Walking up the driveway with Topaz in the warm light of late day in earliest spring…
Even late, fatigued, I’m grateful for the little gifts of today. I’m grateful that I’ve noticed the first tips of mini irises popping through the dirt over the past few days, and the crocuses which opened yesterday. Suddenly, just since Monday, all these little beings have sprouted from the ground.
I’m grateful that after an intense work week, and a full day of meaningful interactions, I was able to rest and reset with a long afternoon nap. I know that I did some good things today. I feel nonetheless the malaise of self-doubt and resistance to the way things are. I made the mistake of reading some articles this evening that I found disheartening, even frightening. Corruption, profiteering, heartlessness, and just plain meanness surround us, in our broken medical and political systems, in our neighbors, in corporations, big Tech and big Pharma, big Banks and big Oil… There are days it is just hard and wearying to know these things.
On days like these, when I’m exhausted by my own efforts to resist the weight of evil in the world, it’s more important than ever to turn some of my attention budget to the little precious things I’m fortunate to have in my life. To savor the tiny beautiful things and moments, to find renewal and nourishment in them when there feels like little else. There’s a peace in remembering Impermanence: these small pleasures are fleeting but they are endless; they coexist with the paucity of spirit in the species that allows and perpetuates inequality and evil. I’m grateful to recall that the human spirit, the human species, also holds generosity, goodness, and love, and that I’ve also seen a lot of that today.
I marvel sometimes at the transient meaningfulness of my simple cheese sandwich lunch habit. There’s nothing at all remarkable or special about it, except that I always have enough to eat. So far.
I’m in the middle of a gloriously creative work week, wrapping up the third big project in a row, burning the midnight oil tonight. I’m grateful that I have had the energy and inspiration to work this hard and enjoy the work, take breaks, and surf the contentment wave that continues to buoy me. I’m grateful for the fresh grapefruit juice I squeezed for a special salty dog cocktail this evening when I took a break for a zoom with a dear friend in Florida. I savored it all the more for being mindful of the reasons it was such a special drink: 1) the grapefruit came from a tree in the yard of the very friend I was zooming with, 2) my new favorite glass was a birthday gift from Amy, 3) I mixed flaky sea salt with raw sugar to rim the glass, and 4) all the elements of this one simple cocktail added together became so much more than the sum of their parts. Now, back to work.
Living inside the kaleidoscope… grateful for a little slice of sunshine at the end of a cloudy day.
Even though I’ve had the same home for thirty years, I’ve lived a life with a lot of coming and going. I used to travel across the country a couple of times a year, missing a whole month or a season at home. When I first had a year that I didn’t have to drive across the country and back, I was startled to realize: It’s been a whole year! I’ve been able to wake up every morning in the same bed, and see every day of every season from the same vantage point. And now I realize it’s been nine years since I’ve driven across the country, and four years since I’ve really done much more than wake up, meditate, fill the day with work, gardening, communication, punctuate it with my little lunch ritual, my little evening ritual, and then go to bed. This repeating pattern brings a pure, deep contentment to each day.
Contentment was an aspiration since I moved to this home. I remember sitting on the rim of the canyon thirty years ago and feeling a voice inside, This is the leading edge of peace. Since then, I’ve touched into contentment occasionally, recognized it in a moment here or there, felt it for a day or two. But a few weeks ago, it began to bubble up in me day after day after day, an inexplicable feeling of quiet happiness. As I reflected, it came clear that it arose from the simple sameness of each day; and yet, within each day, the infinite variety.
I’m grateful I found a good use for these ancestral pickle tongs! I was hungry for a greasy, salty snack this afternoon but I could not stop working: ancestral tongs protected the computer from sticky fingerprints.
