Our February weather roller coaster continues. Monday it reached 70 degrees, today it is snowing lightly. No doubt about it, today feels like winter. But the signs of spring are out there. My snowdrops are blooming, and tulip and daffodil foliage is starting to peek up. Robin flocks have already been passing through, though I don’t believe they’re the most reliable harbinger, since some of them overwinter here. More exciting is the fact that yesterday I heard a cardinal singing, a sure sign he’s beginning to think about staking out nesting territory.
The photo is a closeup of one clump of snowdrops that I naturalized years ago among the roots of the mulberry tree. Now they come up faithfully every spring, usually in early to mid-February, and I don’t have to do anything. Bulbs are so great for the lazy gardener!
An unexpected dose of winter weather hit us last night. The result was beautiful, but dangerous. This was one of the few times I can remember when the weather forecast was not more dramatic than the actual weather itself– the TV and radio weather people really missed a chance to get everyone all alarmed this time.
By the way, technical difficulties from earlier today have hopefully been resolved by now. A little upgrade attempt that didn’t go quite as planned. Thank heavens for webmeister Seth and his amazing multi-tasking skills! Bless you Seth.
A week ago, a friend gave me a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Eat, Pray, Love.” I was aware of the book when it came out last year. A book with a focus on food and yogic philosophy? You’d think it would be right up my alley. But I waited to read it and was eventually discouraged by some negative reviews. People seem to either love it or hate it, with few people lukewarm about either Gilbert or her story. The book begins with Gilbert at a very low point, facing a bitter divorce in her early thirties, accompanied by severe depression. After settling the divorce she finds it difficult to re-engage in life, and seems unable to leave the pain of the broken marriage, compounded by an unhappy rebound love affair, behind. To escape from herself and the situation, she uses a book advance to take a full year off, spending four months successively in Italy, India and Indonesia. These are the three sections from which the book takes its title. She describes her travels as a search for God. God is definitely a part of this quest, but it’s also about trying to find a way to become sustainably comfortable in her own skin.
The outset of the book is heavy going, as Gilbert describes crying oceans of tears and spending night after night in misery on a series of bathroom floors. But she won me over completely once she and the book arrived in Italy. She gives herself over to food and the pleasures of daily life, including the beautiful Italian language. Her description of being charmed by the florid profanity and histrionics at a Roman soccer game conveys her affection for Italy, and is itself completely charming. It is an abrupt change to follow her to a yoga ashram in India, living a life of austerity and prayer. Her new regimen includes five hours daily of scrubbing floors, a vegetarian diet, and daily wake-up calls at 3:30AM for prayer. But her search for an experience of God over four months of prayer and meditation is rewarded with a true glimpse of the transcendent. The final stage of her journey, in Bali, is embodied by a voice that’s clearly older and wiser than the desperate woman who began the story.
As with most memoir, the question for the reader is can you sympathize with (or in some cases, stomach) the complaints of the writer. In re-reading the negative reviews, it seems many critics couldn’t relate to her troubles or her goals. Before diving into the book, I had my own concerns about whether it would be my cup of tea. In the past I haven’t been a big fan of the hits of modern memoir. Excerpts I’ve read from books like “Prozac Nation” or “Running with Scissors” have left me cold. I feel little besides impatience with what seems to me to be endless navel gazing, wallowing in sad childhoods and victim psychology. This book, however, sucked me in immediately. Gilbert has an entertaining voice, able to cover her early mid-life crisis with a touch that’s doesn’t minimize her pain, but is light enough that she avoids taking herself altogether seriously. And she’s genuinely working to try to improve herself, to find happiness and to make her life better. Again and again, her wit and irreverence kept the book from being sappy or tiresome. I was happy for the hard-won equanimity she found, and enjoyed sharing the voyage with her.
It’s very cold and windy outside today. A great day to stay in with lots of pillows and a snoozy cat. I did manage to organize myself after lunch to make some cookies, though. I’ve been doing some minor tinkering with this recipe for oatmeal cookies and I’m really happy with them. They’re irresistibly chewy with a great caramelized almost toffee-like flavor thanks to all the butter. Thanks to Mom for sharing the recipe for these:
Favorite Oatmeal Cookies
3/4 c butter, softened (1 and 1/2 sticks)
1 c packed light brown sugar
1/2 c granulated sugar
1 large egg
1/4 c water
1 t vanilla
2 and 2/3 c rolled oats
1 c flour
1 t salt
1/2 t baking soda
1 c sweetened flaked coconut
1 c chopped pecans
Cream together butter and sugars, then beat in egg, water and vanilla. Sift all-purpose flour together with baking soda and salt and stir into wet ingredients, then add remaining ingredients and mix. Drop spoonfuls onto greased cookie sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes. Since I don’t have a convection oven, I usually bake them for 10 to 11 minutes, then turn the pan and finish for another 1-2 minutes. Cool on the pan before removing to a cooling rack. These cookies are best when allowed to brown to a light caramel color. They are flat and very chewy, almost like Florentines. While I think old-fashioned rolled oats are best, you can use quick oats in pinch—with quick oats use 3 cups of oats and be aware the cookies will be somewhat doughier and less chewy. I don’t have to talk to you about using real butter, do I? Margarine just would not be the same.
