throwback

It appears my new co-workers have me figured out. Today, after examining my lunch, one of them commented, "you're kind of a throwback...a back to the earth kind of person".

Contents of the lunch? A farmers market orange. Homemade tomato-basil soup. Homemade vegan coleslaw. Slice of homemade bread.

Yep, guilty.

I can (and have) said a lot about the economic, political, environmental, and spiritual reasons why I want to be as involved as possible in what I eat. But beneath all of that, there's what it does for me emotionally. In my considerable moving around in the last four years, I've noticed my first instinct after a move or a long trip is to cook. Something about stirring a pot of soup or kneading a loaf of bread helps gather all the pieces of me scattered in transition.

I'm finding I need that gathering now more than ever - new place, new job, new roommate, to be followed in about four months by another new place, new job, new roommate. Even the very space I live in is in transition - an extended-stay housing complex with constant turnover.

This past Sunday afternoon, I got to spend part of an afternoon manually prepping beds (read: scraping in the dirt with a hoe) on a local organic farm. As the farmer was showing me how to break up the soil, she described it as a form of meditation. By the end of my two hours, I had the beginnings of my old farming calluses, sore shoulders, one blister, and a deep sense of contentment and happiness that I've been missing in Phoenix.

I also had a very generous bag of free produce:

homemade

Despite the moves and upheaval, what does it mean to live a home made life? Not in the briefest sense of the briefest pass of the term, but if you parse out "home" and "made", what does that really mean? How could that feed into a more peaceful and simple living?

A bowl of borscht, one of three soups made for a potluck-ish birthday celebration.

I'm probably getting too old for this, but I made my mom a drawing for her birthday.


Now it looks like this.

First attempt at bread from scratch.

walking

A decent measure of my spiritual state is what I spend my walk to work thinking about - what is so important that it surfaces as a theme for those few, uncluttered moments. All to often lately it's been a mental rehearsal of The Budget, and what may or may not fit into it, particularly (I'm sorry to say) what I can (or in most cases cannot) afford to wear. It's come down to one, small, three digit number to cover my groceries, Thanksgiving, clothing, and going out for the month of November. And I think about it. A lot.

I'm thankful for every moment of grace that interrupts that whirl of anxiety. Most recently, it was a passage from the novel Sophie's World. The book is the history of Western philosophy as told to a 14-year-old Norwegian girl.

A few days ago, I got a little reminder from that book. It describes pursuing mystical spirituality as "[consisting] of the simple life and various meditation techniques". I am far far from any sort of mysticism at the moment, but that phrase was enough to remind me that simplicity is something I am choosing as much as it has, for this season, chosen me.