Category: mindful living

The Two Books I Wish I’d Kept

August 29, 2015

A year or so ago we culled the library bookshelves. We had to; they were overflowing. Books can take over this house very easily.

I thought I’d done a mindful, considered cull. I really thought about each book. But it’s now clear I culled two books I should have kept.  They were both books that fall into my ‘contemplation’ category: books I read, think about, read again, think some more. Books that have changed, and continue to change, how I see the world. In the case of these two books, they were among the first – one was the first – to do that for me.

The first book, the one that first made me look at the world differently, is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I read it for the first time at sixteen or seventeen: it was published in 1974, the year I turned sixteen, so I must have found it (how?) shortly after. A deeply personal and sometimes mystical narrative of the writer’s relationship with the natural world that surrounds her home, it spoke to me at many levels. Dillard’s understanding of the natural world and the appreciation of the rhythms and cycles of life were key to my love affair with the book, but the fact it was also written by a woman was immensely important. I’d read Aldo Leopold and Thoreau and others, but there was always a small disconnect; I couldn’t project myself into them. With Dillard, I could.

I re-read the book several times in my twenties, each time understanding more, recognizing more of the spiritual aspect of it. Then I left it alone for a long time, before reading it again about a decade ago. By then I was on my second copy of it – I’d read my paperback to pieces, and when I found a hardback at a used book store, I bought it. And then last year I gave it away.

The second book is Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I suspect no other book has influenced my own approach to life as much as this one. I didn’t tackle it until my early to mid twenties, and it was the first book I read (other than my calculus textbook) where I remember recognizing as I read it that I really didn’t understand all of it, not in depth. So I read it again…and again…and again, over the next ten years. Finally, I thought I did understand it, how the search for understanding the elusive definition of quality, of what is good or not good, had become entwined with the author’s mental illness, and how recovery entailed learning to embrace and balance both the romantic and the rational. But again, my paperback was in tatters, and I thought I’d learned all I needed from it.

I wonder now why I thought I was done with them; where that hubris arose from. I have written elsewhere about how I understand the world through walking; in doing so, I create mental maps both real and unreal. The real mental maps mean that once I walk a place mindfully, I cannot get lost there, unless a very long time goes by before I am there again. The unreal are dreamt maps, dreamt walks, that overlay the real world, are different from it but always echo it. These books have been guidebooks for both my conscious and unconscious journeys. And I thought I could give them away?

I can either buy them again – they won’t break the budget, and both are still in print, and easily available used – or I can get them from the library. I think I’ll buy them. And at some level, ask their forgiveness for thinking I could navigate through this life without them.

Looking at Advertising

August 28, 2015

Hot and humid weather meant I did my walking indoors last week, at the local shopping mall. While it doesn’t have an organized early-morning mall-walking club as some do, its doors open at 6:30 a.m. due to the presence of a fitness club on the lower level, and people are free to walk the enclosed and air-conditioned space any time after that.

I entertained myself during my walks by thinking about the advertising that is, of course, splashed everywhere – it is the job of stores to get you to spend money, after all. And at one level I don’t have a problem with it – I can’t, given that I do it myself with regard to advertising my young-adult novel (which you can currently download for free as a promotion – details here). But it’s still interesting and instructive to look at how it’s done.

The advertising fell into one of three broad categories: the straightforward: e.g., 50% off all summer styles; the not-quite straightforward: BOGOs (buy one get one for x% off) fall into that category, in my opinion, and the ‘lifestyle’ inducers (We Sell Adventure). Straightforward descriptive advertising I have little problem with, and I’ve taken advantage of many of those sales myself in the past. BOGOs need a little more analysis.  Buy one, get one for 50% off seems to be the most common now. And it’s fine too, as long as you went shopping meaning to buy two of something, but if it induces you to spend half again as much as you had planned, or, to buy two of something when you only needed one, then you’ve fallen for their advertising. Even more insidious was this one: “Buy more save more.”  Think about it.  You cannot save money by spending it. Deconstruct that ad carefully. If you really need three new backpacks for the kids for school, and the deal is 50% off the second one if you buy two, and 70% off the third one if you buy three, then it’s worth considering. But only in that type of situation. It’s not worth it when it induces you to buy three skirts when you went to get one, and the other two don’t match anything in your wardrobe.

One store had an interesting twist on this. Inside the display windows was the banner for the BOGO – 50% off the second item. Painted on the display window itself, and overlaying the banner, was the “70% off selected items” ad. With all the other visual clutter in stores, to me this looked as if it was purposely designed to confuse, so that the consumer doesn’t remember which offer was which. Interestingly, this advertising belonged to a store whose clientele are more likely to be middle-aged or older (my age), and potentially less able to sort through the multiple, confusing ads. (I realize that’s a generalization, but it’s based on my own experience – the older I get, the more I can’t handle visual clutter.)

