saw Tara through a cancer scare and a total hysterectomy, followed by a 4 month MRSA infection in one of the surgery sites and the total hormone crash of the surgical menopause. Her forced menopause and the stress that ensued from the health scare, the surgery, the MRSA infection, the hormone crash pushed me into the next level of my own menopause journey. Over the past nine months I've seen huge changes in my own workings. Without going into the gory minutae of all of it, suffice it to say that my symptoms have been enough for me to start getting regular blood tests for hormone levels and to start doing bioidentical hormones under my osteopath's care.



It was hard at first and I didn't like the way the progesterone was making me feel. I was edgy and didn't feel like myself. The thing it did do for me was give me better sleep than I've had in years. The DHEA was useful too to alleviate many of my uncomfortable symptoms. I have started and stopped and started again. My doctor has been saying to me that my thyroid levels are very low and in following them, I am witnessing them slowly but steadily falling. What is true in "the real world" is that my energy levels have dropped as well. For a long while there, I kept accelerating my workouts: running further and faster, doing harder and harder things in my yoga practice. I called it "Personal Best" and the finding how far this beautiful and nearing-50-year-old body could go was exciting and gratifying. At some point, not knowing exactly when, I stopped trying to to do more and was pretty much staying where I was. And then, a couple of months ago, I noticed that the levels I had attained were becoming harder to do. Whereas the outer edges of my limits were, say, 1 1/2 hours running up the mountain and back, now only an hour of running and hiking would leave me more tired later in the day than the 1 1/2 hours did just a couple of months ago. The same was happening with my yoga practice. I found myself less willing to do the harder flows and felt challenged by flows that had been much easier just a couple of months ago.



My osteopath had been suggesting that if I took just a little bit of thyroid, I'd probably feel a whole lot better. I came home and told Tara this and she said, "You know Maddy, thyroid is one of those things that once you start taking it, you don't get to stop." That was alarming to me and from that place of being alarmed, I refused the offer of a prescription. My doctor, who is a great person and a fine doctor that doesn't make me bad or wrong or blame me for being out of whack because I won't do what he says, suggested that I do homeopathic thyroid and adrenal support instead. I agreed. But after 6 weeks of these very expensive remedies, I not only felt no better, I felt a little worse. My last blood test showed that my thyroid levels are scraping the bottom of normal and have one foot in hypothyroidville. So two days ago I asked him, "If I take thyroid and the end of oil happens and I can't get my meds or any other thing comes up and I have to stop taking it, what will happen?" (I love that he didn't even roll his eyes energetically at my question.) He replied, "You'll crash and then rebalance to about where you are now." And that was good enough for me. I told him to write the prescription.



Yesterday was my first day taking 15 mg of thyroid. (OK. Laugh at me. I'm very sensitive to medications.) For the first four hours I felt nothing and then I had an uncomfortable hour or two of feeling like I was on speed. My heart was beating faster and I was having a hard time focusing on anything. Then that leveled out and I felt, er, GREAT. As in, I felt at 5:00 teaching my drum class, as good as I feel first thing in the morning when I am at my best. It was a great class. I felt happy and inspired and inspiring. I had the juice to teach the class. And I realized that I have been struggling more and more to teach this class at a time of day that during other days of the week, I am doing nothing more complicated than starting dinner. I realized yesterday that I've been doing less and less in the "after tea time" part of the day because I don't have the brain power or the juice to do it. That is a lot of hours in my waking day to be doing little to nothing of any intrinsic value. And yesterday I got to see how much I've changed, how much function I had lost or was losing. And to think that I may be getting it back or forward or something is frankly, rather thrilling.



So in bringing this rambling posting full circle, I am not the grrl I was one year ago....not to say that I have ever been the grrl I was one year before whenever "now" was....but it is a good reckoning to see how my body has changed as I dance the menopause dance; the aging dance. For 4 years I was all about losing weight, becoming a person who exercises, acquiring a fit and muscled body, becoming a vegan, maintaining that weight loss and now in year 5, I've come into this "new" body and am finally seeing the aging process in action. My doctor called this hormone and thyroid adventure "a youth treatment" and I protest that phrase. My veggieboard friend Ruth rephrased it as "balance treatment" and I've amended that to "balance therapy". Because when I sift through all the minutae of my feelings and wonderings about, am I doing this for my health or for my vanity? And does it really matter which? What I come up with, and thanks to my ROARS Yahoo group where I posed this dilemma about health or vanity and got pages of wonderful insight, reflection and support, is a balance of both health and vanity. It is a balancing act for this dear body that loves this life so much and I want to feel good inside of her. I want to have these "do over" years; these years of making up for all those years of living like I didn't have a body, living in a vibrantly alive feeling body. I do the work to have that and if I feel I need to use a medication and hormones to help me, I am coming to peace with that decision.



And so the grrl I Am Now will leave on retreat. If I can't get out tomorrow, I'll leave the next day or the day after that. It doesn't matter. What will be will be. And I will be the person I am now, having my little Winter Solstice adventure, honoring the Dream Time, honoring the fertile, quiet places within myself that need alone time, space and being away to speak to me; to guide me as I see this year to a close and step onto the new wheel, to honor the return of the sun, keep the fire burning in my heart in faith that spring will return and I will once again plant many wonderful things in the garden of my being.

A Pep Talk To Others, But Essentially, I Think, To Myself

(I posted this on the Veggie Board yesterday before I got on the scale yesterday afternoon. I never get on a scale in the afternoon, so I can only say in my defense, that I'd just gone for an hour's run and was in my post cardio, sweaty state in which I weigh in. I did not expect to see 155 lbs. But there it was. After doing weight and strength training this morning I was no better than 154.6. After a morning run, I might see 154 give or take. And this is higher than I've been at this time of year since I hit goal.

My menopause journey has amped up a lot. After some starting and stopping, I have resumed taking bioidentical hormones. DHEA and Progesterone to be specific. I know that some of this weight is from taking hormones and the water I can feel that I am retaining. And I know that the body is wise to hold weight to ease the transition to menopause because there is estrogen in that fat. And there is clearly a little more of me around my middle. This is cause for concern and for action, but I have to stop, breathe, and say that I'm not panicking. Nor am I feeling nonchalant about it. I've upped my cardio exercise and am working on my total calorie input for the day. My body is protesting, both crafitly and blatantly, yet being mean or punishing to myself is not an option. This is how I've changed. Constantly redefining what something is by seeing what it looks like is another way I've changed on this journey. And these are good things.

Following, is what I wrote yesterday. I guess in the end, I wrote it for myself. )

12/8/08
I've been witnessing quite a few frustrated Weight Watchers on the Vegetarian Message Board posting lately about plateaus or gains. I have some things to share as a person who was on the losing plan for 2 years and is now coming around the wheel for my 3rd time as a maintainer.

1) We are in the time of year I call the Food Orgy Season. From Halloween through New Year's Day, the world around us is pushing sweets, potlucks, lunches and dinners out on us. Often it is impossible to decline these invitations either because it would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or bad politics. So we attempt to eat lightly the rest of that day, maybe we get a little extra exercise, we try to be careful in our choices. And it is damn hard to do! People not trying to lose weight really have NO IDEA how fraught with peril a Christmas party or company lunch can be for a weight watcher! But we go and we do our best.

Finally, the first of the year comes and the Food Orgy season becomes the Season of Repentance. This is the season where gym and Weight Watcher memberships soar. It seems like the whole world "goes on a diet" or embarks upon a fitness regime. If this looks like the world around you and you are plateauing or have gained a couple of pounds, you are DOING GREAT! Given the pressures and the minefields you have to walk through, staying the same or going up a little is FANTASTIC! KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK! The Season of Repentance starts in just 3 1/2 weeks!

2) You were losing steadily and then the colder weather came, the summer fruits and veggies were done, the heavier vegetables/starches of winter appeared in the stores so your meals got a little or a lot denser, and it became much harder to get out of bed in the dark. You may have what I call Bear Getting Ready to Hibernate Syndrome. Your body is wise. She is gathering her fat and holding it tight because fat keeps us warmer! We may feel more sluggish or not as inclined to get ourselves out to the gym or in front of our work out DVDs or to the Wii, or outside for a hike, a run, a bike ride. For me, I have found that if I just adjust the how and the when of my exercise program, I can still burn the same number of calories or close to it that I was burning in the summer. My pattern of running or hiking in the early morning isn't very attractive when it's dark and freezing out. So I do my yoga and weights in the early morning still because I always do that in my living room, but I have cut myself the deal of doing my cardio in the early/mid afternoons, OR doing it at the gym where it's warm.