There is a routine that shifts gradually from season to season, and varies only occasionally. I work from deadline to deadline on a wonderful variety of projects. But I don’t ever really know what’s coming next. I don’t know whether it’s going to be sunny and I’ll have a long walk—where will we walk? Or if it’s going to be icy and I’ll stay inside and vacuum, or write or read, or work. There is spontaneous variety in what I choose to eat and how I choose to prepare it on any given day. Who might call for advice or help or consolation, or to share some good news I can rejoice in with them? I don’t know what opportunities will arise to be of service in my community, or in the larger political landscape.
Contentment doesn’t mean that I’m never sad. I am finally able to understand, to feel in my whole being, that contentment can also hold my sadness: personal sadness with fading friendships, an aging body that’s rarely felt robustly healthy in its entire life, occasional loneliness, or the deeply held grief over dead beloveds; and a more global sadness at the dreadful state of so many aspects of our world.
I’m grateful for St. Francis, and one day maybe he’ll get an entire post devoted to him. Meanwhile, he took a tumble recently, but he’s been righted and rooted into the mud which should hold him for awhile.
Why has it taken me until this age to begin to feel so deeply content? Why was I not able to feel this contentment earlier in life, and why am I now? I guess because it took me this long to learn the ingredients of the magic formula…
To hear the magic formula for contentment, along with a free guided meditation, check out my podcast, Suffer Less with Mindfulness, wherever you get your podcasts. The episode ‘Want What You Have’ will air tomorrow before dark mountain time.
I’m grateful for experiencing the truth that happiness comes from what we bring to the world, rather than what the world gives to us. I’ve understood it theoretically for awhile, but it felt crystal clear to me yesterday after I had run some errands and was thinking, That was so much fun! Running errands hasn’t been something I generally consider fun. But I set off with the intention to embody loving-kindness in every interaction, and had fun with the clerk at the post office, had fun walking with a friend, had fun at the bank where Wren got to do some tricks for extra cookies and delighted the drive-up teller; then I had fun stopping by the Bad Dog Ranch, where I was greeted by free-range chickens pecking in the grass next to a black cat who thinks he’s a dog, and by three wagging dogs and a cowgirl.
All of it could have been not-fun if I’d brought a different attitude, like rushing for example, or even just indifference. I could have spent a neutral or unpleasant couple of hours, which is what I’ve done on so many errands in the past. I’m grateful for noticing my progress on the mindfulness path: being present and pleasant, looking people in the eyes with a warm smile, listening with the ear of the heart. It is such a simple shift in perspective, one that I realize has become largely effortless, bringing an intention of sincere friendliness into each interaction. I came home from ‘the world’ happy because I brought loving-kindness from inside myself to my interactions with ‘the world.’
On the radio driving from the bank to the ranch I listened to an interview with a poet and translator from Rafah recounting the desperate situation in that city. He said, “You are not safe at all… I never witnessed such a situation… I’m a survivor of five wars… what we are living through, I can’t call it war, it’s another thing… We are spending our whole lives trying only to survive… I don’t want to survive, I want to live… There is a huge difference between living and surviving….” It was a heartbreaking counterpoint to the happiness I was feeling in my safe car driving along on the other side of the world. I’m grateful for all the causes and conditions leading up to this moment where I am able to live, rather than just survive.
I’m very grateful to those of you who tried to submit the comment form to the BLM using the link in yesterday’s post. If some of you were successful, so much the better! But some of you had trouble getting it to go through, as did I, which I reported to the Conservation Center. They fixed the glitch, and at least one person was able to successfully submit the form from yesterday’s link. If you’d rather not try that again, please try starting at their main page, and then click on the light green block on the left just below the banner heading and follow on to the form. Thank you again!
I’m also grateful today for another simple salad, and for a leftover heel of sourdough that I chopped up and toasted in bacon fat to make croutons. I’m grateful for an abundance of smoked Gouda, which I added to the salad, along with avocado, carrot, broccoli, celery, and a little bit of bacon. I made a simple vinaigrette the way I learned from the Colonel, including a pinch of dry mustard, a spoonful of mayonnaise, and some herbs. So simple, so delicious. And I’m grateful to understand that my contentment can hold sadness.
I’m grateful for playing in the snow with little Wren.