The ‘lifestyle’ ads are telling you that buying something will make your life more exciting or you more interesting. Alcohol ads are very good at this, and I’m old enough to remember that these were the primary means of selling cigarettes, so we know they work. But here in my urban shopping mall, these two caught my eye: “We sell adventure,” and “Amazing is in your hands.” The first one was on the window of a clothing store that sells casual clothing with a bit of a ‘northern’ flavour (whatever that means). They are not an outfitter for outdoor sports.  They are telling you, subtly, two things: one, the ‘right’ clothes make you more adventurous; two: that you need these clothes to fit in at the cottage or resort you’re heading to (or would like to look as if you were.)  Ask yourself how true either of these messages are.

“Amazing is in your hands,” was – you guessed it – at an electronics store, pushing the newest phone or tablet. Now, I’m a techie person, and this house has two laptops, two iPADs, two iPhones, and one iPOD. But we also still use a VCR, not a PVR, and a DVD player, because they ‘ain’t broke’. The iPADs are a case in point: they are iPAD-2s, and they serve us well. Why would I buy a new one? – the one I have does everything I need it to, including being my primary writing tool when I’m travelling, and it’s considerably sturdier than the newer models. Some of what the newer technology does is amazing – but is it an amazing you need, want, or will use?  Much of what technology does is driven by the gaming market, and unless you’re a serious gamer, you probably don’t need it.

What I’m really saying is this: be conscious of how advertising is trying to get you to buy things you don’t need or actually even want, and, be very mindful of what it is you do need/want when you go shopping. Then use specials to their maximum.  When my health issues last fall meant BD and I needed a way to be in touch quickly, easily, and unobtrusively (he was still a classroom teacher at the time) I knew our new phones would have to be iPhones. BD had just learned the basics of using an iPAD, and he needed the phone to be effectively the same, or he’d abandon it; he is very easily frustrated by technology. I bought the phones Labour Day weekend in the university town, filled with specials aimed at returning university students, and knowing full well the newest iPhone model was due out shortly. The result was I got the phones – the soon-to-be discontinued model- for free along with the cell-phone plans I was going to buy anyway (having done my research, which had told me that bundling our new phones with our existing wireless and home-phone service was going to give us the best price.) So our iPhones aren’t the latest, but, honestly…do I know the difference? I can call, text, Google stuff, take photos and play Scrabble on it, and it reminds me to take my blood pressure pill. That’s more than enough.

I haven’t even touched on the even more subtle messages – the size and colour of the mannequins clothes are shown on; the overt sexualization of small girls in children’s clothing store ads; the co-opting of social justice messages to sell tween/teen clothing that may well still be made in a sweatshop. But if you’re looking for entertainment on a wet or cold or humid day, go to the mall….not to shop, but to deconstruct the advertising.  It’s quite a bit of fun..and educational.

Loving Leftovers, with a bit of help

August 27, 2015

Leftovers don’t happen to often in our house, because we plan menus in advance and buy only what we need, but on occasion we do misjudge – usually vegetables – this week it’s too many Brussels sprouts and carrots.  Both keep well, so I’ll likely just work them into next week’s menu.  But an article in yesterday’s newspaper caught my attention, making reference to a web-based tool for planning meals around left-overs.  Intrigued, I went looking for more, and found one other that is specific to using leftovers, not just ‘recipe by ingredients’.  Then I tried them out.

The first one I tried is part of the Tesco (a British grocery store chain) website.  It’s a very simple tool to use – you can enter up to three ingredients and it generates recipes.  It couldn’t, however, generate a recipe that used both carrots and Brussels sprouts; it gave me one for the Brussels sprouts, similar to the recipe I buy them for (penne with Brussels sprouts, broccoli and cheese) and many more than incorporated the carrots, from salads to soups to sandwiches and stews.  When I added chicken to the list, the tool focused on the chicken, giving me lots of good-looking chicken recipes but not really helping with the vegetables.

Then I tried Big Oven’s leftover tool. It uses pretty much the same format – you enter up to three ingredients.  I started with just the two vegetables, as before – and got far better results.  It even sorts them into main dishes, side dishes, etc.  One recipe:  for apple-kielbasa bake – will be tried out almost immediately, using turkey sausage.  When I added chicken to the list of ingredients, the site let me choose to be very specific about the chicken, offering me ‘cubed, wings, broth, whole chicken’  which generated more recipes for me to try…I really liked the look of chicken with winter vegetables. (I’d leave the ‘chicken’ choice as just chicken – narrowing it down to ‘cubed chicken’ really limited the recipes, and I can adapt the recipe as needed.)