You can accomodate that bearish feeling to some degree, but you can't totally give into it, or you'll just find yourself sleeping for 4 months. Give and take. Stay in bed later means that you have to w/o in the afternoon or evening. That's the deal. Keep your agreements with yourself.

Regarding the food mine fields: I have found that getting a good cardio workout on either side of a relatively large meal, usually a holiday or celebration meal, meaning that day and the next day, as well as eating lightly and even doing just roasted veggies all day the next day and then resuming normal eating at dinner will usually allow me to "get away with" a large, caloric meal.

3) Watch your self-talk. Be aware of how you are relating to yourself as you deal with your food and activity challenges. Being mean to yourself and calling yourself a failure doesn't further the cause AT ALL. In fact, it can lead you down the rocky road to giving up. NEVER GIVE UP! Nothing ever stays the same and your plateau will break. The couple/few coming-into-winter pounds you gained will come off again. Just stay on program or get back on program, do the work and one day you will step on that scale and be at goal. I promise. It took me 2 years to lose 45 lbs. That was an average of .43 lbs a week. I had two long "fall stall" plateaus both those years and have gained up to 5 lbs each fall since then. And as of today I have those five pounds more than when I hit goal almost 3 years ago and I declare those 5 lbs as my "bear weight" that I expect to have gone by the time I hit my 3 year maintenance anniversary on March 1st, 2009.

4) Getting through the fall is tough for so many of us for reasons that are other than food. Many of us are compelled to spend time with our families around the holidays...people who seem to live in a different universe than we do. They push our buttons, bring up very old feelings, but we travel to see them or have them come travel to see us. If you have a hard family dynamic but do this every year, first: Ask yourself why? Is the world going to end if you take yourself out of the passion play? If you absolutely have to and do it anyway and come home or send them home and are still in one piece, you are an Iron Person! Pat yourself on the back and move on.

Getting through the fall-into-New Year is, for many of us, the toughest time of year for all these reasons and more that I'm not thinking of. We are almost there! 3 1/2 weeks from now it will be January 1, 2009. If you've made it this far with your sense of humor somewhat intact and your commitment to your weight loss, fitness and health still close to your heart then you are your own hero. Embrace that. You are a HERO.

Next Thursday I leave for the hot springs for my annual retreat. Instead of seeking out people, family, friends, I retreat. I'll take Phiona again and maybe stay this time for six days. That will be six days of really getting reconnected with as many aspects of myself as I can handle. And then maybe a couple more. Part of following my pleasure and bliss path on my personal retreat includes caring tenderly and with much awareness for this body and all she holds. I will work on this book some more. I will hike, run, bathe, steam, do yoga, think, love myself, feed myself, follow my pleasure path and see where it leads. Find the dream seeds I want to plant in my garden in the new year. And I will come out on the other side of this fall into darkness, Fall into Winter season and I will witness and feel the sun start to return. And I will be my own hero.

A Weight Watcher's Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was a lovely, low-key day. Daniel, our son, came up the night before so we could cook together. Last year, I had gone to his house where he had cooked his first Thanksgiving. It was a hard day: His girlfriend at the time didn't show up until way after dinner was over. Her mother came and that was pleasant, but I remember him being pretty stressed out and not supported by his g/f who chose to have dinner with her father. And then there was me; coming into his house with all my own vegan dishes in tow. I remember that his stovetop was broken, and I brought my 2 burner hot plate. For a young, talented gourmet cook, it was a challenging day for him.

This year, he came bearing my Celebration Field Roast and the turkey thighs/legs that he, Tara and our friend Debbie would eat. He was my hero, as the closest Celebration Roast was down in Sonoma County where Daniel lives: 90 miles south. I'm sure I could have made my own seitan-something, but I was already planning a pretty extensive menu for the whole dinner and was grateful for being able to "cheat" with an already prepared roast.

Before I tell you about the day, let me tell you a knife story: I've had a Henckel Four Star 6" chef's knife since 1981. It has been one of my most cherished posessions. I used it when I worked as a chef and I have used it daily for over 25 years. And after all these years the tang and the handle are still firmly bonded. The blade tip, however has had a mishap. Recently, Tara sharpened the blade for me and spent some time straightening out the tip, which had suffered some mysterious mishap at some point. It was just slightly bent, but intact. The sharpening and straightening was too much for the tip and one day about a month ago, the tip parted from the rest of the knife. Just like injuring your finger or hand, you never realize how much you use an appendage until you injure it. My knife, while still cutting and chopping like a champ, had lost one of its minor functions and it became clear it was time to replace it. I have replaced it with a hollow blade 8" Henckel Four Star and while I was at it, I also bought a Four Star 4" paring/utility knife and a peeler. I am quite happy with my new knife. The hollow blade design keeps thinly sliced vegetable from sticking to the side of the blade. I am getting used to a bigger/longer knife. I have used and tried out other knives, but for me, nothing appeals like the Four Star line by Henckel. I think this bears mentioning because your knives are your most important tools. A poorly made dull knife is far more dangerous a tool than a well made, wicked-sharp one.


(Back to Thanksgiving) I started the cool, foggy day with an 80 minute excursion in the woods. I ran most of it, only hiking the biggest hills on the route and burned 650 calories. That, I figured, would give me a good jump on the day. Have I mentioned my menopause journey? Well, suffice it to say, we've amped it up a notch and I have been going longer and longer between periods. Now I'm up in the 40-something days in between and after about the 30th day, I've been retaining water like crazy. I know I've gained some weight, but I hadn't weighed in a couple of weeks, so I thought it would be a good motivational tool to get on the scale after my run. I was stunned and sobered by the number: 153.8. This is up 2.2 lbs from just two weeks prior. At 4 lbs over my redline, I realized that I have to turn the ship around and I have to do it now, foodie holy day or no foodie holy day.


So OK. Feedback is good. I'd burned a fair number of calories and in my view, earned my not WW friendly slice of pecan pie as well as my slice of far more friendly pumpkin pie.


After the run, I made breakfast for Daniel and myself. It was one of my typical breakfasts: tofu, veggies, hashbrowns with nutritional yeast and gomasio. Pretty big, filling breakfast. We ate at about 10:30. Soon after, the cooking began. I had made the pies the day before as well as the wild rice for the stuffing. Daniel and Tara collaberated on the turky related parts of the dinner. I sauted onions and celery for the dressings, as there would be two: One vegan one for me and one for them. When everything was cooking or done cooking, we went for about a half hour tromp through the woods looking for mushrooms. No one wanted to do much hiking so we went to a pretty well-combed patch of woods right up from the house. We didn't find any edibles, but had fun tromping around. We came home and I picked a bunch of carrots from the garden. Daniel and I munched carrots through the rest of the early afternoon.


Our friend Debbie came over at about 3:00 and we sat down to dinner at 4:00.


This was the total menu:
Celebration Roast for me (2 slices, total 3.2 oz)
Turkey for them
Vegan mushroom gravy
Turkey gravy
Vegan bread and wild rice stuffing
Not vegan bread and wild rice stuffing
Green beans from the garden simmered with garlic and vegetable bouillion
A giant salad with
Miso Balsamic Dressing
Potatoes mashed with Earth Balance and homemade veg broth, salt and pepper
Cranberry sauce (out of the can due to the perverse tastes of my wife and son)
Pumpkin pie (scroll downdowndown Bryanna's page and you'll find it)
Pecan pie (this came out OK, but not great, so I'm not going to share the recipe)
Soyatoo
Whipped Cream
Really really good red wine


Here is a picture of my plate. I eschewed the mashed potatoes. The stuffing is 1/4 of the recipe posted; about one cup. My total dinner was 620 calories, 60 gms of carbohydrates, 28 gms of fat, 0 cholesterol, 27 gms of protein and 11 gms of fiber.

Here's a picture of dessert. Now this was what I went running for in the morning: the combined dessert of a thin slice of pecan pie and a more generous slice of pumpkin pie ran a total of 600 calories, 87 gms of carbohydrate, 27 gms of fat, 0 cholesterol, 5 gms protein and 8 gms of fiber.
Total calories for the day were about 1650. Total points for the day were about 33. Not bad for a feast day!


