Miracles I've Omitted To Mention--at Home and in Homer

Phil is home now, bruised from his travels, glad to be home, dismayed by some of my less-functional ways of being in his absence. And I realize that there have been some miraculous things going on all the time that I should have talked about here and haven't yet--perhaps partly in concern over what would be interesting. Trust me--this is interesting.

Miracle 1): Two ripe tomatoes in our kitchen.

We weren't even trying to grow tomatoes: as often, there were some tomato 'volunteers' mixed in with our basil seed. This one got big--

 --practically crowded out the basil! It was in a pot that didn't hold water well, in any sense of the word, so it tended to get underwatered, or be under water when it was watered! For all that, there are tomatoes. Now, a couple of our friends did grow indoor tomatoes successfully on purpose, with a lot of work, and obtained whole bowls-ful. Our scant few seem miraculous even so.

Miracle 2): All the literary events in Homer. I mentioned the 12-author reading event that I was heading for on Thursday night. Although it seemed a shame to have only one poet in twelve readers (albeit a phenomenal and marvelous poet), the depth and breadth of writing talent in this small, rough-hewn town at the end of the road is truly remarkable: among the eleven prose writers, there was diversity of tone, theme, style and color. There was also another gathering the previous Friday night, with five local authors discussing the books that had influenced them, and some lively and fascinating discussion of the same question from the audience afterwards.

Five of us poets have been gathering twice a month to critique one another's poems and to discuss a book we've previously read. Every time we gather, I feel awed by the privilege of being in a group with these ladies, astonished that they accept me in their midst.

And I attend two other writing groups in town, too. Lately, I've been roped in to help out with the organization of one of them, and it triggers an alarm bell. I've always been so willing to keep things like this going, I end up curating or assisting, to the detriment of my own creative work.

So this particular miracle comes with a lesson/challenge for me. A few different people asked me why I wasn't one of the readers on Thursday night. Of course, it's not mine to say: I wasn't the curator or organizer this time--and I take a moment to feel flattered that anyone might have thought of me. But it's also true that the organizers wanted people who are 'big names' locally, and I am not that. Still, if I want to be the type of person that gets called on for this kind of event (which is easier to contemplate than "being a big name"), then I do need to be more self-promoting (clear some time in the schedule to get those poems out into the world!) --and this might also meant that I need to be more forthright about how important my own work is. Those of us who love to help others wrestle with this anxiety (is my work really important?)--and those of us who can convince ourselves that getting our work out there is actually good for everyone are the most successful in this.

Do you think I'm equal to this challenge?

Miracle 3): Venus Potato

One of the funnest things about growing and harvesting fruits and vegetables is that you get to see all the oddball creations--the persimmons with funny 'noses,' the carrots with two legs and a phallus, the orange that is just a quarter of an orange, with skin perfectly sealing just that quarter. Or, this potato! This wasn't one of ours: Leslie, Phil's daughter's mom, grew it, but it may be the best 'oddball' I've ever seen. The 'head' part even has the impression of eyes and a mouth.

Miracle 4): Jumping rope in our cabin. It really is miraculous that I can turn a rope in this tiny space!

But I can, and I have been doing so on an almost-daily basis. The rope I bought in Anchorage was about a foot too short, so what you see is a piece of old climbing rope (light and flexible) onto which Phil put the handles from the other rope. Even with that extra foot of rope flailing around, I can do it! I can break a serious sweat right there in the middle of the cabin, in less than a minute (and I'm not a quick sweater).

It's nice to be able to try some different techniques, like running in place while spinning the rope, which were simply impossible with the shorter rope. And nowadays I can trip over the rope and then regain the rhythm rather than having to start over, which feels good. Lately, I've been jumping for 30-40 seconds, then stopping for a few deep breaths, then repeating, for about ten minutes; and then doing bodyweight exercises. Hiking and biking too, enjoying the last few days of feasible biking here.

What are some miracles you've experienced recently?

Tapping and Feeling Empowered; PUFA-Experiment Update

Feeling Good: Thanks, Tapping World Summit!
We are such moving targets: we adjust one thing and something else changes too. Sometimes change spreads like a stain, from the focal point outward; other times, it's more like a domino effect, and everything changes in a cascade.

A snapshot only catches a glimpse of our perpetual motion.

I am so excited by having the feeling of being able to make things better. I'm so excited that I've woken up the past couple days feeling really energized and confident! I have been working on the Tapping, having listened along this past week or so, and am amazed at how it has been affecting my energy and general outlook. With any method of self-help and self-improvement--or anything novel, for that matter, I worry about the trajectory where an initial burst of enthusiasm then gradually peters out and moves into disenchantment. However, the Tapping is having such an immediate and positive effect, internalizing the Law of Attraction into my physical meridians, that I'm finding myself motivated to continue with it. They suggest committing to 40 days of Tapping post-summit, clearing one blockage each day. Now, I'm thinking that many of my 'blockages' will take more than a single day to clear, but I'll take the empowerment of group energy and the optimism of commitment!