Another British grocery store chain, Sainsbury’s, has a leftover tool in development.  It would seem that the UK is taking food waste seriously and attempting to address it right from the suppliers.

I’m not really sure that these ‘leftover’ tools differ from the ‘recipe by ingredient’ tools that are out there – I rather think they’ve just been packaged differently.  But if they help with combatting food waste, I’m all for them.  And they gave me two new recipes to try..so that alone was worth the half-hour I spent testing them!

I’m sure there are more tools out there…which ones have you used and found useful?  Please share!

Staying Focused

August 24, 2015

An all-too-common question for retirees is ‘what do you do all day?’  And there is the occasional day I think ‘what did I do today?”  But those are infrequent, because I’ve learned that my days need structure, and the discipline to keep to that structure.

Self-regulation isn’t a strong point for me, or didn’t used to be.  Now, I’m fairly good at it.  That is in part what this blog is about; by writing it every morning just after I get up, it focuses me on the things that matter to me, and reminds me why I do some of the things I do.  I guess, in a way, it makes me more accountable to myself.  And I love getting out of bed, making coffee, doing some stretches (often while emptying the dishwasher – dishes are good light weights), and then settling down with a mug of coffee to write for a while.

There are four things I expect of myself every day:  eat properly, stay hydrated, exercise, spend time with BD.  Food shopping and preparation, and exercise, take up about three hours each day.  Time with BD is variable; occasionally there are days when it’s just mealtimes; other days we’ll spend all day together.  Then there are the high-priority daily activities: the on-going house renovations; writing – not just this blog but also work on Empire’s Hostage; the necessary work of daily living – the budget,  housework, lawn care, laundry.

I have stopped multi-tasking, except for listening to music while I drive or cook.  I’m far more productive this way, giving my whole mind to what I’m doing.  I try to structure my time in roughly one-hour chunks, alternating as best I can between a sedentary activity – writing, doing the accounts, watching a game with BD, playing Scrabble – and active ones, mindful of the studies of the negative effects of sitting too long on our health.  So, each morning, generally after I write the post for Two Simple Lives, I map out my day – not just what I want to accomplish, but when.  Do I always stick to it?  No. Sometimes the piece of the house renovation project turns out to need longer that day.  Sometimes errands take longer than I scheduled; sometimes I walk or bike longer than an hour just because the day is so beautiful. Sometimes BD suggests something to do together over breakfast. The code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules*.

Once self-discipline is in place in one area of your life, it’s easier to extend it:  it becomes a habit.  It makes the goals of mindfulness, of sustainable practice and of frugal living easier.  The map of my day doesn’t restrict me – I can change it at any time – but it does provide check-in points, times to look at what I’ve accomplished and what I haven’t, and review why. It also helps me not overdo something – I may want to keep writing, or keep walking – but should I?  I know there are limits on both my creativity and my energy at any given time.  Going beyond those limits generally isn’t wise. It’s a bit like coffee – I may want that third cup, but it’s going to make me jittery, and less productive. So two cups, and I’m done.

It’s a rare day I get to bedtime and aren’t satisfied with how I’ve spent the day.  And sometimes, all my day plan says is ‘read, relax, have a glass of wine.”  We all need those days, too.

* my favourite line from the Pirates of the Caribbean series.

Hanging Laundry

August 23, 2015

This is one of my earliest memories.  It is the summer I am three; I know this because of the house in the memory, and where the trees are.  It is the summer of 1961, and I am helping my mother hang laundry outside.  My job is to hand her clothes pegs.  I want to play with them, make them into little people – these are the pegs that are one split and shaped piece of dowel, with rounded heads, not the sprung ones. My mother lets me play; I am being kept quiet, and not wandering, which is all that matters.

Fast forward fifty-four years.  I am standing outside in our garden, not long after dawn on an August morning, hanging laundry.  A red squirrel chitters and scolds at me from the tall Norway spruce, and a crow announces my presence to the wide wild world.  A breeze ruffles my hair.  I am wearing rubber boots against the dew, and long sleeves against the mosquitoes.

Hanging laundry is pure pleasure for me.  I shake out each piece and pin it to the line, listening to birdsong, and the sounds of cattle and geese from the farm beyond the woods that border our garden.  The day smells new, and there is still a pinkish glow in the sky, reflected on the trees.