Several of my yoga students have asked about the music I play during class. I know many teachers disapprove of music during practice, but I feel it helps create a unique mental space for the practice and also creates an aural buffer for those of us living in noisy urban environments!
I’ve set up a couple of music mixes that I play on my iPod during class, and have posted three of them on the iTunes website. Here’s the first one I thought might interest my readers:
Last week my grandmother died. My mother’s mother was 96, and the matriarch of a large extended family centered in Delaware. She was an important presence in the lives of her children and grandchildren right up until the end, and we will all miss her very much. At the funeral on Friday my mother delivered the eulogy, and it was just right. We all felt she captured Grandma’s spirit and the reasons we will miss her. I wanted to include an excerpt from the address here:
Our mother left an indelible mark on all of our lives. We find ourselves, to this day, quoting her maxims. One of her favorites was, “Don’t make a song and dance of it.” This was said when we were crying and making a fuss over something. We were permitted to cry, but then she expected us to get on with things.
Mama and Daddy had a very good marriage and set a good example for all of us. Their arguments were few. We always hated it when they were mad at each other and not speaking. We were just not use to family dissension. I remember that once I told Mama to make up with Daddy because I was so bothered by their silence. She told me, “No, I am not going to this time. I always have to say ‘I’m sorry’ first.” I never knew if she said it first or not, but they never stayed mad for long.
As children we loved to see her dress up and wear perfume. Daddy liked her to wear perfume and she did so often. We kids thought she was beautiful when she was dressed up. She always cared about her appearance an freshened up every day before Daddy came in for supper. When she was working around the house she always wore fresh, stiffly starched aprons of print or flowered material over her house dresses. She never wore slacks until long after we had all left home. She loved shoes, and always had many different styles and colors.
I think she was as fair as she could be in the disciplining and treatment of the four of us. She always demanded total obedience, and there was to be no sassing or questioning her decisions. I sometimes felt that she was too hard on us because we never got to tell her our point of view. On one of my visits to the nursing home last year, we were having a good visit and reminiscing about old times. I told her that I thought she had been a good mother. She smiled and said, “Well, I sometimes think maybe I was too hard on you.” That really made me laugh. That was the very first time she ever admitted that.
She had a wonderful sense of humor, and sometimes at the dinner table we would all get silly and laughing. She and Daddy were always in the midst of it. Sometimes when we got carried away she would tell us we were going to have to go and sit on the cellar steps until we calmed down. I never remember any of us doing that, even once. She very seldom got mad at us, and then it was usually on rainy days when we could not go outside to play. I only saw her cry a very few times, when her four small children would finally wear her down.
Mama was always there for us, no matter where we were. When Doris was working in France, she mailed a homemade angel food cake and a separate container of icing for her birthday. When the postal clerk said, “Ma’am, it would be cheaper to send her the money and let her buy a cake,” Mama replied, “But it wouldn’t be the same.” She was a very caring and affectionate person, and her “never minds” were comforting when I had been hurt. As she got older, whenever we called her on the phone and when we were leaving after a visit to see her, she never failed to tell us that she loved us.
We all consider ourselves very lucky that we had a caring, loving mother up into our sixties. Not many people are that lucky. We always knew that she prayed for us every day and that was very comforting to us. We will all miss that.
My beloved mulberry tree had another gift for me this week.
This blog, of course, owes its name to the mulberry in front of my house. (See “Why Mulberry Jam?”) The masthead on this page is a photo of the tree in autumn. This fall my mulberry faithfully turned its usual spectacular shade of gold. You would laugh if you saw my photo library because it has WAY too many pictures of this tree. Every year I can’t resist taking another series of shots trying to capture the evanescent beauty of the turning leaves.
As it happens, this year we’ve had a very warm fall, with only a few light frosts all the way up through mid-November. As a result, the leaves have hung on much later than normal. Up until Saturday the mulberry held all its leaves, hovering protectively over the house and lighting up the whole street with the brilliance of their yellow color.
Finally on Sunday morning we woke up to a heavy frost with temperatures well below freezing. A light coating of silver lay over everything. From my kitchen window I looked out and saw the morning sun beginning to strike the tree. And then it started. As the sun warmed the leaves that were made heavy by their coating of frost, they began to fall. At first just a few here and there, but in a few minutes, the tree was creating a rain of golden heart-shaped leaves. There was no breeze, so the leaves fell straight down to the ground, fluttering gently and turning over in the sunlight on their way.