Here's something I've learned about feasts and weight watching: There was so much food, but I didn't have everything. In this case, I passed over the mashed potatoes for stuffing which is such a once-a-year thing. I had less than one cup of stuffing and less than one full serving (4 oz) of Celebration roast. I used about 1/4 cup of gravy and about 1 Tbsp of salad dressing. Yet look at my plate: It's full. And after eating everything on it, so was I. Comfortably full. Not stuffed. Not distended. Somewhere over the line of satisfied, as after all it was a feast, but comfortably full. I think this is important. Now let's dovetail this with my weighing myself in the morning: I have gained a few pounds. Some of it is due to menopause-ish bloat, but some of it is due to the overeating I've been doing these past couple of months. I was 149.8 on September 27th. On November 27th I was four pound heavier. This is significant; definitely a yellow alert situation. But I think it is important to say here that I didn't punish myself for gaining a few pounds, beat myself about the head and shoulders and do some kind of pennance for it, nor deny myself a feast on a feast day.


What I did instead was this:
~ I ran for over an hour and burned 650 calories
~ I had a hearty late breakfast
~ I noshed on carrots in lieu of lunch
~ I had a full plate, but reasonable feast dinner and dessert, savoring it all
~ The next day, Friday, I ate only fruit in the morning and only roasted vegetable for the rest of the day until dinner, which was a normal dinner. I had pie for dessert that night.
~ Also on Friday, I did 1 1/2 hours of vigorous yoga and went to the gym in the afternoon for 50 minutes of steep incline on the treadmill. Total calories burned on Friday were 700.


Yesterday I went for a mushroom hike for a couple of hours and got on the scale upon my return. I was down to 152.8. Net loss 1 lb.


The purpose of all of this detailed sharing is to illustrate that I, we, you can have it "all". I, we, you can indulge occasionally or even often, as long as there is balance. The key, as I see it, to maintaining a fairly large weighloss is to find where that balance points are for myself and make the necessary course corrections when my projection of that balance is off, which is reflected to me on the scale.


Now here we are after all the feasting was over. Just look at us! Do I look like I'm suffering? Deprived? Hungry? (I don't think so.)

The Wheel of the Year Has Turned: It's Mushroom Season!

Tara and I went for a walk on the Rockefeller trail yesterday afternoon. This isn't a trail I go on too often, but it's a nice 3 1/2 mile walk: gently downhill going out and gently uphill coming back. There is a court that you cross from part one of the trail to part two.

Coming down part one, I espied the first Chanterelle of the season. It is a little early for Chanterelles, but this beauty wasn't out of season. I didn't have a bag with me, so unfortunately, I had to gently break the mushroom in half so as to fit it in my sweatshirt pocket. I was so thrilled, as I seem to have missed the Boletes this year altogether, which are my favorite mushrooms to dry, but the mighty White Chanterelle is by far my favorite to eat fresh and pick. They don't host bugs or their larvae, they are easy to clean and their growing season is quite long. So if that had been all I had gotten, I would have been deeply satisfied, but there was more:

When we got back to the court after the return trip up part 2 of the trail, I thought of Walter and Barbara, a great older couple that live in the first house down this steep street. Walter and I have traded produce over the years. His eco-climate is different than mine. He grows wicked huge onions and I grow wicked huge winter squash. His dog Scooter was out and ran up the street to greet us. I remembered the Lion's Mane mushroom tree. This is an ordinary young tan oak tree that happens to host the mycillium of the mighty Lion's Mane. Just one tree; and every year it produces one to three giant Lion's Mane mushrooms. It's a little early in the season, but with apparent climate changes, 'normal' seems to be constantly changing.

Walter came to see who Scooter was barking at and we all greeted each other. And there, across the street from Walter's house was the prize: a 2 1/4 lb Lion's Mane in all its fully ripe glory. Walter, who doesn't eat wild mushrooms told me that his son in law, whom he picks the Mane for every year wasn't coming this year. He loaned us a ladder and Tara climbed up and cut this beauty off the tree, leaving the "root" of the mycillium attached and taking just the "fruit". And here she is in all her 2 1/4 lb glory.

I never was a winter person. Yet the thrill of the hunt has helped me transition from my native summer preference to this wet, darker, cold season. All hail the mighty mushroom!

Recipe Time! The Perfect Vegan Omelette

At last! The perfect vegan omelette is mine! (And yours if you wish to make it.)

I have been adjusting this recipe for a long time. Funny thing is that it took doing the counter-intutitive thing to get the right texture. By adding More liquid instead of less, this set up beautifully and didn't fall apart when I folded it over. It was golden brown on the outside, creamy on the inside and just delicious. The blended tofu, etc should be thin enough to pour into the omelette pan, with a rubber spatula only needed to scrape the last bits out of the blender/processor. This is a bit of a messy production to make, but if you are vegan and miss the whole dynamic of eggs folded over filling, I think you will find it worth the work.

Ingredients
4 oz firm silken tofu
1 Tbsp cornstarch
1 Tbsp flour
1 1/2 Tbsp nutritional yeast
1 tsp onion powder
salt and pepper to taste
5-6 Tbsp water or broth
1/2 - 1 cup veggies of your choice, sauted. (I used 1/4 cup leeks, 1 jalapeno pepper, 1 cup fresh mushrooms and 2 cups fresh spinach)
1/2 oz vegan cheese sub (optional) I used Cheezly Mozzerella style

Directions
In a small blender or mini food processor combine tofu, water or broth, onion powder, salt, pepper, nutritional yeast, flour and cornstarch. Blend until very smooth.

Have veggies for the omelette cooked and ready.

Heat a non stick pan with some oil spray. Pour in the "omelette" mixture and gently spread to the edges of the pan. Let cook for a few minutes on medium until bubble holes appear from outer edges and have moved in about 2".

Spread cheese sub and veggies over 1/2 the surface. Check bottom. It should be nicely browned to golden. Gently fold over omelette style. Cook another minute, and press gently down on surface. If the inside is liquidy at all, then carfully flip over and cook another minute or two on the other side.

Omelette should slide onto plate and be ready to enjoy.

If you'd rather do it fritatta style, have broiler preheated before you start. This must be cooked in a cast iron or other broiler-safe pan. Start on stovetop and cook until bottom is set, then slide under the broiler for about 2 minutes until top is hot and bubbly but not burning.

This is such a nutritional powerhouse that I'm posting the "long version"

Nutrition Facts
Serving Size: 1 serving
Amount Per Serving
Calories 262.5
Total Fat 9.0 g
Saturated Fat 3.1 g
Polyunsaturated Fat 2.6 g
Monounsaturated Fat 0.9 g
Cholesterol 0.0 mg
Sodium 323.5 mg
Potassium 1,234.6 mg
Total Carbohydrate 28.2 g
Dietary Fiber 6.7 g
Sugars 5.7 g
Protein 22.0 g

Vitamin A 122.3 % Vitamin B-12 100.2 % Vitamin B-6 379.2 % Vitamin C 46.2 % Vitamin D 13.3 % Vitamin E 9.0 % Calcium 25.5 % Copper 36.6 % Folate 42.5 % Iron 27.5 % Magnesium 33.2 % Manganese 45.7 % Niacin 229.5 % Pantothenic Acid 12.4 % Phosphorus 36.3 % Riboflavin 454.8 % Selenium 34.8 % Thiamin 499.8 % Zinc 27.0 %

From Pundits to Puppies

OK, it's obvious. I haven't been blogging much lately. Life has been running me at full tilt and there have been too many plates to be kept up in the air (picture me juggling plates as I run to keep up with my life,) and I can't say that none have hit the ground and smashed over these past couple of weeks. My weight is up, my energy is down, the march to menopause is, well, marching along with all its humbling symptoms and I am just tiredtiredtired and starting to dream of my Winter Solstice retreat with the RV at the hot springs.

Without getting into the relief and joy of the Presidential Election literally cancelled out by the kick in the guts by the Rovian-like campaign that passed CA Propostition 8, I have been feeling many things including overwhelm and no small degree of depression. That has been lifting and I am almost embarassed to say that Puppy Cam has been my favorite depression-lifting tool this last week. MSNBC broke the story about the live webcam that watches six 5 week old Shiba Inu pups while their people aren't home. (Here's the video of the story.)

(from the homepage) The six Shiba Inu pups (3 boys and 3 girls) turned 5 weeks old on November 11th. This is the first litter from their mom, Kika.
Girls:
-Autumn (Purple collar) - 3 lbs 5.8 oz (as of Nov 11th)
-Ayumi (Yellow collar) - 3 lbs 3.4 oz (as of Nov 11th)
-Amaya (Red collar) - 3 lbs 6.6 oz (as of Nov 11th)
Boys:
-Aki (Green collar) - 4 lbs 0.4 oz (as of Nov 11th)
-Akoni (Black collar) - 3 lbs 12.6 oz (as of Nov 11th)
-Ando (Blue collar) - 4 lbs 1.2 oz (as of Nov 11th)

What started as a great idea to use the Internet and newer technology to keep an eye on their puppies, has become a worldwide phenomenon, or in the current vernacular, it's gone viral. The MSNBC report claimed that over 4 million people have been watching the puppies. I can say that I've been keeping a browser window open throughout the day and between 9:00 am and 9:00 pm, I've seen no fewer than 10,000 viewers on the site and as many as over 30,000. And this is at one time.