To be out here at dawn, or just after, I have put the laundry in the washer the night before, at bedtime, and let it finish its cycle and sit until morning.  This both gives me the maximum drying time, and uses electricity at an off-peak time. Small frugalities; habits of thrift.  Even now, in mid-August in Ontario, I can need all day for things to dry – it was cool today, and cloudy, and the drying line is in the shade for much of the day.

Memories.  Hanging laundry on a rope line in a campground in Arizona, where the cotton shirts and underwear were dry almost before I hung them.  Another campground – Texas, I think – where hummingbirds came to investigate the blue plastic clothes pegs.  A line in Botswana, where all items must be ironed after drying to kill the eggs of a fly, laid in the damp cotton.  Ecuador, where things take three days to dry, in the humidity of the rainforest.

We don’t hang everything.  Tree pollen is my worst hay-fever antagonist, and our garden is full of trees, not even counting the woods behind us, so bedding goes in the dryer in the spring.  BD’s cotton shirts come in damp and are finished in the dryer for ten minutes to prevent wrinkles (and ironing).  The outdoor drying season is only about five months long, six in a year of early spring and late fall; the rest of the year we use the dryer.

Outdoor drying means being mindful, paying attention to the weather forecast, and then to the skies, because the weather forecast isn’t reality.  It takes a bit of planning.  But when I went out, this time in shorts and sandals, to get today’s laundry in at five-thirty, the towels smelled like sun and grass.  The water – our well water – that they had held had evaporated off, to become part of the water cycle and return as rain.  I think about cycles and continuity:  women have been hanging laundry in this garden since this house was built in 1911. The robin that is singing and the red squirrel that is chattering are probably descendants of the ones that were singing and chattering a hundred and four years ago. The water from our well has evaporated off wet clothes, condensed as clouds, rained, become ground water, filled our well….how many times?

My mother lived to ninety-three.  She stopped hanging out laundry somewhere in her late sixties, when arthritis and stairs to the back garden made it impossible for her.  But she missed it; missed being in the garden, being out in the sun, chatting with the neighbour across the fence, hearing birds. She hung laundry for much of her life because she had to; I do it for reasons of sustainability and thrift, but for both of us, the pleasure was, and is, greater than the chore.

MOOCing along: The Pleasure of (Free) On-Line Learning

August 20, 2015

This is an expansion of a post on my writer’s blog, Wind and Silence, so if you read that too, you’ve pretty well read this post, although there are a few differences.

In an earlier post, I wrote about how I sought out community and intellectual stimulation during my house-bound period last winter, following surgery, through becoming involved in Project Feederwatch. In that post, I mentioned there were other ways I found what I needed, and, because this also relates to one of my themes of being frugal, I decided it was worth writing a post about.

I subscribe to a site called Lifehacker on my Facebook newsfeed. Originally I started reading it because it often had technology-related reviews, ratings and ideas,which I needed for work. But then some time last summer, there was a post about free, on-line education.  Intrigued, I looked at it, and found a link to FutureLearn. Associated with the Open University in the UK, this completely free educational site offers dozens of courses on subjects as diverse as Global Food Security, The Works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and The European Discovery of China.  Universities from around the world are involved in the design and teaching of the courses. All you need to sign up is a computer and the internet.

I browsed through the course offerings, with, of course, an eye to courses that would increase my understanding of the Roman Empire, the historical template upon which the world of Empire’s Daughter rests. As I wrote in an earlier post on Wind and Silence, my understanding of my created world needs to be thorough, or I can’t write about it convincingly.   Two caught my eye: Hadrian’s Wall:  Life on the Roman Frontier, and, Archaeology of Portus:  Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome. These looked promising, and the Hadrian’s Wall course’s timing was perfect – it would start soon after the surgery, but not immediately, so I had time to be able to handle sitting with my laptop again.  So I signed up for the it – we’d been to the Wall a couple of times, the most recent just over year before, and in that case specifically for research for the book and its upcoming sequel. I’d learned a lot from visiting the museum at Vindolanda, as well as just walking the Wall and thinking about what it was like to be a soldier there in the second century A.D., on a cold, damp, windy March day, waiting for your relations to send you more socks.

I’d taken on-line courses before, in relation to my work, so I was prepared for the basic format of readings, videos, questions to be answered and on-line discussions to occur. The course was well-designed and fun; I learned a lot, but the (for me) unexpected benefit was the literally hundreds of viewpoints that were expressed.  These courses are what are known as a MOOC – a Massive Online Open Course – and can have many, many participants.  Not everyone is very vocal, of course, but the wide range of experience, background, imagination and world-views of the participants who did express ideas made me think – not just about Roman Britain, but about my imagined world, and, some of my own preconceptions. It was rich discussion. The result is that some of what happens in the next book(s?) has been directly influenced by this community of learners (in both courses) who were willing to share their knowledge, ideas, and expertise with each other. I hope I remember to thank them all in the author’s notes!