I ran out in my bathrobe and stood beneath the tree. The sound was incredible on a quiet Sunday morning. Without the usual sounds of traffic I could clearly hear the leathery rustle of the leaves as they fell past their fellows and landed gently on the ground. I was surrounded by bright fluttering coins that brushed my head and shoulders as they fell. I ran back in for my camera and attempted to capture the image.
There is no word in English to describe that feeling of mingled joy and sadness at the beauty of fleeting experience. The Japanese have the concept of “mono no aware,” or the sadness of things. It’s very much connected to a Buddhist sense of the brevity of life and the transience of beauty, summed up in the old Japanese phrase “swirling petals, falling leaves.” It’s partly that spirit that encourages the entire nation to turn out for cherry blossom viewing or hanami, during the brief days when the sakura are in flower.
On Sunday morning, the rain of leaves continued, until within an hour the tree was almost completely bare. By afternoon on the same day the formerly brilliant leaves had faded to a dull brown that thickly carpeted our front walk and yard. Now the tree stands with naked branches, waiting for spring.
In the days before I fell sick last week, I was talking to my yoga students about the unity of body and mind. Lying on the sofa for days with a nasty cold gave me plenty of time to reflect on the mind-body connection.
I think most people recognize that mental stress and tension definitely affect the body. Iyengar wrote “While yoga may begin with the cult of the body, it leads toward the cultivation of our consciousness. As we cultivate our mind, we are able to avoid the stress that would otherwise lodge itself in our body, causing disease and suffering.” (Light on Life, B.K.S. Iyengar.) I know that some of the worst illnesses in my life have definitely had a relationship to the stress in my daily life. Mind you, I don’t think this relationship always applies to things like simple colds. Sometimes you just get exposed to people with infectious conditions. But I do believe that when the soul is sick, the body is likely to be also.
What I think we are less likely to remember is that the reverse relationship also applies: the stress of the body affects the mind. I remember reading a report on a small study where women with serious depression were given Botox injections. The Botox was not used in this case for cosmetic purposes but to relax their habitual sad and frowning facial expressions. Shortly thereafter, the women reported a dramatic improvement in their moods and a lifting of their depression symptoms. (See articles that appeared in the Washington Post and FoxNews among other places.)
This study was far from scientific, being much too small and with limited follow-up on the women. But I found it very thought provoking. Why do we so often act as though the body-mind link communicates only one way, from mind to body? We know that a rough day at the job engenders headaches and tight shoulders. Why should we doubt that holding the body with poor posture or habitual imbalances or an angry facial expression can also negatively affect both mind and spirit?
Have you ever seen photographs of Tibetan Buddhist monks? One thing that always strikes me is how pleasant they look. Many of them have faces of such kindness and warmth you can’t help but feel they’d be wonderful people to know. I believe it has to be related to the kind of meditation they habitually practice, of meditating with compassion for the world and all its problems. Doing that kind of spiritual work day after day has to make itself felt in the body and especially in the face. Or perhaps because they habitually smile and look kindly their spirits naturally become more compassionate as a result. The outside and the inside are one and the same.
So I finally got some time to update the blog. Actually I was forced into it by my mutinous body. Mind was sailing along on its usual routine, getting things done and planning ahead. Body put an abrupt stop to all that by succumbing to an acute cold, one of the worst I’ve ever had. I spent the week of the Thanksgiving holiday lying on the couch with an ever-accumulating pile of crumpled tissues and endless cups of tea, whispering pathetically to my long-suffering husband since my voice had vanished.
I say long-suffering because as bad as it is to be sick, I know it’s no fun being the healthy one either. Being the sole healthy person in the house means doing a lot of dishes, picking up a lot of the aforementioned crumpled tissues and listening patiently to a maddening assortment of pitiful wheezes and weak coughs. So here’s a big official THANK YOU to the man who promised to love me in sickness and in health.
Can I just say how hard it is to go a whole week without speaking? Silence is not my natural style. At the worst point I couldn’t even whisper and was reduced to writing notes to communicate. This was the one time in my life I’ve felt the disadvantages of not having a Blackberry. Not that I intended to e-mail my beloved, but it might have been handy to have the knack of that text-message sort of shorthand people use to communicate quickly. You know, the “how R U doing?” kind of thing. As it was, all my notes contained grammar and spelling my fourth-grade teacher would have approved.
Thank goodness, I’m pretty much back to my normal garrulous self as of today. I look forward to circulating my no-longer-infectious self back into normal society.
I'm a writer, healthcare consultant and yoga teacher. My hobbies are cooking, gardening, blogging and books.