But over and above how many other people are watching the puppies, this has been a weird and comforting antidote to all the msnbc.msn.com videos, Keith O and Rachel M videos, youtube campaign videos, more pundits, more campaign videos even more pundits, more campaign woofwoof, opinions, polls and creepy, nerdy Nate Silver in his elongated fifteen minutes of fame with his fivethirtyeight.com savant-i-ness at creating eerily accurate polling outcomes. In answer to all that led up to and beyond November 4th, 2008, there came, into my home a view from a camera, volume on and sometimes off, focused on six adorable, rough and tumble puppies.

When I hear yipping or growling coming from the office and I'm in another room, I hurry in to see what they are up to. I watch them wrestle, play with their variety of toys, twitch in their dreams, pee, visit with their humans and sleep. They sleep a lot and it obvious how much they've grown in just a week. Sometimes their people come in. You never see either of their faces and they have remained anonymous to the world. Some lucky people have seen Kika, their mother come into their pen to nurse. I'm not one of those people.

I found out about Puppy Cam on the veggieboard, that seemingly endless fount of love, friendship, support and magic in my life. I never have to read another online 'zine to know what is going on of any import in the world. I just have to go to my Weight Watchers online group and it's all there. And that was how Puppy Cam has come into my life.

When I told an in-real-life friend about this phenomenon and how attached I've become and how it makes me a little befuddled to have gotten attached to these babies, she replied, "They're babies! Full of love and innocence. And love and innocence make people feel good."

Word to that.

Off Topic: Keith Olbermann Was an American Hero Last Night

This blog isn't per se, a political blog in the classic sense, but with my growing distress over the outright lies and abuses being bandied about by the McShame campaign, I have to post this. I saw this on huffingtonpost.com last night. Keith's anger and righteous indignation was like a strong wind blowing the dust off the windshield.

Thank you Keith. Last night you were a hero.

Totally Off Topic: Is It Just Me?

Or do you bristle or cringe too everytime you heard yourself referred to by politicians, not as the American People but as Main Street?

The other thing: I watched CSPAN today for hours while the Senate made their pitches and finally voted on the new bailout bill...not that they're daring to call it that anymore....and then I watched them all congratulating themselves at coming to this monumental decision, on our behalves of course, crossing party lines and working together and what a historic day this has been.

John McCain has been talking like a benevolent patriarch grandpa to an adoring audience for about half an hour his tone of voice as he talked about drilling into the body of the Earth and building more nuclear power plants like he's telling a bedtime story, and then tooting his own horn...the level of self-congratulations of all of them makes me feel sort of ill.

I'm not MainfuckingStreet. And I don't trust or believe you. I'm with Bernie.
You Senators all played nice. Woohoo for you. It's a learned skill. Maybe you learned something?
John McCain scares the shit out of me

Over and out.

What a Difference a Mountain Makes

There is this run I do when I'm feeling the running mojo. It reaches my outer endurance limits, at least for where I am right now, gives me several running environments to face and always leaves me feeling pretty proud of myself.

I know I've mentioned my O/C tendencies and how having a Polar F4 Heart Rate Monitor helps me channel my obsessive/compulsiveness in a good way. I'm constantly gauging time:distance ratios, creating new personal bests, etc. Lately, I have been starting my HRM at the trail head and not right out of the door when I start. Without that 1/4 mile walk down to the trail head in the mix, I realized this morning that my route had four clear sections of 1.3 miles each. That is 5.2 miles, my (so far) personal best. I only do this particular route about once every 1o days or so because this route not only includes about an 800 ft elevation climb, but also, running 5.2 miles, while exhilirating, is hard on my hips and knees and I want to be able to do it for a long time to come. So I take pains to protect my 48 year old body from overdoing injuries.

I usually run every other day. In the dry season, this is the piece of woods I run in. I can't go all the way to the end in a high water year, as there are 3 creek crossings; the first I can creatively get around, the second has an alternate way alongside it instead of over it which is passable in all but the highest water month, but the third is pretty impossible to cross without getting one's feet and lower legs pretty wet which is not very pleasant when the outside temps are only in the 40's. So going all the way to the end of the 1.3, creekside leg is a privilege of the dry season and I do it often. At the end of the 1.3 mile creekside trail are two trails; one in either direction. The one to the left is aptly called Last Chance and goes up a steady, steep incline up to Ridge Road.

I find it a minor miracle that I can run up the whole thing period. And maybe I'm loosely using the word "running" as in I'm using the motions of running, but the grade is so steep for most of the trail that the word that comes to mind when I'm doing it is "shuffling". But today, I wanted to see how long it took me to run each leg as each leg has its challenges.
Leg 1: I'm warming up. I'm breaking through my resisitance to the very act of running for the first few minutes until the endorphins kick in. And they always kick in. It's just a matter of when. Usually, right after they kick in, I've reached the one hill on the trail: a 2/10's of a mile hill that's about a 5% grade.
Leg 2: As I said, about an 800 ft elevation climb over 1.3 miles, grade going as steep as 12% or so.
Leg 3: Just because it's downhill, doesn't mean it's easy. A steep downhill on a rocky trail requires really fit quads, constant vigilance to watch where I put my feet so as not to trip and fall. When you trip going downhill, you're far more likely to go all the way down instead of recover.
Leg 4: I'm entering or somewhere in my 5th mile, the steep downhill is over, I'm on relatively flat ground with the exception of one small hill in the middle and I'm tiring.

And the results today were:
Leg 1: 16 minutes
Leg 2: 26 minutes(!)
Leg 3: 13 minutes
Leg 4: 15 minutes
Total: 70 minutes to run 5.2 miles.

I admit this is very slow running time. Some runners would call it jogging. Snobby ones might call it shuffling. But a year ago I couldn't do this and now I can. Without stopping. And today when I finished getting back up the huge hill to the house my Polar F4 said I had burned 825 calories in 85 minutes: just under 10 per minute including my cool down. Not bad for an aging broad. I'll probably never be a fast runner. And that is just fine. But I can run up a mountain. And I sure like the way that sounds.

On Being a Role Model and a Hero

There is a newishly reborn thread that comes up almost daily lately on the Veggieboard. It's for maintainers like me. Weight Watchers gives just token support for maintaining. It's why I stopped paying them 2 years ago. And at the same time, my relationship with this online community via Weight Watchers is integral to my continued success. I don't need support terribly often, but when I do, I always get it there. The constant input of others; their victories, hard work, struggles, stumbles, all of it helps me succeed. What truly helps keep me on track is knowing that I am a role model for others who are dreaming of getting to where I am at now. I share my very human process and illustrate as often as it comes up how much work and focus it takes to keep this beautiful body that I love fiercely for the first time in my life.

Today on the Maintainers thread someone posted this, "I am in a bit of a slump. I have gained in 6 out of the last 7 weigh-ins (net gain of 5.6 pounds). While I am still under goal, this trend is becoming alarming. The only difference lately has been that I am trying to use more of my WPA (weekly Points Allowance: the extra 35 points per week you can use or not at your own discretion.) I have never had much luck with them - a handful here and there has been fine but when I continuously use most of them I gain. This is frustrating because I had been hoping to increase my intake a bit as I am starting to feel like I am dieting again - that I am restricting too much. I kinda hoped that once I maintained for a while I could start to 'live a little' - within moderation. To add insult to injury in my meeting someone kept calling me her 'hero' - I know, it does not sound so bad but I just got the news of another gain and I was not feeling very heroic. She kept asking for advice but I did not feel like my advice was very valuable. Then my leader used me as a 'successful' example in the meeting and I wanted to cry.
"Having lost the weight, do you ever find yourself being looked up to as a role-model? How do you handle it when you are not feeling very inspirational?"

I found I had a lot to say about this and realized this is a blog entry. This is something I want to keep instead of just putting it out there on a message board thread where it will disappear into the annals of time. So here is my reply.

I think I've got a lot to say about all of this. First of all, it doesn't matter how much or little you've lost. If you have lost to goal, you are a role model. Amounts don't matter. That's like saying that the only women worthy of being called beautiful are the photoshopped fakes on billboards and magazines. We are such a culture of extremists. Why is someone who has lost 100 lbs more of a role model than a smaller person who has lost 20? In my mind, the person who turned their ship around before they had 100 lbs to lose is a role model of that which is just as important and valid as the person who did the long, sloggy, hard work to lose the 100. The person who turns their ship around before they are morbidly obese is rolemodeling awareness that they are not OK where they are (20 lbs overweight) and doing the hard work of changing that reality.