There are, of course, lots of other opportunities for free or low-cost learning (the Lifehacker link is a good place to start) and I’d be interested to hear what others have found.  FutureLearn is just one place you can find free courses, and I’m waiting to hear if another on-line course that looked intriguing is to be offered again, this time through a different provider, Coursera.  My local Senior’s Centre…(yes, it appears I qualify, being over 55, although there is part of me that doesn’t believe this…) offers a number of no-cost face-to-face programs this winter. I am, actually, overwhelmed by choice, and have to be mindful, to stay focused on courses that will inform my writing…and leave me time to actually write.

In Praise of Chickadees

August 19, 2015

It’s a hot, sunny August morning, and there is probably something else I could be doing, but instead I’m sitting in the sun-room, watching the ruby-throated hummingbirds at the feeder.  There are at least two:  a male, and then one or more juvenile/female-plumaged ones, which could be his offspring or mate.  I think offspring, because he keeps driving them away. There is another feeder, around the corner, situated to be seen from the kitchen window, and occasionally the male flies off to patrol it, letting the juvenile beeline in to feed.

In mid-August, other birds are beginning to appear, landing on the feeder pole and investigating all the arms, looking for the seed feeders they know were there last winter.  Chickadees and goldfinches, mostly, and the occasional blue jay.  We’ll put the seed feeders back up October first; there is plenty of wild food around for these birds, including the sunflowers planted along our fence.

I’ve walked on every continent on Earth to see birds, and I’ve seen literally thousands of species. Some stand out over others:  the Adele penguins on the Antarctic peninsula; Siberian cranes on the Yangtze wetlands in winter; the California Condors over Big Sur; the huge, shy, Great Argus of the Malay peninsula.  I’ve birded in places you wouldn’t think there would be birds:  in the heart of Paris, on the hills above Hong Kong, in downtown Buenos Aires.  I’ve seen the wonder of the sandhill and snow goose migration on the Platte in March; the dance of prairie chicken on the hills at dawn, the mating flight of woodcock in the wet fields at the edge of our village.  But while these have been wondrous, and I am filled with nothing but gratitude and awe that I have been able to see them and so much more, nothing quite makes me smile like a chickadee.

They are such cheerful, curious optimists.  Yes, I know this is anthropomorphism.  Yet there they are in August, landing on the feeder poles, buzzing their questioning chick-a-dee-dee-dee.  If I go out, they won’t fly away; I’ve had them land on me in the garden as if I were a moving tree.  On a minus twenty February morning, as soon as the light begins to filter through the darkness, they’ll be there.  If the feeders are empty, believe me, they tell us, and they’ll fly around my head while I fill them, landing on the hanging feeders before I’ve even put them up again.  The cats – who are strictly indoor cats – sit at the windows and chatter, tails lashing.  When the chickadees come to sit in the bushes under the sun-room windows, Pye and Pyxel are balls of pent-up, frustrated energy.  (But can these two catch the odd white-footed mouse that finds its way into the house?  Of course not.  They are the cat equivalent of armchair quarterbacks.)

Last fall, after major abdominal surgery, and through the weeks of recovery, further treatment and more recovery, the bird feeders – or more precisely the birds at them – were one of my joys.  Prior to my weeks off work, I’d only been able to watch the feeders on weekends once daylight savings time ended, since I left for work in the dark and got home in the dark, and weekends were inevitably filled with chores and errands, so we got brief glimpses here and there of what we were feeding. Sunday brunches were the only times we’d really get to watch.

To focus my watching, I signed up for Project Feederwatch, through Cornell University.  A huge, on-going citizen science project, my part in it was to watch the feeder for at least part of two consecutive days a week, and record the species and numbers I’d seen.  It was great fun, as well as being informative and producing a few surprises, like the flock of nineteen wild turkeys who appeared mid-morning every day to pick up the seeds scattered by the small birds.  More than that, though, for the weeks before my surgeon permitted me to drive, and the weeks before BD felt comfortable letting me go for a walk on my own, it was my daily connection to nature, to the change of the seasons and the living, breathing, wild world.

