Cooking, Writing, then Cooking Some More

Today, the last day of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I'm writing... writing... writing.... I finished an earlier draft for a post but, once I read it to Frances, she suggested I save it for a few days and reread it. Then I can decide whether I really want it to merge with traffic on the information superhighway.

I admit. The writing was a bit sarcastic. "Not your typical style," Frances warned, even as she also admitted that it did reflect my Winter family sensibilities, especially those of good old Dad.

I'll give you a clue to the topic: "What $$$ were $$$ those $$$ people $$$ thinking?" That line refers to Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the couple who crashed President Obama's first state dinner at the White House last week. Okay, so maybe it wasn't as witty and charming as I thought.

I think that my writing may be under the influence of the book I'm currently reading: Julie & Julia 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How One Girl Risked Her Marriage, Her Job, and Her Sanity to Master the Art of Living. Its author, Julie Powell, has a keen mind and an uncanny ability to throw an idea up into the air, catch it in the other hand, then add additional ideas and stories--one by one--until she's juggling a multitude of topics with words and images that are frequently fresh and startling.

Julie doesn't confine her book to the original plan, a.k.a. cook all of the recipes out of Julia Child's masterpiece: Mastering the Art of French Cooking (also known as MtAoFC) in one year's time. No. She adds her own flavorings and spices: tales from her married and family life, sexual exploits of her female friends, illnesses and injuries endured by her husband and herself, trials and tribulations involved in buying obscure ingredients for unfamiliar recipes, and the mundane and mind-numbing effects of working as a secretary for a government organization dealing with the aftermath of 9/11.

Powell describes in delightful and gross detail the method she employed to extract marrow from a cow bone (see pages 73-75). It's purpose? To garnish her rendition of Bifteck Saute Bercy. This segment ends with a promise from her husband:

Someday our ship is going to come in. We are going to move out of New York, and we are going to have our house in the country, like we've always wanted.... When this happens, we need to get ourselves a rescue cow. We will buy it from a slaughterhouse. And then we will treat it very well.

Powell admits in her Author's Note that she's altered identifying details throughout the book and made a lot of stuff up, especially scenes from Paul and Julia Childs' life. Yes, this is far more than a book about Powell cooking her way through a leap of faith.... It is the travelogue of a 20-something woman who writes about her life in a style that makes you hungry for more.

Rooted in Earth, Suspended from Sky

Yes, it's begun. On Thanksgiving Day I created Blog #2. Its title? Rooted in Earth, Suspended from Sky. Its sole intent is to take the reader along on my daily journey with t'ai chi chih moving meditation practice. But you never know. Other things may happen along the way....

I plan to continue writing Under the Forest Canopy with a minimum of four entries per month. Rooted in Earth will, on the other hand, be a daily blog (I hope!). Short and sweet.

Call me a neophyte or Neanderthal, since I don't know how to find blogs other than through their web address the new blog is at: http://taichichihmoments.blogspot.com.

Check it out!

T'ai Chi Chih Thanksgiving

Yup. I’m gonna do it. At least begin. Then what?

For years I’ve imagined creating a bigger space in my life for a daily t’ai chi chih practice followed with a blog entry. Like Julie Powell’s one year experiment with Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as detailed in her book, Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen, I want to launch into a regular commitment that requires something more of me … something yet to discover.

Truth be told, it’s been a long time—years!—since I’ve engaged in a daily t’ai chi chih practice. After I moved to the middle of the woods there was always something else to attend to, much of it survival-based: gathering wood, tending the fire, cooking, washing dishes, cleaning and maintaining the house (I’d never been a home owner before!), gardening, paying bills, shoveling snow, to say nothing of work….

But now winter approaches … a quiet(er) time here on the Bayfield peninsula. It’s now or never.

This morning’s t’ai chi chih practice was en-deer-ing. I began in front of the patio door listening to “Circle of Compassion” by Marina Raye, a comforting blend of native flute and acoustic guitar. The sky was overcast, the house dark, the woods grey—brightened only by orangey rust-brown leaves scattered over the ground—and the bird feeders were bird-less. All was quiet, peaceful. One thought floated into my head…. “I wonder whether I’ll spot any deer passing through the woods while I practice.”

Several minutes later I sighted the flash of a white tail flipping up and over. Deer coats blend so completely into their surrounds that it’s hard to spot deer even when they’re standing directly in front of you.

Quickly I noticed another deer … a pair. Soon after, two more deer slipped out of their camouflage and into view. I continued my practice moving softly and slowly. Deer five appeared. Then number six. It reminded me of a card I recently sent to a t’ai chi chih student diagnosed with breast cancer. The card featured a Jim Brandenburg photo of deer lined up in silhouette on a tree-filled hillside. It read, “May peace … and peace … and peace be everywhere.”

That’s the essence of t’ai chi chih practice. Centering, quieting the mind, relaxing into the moment … reaching a stillpoint. Perfection.