I am a role model. And happy to be one. Not just for my successes but for my struggles to stay here, to keep this body. People who think that maintenance is easy are in for a total mindfuck once they get here because it's not easy. It's different from losing, but not easy. Yes, I eat more. I eat a lot more than when I was losing. I'm maintaining around 150 lbs and I eat about 1550-1800 calories a day, which translates upward of 30 pts a day. How do I do that? I am fit. I am really fit. I exercise 1-2 hours just about every day. I do hard cardio and balls-to-the-wall strength training. It has built me a muscle body that burns those calories up. If I were 150 lbs without this tone, I wouldn't be able to eat as much as I do. And yet I struggle with a body that is always pushing for more food, more treats and a head that's always pushing for more intensity and for Pete's sake! I'm 48! I bump up against those 48 year old joints every day. I'm always finding how far I can go without injury.

It's a weird kind of roulette I play. Mostly I win. Sometimes I lose and hurt myself. And the panic and discomfort I experience when I have to stay down! It's high drama, I tell you! But my struggles to stay here are real and they are daily. When a body is "used to" a certain amount of input (calories) and it has gained and has to be dialed in to relose those pounds, it's hardhardhard. But hard almost never stops me from trying and rarely stops me from succeeding. Why? Because it matters to me more than anything. I am fierce about it. And that's what I perceive I need to succeed.

A tool for maintaining that works for me: I have an upper redline and a lower redline. Whatever those numbers are, if I go above the upper, (I've never gone below the lower) then I have to dial in my eating behavior: eat less (which usually translates to snack less/exercise more until I get back in my happy zone or (if it ever came up) eat more so I'd gain back into my happy zone.

I don't feel like I'm on a diet. Why? Because I eat within these new patterns I established for myself over 2 years of losing and 2 1/2 years of maintaining. I really took the "lifestyle" concept to heart all that time ago. I am down with having to journal for life and be O/C about it all. I figure that no one taught this to me as a child: How to have and maintain habits for a healthy relationship with food. I really didn't know how to have a healthy relationship with any of my parts no less my food for so many years. So all of this is only 4 1/2 years old behavior for an old dog trying to learn and set a new trick. I need the structure.

As a maintainer, not only do we have to learn and implement these new behaviors, but we are doing that at the same time we are constantly uprooting the bramble-like tendrils of roots from however we were patterened as children. That's double jeopardy! And we're doing that! And that alone makes every one of us a role model and a hero. If we were perfect, we would demotivate people. It is our struggles and human condition that makes us role models, that others who are far from where we are can look and say, "She's a falliable human being. So am I. That must mean that when I get to goal, I'll be able to keep my weight off too."

I Keep Finding Photos on My Camera that Were Once Integral

....to a blog post I wanted to write, but time did it's drifter thing and by the time I've used the camera again, I look and look at the pictures and try to either remember what I was wanting to write about, but didn't (or) find that shimmery thing that sticks to me and begs me to write about it, but I can't find the shimmer. The moment has passed. It has drifted.

My San Pedro cactus bloomed this last week. It is only blooming for the second time. The first time was the taller section making one flower that became the now, only slightly shorter section. Now it has made eight flowers. After two months of these six, grey, fuzzy nodules appearing in a circle around the top of the smaller cactus, which is growing out of it's Mother, my original 9" tall cutting, which is sporting two of her own, eight flowers were just there and open at dawn four days ago. The nodules didn't seem, from the outside, anyway, to do much all summer and all of a sudden, the first seven bloomed with the eigth blooming the next day. Over the past four days they have gone from the surprise of birth to slimy droopy things, possibly holding the primordeal secret of new life within this flower that has folded in on itself and elongated from the base. If these flowers have been fertilized, and I did spy bees crawling inside them on their one day of glory, I will have to take cuttings and plant them all anew, giving them time to settle and root so I can give them as gifts just as I received my mother plant as a gift from a casual friend six or seven years ago.

And time keeps drifting in both the long and short view. I'm finding that this light season has not been a time of reflection and recording. More, it has been a time of doing and only reaching outward into my veggieboard community instead of the one on one relationships I have formed there, only doing the deeper intmacy work with Tara, but not other people. It's been the summer of feeling incapable of going any deeper than I've been actually going with other people. A pull in season while outwardly seeming to do a fair amount. At least that's how I see it. Tara might beg to differ. You'd have to ask her.

It's been the summer that I learned from taking the Myers-Briggs test that I am an introvert. And I realize that I never really knew the Jungian definition of an introvert: someone who is fed more by her own internal landscape than the ones outside of herself: Someone who feels drained after being around lots of other people and prefers small groups or being alone. This has been the summer of watching my beautiful wife heal and seem firmly on the path of wellness and finding strengths which have been happily retaken. This has been a summer of lots of doing what I feel I need to do for myself, and a serious struggle with being connected to others. This has been the summer of the dwindling drum student roster. I'm down to just Tuesday, my beloved drumming students, sisters, tribemates. And as I have observed this piece of my life seemingly unravelling, I am struck with the variety of my reactions to this curious thing which has been going on since early May. On the first Sunday in May, Pachamama performed triumphantly at the Willits Methodist Church. After that show, the Friday practice group ceased. In less than a month, the Wednesday beginner class lost 1/2 it's students, so it seemed wise to move the remaining 3 or 4 to the also-small Monday class. Last Monday was the last Monday class. I have moved the remaining student who isn't already coming to the Tuesday class over to the Tuesday class. We will see how she feels after class tomorrow. As of right now, I have eight students.

At first (of course) I thought it was me. That my magic was gone. All these months women have been telling me how much I have changed and enriched their lives and how much they love drum class, but can't come or commit to comming for reason A, B or C. Some swear they will return. That has yet to happen. Right now I am feeling the space where all that focus was and truly seeing it as a gift; a gift of space to fill or not. To fill with drumming or not. It feels like a sweater unravelling, but the fiber is so beautiful that surely it will be reknit into something even more beautiful. Once can hope.

So maybe, inside the flower of my creative center, which looks folded in on itself, there is a new something wonderful gestating, being formed, reformed. I have a book to write and share with the world. I have a garden in all the literal and metaphorical ways that word applies, to tend. As we come up to and pass the balance point of light:dark of the year, I intend to record more, start just doing the hard, sloggy work of creation. And we shall see what comes.

Oh These Interesting Times We Live In, or, "In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check." MLK, August 28, 1963

Last weekend, we were at the Northern Californa Women's Music Festival at the Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville CA. The headliner on Saturday night was Laura Love, an artist that I have loved for years but have never seen perform. (In trying to take a picture of her in the dark, I hit the video function by mistake and got about 10 seconds of video, for what it's worth.)
Laura is a mixed race women whose great grandparents on one side were slaves. Below is a promo from her website about her recording NeGrass:

"NeGrass is an acoustic collection of traditional and original field hollers, Negro spirituals and folk songs[.] There is a personal and historic theme to NeGrass. It is something of a family history – Laura takes what she knows of her great grandparents’ lives and imagines how it might have been for them around the end of the Civil War as they were being freed from slavery and embarking into an unfamiliar world. NeGrass is a lovely, heartbreaking and joyful piece of work."

So this past week, I've been listening to NeGrass and thinking about the profound reality that in the 145 years since the Emancipation Proclamation was written into law, we have come to this place today, right here where a black man is running for President of the United States. I found this article today on Truthout.org "So Many Miles From Selma", that speaks to the changes we've come through as a country since the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. There are some great pictures of that historic event here.

My father, Ted Salzman, who was a civil rights activist teaching junior high school math in Harlem, NY at the time, asked me (age 3) if I wanted to go with him to the March on Washington and hear Martin Luther King Jr speak. I remember him explaining who MLK was and why he was going. I also remember him cautioning me that many people didn't want Negro people to have the same rights as white people and that the people marching might have things thrown at them or angry people yelling at them while they were marching. He scared me (I remember this) and I declined to go. To this day I regret that he didn't just take me. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his I Have a Dream speech on that day, 45 years ago, yesterday.