It was also two other things: community and intellectual stimulation.  One of the things I worked on during my weeks ‘home alone’ was about creating, or rather recreating, both of these, in a different form than they had taken before. My friends were hugely supportive, driving me to doctor’s appointments before I could drive myself, taking me out for lunch, just visiting.  BD, of course, was there evenings and weekends. But I was used to a work environment, where there was always someone who needed to talk to me, or I needed to talk to, in person, by phone, by e-mail, and there was always a problem to be solved, a situation to be mediated, new hardware or software to be reviewed, tested, analyzed.  And so I set out to recreate a smaller version of that – I didn’t want the constant interactions; even at work I had long ago learned to close my door, or drive out to the furthest site I was responsible for, to find some solitude and thinking time. Nor did I want to pursue anything that looked like the work I had been doing – it was a vocation, not an avocation, and I knew I was retiring.  But I did need to use my mind, and to talk to people. All the edits on Empire’s Daughter were done, so the frequent e-mails to and from my editors had ended.  The new book was just an outline, and on my best day I can only write for about three hours.  I was determined to find other ways to use my mind and be connected to people, and I was, temporarily, housebound.

By finding a place in on-line communities – not just through Project Feederwatch but through other means (which perhaps I’ll write about another time) – I satisfied both the need for interaction and the need for intellectual stimulation.  Everything I worked on last winter was time-limited; I knew that once I’d recovered, I’d likely want to spend less time on these projects; I can sign up for Project Feederwatch again this winter, or not, depending on how we decide to spend the winter.  But the project gave me more than either community or intellectual stimulation, and perhaps this last thing is the most important.

I’ve been watching birds for about forty-five years, but this was the first chance -or at least the first opportunity I’d taken – to watch in a different way; to watch the details of how the birds interacted with each other; to sort out the apparent pecking orders within and among species; to note the fine differences between how a chickadee and a goldfinch picks up seed.  I learned to identify specific birds through minor variations in plumage, and I studied the gradations and differences that sorted out the species of redpolls, before the boffins decided, on the basis of DNA, that they’re all one species, regardless. Just when I’d got good at it, of course.

Learning to watch the birds differently, paying attention differently, is a distillation of much of what I have been working towards – to be more mindful of what is important to me, to slow down and see, to live here, now, understanding the landscape and ecosystem and community in which I live and am part of.  T.S. Eliot said it far better than I ever could, in his magnificent poem Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Perhaps I have just begun to know chickadees.

Walking, Health and Wholeness

August 16, 2015

When I began this post, I wondered how I would tag it:  #health  #mindfulness, #sustainability, #writing #frugal #community.  All those reflect what walking means to me, and all are components of something larger, something I am going to call wholeness.  I am not whole if I do not walk.

From my earliest years I have learned by walking, dreamed of walking, found solace and healing in walking, tapped creativity by walking.  My memories of all the places and countries and continents I have been to are memories of walking, of the way one soil feels different underfoot than another, of the contours and smells of the land around me, the flow of rivers, the flight of birds, the shape of trees.  I learn new places by walking them, and once I have done so I am never lost.

I was the youngest by some years in our family, and was frequently solitary.  But I had fields and woods and farm lanes to roam, and those were different days.  I explored further and further afield, usually on foot, sometimes by bicycle, and with the dog for company.  I learned to look, at wildflowers and trees, at birds and mammals, snakes and frogs, at insects.

Then I went to university a long way from home, choosing the university in part because it was not in a town, but set some miles out of town, on a large expanse of land.  But a new reality faced me there:  girls – women – were warned not to walk alone beyond the lighted and paved campus, and none of my new friends wanted to walk.  I stayed a year, became depressed, gained too much weight, and changed universities.  This one too had a large open area, an arboretum with trails that linked to other trails extending out beyond and through the town, and I met friends who wanted to go walking, to look at trees and rivers and birds.  I lost the weight, stopped being depressed, and fell in love with a man who walks more than I do.

Walking informs almost all my writing, either as a theme (sometimes transmuted into other forms of travel through a landscape) or as how I tapped into whatever it is in my brain or the cosmos that creates fiction.  I will go walking with a problem to solve, one of plot or motivation or background, and after a good walk or two, even if I haven’t been directly chewing over the problem as I walk, the solution will appear.  I find letting the problem swirl around in the back of my mind, not looking at it directly, while I focus on watching birds, or fish, or searching through a stand of milkweed for Monarch butterfly caterpillars, often produces the quickest results.

When I start walking I’m stiff, sometimes sore, depending on the day, the weather, and the vagaries of arthritis.  That will pass after the first ten minutes.  Some days, I’m out of sorts, or worried, but being back in touch, physically and spiritually, with sky and land and wind provides perspective, and calms even my most persistent or serious concerns. Most days I walk for an hour or two; at this time of year, when the mosquitoes and deerfly of summer are still active, I walk at the university arboretum.  As summer winds down, I’ll go back to the conservation area trails that surround us.  Only when the weather is at its worst – heavy snow, torrential rain, extreme humidity – do I resort to indoor walking, either at the local shopping mall, or on my treadmill.