I’m grateful for community activism on behalf of environmental protection, and this time it’s right in my own back yard. As a community, we’ve been fighting for our quality of life and our livelihoods for more than a decade, in a battle with the oil and gas industrial complex that seems to never end. If you’ve ever visited here, or you just want to support us, please consider signing this comment form to the BLM now. The deadline for comments is February 20.
When this started in 2011 with proposals to lease public lands at the heart of our watersheds for fracking, there was enormous community response. Hundreds of people attended meetings, thousands sent letters, urging the government to protect these lands that are crucial to the agriculture and recreation that drive our economy. What can one person do? I realized I could compile some of my many photographs of the area into a ‘visual comment’ to submit to the BLM during the initial public comment period. And then I realized I wasn’t the only one who had photographs.
By the time it was done, more than fifty valley residents and a few visitors from out of state had sent me hundreds of digital images, which I complied into the North Fork Scrapbook. Please visit the online scrapbook generated and maintained by our leading environmental protector, Pete Kolbenschlag, now director of the Colorado Farm & Food Alliance, to learn more about the unique valley and the looming threat to its health. I’m grateful to Pete, to the Western Slope Conservation Center, to Citizens for a Healthy Community, and to the thousands of valley residents who are making their concerns heard in an effort to protect our home.
Look, Ma! No Cheese! I’ve been approaching Dairy Overload this past week, so was grateful to have a bunch of goodies to make a delicious salad for lunch, even without cheese. And the dressing was mostly walnut oil and vinegar, I just made it in an ’empty’ mayonnaise jar to use up the last tablespoon I couldn’t scrape out.
I made apple cider cinnamon rolls again, this time determined to do everything exactly according to the recipe. I started the dough Sunday night, left it in the mudroom overnight, and was delighted to see it so beautifully risen in the morning. I remembered to bring it inside as soon as I got up, and set the bowl across from the fire to help it come to room temperature more quickly. It rolled easier this time, and I brushed the melted butter on the dough as prescribed instead of mixing it with the filling.
It made a perfect log that turned out just about the diameter of the rolling pin. I sliced that in half, then quarters, and each quarter into thirds…
…making twelve nearly perfectly even rings.
These rose for an hour until doubled, more or less…
And this time they baked perfectly all the way through. Then I made the glaze exactly according to directions, cooking one-half cup apple cider with a pinch of salt down to exactly a quarter cup, and mixing in cream cheese and butter. It turned out perfectly. And once the rolls had cooled for five minutes, I spread a very thin layer of glaze over, and let them cool an additional twenty minutes before spreading the rest of the glaze. I’m not sure why this extra step, but I’m not going to argue with it: I can imagine some magical alchemy of the thin layer melting into the hot rolls and creating a protective film or something.
The looked absolutely perfect. I could hardly wait for them to cool enough to try one. And when I did, it tasted like something was missing. It was delicious, but there was just a little something something not quite right… a few hours later it hit me: I forgot the nutmeg! The filling mix, mostly brown sugar, also calls for cinnamon, ground ginger, nutmeg, and a pinch of ground cloves. I had lined up the spices from the baking drawer, but forgot to set out the nutmeg grinder from the countertop turntable. I’ve never been a huge nutmeg fan, but I can see that even a quarter teaspoon can add that extra little pop in a cinnamon roll. Oh well! Practice makes perfect.
This wide-angle perspective of Wren shows her complete ownership of me. I love how she seems to experience me as a convenient piece of furniture to give her a higher perspective one moment, and another moment as though I am an extension of her very self, or she of mine.
Wren and I did something today that I haven’t done in a few years: we went to a Super Bowl party. We took a bacon-cheddar-cream cheese dip, topped with avocado and the first two tomatoes of the season! That little vine in a bag that I brought in last fall? Its tomatoes ripened through December, and then it didn’t quit: I gave it one dose of full-spectrum plant food, and a couple weeks later it made a few flowers, and then a few more. I picked the first ripe tomatoes today, and there are half a dozen more green tomatoes on the vine. They’re small, just barely bigger than a cherry tomato, but still! I’m grateful for this pertinacious little plant.