As a woman, I too have a dream. I have a dream that someday I will be represented in the White House by a president who is either a person of color or a woman, preferably both at the same time or one of each. (If I am allowed to get really specific, I have a dream that someday I will be represented by a Progressive, Visionary, Diplomatic, Earth-loving, Vegan, Peace worker, Queer person.) I have a dream that someday I will be represented in Washington and California and in my county of Mendocino by women and people of color. At least 55% so we can be a majority. Surely the day cannot be far off. The reign of the affluent and priveleged white man is over. In my lifetime, may it be so. And ironically enough, with John McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate, barring unforseen chaos, I will get my wish. "Be careful what you wish for." Alaskan Governer Palin is one scary woman. When I think of being represented by a woman, I think of Senator Clinton or my personal favorite, CA Congresswoman Barbara Lee who bravely said "NO!" to war after 9/11; the only Congressperson to do so.

Yet, if I come out of the issues and the parties and the positions and into the symbolism of it all, we as a nation have come to the brink of our third Presidential election of the this century, this new Millennium, with an election that will give us either a Black man as a president or a Woman as a vice president. For the first time in our history. In this symbolic context, we are, as Martin Luther King Jr said 45 years ago, "In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check."

May the cashing of this check be for the true good of
women,
people of color,
the poor,
the shrinking middle class,
the dispossesed,
all those at home and abroad suffering due to 8 long, horrific years of the Bush Administration,
the Earth,
choice,
the animals,
the last wild places,
our children
and most of all for Hope, the thing that remained at the bottom of Pandora's box after all the horrors were released into the world.

After the 2004 election, the second stolen election, I packed my Hope away. I was resigned to just be a deep witness to the fall of so much of what I hold sacred. It's feeling like it's now time to pull Hope out of the box.

Uh huh.

An Article I Came Across on Sparkpeople.com Today

Sparkpeople.com is my bomb. It is the free site on which I track all my nutrition, all my exercise and have been hugely motivated by joining their SparkAmerica Challenge of accumulating a billion minutes of exercise during calendar year 2008. I don't have to do a billion minutes, silly....it's a collective effort. My annual goal, which I set in December 2007 is 27,000 minutes; 75 minutes a day, 360 days of the year. That seemed very doable and at this juncture I am well ahead of par to make my goal.

I've been sort of stunned at how much I've been eating this summer, actually more stunned by actually losing those pesky 2-3 extra pounds I put on last winter. I'm 148flat and holding steady there while eating between 1550-1800 calories a day. In Weight Watcher points, that's about 30-37 pts a day. When I was in my first year of maintenance, I was eating between 24-28 pts a day, or roughly 1200-1400 calories. So what's up with that? Why am I eating so much more and losing, albeit very slowly? I happened across this article by Coach Dean on Sparkpeople this morning when I went to log my 5 mile run. This is actually two articles. Today's was Part 2, so I'll post the links to both parts, plus copy it here for those who found my blog, but don't want to navigate Sparkpeople.
Part 1
Part 2

High Performance Nutrition - Part 1
The Big Picture: Food as Fuel
-- By Dean Anderson, Fitness & Behavior Expert

Good nutrition provides the foundation for your goals, whether you want to lose weight the healthy way or fuel high-level physical activities. Unless you eat “the right stuff” at the right times, you aren’t going to get very far in either direction.

Unfortunately, what counts as the right stuff often depends on the situation. Your body can’t do everything at once. Restricting your calorie intake to promote weight and fat loss can make it very difficult to build muscle mass or train for endurance events. If you’re trying to combine any or all of these goals, things can get pretty complicated. This article will help you understand the role that carbohydrates play in fueling exercise and recovery and how both the timing and nutritional makeup of your meals and snacks can help you achieve your performance goals.

Fact #1: The more you exercise the more carbohydrates you will need for fuel.

With all the emphasis placed on exercising to lose weight, many people are surprised to hear that exercise itself doesn’t actually burn much fat as fuel. Exercise uses up the calories you've eaten, but most "fat burning" occurs when your body then has to turn to fat stores to fuel basic bodily functions.

To fuel moderate and high intensity exercise, your body relies primarily on carbohydrates (glucose), which are broken down quickly to fuel muscle cells. (Your body can't turn fats and proteins into usable energy quickly enough to meet the demands of exercising muscles.) Therefore, higher intensity cardio and strength training activities will burn more glucose as fuel, and more calories overall. Learn more about the myth of the "fat burning zone" by reading this Ask the Expert Q & A .

Action Step: Don’t limit your carbohydrates.

Most people need about 100-150 grams (400-600 calories) of carbohydrates every day just to fuel their brains and central nervous systems. On top of that, you need additional carbs to replace the energy stores you used when exercising. If you’re trying to lose weight, research shows that a diet where 55-60% of total calories come from carbohydrate is ideal for most physically active people

Fact #2: The fuel you use during exercise doesn't come from your most recent meal.

It takes time to digest your food and turn it into glycogen, which is the primary fuel your muscle cells actually use during exercise. Glycogen is made out of glucose (which comes from carbohydrates) and is stored in both your muscle cells and liver. As long as you're eating enough nutrients to meet your activity needs, your body can store enough glycogen to handle about 2000 calories worth of high-intensity activity or 4000 calories worth of lower-intensity activity—even if you haven’t eaten in a while.

If you’re highly active, you should plan your meals and snacks so that you don’t run out of muscle glycogen at the wrong time (like in the middle of an exercise session). A marathon runner can deplete her glycogen stores before the end of a single race (called “bonking” or “hitting the wall”). A more casual exerciser can run out of glycogen after a few days of not eating enough carbohydrates and total calories to replace it.

Action Step: Eat enough total calories to support your activity level.

The combination of a low-calorie diet and a high level of exercise will force your body to breakdown muscle tissue to meet your immediate energy needs. Total calorie deficits of more than 500-1000 calories per day will actually inhibit exercise performance—even for moderate exercisers.

Fact #3: Planning nutritious meals will help you recover from exercise.

The most important window for replenishing glycogen is the four to five hours immediately after a vigorous exercise session. During this time, the enzymes responsible for this process are more active and effective.

Most healthy people don’t really need to eat immediately before exercise. But eating a small snack or meal 20-60 minutes before an exercise session will trigger an insulin response that helps glucose enter your muscle cells, making it easier to exercise without discomforts like dizziness, faintness, or a general lack of energy. But if you or your stomach prefers not to eat before a workout, you should have plenty of muscle glycogen to fuel one to two hours of moderate to vigorous exercise before eating. To learn more about exercising in the morning or on an empty stomach, read this Ask the Expert Q & A.

Action Step: Eat a good post-exercise meal.

Sports nutritionists recommend that active people eat about 250-300 calories (with a 4:1 ratio of carbs to protein) within 90 minutes after exercising. This breaks down to about 50-60 grams of carbs and 12-15 grams of protein.

Putting It All TogetherWhen you put these facts together into one big picture, you can see that keeping your glycogen tanks topped off is the key factor to maintaining your ability to perform at a high level while losing weight; the Action Steps outlined above will help you do just that.
Article created on: 8/16/2006

Putting It All Together

When you put these facts together into one big picture, you can see that keeping your glycogen tanks topped off is the key factor to maintaining your ability to perform at a high level while losing weight; the Action Steps outlined above will help you do just that.

High Performance Nutrition - Part 2
Recommendations for Very Active People
-- By Dean Anderson, Fitness & Behavior Expert

Trying to lose weight while eating enough to support vigorous endurance or strength training can be a very tricky business. Cutting too many calories can cause the body to breakdown muscle tissue to meet its energy needs, and make it impossible to replenish energy reserves in time for your next workout. In turn, both of these consequences can lower your metabolism, making it much more difficult to shed body fat and improve body composition.

Most people who consistently exercise more than 60 minutes per day at high intensity levels need to adjust their nutrition plans in one or more of the following ways:

*Adjusting carbohydrate, protein, and fat intake so that the amount of each nutrient is appropriate for your individual body size and the type, intensity, duration, and frequency of your physical activity
*Timing meals and snacks in relation to exercise so that the right amount of fuel is available when needed
*Using appropriate fluid and energy replacement strategies during long and intense exercise sessions

Below, you’ll find some general recommendations in each of these three areas that you can use as a starting point for finding the right combination for yourself. These recommendations are based on a recent survey of studies, presented in the American Dietetics Association’s Position Statement on Nutrition and Athletic Performance (2004). You can access the full statement at the ADA’s website, http://www.eatright.org/.

Nutrient Recommendations for Very Active People

The following chart shows how active and very active people can adjust their intake of the three macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein and fat).

Active is defined as taking part in planned, continuous exercise that is equivalent to walking 6-10 miles per day (a calorie expenditure of 600-1000 calories/day).

Very active is defined as taking part in planned, continuous exercise that is equivalent to walking more than 10 miles per day (a calorie expenditure of 1000+ calories/day).