Walking together fosters community, whether its the community of our marriage – BD and I talk best when walking together, and face our most difficult challenges that way; the community of friends you’re sharing a walk with; the more casual community of people met on the shared paths and trails, or the neighbours you meet walking down to the mailbox. It’s also a pretty frugal way to exercise: good shoes are recommended, especially for aging feet, but otherwise there aren’t too many places where you can’t find somewhere to walk without paying an entrance fee.

I wonder, sometimes, who I would be, had I not been that youngest child, free to roam a safe rural environment, touching, tasting, watching the wild world, letting my mind and imagination run freely along conscious and unconscious channels, an experience unstructured and unguided. Would I – could I? write?  How healthy – mentally and physically – would I be? Questions that can’t be answered, because every choice of path, every turn we take or don’t take, every hill we do or don’t attempt, changes us, in ways we can’t begin to imagine.

Considering Diderot, IKEA, and Furniture

August 15, 2015

Two pieces of ‘mail’ this week got me thinking.  One was e-mail – I subscribe to Joshua Becker’s blog Becoming Minimalist, and an e-mail came in telling me of a new post.  The second was traditional mail – a new IKEA catalogue.  I realize those two things seem pretty unrelated, but bear with me.

Becker’s post, Understanding the Diderot Effect (and How to Overcome It) refers to an essay I read in my late teens by the French philosopher Denis Diderot, about how his comfort with his worn surroundings disappeared when a friend gave him a beautiful new dressing gown, which contrasted with the shabbiness of his rooms.  The IKEA catalogue reminded me of Douglas Copeland’s description of the lives of three ‘twenty-somethings’ in his novel Generation X, which included the term ‘semi-disposable Swedish furniture’, and I thought about how we are pressured to constantly replace things – our dishes, our clothes, our furniture.

And then I took a mental step back, and considered our house and our furnishings.  We bought this place – a four-square built in 1911 – in 1984, as a near-wreck, and after a long weekend doing some basic patching and painting of the interior, we moved in with the furniture from our much smaller previous house, much of which had come from IKEA.

Twenty-one years later (and another coat of paint), we still have that IKEA furniture.  And it’s not in the basement.  It’s in our living room, and our sun-room, and the bedrooms, and the library.  The cushion covers on the three chairs and two couches have been replaced,  three times, I think, in the last thirty years – twice by my amateurish upholstering, and once, most recently, professionally. Over that time we’ve added to our furniture:  some came from one aunt’s house, some from another; some was bought second-hand, a very few things bought new, and the rest built by BD.  It’s often a combo:  BD built the dining room table, but the chairs came from IKEA, and the two china cabinets came, one each, from my aunts’ houses.  He built the desk at which I write, but bookshelves from IKEA line the walls of the library; I bought the library rug at a yard sale, and my desk chair came from Staples.

The picture that accompanies this post is a shot into our living/dining room. The rug in this photo is new, bought just last summer, replacing two large hand-braided rugs, made by a friend of my mother’s, that after about seventy years of good service had finally just fallen apart. It’s the piece that could have (should have?) set off the Diderot effect. Everything else – except the footstool and lamp – is at least thirty years old. (You can’t see BD’s armchair, off to the right side, but it’s the same as the couch.)  But somehow, there was no Diderot effect (at least for us – you may think differently!). Perhaps it’s just that I’m comfortable with things not matching, perhaps its the associations I have with each piece of furniture. But whatever the reason(s), I like the way everything looks together.

In the end, furniture is functional, and as long as you like it and it’s comfortable, that should be all that matters.  It doesn’t need to match; it doesn’t matter if some things are more worn than others, and, it’s only ‘semi-disposable’ if you choose to view it that way.  As with just about anything and everything in our lives, if we value our furniture, are mindful of keeping it in a safe and useful state – tightening bolts, working wax into wood, fixing fraying seams – it will serve us well, often for more than one generation.

Garbage Loaf

August 14, 2015

A week or two ago we had friends over for dinner, a simple post-movie meal of cold chicken and salads, followed by local raspberries, fruit loaf and ice cream.  After everyone had finished, there were a few raspberries left.  “Eat them, BD,” one of our friends said, “otherwise, they’ll just go to waste.”

As I assured her they would most certainly not go to waste, but be eaten the next day, probably as part of my breakfast, I reflected on the amount of food that is thrown away.  According to The Guardian, thirty percent of all food produced in the world is wasted, and in western countries a large portion of that waste is in the home – food we buy, don’t eat, and throw out.

