First Postcard from Israel

Time, high time! Our first relatively quiet day since arriving here almost two weeks ago, and it's taken a little finagling and following of learning curves to get an internet connection and to transfer photos from phone to computer... We arrived in Israel promptly for my cousin's wedding...

my mom with my cousin

 ...which was beautiful, and our dance card has been full from sunrise to sunset every day we've been here.

It's been wonderful to catch up with friends and relatives, and simply to be here in this small, relatively affluent, expensive country that has so little remaining wilderness on the surface, and certainly compared to when I was a little kid (let alone when my mom was), and yet is full of wild nooks and corners everywhere. 

I visited a friend I hadn't seen for many years--from all the way back to my fruit fairy days in California--and was reminded and recalled to a very different time in my life and a very different way of living my life, on which more soon.
Also more soon on my mom's and my visit to the Babylonian museum, and our day trip to Petra.

My mom had been wanting to go to Petra forever. I'm never normally into one-day tours, but this was just perfect. A truly unforgettable experience--much more in my next post.

Short and sweet for now. The wedding was two days of festivity and gaiety (bet you haven't seen that word in type in a while!). In Israel they know how to do it in style. 

But I think the fact that the outdoor environment is so effortlessly gorgeous helps a lot! This was at a former kibbutz in Kfar Saba.
My mom is so lovely...

The second "leg" of the wedding was the Shabbat Chatan--the bridegroom's sabbath--at a hotel right on the beachfront in Tel Aviv. At the end of the Shabbat, my mom and I took a walk on the beach, full of people watching, full of boats and waves and cloudscapes...
...and these birds--geese, I think--flying south. They came in v-shaped waves, so directed, so intentional.

 The sunset speaks for itself.

I don't know how to speak for myself here, except to say that I can't help feeling at home here, despite all the mismatches and despite my frustration with my far-from-perfect Hebrew. Even if I don't talk a lot, being able to talk and to talk well is so important to me.
On the other hand, I was careless and got glutened at some point during the wedding, and am having the familiar experience here that while everything is so much more delicious, my digestion sucks even more than usual. It's taking a long time to recover from the gluten, most likely, but many times before I've had this physical inside-outness here.
Maybe it's an overturn I need to embrace...
So much more to think and talk about.
More soon--off to visit another great aunt.
Much love!

Gut Feelings--No More Eating To Please

Just at the four week mark in England, heading to Israel tomorrow; I finished translating Alpha this morning! And sent in the final portion of my second packet of this year's MFA work (i.e. thesis and critical paper work). Doesn't it always feel good to have some closure before a trip?
For a little more closure, since I'm burning the candle hard at both ends anyway, the promised post on some food stuff that isn't going away (yet?)
You'd think--I keep thinking--that a light bulb will go off and I'll have it all figured out and have created a sustainable, simple, failsafe way to fuel my physical existence in this world and perhaps even understand that this is necessary as a prerequisite to other things.

But just as I failed to find one single "bottom", the light bulb moment is elusive too, and I keep bobbing around the same old gyre. That said, my current problem is a result of having tried something "new" but finding it led back to "same old." Since getting out of the hospital--two months now, yay!--I'd been trying to eat a variety of foods rather than living mostly on coconut milk. This meant experimenting with legumes and gluten free grains, and even, via an ill-advised purchase of a marked-down-gluten-free boxed brownie mix, with some refined flour and sugar in the dynamite medium of chocolate. Oh, my proclivity for marked down goods! Always gets me in trouble. And then I allowed my mum to get me similar gluten free packaged goods to sample over here. I learned that my body, like most bodies, is susceptible to addiction to the chocolate/sugar combination, and suffered much guilt and painful cravings even while being able to taste the essential emptiness of that food.. 
I continued with the illusion that my body could cope with these foods...
And even relaxed my ban on sucralose so I could have good old English ginger beer in the zero calorie version.