Although aerobic exercise typically burns more calories per training session, most individuals whose major form of training is strength training should consider themselves to be in the “very active” category, due to the nutritional needs associated with larger amounts of lean body mass and the glycogen-depleting effects of extensive, anaerobic strength training.

Nutrient Needs Based on Activity Level and Body Weight

Carbs:

Active: 2.3-3.2 grams/lb of body weight

Very Active: 3.2-5.5 grams/lb of body weight

Protein:

Active: 0.6-0.7 grams/lb of body weight

Very Active: 0.7-1.0 grams/lb of body weight

Fat:

Balance of total calories after meeting above requirements

Note: To avoid performance delcine, people attempting to lose weight while engaging in demanding athletic training should not reduce their calorie intakes by more than 10-20% (or by more than 500-1000 calories per day). For good health, total fat intake should not fall below 15% of total calories.

Meal Contents & Timing for Very Active People

The Pre-Exercise Meal: Your individual reaction should be the primary factor that determines what, when and how much you eat prior to exercise. For many, eating before exercise enhances performance—especially during long exercise sessions that can exhaust glycogen reserves. Since most people find it difficult to exercise with a full stomach, you should allow plenty of time for digestion (about 3-4 hours before exercise) in order to get the energy benefits of a pre-exercise meal.

For long bouts of higher intensity exercise, studies show that eating 200-300 grams of carbohydrates during the pre-exercise meal results in an endurance boost. This meal should be relatively low in fat and fiber, and moderate in protein (a 4:1 ratio of carbs to protein), to promote stomach emptying and reduce the potential for gastric distress.

The Post-Exercise Meal: Most people can replace the glycogen used during an intense exercise session within 24 hours without a special eating schedule (provided that overall nutrition is adequate). However, the best time to replenish your glycogen and nutrients is within the first 4-5 hours (and especially the first 90 minutes). If you participate in more than one exercise session per day, you'll need to pay close attention to your post-exercise meals.

Research indicates that eating a high-carbohydrate meal (about 0.7 grams per pound of body weight or 1.5 grams per kilogram of body weight) immediately after exercise is the best way to replenish glycogen.

Various types of carbohydrates will affect glycogen replenishment rates. Eating simple sugars and high GI (glycemic index) foods results in slightly faster storage rates during the immediate post-exercise period. This is important when immediate glycogen replenishment is needed, such as taking part in both an intense training session and athletic event in the same day. Whole foods containing higher proportions of fat, fiber, and protein result in slower replenishment rates, but overall, these foods should make up the bulk of most people's diets.

Including protein in your post-exercise meal does not seem to affect glycogen replenishment rates. In fact, eating plenty of amino acids is important for muscle recovery after each workout (especially after strength training). The general recommendation is to include a 4:1 carbohydrate-protein ratio when eating after a workout.

Fluid and Energy Replacement during Extended Exercise

Optimal performance during extended exercise sessions occurs when the rate of fluid taken in equals the rate of fluid lost through sweating. For most people, this means drinking about 20 ounces of water before exercising; 6-12 ounces of fluid for every 15-20 minutes of high intensity exercise; and 16-24 ounces for every pound lost during exercise. This post-exercise drinking can be spread over time, as dictated by your thirst.

If you exercise intensely for more than 60-90 minutes, experts recommend that you drink a beverage containing carbohydrates and sodium (such as a sports drink) to meet part of your fluid needs. Sodium isn't typically needed for electrolyte replacement during exercise, but it can make it easier to stay well hydrated by increasing your desire to drink. Endurance exercisers such as marathoners often eat carbohydrates in the form of gels during events to maintain blood glucose levels and hold off glycogen depletion for as long as possible.

You may need to experiment with these general recommendations to find a combination that works well for you. Although it is possible to lose weight and maintain a very high level of athletic performance, keep in mind that these are two competing priorities, with no simple solution. Success at both depends on a balanced nutritional approach that does not sacrifice your long-term goals for an immediate benefit.

(end)

I found these articles interesting, but not really how I eat my post exercise meal. As a Weight Watcher, I learned long ago that I need lots of protein for breakfast to keep me going for at least 4 hours before I feel hungry again. Since I'm such a nighttime eater, it is imperative for me to eat basically just my three meals during the day with maybe a small snack between my relatively small lunch and large dinner. Over the course of a 24 hour day I eat close to Coach Dean's recommended ratios, but my way seems to be working for me. At the end of the day, my carb to protein ratio is about 3.75:1, rather than 4, but I do think we are all very different and have different needs. And 3.75:1 isn't grossly different from 4:1.

What's true: I feel great. I look great. I can run for 5 miles, albeit not fast, but it's the endurance I'm more interested in. And so it goes. Now I'm off to eat one of my huge breakfasts so I can replace my glycogen stores for later :-)

My Big Fat Breakfast: Tofu Veggie Hash

3 oz Wildwood Super firm High Protein Tofu, 1/2 cup sliced leeks, 1 cup sliced mushrooms, 3 cups baby spinach, 2 tsp gomasio (sesame salt), 1/2 jalapeno pepper, 1 1/2 Tbsp nutritional yeast all sauted together with 1 cup fat free frozen hash browns added at the end.

Nutritional Info
Servings Per Recipe: 1
Amount Per Serving
Calories: 294.3
Total Fat: 8.2 g
Cholesterol: 0.0 mg
Sodium: 270.6 mg
Total Carbs: 34.4 g
Dietary Fiber: 8.1 g
Protein: 26.8 g

148.8 and Some Musings About Yin and Yang and the Past

That was my weigh in number yesterday morning after a great run out on the Thimbleberry trail system. I was feeling skinny and voila! My first weigh in under 149, albeit by 1/10th of a pound, in months and months. I know I exercise a lot, but ohmygoddess, have I been eating a lot these past weeks. (Or is that months?) At just shy of 28 months of maintenance, I'm really getting it that my body is happy here at this weight; that although I still have to work every day to have my body be like she is, she's happy here. I've been this size before. I was this size for many years in my younger days, my 20's when Daniel was young. I was 200 lbs right before he was born and I was back at this size by September, when he was 3 months old.

I remember taking him as a baby to Anderson Hall in Camp Meeker where I did an aerobics class. I can't remember how many times a week I went, just that I did and that he wasn't the only baby. If I was lucky, he'd be asleep and sleep through the class. Otherwise, I'd have to run to the sidelines and nurse him while all sweaty and breathing hard. I remember wanting my body back, but just in a matter-of-fact way. And it was so easy to do. I remember that in my 20's, although I was this size, I was dissatisfied with my shape and size for the most part. But I remember going to the women's gym in Sebastopol in the mid 80's before the liabilitiy insurance crisis that wiped so many small businesses, including The Spa right off the map. I went to yoga classes at the new gym Coaches' Corner, tried an aerobic class or two, but I'm so spatially dyslexic that the more fussy, dance-steppy aerobic class format that grew into being in the late 80's/early 90's left me tripping over my feet and spending way too much energy trying to get the steps right rather than get much exercise. Instead, I would go running before work at the Junior College's track. I never ran far or fast, but I would go to the track for about an hour a few days a week, sneak into the poolhouse showers, shower and change and then go start my work day.

But I did make an effort to exercise in my 2o's. Nowhere near as focused as now, but I did seek it out and I held my weight right about where it is now. It was The Bad Boyfriend years; 1989-1992 where things shifted for the worse for me in just about everyway with the outward manifestation being my slow, but steady weight gain and my growing disconnect from living in my body as I drifted into my 30's, a drug habit, smoking cigarettes (again) and found myself completely entangled in an emotionally abusive relationship. My 30's were surely the Big Life Lessons Decade for me in so many ways. Fortunately, I think I actually learned a lot of my lessons that the Universe was giving me and I've lived to tell the tales.

So here I am: 48 years old and feeling better in my skin than I did at 32. Feeling better in my spirit and my heart than I did at 32. Feeling better in my inner eye's view of myself than I ever have. And there is this curious thing that I really haven't put much into words yet: As my muscle body has gotten more and more established and visible, as my hair has gone from long to relatively short, as I've gone from my "breeder" years into peri-menopause, as I've gone from trying to live a heterosexual life into a queer one, I've taken on more of my own yang nature. I have found, to some degree, my inner butch. As the years have passed, my closet has completely changed from the femmy, silky flowy things of my younger years into tee shirts with the sleeves cut off (thanks, Tara!) $125 trail running shoes, low cut long shorts, boy's jeans and even chinos. I still have 2 dresses. They are both tie-dyes in purple shades: One a tank short dress, one a tank long dress, both for those hothothot summer days where clothes are required, but I've just got to have bare legs. Tara is always so greatful and wolfy when I wear them because I was a feminine grrl when we got together. But my muscle body carries a far more yang energy and I have taken much delight in exploring this aspect of self.