Any suggestions, shared stories, ideas for further reading would be much appreciated.

Further thoughts on PUFAs (and how to avoid/reduce them) and an Update on My Experiment

Self-Experimentation

Speaking of being moving targets, and of the impossibility of changing one thing without changing others... Of course I haven't been 'perfect,' haven't completely eliminated all PUFAs, not even all omega-6's. But I have dramatically reduced them in my diet the last month or two, and on the few occasions that there's been something more omega-6-heavy around, like that peanut-butter-mousse brownie (yes, my fault!) I've added back some flax or chia into my morning smoothies to balance it out.

Here's a post by Dr Weil that Mindy shared in a recent comment that explains in straightforward terms why it's so important to keep the omega-3 to -6 ratio from getting overly high to the -6, to rebalance if you have something high in the -6.

Well, a couple of observations on this. I hadn't realized until I put flax/chia back in my smoothies that the post-breakfast nausea I'd had for ages had gone away. It came back when I put them back in! Whaddaya know? And I don't think it was a case of higher overall fat content: I think I'd upped the coconut oil in my smoothies to compensate. So that's an unexpected downside of flax or chia for me (I hadn't noticed any correlation with nausea at times other than breakfast, though).

Otherwise, I haven't noticed any instant alarm signals like memory loss, neurons not firing, intense depression, or any of the EFA deficiency classic signs. One the other hand, I haven't noticed that my metabolism is roaring quick all of a sudden without the metabolism-dragging PUFAs (although my digestion transit seems to have improved, as I mentioned earlier, but that seemed to be more to do with increasing starch consumption).

One negative thing that I have noticed, or more accurately, that Phil has noticed, is that my skin is not as clear and smooth as it had been since I started coconut oil and a generally higher-fat diet. It seems that my back is broken out and that generally my skin is a little rougher. Again, I don't know whether to ascribe this to absence of PUFAs, to reduced fat intake overall, to increased starch, or to my excursions into cacao and more sugar than normal for me (mostly by way of fruit).

For other reasons, which I'll discuss more soon, I'm nixing the cacao and sugar excursions and suspect, just from how my body works, that I should replace them with more fat, i.e. coconut, in my diet. Hopefully that will smooth my skin out, but if it takes flax and chia seeds and a few nuts to make that happen, it would be some interesting data for sure!

PUFAs and How to Avoid Them

Unless you're of the 80-10-10 persuasion (as I was for years) and avoid all fats like the plague, it might sound like a pretty tall order to be a mostly raw-foodie who eats good amounts of fat and to avoid all heavy PUFA sources. In fact, it's really pretty easy. When I started out, I wasn't even eating avocado or olive oil on my salads for a bit, and was still enjoying satisfying and delicious salads as a staple. (Lately, perhaps for sanity's sake, and partly because my ND specifically asked me to eat avocados, I've eased up on that restriction: both olive oil and avocado have much more Monounsaturated fat (or MUFA) than they do PUFA.)

This is a 'slaw that is pretty much what you can see: napa cabbage, purple cabbage, carrots, sprouts. The dressing was made of appropriate spices, apple cider vinegar and coconut oil! Kind of Asian-tasting and really good and refreshing.

Since macadamia nuts have virtually no PUFAs in them, you can team them up with coconut to make all kinds of creamy dressings and dips. By the way, here's another instance of a case where the 'cooked' version of something might be healthier than the raw. At the moment, I feel better about eating real black beans than a raw mock refried beans dip made mostly of sunflower seeds (although it's true that legumes contain more omega-6 than omega-3 also, like most seeds of any kind, flax and chia being the magic exceptions, legumes have far less of either than nuts and seeds do). Ditto for nut-based hummuses.

For the wiggle room, since I'm not crying off them altogether and forever, there are ways to reduce overall PUFA content in your creation. I think the best long term strategy is to use mostly coconut and macadamia (sure makes me miss Hawaii--why are mac nuts so expensive when the farmers there can't sell their crops?) and otherwise use flax and chia so that the PUFA ratio favors the omega-3's.

But for the excursion times, I already showed in my peanut-butter-mousse-brownie recipe how easy it was to reduce the PUFAs by using mostly peanut flour instead of peanut butter.

Thankfully for us, cashews and filberts are relatively low in overall PUFA (around 2g per ounce), so they'll work for the odd cheesecake and crust...(though I love a mac/coco crust).

Another trick: remember those Congo Bars I made all the way back before Christmas (wow, have I been playing with reduced PUFA that long??

Well, the base involves a whole bunch of walnuts and pecans (i.e. a boatload of PUFAs), that you pulse first and then add a bunch of other ingredients. I processed them a little far, and the cold ambient temperature and the warmth of the processor provoked the nuts to release their oils, and they separated from my dough. Rather than try to mix it back in, I poured it off!