Why?  Well, a very small bit of spoiled food occurs – the tomato sauce that gets shoved to the back of the fridge and forgotten, and has grown a lovely blue mold when you do find it, the cracked egg in the dozen. But those are not that common in the western world of refrigeration and freezers.  I think food is thrown out because of a lack of planning; a lack of cooking skills in some cases, and because we don’t value food enough.  We want it to be cheap and easy.  We forget the purpose of food – to transform the light and warmth of the sun, the nutrients of the earth, the molecules of water – into nourishment for our bodies, through the labour of many hands.  When something is that fundamental, that miraculous – and can I say it, as a secular person? – that sacred – how dare we waste it?

We try to be mindful about food, and that means planning.  Once a week or so, we draw up a menu, and from that menu a shopping list.  And then we stick to it.  This takes time, every week, but it’s time well worth it, and not just because it will mean less money spent; it means BD and I talk about what we’re eating, what recipes to try, how long we’ll need to make supper, where to buy the produce. We are, as a result, perhaps more conscious – more mindful – of what food is in the house, and what it’s for.

I shop twice a week for grocery-store perishables like milk and yogurt, in part because our fridge just isn’t that big.  (Which in itself is a good thing, since it does mean that there is less chance that half-jar of tomato sauce will get shoved to the back and forgotten.)  I shop almost daily for fruit and vegetables during the summer, when the farm stands are open and the produce is freshly picked.  But for meats, I shop, roughly,  monthly, or perhaps every six weeks, buy in moderately large quantities, divide into portion sizes, and freeze.  All this significantly reduces the chances that food will be overlooked or wasted.

But don’t think I’m a paragon of planning.  I keep a freezer inventory, and I mean to cross off what is used, but it doesn’t always happen.  And so, yes, every so often I find some chicken in the freezer that’s looking a bit freezer-burned. Sometimes the only zucchini I can get at the farm stand is too big for just the meal I want it for.  Sometimes one of the apples has too many bruises, or BD forgets to eat his raw carrots and they go soft.  So what then? I can’t bring myself to throw out food unless it’s truly gone off.

Freezer-burned chicken, like the carcass when we have a roast chicken, is saved to make soup, a mainstay of colder-weather meals.  (I’ll wait until the colder weather arrives before writing more about that – I can’t get excited about soup recipes in the summer.)    Soft, over-ripe, or just plain excess fruits and vegetables that don’t freeze well, though, go into ‘garbage loaf’, basically an adaptation of a banana loaf recipe with the same amount of just about any vegetable substituted for the banana.  I even mix them – but be sensible about that:  tomato and zucchini work together, as do apples and carrots, but I wouldn’t do strawberries and tomato.  BD will eat almost any baking, but even he’d draw the line at the last one!

So here’s the recipe for ‘Garbage Loaf’ as I make it. (I probably should have called it Leftovers Loaf, but at least in our house, it’s too late now – Garbage Loaf it is.)

Wet ingredients:

1 cup just about any fruit or vegetable, diced, shredded, or cooked and mashed..  If using carrots or parsnips, grate and steam slightly first.

1/4 cup applesauce (to reduce the fat; if you don’t have it, or don’t want to use it, double the amount of oil.)

1/4 cup light oil – I use safflower, but sunflower, corn or soy works too.

2 eggs, beaten

1 tsp vanilla

4 Tbsp fruit juice (not tomato juice)

Dry Ingredients:

1/2 c brown sugar (this suits us; you may like it sweeter.  It also depends on whether or not you add chocolate chips or dried fruit.)

1 and 3/4 cups flour:  I use whole wheat.

1 tsp baking powder, rounded

1 tsp baking soda

Optional Ingredients 

1/2 cup of any of:

nuts

chocolate chips

raisins or other dried fruits

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.  If using a glass or metal loaf tin, grease it; a silicon one should not need it.

In a bowl, combine the fruit or vegetable mash, oil, eggs, sugar, vanilla and fruit juice.  Mix with a heavy fork or a hand mixer until well blended.

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and baking soda, and any optional ingredients you are using.

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry, and mix with a heavy fork or a hand mixer on low; do not over-mix.

Spoon into the loaf pan and bake for 55 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.

As I’ve said in an earlier post, BD is a tall and highly-active man, so this loaf doesn’t tend to last long – but it freezes well, and, if by some miracle there is a slice or two left after a couple of days, it also toasts well.

I’ve also added shredded carrots and apple to bread:  it makes a denser, moist bread that won’t keep as long – after the first day we slice it and freeze it, and toast the slices; but it’s good with cheese (for me) or hummus.

And dessert at that dinner that prompted this post?  The fruit loaf was indeed Garbage Loaf, made with over-ripe bananas and a slightly suspect apple, and it complemented the raspberries and ice cream very well.