And as a feminist that came out queer so late in life and now lives a far more separatist reality than most of my lesbian peers, accepting this male aspect of self is good. I feel it is healing places in my that carry a lifetime of damage. I never felt that male = bad and wrong, but oh, the damge done to me by that sector and the many, many years of healing necessary to come to where I am. So this is good. Another musing: I realized the other day that when I'm checking out my muscles or how flat my belly is in profile, I prefer looking at my right side. This is the yang side of the body. When I do yoga in my livingroom, I face north/east. The window with the morning sun illuminated the right side of my body. The left side is always more in shadow. And since I use a mirror when I do yoga, my right side is brighter and easier to see. And for some reason, maybe the light issue, my left side doesn't look as good to me; muscles less defined, belly not quite as flat. And I know this isn't true. I confessed this to Tara yesterday and she agreed that it wasn't true. But there it is: not a rejection of the feminine side of myself, but a preference for looking at the male side. Speaking to this is a vulnerable thing because it's not all neatly wrapped up, analyzed and packaged to present to the world. But this is my blog and the recording of my life, thoughts, deeds, processes so here it is, like a sentence without a period.

So here I am at 7:00 am feeling the pull of what awaits me this morning. I have a nice space right now for at least a 60 minute yoga practice, so I'm going to sign off and do that. I am thankful for this beautiful life and this beautiful body in all her processes. I am so keenly aware that my time to dance on the Earth is not infinite. And as I've said before, I feel like I am making up for so many years of living like I didn't even have a body. It's a curious process, but I'm grateful for all the awarenesses that have been offered to me. And I'm grateful to Louisa, someone I don't even know, who left such a kind comment on my prior post early this morning which inspired me to write more today.

So 148.8. The expression "You've come a long way, baby," rings in my head: To be so happy with this number, to feel like I am successful because I can maintain here feels like a state of grace after all the years and miles of wanting a different body size, a different body shape. My shape is beautiful and my size is just right. And that is my ongoing soul mantra. And the best part is that I believe it.

And Time Keeps Drifting

I was somewhat shocked to see that I hadn't blogged since the first day of the month. And that was sort of off topic about the animals that I share my land with. The month has been so busy. The fires continue, so some days are clear and the air is relatively clean and other days the air stinks of smoke and is yellow with very low visibility.

Tara and I bought Phiona the 1986 Toyota Dolphin (22 ft RV) last fall and this is the first summer of owning an RV. And I've been (and we've been) using it. (link to word Phiona and scroll down about 1/2 way to read how we got her and link to 1986 Toyota Dolphin is my post of our first trip.)

The week of July 7th, I got a call from Evalena Rose who teaches Tantra in Sonoma County. I had done her 6 month workshop back in 2000/2001 and been to Tantra Summer camp in 2002. She was having trouble finding a drummer for a couple of rituals for this year's summer camp and she called me and invited me to come to camp as a drummer. The smoke was bad and we were having a heatwave so the idea of escaping for a night to cooler, foggy, smoke-free Sonoma County was very appealing. I thought that if I were going to all the effort of making the RV road ready, I would stay 2 nights making the 2nd night a visit to one of the lovely Sonoma County beaches. I called my friend Mar who lives in Occidental, my old hometown and she was happy to join me on an RV adventure to the beach. So off I went, leaving Tara doing a work project with our friend Debbie building a new wood shed and finally painting the one remaining wall of the garage green like the other three walls and four walls of our house and carport which have been green for a couple of years. They were going to be working all weekend so I gave myself permission to have an adventure.

Tantra Summer Camp was just great. I drummed a LOT. Here's some pictures, one of me drumming for the Maha Mudra, the making love to the Earth ritual on Saturday morning. I reconnected with old friends, made a couple of new ones and had to ask myself, "Why haven't I done this in 6 years?" We'll see where that question leads.

After lunch on Saturday, I picked up Mar and went to Wright's Beach. I had been very fortunate in speaking to my friend Bill the day before and lamenting that every campsite at every Sonoma Coast beach was booked every weekend night through the rest of the summer and he told me about the overflow parking at Wright's beach. Mar and I had a reservation next to the Spud Point Marina in Bodega Bay, but I really didn't want to be RVing in what was essentially a park for people who go out on boats fishing, no ocean beach because it was the bay, close, but not quite, but that was all I could procure from my computer and phone in Willits in the days beforehand. Wright's Beach is a State beach and they have about 7 spots that are on a first come, first served basis: Not "campsites" per se, rather lengths of space alongside the main entry into the campground. We were very lucky. Because Phiona is so small at 22', we got the "last spot" in overflow which technically wasn't even a spot, but the woman that the booth was kind. AND it was "Lesbian Lane" right there as the RV in front of us was a lesbian couple as was the RV in front of them. We all hung out a little which was great because the entire rest of the campground seemed peopled by straight families, many with children. Here are a couple of pictures of the beach. I nabbed them from Google images, so I have no idea of who the people are in the picture of the beach looking south. The campground is a typical campground. We'll be going there in September with an actual site so I'll take some of my own pictures then.

So a little "On Topic" aside: This is about really cementing my fitness habits as things I am doing for life, not just when I'm home in my own routine. At camp, the morning I woke there, I was exhausted from a very spotty night's sleep. I awoke later than I planned, but saw my way towards being able to do Eoin Finn's 35 minute Complete Practice yoga podcast. I had my iPod, my little Saitek speaker and my mat, so I went out in the cool morning and on a lawn of lush grass, did a 35 minute yoga practice. I was feeling so exhausted in my body as to feel almost sick from it, but that 35 minutes totally changed my physical reality into a much better one.

When Mar and I went to the beach, we set up the RV and then went for an hour's walk on the beach. Wright's beach is a tricky beach to walk on. There is a very steep slope down to the water, so to walk on anything relatively flat, you're slogging through mostly dry sand. So that was our walk. On Sunday, I took my iPod, speaker and mat and did a 60 minute Eoin Finn practice on the beach, on a bluff overlooking the ocean. A few hours later, we packed and drove to the midpoint of the Kortum Trail which runs from above Wright's beach all the way to Goat Rock State beach, my favorite Sonoma County beach. We didn't do the whole trail as Mar wasn't up for that, but we did do a little over an hour's hike. I wore my Heart Rate Monitor and logged 250 calories burned.

This is to illustrate, besides my somewhat obsessive drive to accrue Activity Points, the creative ways I find to actually stay On Program with my exercise while out of my regular routine. (Just saying.)

So back to my long, winding excuse as to why I haven't blogged in a month: The next weekend, just a few days later on Thursday had us leaving for Born To Drum Women's Drum Camp, being held this year at the beautiful Walker Creek Ranch in West Marin County. Thursday night we camped in the RV in my friend Randi's driveway in the Oakland Hills as there was to be a concert of all the drum teachers at La Pena in Berkeley. The show was fabulous, we got little sleep and got up in the morning and motored off to camp where we spent the next three days and two nights drumming and being in a blessedly beautiful multicultural group with about 200 women. There were women from Ghana, the Congo, Venezuela, Cuba and many more places. There were Latina women, Black women, Indian women, white women, all there to drum, to learn, to fill our wells up and bring this joy, these rhythms back into our lives to maybe share with our friends, or in my case, my students. I took no pictures. I did no focused exercises. I schlepped my heavy oak conga (albeit in a bag with wheels) from one classroom to another for Afro-Cuban style classes and my big Dun-Dun (also in a bag with wheels) to my 2 classes with Mabiba, Congolese Drum and Dance Master from The Congo. I tried (and miserably failed at) an African Dance class too. We were going going going all day long into the wee hours of the night. I probably drummed, cumulatively about 6+ hours every day.

Regarding the exercise: I brought my 3 lb weights, my iPod, my yoga mat, my HRM, my running shoes, a bathing suit, but didn't want to give up a single class opportunity in order to do any of these things. I was so hungry all weekend, I figured I was burning calories at a very accelerated rate. For the first time in FOUR AND A HALF YEARS I gave myself permission to not journal food at all. I was aware, never mindless, but I wrote nothing down the whole weekend.

I must say: I was nervous upon returning home that I'd gained 5 lbs...that's this monster that stalks me: Stop journalling and exercising every day and within a few days, I'll gain 5 lbs. I stepped on the scale on Monday or Tueday and was pretty gratified to see that although I was up about 1/2 a lb, that was my e