The party was just across the living room in my recliner, and we were the only guests. Topaz stopped by for a few crunchy treats. Our team didn’t win, but we had a good time, and the event gave me plenty to reflect on. I was grateful to swap perspectives with a friend over zoom after a halftime show that NPR called “chaotic.” I’ll say. I couldn’t make a lick of sense out of it after the first few minutes. I kept waiting for Usher to sing a song. But I watched, and I wondered, How is there still racism in this country when so many Americans of all colors and political persuasions celebrate the Super Bowl? It’s not a white sport. At least half its megastars are Black. The halftime show was a celebration of Black artists and cultures. How do some people revere Black football stars or performers, and simultaneously hate their Black neighbors?
The ads, which for some years were actually clever or artistic or surprising, this year struck me as even more materialistic, banal, depressing, and alienating than ever. I don’t even remember seeing a single Clydesdale, but maybe I blinked during that one. I’ve been studying human beings from the moment in college when I learned I could get a diploma in people-watching, and I barely understand them any better than I did when I embarked on my Anthropology degree. What I do understand, though, is that our predominant American culture is tragically alienated from one thing that is essentially real and true, the natural world: soil, water, trees, non-human animals, and the interconnected cycles and systems that regulate this fragile spinning globe we live on. For all we know, “Life is only on Earth… and not for long.” (Justine, in Melancholia.)
On the political front, here’s another hopeful, clarifying, and inspiring perspective, recommended by Jessica Craven, from Mike Lux Media with the headline “The 2024 election will be determined by two things. Neither one is Joe Biden’s age.”
Leftovers: a crabcake smashed into a cheese and avocado sandwich.
I’m grateful today for courage. Not mine, but the courage of the many voices being raised in the independent news and opinion sphere about the recklessly biased coverage of the two presumptive candidates for president this coming November. Once again, mainstream media is following the lead of rightwing so-called ‘news’ like Fox propaganda, by trumpeting the grandiose theatrics of the former narcissist-in-chief while ignoring his daily distortions, lies, and cognitive failures; at the same time, pouncing like a starving cat on a single mixup by an accomplished and proven statesman who cares more about Americans than about his own ego, and more about the planet than his own profit.
The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other infotainment outlets, won the 2016 election for Trump with their free nonstop promotions, and seem on track to do the same thing again in 2024. Their recent egregiously skewed coverage of the biased Hur report and their relentless attacks on President Biden for his age and occasional mistakes is unfathomable. I can’t say anything about it nearly as well as courageous writers like Robert Hubbell in Today’s Edition:
“Perhaps voters don’t question Trump’s sharpness despite more frequent and serious misstatements because the NYTimes devotes an inordinate amount of coverage to Biden’s missteps but hardly mentions Trump’s. The Times creates the dominant narrative and then claims it doesn’t have to report on the counter-narrative because voters aren’t interested in it! What arrogance!
Within the 24-hour window of the NYTimes raking Biden over the coals, the following Republicans misspoke but the Times reacted with indifference:
“An hour after Biden says the President of Egypt is the President of Mexico Trump says the Prime Minister of Hungary, [Viktor Orban] is the President of Turkey”—a repeated mistake by Trump on the campaign trail.
Speaker Mike Johnson confused the countries of Iran and Israel in an interview on Fox News, saying that the US has already “funded Iran” in the existing US budget—a mistake viewed as slanderous by the tens of millions of citizens in both countries.
Fox News infotainer posing as a journalist Jesse Watters introduced South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as the “South Carolina Governor.”
