Balance; Validation from the Shadow Side

We have snow again.

I'm used to shoveling steps, porches, walkways--driveways, even. On Saturday, though, I took it to a new level--spent an hour digging out the road! I'd been having some difficulty driving in and out, and it was still snowing, and I wanted to be able to drive out Sunday. As it turned out, on Sunday I got as far up the road as I'd shoveled, but shortly after that my car was swimming in snow. Sinking in snow. Immobilized. I opened the door, and the snow was more than a foot deep. So I got to shovel some more and--best of all--the plow guy finally showed up just as I, aided by my neighbor, had shoveled my car out enough that I could back all the way down the twisty, snowy, fluffy road to let him open it up.

My arms are pretty sore today, but hey, if I can shovel a road and dig my car out, I can't be doing that bad, can I? Although I don't intend to fast three days out of this week as I did last week; the idea was to work back down to one day and then none...

I may seem weak, but really I'm strong. Yes, physically too. And I'm finding that to be so with the different parts that make up my self too--in the vernacular: things I think I suck at, I might turn out to be good at in some respects.

I'm very strongly left-side dominant. And whereas some people divide the labor so that their dominant hand is better at fine motor control and their other is the "strong and stupid" blunt instrument, my left hand is both stronger and more dexterous (and yes, dexter means "right hand"--my left hand is like a right hand, how sinister...). So I tend not to respect my right hand much.

Credit: drmahendrapratap.blogspot.com

This afternoon, though, I was using the external keyboard and mouse, and I switched the mouse over to my left hand because my right shoulder/arm is super sore (a combination of the shoveling, lots of mousing, and sleeping on it awkwardly). And my left hand was an absolute klutz! The cursor was wobbling around all over the place making the annoying Windows 8 charms and dingdongs appear randomly, the mouse itself, ridden by my hand, practically falling off the edge of the table.

I would never have guessed that my right hand could outperform my left at anything save maybe holding the phone receiver to my right ear.

Sometimes the shadow side carries strength. It pleased me that my reaction was to admire my right hand's skill rather than deplore my left's klutziness. My right hand has about fifteen years' worth of practice with a mouse and my left hand maybe barely a few hours over that entire period. 

So there, demonstrated in my own body, the "10,000 hours of practice" adage: talent alone isn't sufficient; practice is essential; with enough practice a person can achieve a high degree of mastery even with mediocre talent. 

When I was eleven or twelve, a classmate taunted me: "You are as useless as your right hand." And that was about what I believed, about my hand and about myself. So, guess what? Even the weak, even the useless...practice, and manifest strength.

I'm grateful to have had my attention drawn to this, to get to share it with you, too. It's also a good reminder about balancing left and right. Humans recognize symmetry as beauty, and there are studies showing that harmonizing the brain's hemispheres is good for mental/emotional health as well as intelligence... and I for one am asymmetrical (cattywampus? skewiff?) all the way from my face to my feet. So, off I go to practice writing with my right hand--my left hand has hundreds of thousands of hours' headstart writing. Who knows what might get channeled? 

What do you do to stay in balance?

Recipes For Poets: Nettle Pesto and Thoughts on Versatility and Peacemaking

The last two days have been throat-clearing and pump-priming, but today I'm determined to get back to poetry writing, sweep finally through the clutter and inertia caused by our trip. It always seems to take me eight or nine days to get back to it, and I promise myself that I'm going to build and find ways to keep writing on the road.

Versatility and peacemaking: these are two features that are dear to me both in food creation and in poetry writing. Part of my 'pump priming' process in getting back into writing has been to ask myself, seriously: "What do I really love--to eat, to write, to do, to share as a message?" As a person who spent too many years in the anorexic universe, this is a very trenchant question (I don't know what I want): at times, the aporia it generates is astonishing. It's something I'd like to bring to light and to talk about more here in future, but versatility: the flexibility to fit with many environments and contexts--and peacemaking: filling a context that allows for agreement, of themes, people, flavors, viewpoints--are two qualities that came to mind that I aspire to.

So, without further pump-priming, a good recipe for this poet is one that admits of poetic license--variation of ingredients, proportions and specifics. It is delicious. Ideally, it speaks of the environment whence it comes. It can be used in a variety of ways and marries well with many flavors, brings parties together.

 This is nettle-parsley-basil pesto: fresh nettles, pioneers from the explosion of green that the 'Rite of Spring' produces here, married with more familiar, aromatic herbs (grown in pots indoors), with nuts, olive oil, garlic and lemon.

It took me barely seven minutes to make in the cuisinart, and can then be used as a base for many other quick and delicious recipes.

Note that I rarely measure when I create, so these ingredient amounts are approximate and reflect both poetic license and respect for a formal proportion that 'works.'