This ginger beer is from Sainsbury's; the "diet" versions from two other supermarkets I looked at had barley malt in the ingredients! Diet soda that isn't gluten free?! Aside from the sucralose, the above picture has two other issues. The enormous amount of liquid recalls a flagging of massive liquid consumption as ominous in a post of about 18 months ago. And, well, the diet product. Um, of course it's reasonable for me to try the products over here and see what they're like, right? It's quite good, incidentally.
I got sick. Not from the sucralose--so far that seems okay. From the food, from expanding my palette and kidding myself that I could handle a broader range of foods. There were two days in the past week that I basically couldn't do anything, except some translating, and was just in abject pain all through the inside of my body. I've had to scale the variety way back and to accept that I have to be super careful. Even relying heavily on charcoal and silica gel and enzymes, if I have one bite too many I am in agony. I already mentioned using tons of charcoal a little while back, but I wasn't yet ready then to face that the things I was choosing to eat were simply making me sick.
So, no I can't just eat anything gluten free and be okay. And I can't just go out to eat and trust I won't get sick if I order something I know will work. And no I can't just eat more of something because it tastes good. I was doing quite a bit of "eating to please" also, and can't do that anymore. Whether my gut issues are a result of having celiac or are created/exacerbated by the history of self starvation is a moot point at this stage, and saying a person can go gung ho on all kinds of foods in the interests of "recovery" or of fitting in with other people is misguided if there are genuine problems, even if getting sick doesn't happen immediately.
If you have gut permeability issues, they can preclude good digestion even if you're not getting symptoms of indigestion. Inflammation will build up, until you're confronted with it harshly as I was last week, and as I could have avoided being by laying off grains, legumes, and refined sugar also. Since sucralose is sucrose with the hydrogen bonds replaced with chlorine, it's pretty likely it could penetrate a leaky gut in a not-so-nice way, so I should probably reconsider the ginger beer and (unpictured) energy drinks.
Duh, right?! A light bulb turning off and on like a fireworks display--can't I just keep it on and act on the realization?
The best part is that my mum has undertaken to remind me not to eat "too much", which will be a welcome contrast from her expressing concern over whether I've eaten "enough".
Ugh, I don't love talking about food! Do you hate me talking about food? It's good to have this under awareness before we go to Israel, since the food is so fantastic and tempting there. I'm relieved to be back on the straight and narrow, and to have overridden the "eat to please" imperative, to have headed back to more bearable ways to deal with the problem that generally, eating tends to beget eating.

Encountering Strange Fruit--Medlars!

Time, high time for a post. I've had the delight of encountering weird and wonderful fruit in various far flung places of the world, and in one of my lifetimes was nicknamed "the fruit fairy". Who knew that I'd find an unfamiliar fruit right here in London? Show and tell must ensue, but after I put up this post I also need to talk about food in a more serious way, as the time has come to face up to some issues I've been trying to ignore.

The apples are russet apples, which I mentioned before, crisp, sour-sweet, special texture, never had them outside of England. The little fruits that look like tan-colored rosehips?

These are called MEDLARS. I said they look like rosehips, and the juxtaposition with the russet apple insinuates the relatedness to apples and yes, they are in the rosaceae family, as apples and roses are too. They are mespilus germanica. I had read about them in classical texts--the Greeks and Romans ate them. But what to do with them? In the above picture, they look pretty green. and they were firm. I bit into one, knowing I would probably get woody and astringent, and that's what I got (probably not an example of manifesting your reality).
I let them get really dark brown, soft, mushy, which they have been doing serially, not all at once (as you can see in the picture below). I peeled off the husks and removed this brown, mushy pulp with five sizable seeds in a loose star shape at the center (just like an original, ungrafted apple).

 Mushy, mealy--a texture not appealing to everybody but obviously very rich in pectin, which is good for many people's gut. Mild in flavor, not strong or outstandingly delicious. It's usually boiled up with a bunch of sugar for jam.
I mixed it up with another product I haven't been able to find back home. The Turkish and other ethnic shops here are a treasure trove for my Israeli palate--whole shelves of houmous and tahini and halva and pickles and unusual herbal teas... And in the jar below is carob syrup! 

