food thrills for our times

Some people look for race car driving, roller coaster rides, or bungee jumping for thrills. I look to food for an adventure that stimulates and excites my senses.  I am simply curious how things taste in hopes it’ll be pleasant and delicious, novel and delectable, or perhaps foreign and unexpected.

Many traditional exotic foods are no longer acceptable fare because they’re animal based, their harvesting is unsustainable, or they are cruelly made, and we are starting to know better, think foie gras or shark fin soup.   Hence, we need to look to the plant world for new food excitement.  

Already, I have fallen in love with Chicken of the Woods, a foraged early summer tree mushroom with a surprising meaty texture that is very satisfying.  Puffball mushrooms pop up from one day to the next in meadows a bit later in the season.   Their creamy and dense texture is a surprise and a delight.  The big thick gooey tapioca pearls that have made bubble tea a worldwide phenomenon, are fun to catch through a thick straw while sipping the beverage.  Smooth and slightly sweetened cashew cream has been a delectable revelation to me, and then of course there is color.  Animal products just don’t cut it when it comes to aesthetic appeal.  But cut a watermelon radish open, and surprise!  While a sliced starfruit will put a smile on anyone’s face.

Watermelon Radish

All these sensations delight me, excite me, make me want to discover new tastes, textures, consistencies, combinations, and possibilities.  Let me know if you have made any thrilling vegetarian discoveries.

polarity and the human condition

Judging and evaluating, comparing and taking sides define the human condition.  We exist in a world of opposites.  Remove the concept of darkness, as for example in the Dark Ages, the concept of the Age of Enlightenment is impossible to define.  Take sickness away from our earthly existence and you cannot desire to be healthy since you would never have been sick or had ever experienced sickness in others.  Health would be an incomprehensible, unreal and abstract concept.   A heavy cast iron skillet only conveys its weight to us in comparison to a bag of feathers, not on its own.  

Yet, when we take sides, preferring one over the other, judging one as “good” and the other as “bad,” wanting only what’s “right” and not what’s “wrong,” we only accept half of the picture.  Reality is both, must have both, does not exist otherwise on this earth in the material realm.

Hence equanimity and contentment arise out of accepting that abundance and poverty, hunger and satiatedness, generousness and stinginess must coexist, and only together are One.  One aspect cannot be wished or manipulated away in favor of more of the other.  That’s banging your head against the wall of how the universe functions. Besides, everyone has a different definition of “good” and “bad” and we are now entering sticky philosophical terrain.  The murderer obviously did the only possible thing in that crucial moment, and it was the “right” thing at the time.

Spiritual development begins with the acceptance that what we encounter and experience just “is,” and it is “good” because there is no “bad” or “wrong.”  They both cannot exist without the other, and by necessity are part of the package we signed up for when we came upon this earth.

as abundant as nature

We have been gifted so many plants from friends over the years, by splitting root  (lily of the valley, hosta, hydrangea) or rizome clumps (tiger lilies, irises), separating shoots (lilacs, raspberries) and transplanting runners (strawberries, strawberry begonia), as well as accepting seeds (hollyhocks) and whole seed heads (echinacea).  Many of these plants have grown big enough that we can now share and provide a never ending supply of joy to others.  And we know how quickly animals can multiply, the smaller the faster.  One mouse pair could theoretically produce about 5000 mice in a year.

Nature is just so amazingly abundant that I’m not quite sure how we humans ever came up with this idea of lack and not enough which so permeates our culture (“not enough time,” “not enough money,” “only 2 left,” or “get it while it lasts”).  Perhaps we are so disassociated from nature that we no longer understand its principals. Nature gives so freely, it doesn’t hold on.  It sends its seeds so liberally into the wind by the gazillions.  Abandoned farmland reforests all by itself over the years.  A garden rewilds and overgrows so fast if you don’t constantly pull the weeds and mow the lawn.

The difference between nature and our human behavior is our lack of generosity.  We hold on, tight and tighter.  We stash our money away and get rewarded for it with interest.  During the pandemic we horded toilet paper and meat and created actual shortage.  No wonder then that we live in a culture of stinginess, lack, and miserliness.  Instead of living and modeling abundance, we live and model lack.  Perhaps things would be different if we got rewarded for giving our stuff and money away

To experience abundance, we need to emulate nature’s generosity of giving.  Be like nature.  The more generous you are, the more generous the world around you becomes.

let's make a little room

We just learned that zoo baby births increased by 25% over the past pandemic year because the lack of human visitors put the animals more at ease.  

Good things happen when we humans get out of the way.  When our impact lessens everything else – the air, the water, the animals, the environment in general – recuperates and flourishes, as we saw so immediately last April.

We need to shift our thinking from I to We and consider the bigger picture, the benefit of the many versus the personal benefit to just one person, then we all profit.  Let’s make a little room for the rest of Nature so we can all thrive!