And so I submit myself to this commitment: perform a daily t’ai chi chih practice and write about it. Move. Write. Slow down. Write about it. Take note of what I notice within and around me. Detail it on my blog.

Can I do this? It’s hard to know as I’ll be scrabbling for computer time with my partner, a die-hard on-line stock investor. But, for the moment, it’s worth the effort. As Powell writes in Julie & Julia:

A few words strung together, is all. But together, out there, they seemed perhaps to glow, only faintly. Just enough.

Squirreling Around with Santa

Santa Claus slipped down our chimney early this year. He wore fur and a flat tail that he wrapped around his head as he settled in for a long winter’s nap. This Santa is not from the North Pole. He’s a local character: Flying Squirrel Santa.

“And how,” you may ask, “do you encourage Santa Claus Squirrel to continue his journey?”

It takes creativity and patience. For the most part Frances is the person who exhibits these two key traits, especially when it comes to rescuing wild creatures trapped in compromising situations.

With her typical aplomb Frances devised an exit strategy for our little Santa. Not just once, but twice!

One morning several weeks ago Frances mentioned that she’d heard something drop down our chimney the previous evening around 10:30 p.m. As the morning progressed we noticed occasional rustlings and movements inside the stove pipe. Obviously our chimney-drop guest was alive.

Finally Frances opened the stove door and spotted a furry creature sitting in the stove pipe. “What is it?” she asked, as she held it in her flashlight beam, “It looks like a bunny.”

“How could a rabbit get to the top of our chimney?” I replied. “It has to be a flying squirrel.”

I based my response on two factoids: when we toured this property prior to buying it seven years ago, we found two flying squirrels lying in the fireplace, dead. After we moved in, my cat, Hiziki, frequently spent his nights outside. On occasional mornings-after I’d find a small, disembodied, flat tail outside the patio door.

In short order Frances devised an escape strategy for the squirrel. She taped a black garbage bag around the stove door. She slit open the bottom end of the bag and taped that to a 15-inch diameter plastic leaf-blower nozzle. Then she taped the other end of the nozzle to a white plastic sunflower seed bag with its bottom cut out. The path led to and through the nearby patio door. We waited.

Soon we heard shuffling. Next we saw a small nose peek out a hole in the black plastic bag. Frances predicted that the smell of fresh air running through the exit tunnel would draw the squirrel out of the house. Still, he advanced and retreated, advanced … then retreated. Finally we agreed to rip the bag off the stove, throw open the patio door, and carry the exit “router” to the deck. In short order our squirrel appeared. He hopped and dashed frantically across the deck. When he found an appropriate deck edge from which to leap and glide, he was … gone.

Two days later—plunk—the now too-familiar sound of a small body dropping down our chimney! Frances retrieved her hand-fashioned rescue “router” from the basement, taped it to the stove, and patiently waited. Flying Squirrel #2 quickly trotted through the bags, the pipe, and out the door.

For the moment we’re storing Frances’s uniquely designed “exit router” in the basement. In the meantime …

You better watch out.
You better not cry.
Better not pout.
I’m telling you why.
Santa Claus is coming to town….

Sick Daze

Whew. It’s already mid-November. Thanks and Giving are hovering nearby. Frances and I are beginning to resurface after two? three? four? five? weeks of illness.

I have to say … it’s difficult to be so sick that you can’t think. That was us. To cope we checked out DVDs from the library. Then we sat in our chairs and engaged in hour-upon-hour of mind-numbing entertainment. And, amazingly, we WERE temporarily distracted from our illnesses as long as we were in the middle of a heart-pounding segment of “24” or another serial murder in “Dexter.” So now we’re up-to-date on the TV and ShowTime offerings for another year.

My sister-in-law asked me if our nutrition was good while we were sick. It was, I suppose, the best nutrition you can get when you’re both ill, you can’t visit the grocery store, and you don’t have the energy to cook. I floated my body in glasses of water. I quit drinking coffee. I ate most of the fresh fruit we had available from a local orchard, i.e., one bag of apples and one bag of pears (“An apple a day.…”). I made a huge pot of chicken soup then ate a bowl a day until I thought I’d turn into a noodle or a chicken … or both.

Now I have more understanding for people who don’t want to stay home when they’re sick. It takes a lot of patience to see the same walls, the same person, the same Kleenex box, and the same messy rooms for days on end. It takes tremendous fortitude to eat the same food and go through the same routine (lying down, coughing, sitting up, sneezing, walking around, coughing, lying down again, drinking, eating, coughing, napping, sneezing, ad nauseam).

I hope that everyone who gets sick this fall/winter stays home. Stay-at-home zombies are a lot easier to take that the kind that circulate around the community spreading their viruses to others.

Be kind. Take time to heal yourself before you infect others.

[This is a public service announcement from your local health care provider, Same Spirit Healing Arts LLC.]