The only ingredient is carob pods, but obviously they've been boiled down into a sort of molasses. Full of carob's natural sweetness, with its complex dark and bright notes prominent also.

I then stirred in some tahini (carob syrup and tahini is a very normal dip, as are tahini/honey and tahini/date syrup). And thus, I created a dip slightly less dense than straight up carob syrup and tahini, with the gentle, soothing texture of the medlars.
Fun fun! I love getting to know new fruits, especially when they're actually old, heritage fruits, and I love getting to be in the abundance of carob and tahini and all things Middle East palate oriented.

I don't want to make this post too long, so I'll post another very shortly addressing the too-long-ignored food situation.
Love from London!

Keep Following the Curve...

Hello again from London! It's evident from the lapse of time between the previous post and this one that I still haven't quite gotten my act together on the resolution to do more creative and communicative writing. There are many things I've wanted to do that I haven't done, and there are many ways I've wanted to be that I haven't been. 
Of course, there are many things that have been right, too, and I'm learning the value of acknowledging what is going well and recognizing what huge learning opportunities I'm being offered as I spend so much time in the company of beings out of whom, (in some ways at least) literally, I'm made.
As my wise and wonderful mentor reminded me, any ardent commitment requires our rededication every single day (for which this image is particularly appropriate as I've been working on a poem about driving the curve for almost a year now). 

"I write today, I write today, I write today." Every day is only "today," but the more "I write" becomes part of "today," the more "I write today" comes to imply "and tomorrow, and yesterday, and next week, and always." If writing is really what I want to do, if literature is really what I want to produce, then the process and the product must reflect that desire.
Or:
I choose not to eat what I know will not serve me--the wrong food, at the wrong time, for the wrong reason, for others, so that I end up feeling bad about myself  and in myself and having to chase every meal with charcoal...and I choose not to excuse myself that in every case it's innocuous food I'm not allergic to: if I know it won't create the "me" through whom I wish to experience the world, I should decline. 

And oh, the devil in the doubt--do I really want to write or should I just edit and translate or go work in a cafe; would I really rather feel safely and comfortably austere in my body, or do I want to be someone who gratefully humors a person offering me gluten free treats or tickling my dark chocolate buds...?

The lesson I keep returning to is that my behaviors and actions reflect my goals. Which means I need to be crystal clear about what those goals are, in a way that I've never been in my life so far. I can choose what goals my actions reflect, rather than having my actions represent goals I might not wish to claim.
After my close brushes with death this summer, this should be even more urgent--but is it? I translate words over and over again, matching meanings, but my own matching to life and self remains unwhole. Unholy? 
Every day is an opportunity, and the opportunity is an honor.
Every moment is a choice, and every choice can be a lean into the curve or a deviation from it.

Please share your thoughts, dear reader. How do you find the resolve to recommit to your desire daily, to form process into practice, to enjoy the product of the process?

Forgive me for being obtuse. I've been burning the candle at both ends. Keep following that curve. Keep learning...

Letter from London--Gathering, Harvesting, First Haircut in Five Years...

Greetings again from London. I've been here a week now, and realize I need to come through on my promise, to myself and to you, to write here more. So far all aspects of my creative writing form the big missing piece in my being here.

As my dear friend Leslie pointed out, I've now been out of the home as long as I was in it--I left for college half my life ago! So, of course, it's a time for revisiting, and for noticing how much has changed while so much else has stayed the same. Same house, but as time wears it down, of course it's not the same house. Analogously for my parents, and for me.

But some delightful new additions, also. Just as my mom bloomed when she became a homeopath and started really helping people, the garden is blooming like it never was when I lived here. Aided by an English summer as unprecedentedly warm as ours was in Alaska, the vines are producing grapes...

 ...and the pear tree, young as it is, had lots of pears.

 Pears in pairs...something so peaceful and companionable about that image.

 Here's a sunny day's harvest of both. (It's mostly been raining while I've been here.)