It was a slow process: you can see the oil still pooling at the parchment paper under the batter to the left of the pic. I probably got about a half cup of oil from those two cups of nuts! So that was a half cup of PUFA that no one had to eat (although it may end up on Phil's popcorn one day)!

Conclusion: I feel good about continuing my moderate exclusion (as opposed to exclusive exclusion!) of PUFAs. I still think that the most important thing is to avoid much omega-6, however, and I wouldn't be shocked if long-term, flax and chia regained their status as staples in my diet. More changes coming soon!

What do you think about omega-6's? Do you think I'm over-thinking this whole thing or is it interesting? What's your latest great experiment on your body? (And what about that Tapping?)

Static and Momentous Fears, Changes and a Raw Pea Soup Recipe

When you're on a rollercoaster, you stay on and ride it out, even when it takes a sharp turn or a plunge that you wish wasn't there. You have no choice. Similarly, when you're driving icy roads in the black of an Alaskan winter night, no moon, no light except for occasional blinding oncoming headlights, and you can't see where the road goes, you simply trust to the motion and keep on going, riding the road, riding your momentum, riding your fear. And then, you get out on the practice arena and confront your fear, evoke that sick pit-of-stomach squirmishness and show yourself that this can be survived.

These are fears that take a grip as the situation is flying by out of control and at speed. The situation offers its own momentum that you can catch hold of and ride out. If you're simply letting the momentum take you, even a hike in foul weather, bitterly cold, sleeting/snowing horizontally into your face, is just another experience: you know you will be warm again (although I'm not quite warm yet, five hours later!)

But what about those fears that surround changes that are effected one deliberate decision at a time?
So, so scary to order a banana-peanut butter-spirulina smoothie with apple juice...

...because doing it once means it could happen again--it might become a regular part of life. And what other sugarific, PUFA'd-out places might that lead to? Ah, black and white is so comforting and reassuring. It saves taking that step that might become a slip that might pull you onto another rollercoaster... (Does that 1% sodium casinate in the coconut milk powder I use for my kefir mean I'm not a vegan? And what excesses could be unleashed if I let go that label? Or, for years, the relevant question was 'if I feed myself at all, I'm not a real anorexic: and then what's left and who am I?)

I am not a label. My name is a convenient handle to grab me by, but all the rest (poet, writer, vegan, eating-disordered, raw, bigger, thinner, lover, whatever) must be a pretty loose fit.

Those roasted veggies...

...and roasted veggie-legume dishes

...were daunting steps toward the rollercoaster: what if it becomes a habit? What if it changes who I am?

Next blog post, I'll expand more on what I hinted last time, that actually this may be a very positive and empowering--and healing--'coaster for me to step on.

If you try anything 'once,' you'll increase the likelihood that you'll do it again.

Shifting Topics a little...
If an eagle in our yard will let us get this close once... (this one's a juvenile, they're bigger than adults)...

...it's likely it will happen again.

Stunning.

And finally, some greenery and a contribution/tribute to the single-serving focus that seems to have been initiated by Amber.  I was thinking about the whole single-serving recipe idea, and how oftentimes, if I'm making something, I want to make a good big batch to last some time, but that I make 'single-serving'
smoothies all the time. Next thought: I've had pea soup on my mind (who knows?...) these past few days, and in the raw food arena, a soup often differs from a smoothie only in that it's savory, served in a bowl with a spoon and some toppings and textural garnishes. And some smoothies work pretty well that way too.

So, I present a single serving of Thai-flair Raw Pea Soup!

You'll need:
1 cup almond milk (I used mostly coconut kefir whey and a little almond milk)
4-inch strip (half-inch wide) of mature coconut meat (could use two tablespoons shredded coconut)
2 inches scallion (green part)
2 sprigs parsley
1 inch lemongrass
a big piece of ginger (half inch knob)
1 tablespoon white miso

2 tablespoons lemon juice or coconut vinegar

1 cup thawed frozen peas (if you're lucky enough to have access to fresh peas this time of year, by all means use them.

Blend everything except the peas on high until well-incorporated and smooth. Then add the peas and blend again.

Pour into a bowl and garnish with coconut kefir (any 'sour creme' would work well), a dusting of chlorella and a sprinkle of nutritional yeast. 

This is delicious! I would have liked it even more if I'd let the peas thaw thoroughly before making it: I was so chilled from our hike that something warmer would have been welcome. Otherwise, though, the coconut gives it more of a hearty, chewy texture, the Thai spices make it interesting and well-rounded and the peas themselves are sweet, flavorful and comforting. I'm sure it would lend itself to dunking crackers just wonderfully. 

Tomorrow I may try to make a cooked pea soup too, but I can't imagine doing that as just a single serving. I'll let you know.

What rollercoasters are you afraid to step on? What fears have elided by through sheer force of momentum?

much love