You need: a cuisinart (7-cup works well) with the S-blade fitted
Ingredients:
1 cup nuts or seeds of choice (I used half pumpkin seeds: zinc powerhouse, and half walnut: represents the brain in the 'doctrine of signatures') (Pine nuts, mac nuts, hemp seeds, sunflower seeds or a combination would all be good too)
3 cups fresh nettles (I harvest with scissors into a picking basket: I seldom get stung. I chop them roughly with the scissors once they're picked)
Half a cup each basil and parsley
2 cloves garlic (or more, or less!)
Juice of half a lemon (use two tablespoons apple cider vinegar if you don't have lemons)
Good quality salt to taste
Quarter cup olive oil (or more)
Ascorbic acid/vitamin C

How-to: Start by grinding the nuts/seeds finely in the food processor. Add the garlic and greens, and spin until well broken down. Leave the motor running and slowly add the lemon juice, salt, ascorbic acid and olive oil through the hole in the lid. You may need to stop once or twice and scrape down the sides. Watch as you add the olive oil: at some point, the whole paste should become homogenized and integral.
Ascorbic acid: despite the lemon juice, I always add this to pestos and guacamoles because it's the only thing I've found to prevent browning so that the food is still beautiful later. I keep vitamin C powder, but you can just open one or two vitamin C capsules and pour the powder in.

So, now you have the pesto and seriously, it takes less than ten minutes. You can make it the centerpiece of a meal in various simple or more complex ways.
Simply dip carrots and jicama in it, or crackers if you like (and have them handy).
Use it to stuff bell peppers, or layer with sliced tomatoes and sprinkle with poppy seeds
Use it to dress your preferred spaghetti, whether that's kelp noodles, durum wheat pasta, rice noodles or spiralized zucchini.
Thin it with more lemon juice and some water to make a delicious dressing for greens and tomatoes.

This is what I did for Phil last night: not gluten free, not vegan, but good for Phil and took fifteen minutes:
A cup of pasta takes about eight minutes to cook al dente.
Meanwhile, I sauteed half an onion and a cup of chopped clams

 ...then added two cloves of garlic, half a cup of pesto and a little water.
Drained and salted the pasta, stirred in the clam-pesto mix, garnished with sliced tomato.

 I could imagine an even more delicious version with kelp noodles and mushrooms instead of pasta and clams...

Meanwhile, my own dinner was squarely within my current tweak: not a mono diet, but maybe a 'tetra diet.' More on that in my next post!

Have you had nettle pesto before? If you don't have nettles where you are, you can make this with any other herbs, but if you can, do try nettle pesto: it's so earthy and delicious. I haven't seen anyone that doesn't like it.

April Fool Pics and Announcement--Na Po Wri Mo: A Challenge and Commitment

Before I get into the content of this post, here's my favorite April Fool. Don't his eyes look so much better?

 Maybe we'll get round to a haircut sometime soon...

 Happy "April Fools' Day," everyone! Or, as I saw it on a calendar at the laundromat today, "All Fools Day."

Many of the blogs that I enjoy periodically take on and feature a theme or challenge for a certain period of time. Often, it's some sort of culinary challenge like blogging one's way through a particular recipe book, or a fitness challenge like a marathon, bodyrock, or PG90X. I even joined up for Tina's 'Thirty Days of Self Love' last September. A blog is a great accountability tool and means to share insights and goals, setbacks and achievements. There's that feeling of camaraderie, especially if it's a group challenge, and of having an audience, a virtual safety-net as you ride the high wire.

Although I'm definitely doing my best to get in shape for hiking (and generally manic-summer) season, I haven't felt drawn to taking on a 'fitness challenge' in public: partly because it's not the locus of my main passion. And since I'm no kind of recipe follower, passionate foodie/nutritionalist though I am, blogging through a recipe book hasn't yet appealed to me (perhaps one day I'll be blogging my way through writing my own recipe book)!

I am ready for a challenge, though, and a slightly different direction also. Although I knew that April was National Poetry Month and had some plans of my own for that already, I hadn't even heard of Na Po Wri Mo--a counterpart to the more famous NaNoWriMo (I don't love those truncated not-quite-acronyms) until Erin mentioned it earlier this week. The challenge is to write a poem every day of the month, or at least create a new draft of one. You can share them on your blog, or just leave them in the notebook, or carved in rock...

beach boulder with its own native artwork

I'm in! I'm part-thrilled, part-daunted, as I'm already facing a full plate this month. Erin suggested that a benefit she gained from doing the challenge last year was that being required to create a new draft every day mandated thinking outside of the box and encouraged fresh, striking, new ways of thinking. This consideration was a major enticement for me to throw in my lot, although perhaps the fact that I wanted to do it as soon as I heard about it (the way some people feel about running races or climbing challenging rockfaces) is a good index of where my passions lie. I will say that although it's definitely true that generating drafts is a very energetic, thrilling part of the process, I have come to learn that when I'm several drafts into a poem and have really been working with it for some time, that is often the most exciting and compelling, lie-awake-at-night phase of all. So the best dividends may come after April, when the challenge is over and I can start revising!

I'm not going to blog every day, but will stay with my usual rhythm of three-to-four posts per week. I am going to write a poem every day, but I'm not going to post it on here in its entirety (or maybe at all). I don't think it would be fair either to me or to you: getting a draft polished usually takes me more than a single day!

And I will still write about food! Two poems that I'm currently working on are both about aspects of food, and it's been enjoyable to start writing poetically about something I so often write about prosaically.

These julienned beets are an ode to spring coming! I hadn't had beets for months, had almost forgotten how good they are. And they grow so well here. I feel invited to look forward to growing season.

 Together with mashed parsnips with a little miso, coconut, curry powder, with peas stirred in, they have been making life colorful and delicious around here.

What challenge are you taking on this month?
Have a great weekend!