 And they're really good! There are so many varieties of apple and pear one doesn't find over in the US. It's a delight to have Russet apples and Cox's orange pippin apples, and William pears, and Conference pears, which are what my mom's are. They're kind of like a bosc pear, although they're smaller--similar sweetness and bite.

There was another harvest that had to happen as well. Before I left for England, I mentioned to my mum over the phone that I'd be willing to go to her hairdresser's with her. My hair hadn't been cut since five years ago, when I shaved it completely. It had gotten pretty long--for me. Apparently everyone's hair has a certain length beyond which it won't grow; that's been my life experience. My hair wasn't super long up until last week, but it was about as long as I've ever been able to get it.

When I arrived, my mum was pretty horrified by the tangled mess of split ends that was my hair. It was like one big dreamcatcher, I confess. So my appointment at her hairdresser's was made urgently, and much hair was removed. 
She straightened and styled my hair as well, so I came away looking quite different.

I don't know if the above shot seems kind of contrived, but to bring it back down to earth, the top right is my mom's finger, and the bottom left was a desk lamp on the floor. Accidentally looked kind of neat.
It's been almost a week now, and of course my hair is back to its curly, unruly self.

I'm not willing to start a daily habit of straightening it as my mum does, and as she would like me to. Is that wrong of me? What I will undertake to do is brush it somewhat more regularly, to guard against the dreamcatcher tendency. If I let my dreams move freely from my head, perhaps they will travel where they need to go and plant themselves in some fertile ground or ether.

More soon! Lots of love.

Falling Upward, Letting Words Pour Through Me

Such a postponed post, but I am back. I re-enter this space with the intention to share and be present. There was so much to stay before I left for my two-month trip to visit family in England and Israel. I'm in England now, on which more in my next posts. Here is Homer the morning I left, sunrise over the glacier. Look at that light, or its insufficient reproduction.

I spent the last week in Anchorage, and thanks to the furlough got to have fun and grand times with my friend Terry, rather than just holing up at her house while she worked as originally planned. Fall colors and gleaming silver birches were spectacular.

Fall it is. Falling rapidly into winter in Alaska. Freezing at night in Anchorage and Homer, snowed in Anchorage already, well into snow in Fairbanks and north.
A perilous time of year. Fall, it's called. When things sink, droop, die, rot, go dormant and rest--toward renewal and regeneration but still a long way off.

I had been falling for so long. I lost friends, I lost work, I felt there was no end to the bottoms. But this Fall, it seems I've been falling upward. I feel more stable than I've felt for almost two years. Almost a different person than I was earlier this year. The ways I was being then feel frightening to me now, as they should, but back then they were inevitable to me. 
At the bottom at that time, I found myself with a mountain of translating to do--the dictionary project that I love so much must end at the close of December. And a book to write! Or something like that anyway, my MFA thesis. Also a critical paper. Work to do. Meaningful work. I've been climbing that mountain. I've been working. Just five weeks out of the hospital now, and I moved twice and flew away. At first, I had no energy, I worked and slept. And ate. And worried, but had less time to do that, because I was working.
I'm working on myself too, on my personal stability and safety. My meds are working well, even though I can no longer take lithium, which I thought worked so well, because of the kidney failure. What I'm taking in place of it is working well in a minuscule dose. Mostly, because I'm not feeling crazy now. A good kind of circular effect--upward spiral?

It seems everyone I know is downsizing, myself included. Coming out of the relatively anchored position of being married to someone who owns a home (albeit tiny) with abundant storage space, where I allowed myself to acquire some heavier possessions (loads of books, extra clothes, VitaMix, dehydrator, rebounder, nonperishable goodies), I'm moving back into my former more itinerant way of being. 
I'm so grateful to my wonderful friends Tom and Jeanie for letting me stay in their home for those first four weeks back in town while they were still in the Arctic. A sacred space, and it was a haven. I'm so grateful that a house-sitting position came through for the winter, so I have a living space (if not a home) to return to when I go back to Alaska in December.
I was pleased that with my car not nearly full...

 ...and one scant pickup load...I was moved!