Another daily voice for sanity is Jessica Craven, who shared in her newsletter yesterday her letter to the NYT editorial board. A bonus with her newsletter is a weekly dose of good news which celebrates political, environmental, and social justice victories in the previous week, of which there are many. Here’s an excerpt of her letter to the Times:
“What can the New York Times be thinking? Trump shows clear signs of cognitive impairment. You regularly give him a pass. President Biden is considered by all who’ve interacted with him—including his political enemies—to be sharp and capable. The Hur report was written by a former Trump associate; it was a political hit piece and the Times bought into it with zero journalistic scrutiny.
I have to ask again, do your editors WANT a Trump presidency? Because that’s what your misleading, biased, and hysterically one-sided coverage will bring us.
History will not be kind to the Times for its relentless attacks on the one man capable of saving us from dictatorship. Shame on you.”
As agitated as I am by the unraveling political coverage, I still make sure that I appreciate the simple pleasures in life, taking time to enjoy a simple, delicious lunch: homemade sourdough toast with ‘fromage fort’ and avocado, salt, pepper, and a sprinkle of homemade paprika. We have to nurture and take care of ourselves, and find joy in our lives, in order to have the strength and resilience to rise to the demands of our current crises, be they personal, local, national, or global.
If you feel discouraged by the media narratives that are shaping the opinions of Americans, then take some action to shape the media narratives. Write to the papers or networks you follow, share your outrage on social media, use your right to free speech, and speak truth not only to power but to the media that seems to control it. Join one of the thousands of grassroots political organizations that sprang up during the Trump regime to fight his agenda of power and tax cuts for the wealthy, stepping up the rape of the planet, racism, antisemitism, white male supremacy, and oppression of minorities of all kinds. Subscribe to Hubbell’s and Craven’s newsletters, they tell us how to fight this fight every single day. If we don’t beat Trump at the ballot box in November or legitimately stop his campaign before that, we are in for a worse nightmare than you can imagine.
But as Hubbell often says, we’ve beaten him and his agenda in almost every election since 2016, from special elections to midterms and the 2020 presidential election; we can do it again. “We have every reason to be hopeful, but no reason to be complacent!”
I’m grateful for my tracking skills, however limited they are. As the tiny dingo trotted up the driveway this morning (left) she crossed tracks with a larger canid who had clearly been down the driveway before snow fell, and back up the driveway in the same path after the snow. We didn’t try to follow the trail but walked alongside it for awhile. It could have been a rogue neighbor dog, but I prefer to think it was a coyote.
I’ve spent a couple of hours over the past few months trying to determine the most sustainable kind of canned crab meat to buy, and learned that both Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea purport to harvest and process crab sustainably. Seafood Watch from Monterrey Bay Aquarium is a great resource to determine the best seafood sources for ethicarian consumption, but not much help in determining which brands of canned crab meet their standards. It advises which countries or states within countries including the US are the most sustainable sources of crab meat, but the hard part is finding out where the crab canning brands source their crabs.
Our regional supermarket made the choice easy, with only their store brand available. Kroger, like the two brands mentioned above, dedicates a page to its sustainability pledge and progress, but doesn’t specify its seafood sources. So I made do.
The good news for me was that the canned crab made much more authentic crab cakes than the frozen krab, and the good news for the crabs is, even so, they weren’t so delicious that I’ll be making them a lot. I guess I’m still not that crazy about crab cakes, and have now satisfied my odd craving for awhile.
I made half the recipe since I only had twelve ounces of crab meat, so I enjoyed two for lunch and froze the other four for another time. I think next time I’m craving fried seafood I’ll just make salmon croquettes, or maybe fish n’ chips. Or a fried cod sandwich. Or maybe a fried catfish sandwich. So much seafood to choose from, even in the mountains of Colorado! As usual, a double-edged conundrum from the global market: how to eat ocean protein ethically while landlocked. It’s great that I can get seafood from anywhere, but all the petroleum that goes into getting it here! Some days I’d like to learn to fish; but, that comes with its own challenges to my tender sensibilities. Sigh.
I’m grateful for good food, and for finding my way through thorny ethical thickets to allow myself to enjoy many delectables in moderation, while doing the best I can to live lightly on the planet.