It was good to have that sense of settledness I did, to allow myself to have possessions like normal grown-ups do; it is good to let that go to some extent. On the other hand, having a stable space to be in is so conducive to my writing, and to mental stability, so I'm going to need to find a middle ground. Either get very good at settling in and making a stable space wherever I go, house-sitting permanently from one place to the next, or having a single space--a room of my own--but with the downsized, spare approach and aesthetic.

Gentle on the ground, portable in my work...Another way I enjoyed Anchorage's splendid fall sunshine last week was working at the library. In an armchair, sunlight floor to ceiling, external keyboard on my lap, doing work I love. 

I used to do this translating in fits and bits, flicking away as it loads up rather slowly, writing email or blog posts in between. I've always used the metaphor of the letter Y or a funnel: I'm translating out of ancient Greek and Italian, and making an English version--two languages pouring through me into one. Now, the process as well as the product is a letter Y, a funnel, letting the words pour through me. I translate in a vortex, my arms, shoulders, wrists getting more and more sore; when the pages are slow to load up I stretch and think about the words I'm working on rather than navigating away and doing something else.
Gratitude that I've been less tired despite the intense mental work; gratitude that I've been working on essays, poems, book reviews, critical paper, and that all the translating work has if anything been inspiring to that.

But now, back to writing on this blog also! That's an awful lot of typing...
When we walked up on this impressive bull moose at Kincaid Park in Anchorage (I hope you can see it--the sun was very bright), I thought of his being in a different universe from typing and writing. And my second thought was how sore his shoulders might get from wearing those antlers on his head everywhere he went.

 Greetings to all. Missed you!

Ephemeral Art

I've been writing about beginnings and endings, that perhaps they're imaginary, they're just little steristrips of continuity. And as a blogger, I've always wanted my posts to follow one another in some sort of satisfying sequence, one evolving into the next. Continuity of time really helps with that, and lately I haven't had that. So I guess I'm proceeding in a more fragmentary vein--which has its own "fit", in that I've been writing about my work translating the dictionary, and thinking about how fragmented an experience of words and life a dictionary offers.
I've also been thinking about Ephemeral Art. This last Sunday was the Burning Basket celebration at Homer: a homegrown local festival celebrating all that grows here, creating a thing of beauty, an art object, from it, inviting people to write and tuck in notes listing what they want to let go of, what they want to celebrate...

Inviting the community to be present and witness, and celebrate with drumming and flowers and shared food...

 And then letting it burn to nothing, exploding with hidden sparklers, mimicked by poi-spinners and the caverns of drums.

So often when we make art, we are concerned that it should be lasting--last forever, even--and that it should affect or impact people in meaningful ways. But we often practice obscure arts, indoors, concealed inside pages, lasting only because it sits on a shelf or inside a hard drive or in "the cloud'. But this piece of ephemeral art gets the whole town out, practically, and people of all ages are just so into it. This is art that makes of itself an event. Even people who don't have any thoughts about art, or of fire as cleansing, or of praise for the plants that grew themselves and have been woven into this beautiful structure, are having an experience generated by the art.

As the leaves turned this week, as the temperatures are mostly below 50 degrees, as seeds sink and the harvest dwindles, I've been thinking how everything is ephemeral and everything is art.

Every year the oddly shaped roots for us to interpret as it strikes us.
The fireweed webbed in seeds, which seems impossible since the air has been filled with fireweed seeds for a month. Each cotton-candy spire a work of art.

Even a sample pack of two gluten-free chocolate chip cookies.

I ate one, a 60-calorie sub-in part of lunch. The chocolate chips, firm, spreading, stimulating. The matrix of
flours and gums and sugar and palm oil and natural flavors crunchy and evanescent, the snap of the crunch melting away as soon as it passes the teeth--a mirage, shimmering and waning. Pure art. Pure ephemeral art. For sixty calories you could have nine almonds or a small apple, or several carrots, or many other things that would be far more hunger suppressant. So why would I ever choose the cookie?
How many calories should one allow for art?
I don't know the answer.