Foraging

Much of the food we consume travels miles to reach our table; and yet all that we need to grow a healthy body may be sprouting in our own backyard.

I do my part. I recycle; buy local organic fruit and vegetables, free- range chicken and their eggs, make my own ghee from organic butter, but, not always. In fact often I bring home bags of dates, avocados, imported cheeses, wine from Chile, olive oil from Spain. Nothing local. Sometimes, especially when I eat out, I don’t know where my food comes from.

Recently I watched Now, Forager: A Film About Love and Fungi. It was filmed in gorgeous wilderness, brilliant deciduous autumn foliage, home to colorful mushrooms and fungi, wild turkey, great blue heron. The love story holds the tension between a guy ready to give up the cost of the apartment and travel down the coast selling mushrooms and foraging for food and his sweetheart seeking more stability and security working as a chef in an upscale neighborhood restaurant. When they go their separate ways for a while, each has their own personal adventure.

Much of the film is silent, the young man alone, hunting fungi and living off the land. For breakfast, he finds three eggs left by a wild turkey and scrambles them with wild onion and mushrooms in a pan over the fire. There are also wild greens and berries available. We see him catching a large fish off the coast and in precise detail, cut off the fins, debone the carcass, sever the head. Hunting fungi is not without danger. As his sweetheart points out before he leaves, he could fall, break a leg, the car frequently dies. Only nothing like that happens. Instead, he faces a pair of threatening men who find him alone in a remote wilderness and out of anger or sport plan to take advantage of his vulnerability. Finally they change their mind and our hero is spared the risks of living the simple life.

I can see the benefits of eating just what grows in my neighborhood, but I’m not going to change my diet. I have plenty of other things that cause me more than enough anxiety. Still, the film makes us take notice, how much of what we consume do we actually need. Fish, eggs, wild greens, mushrooms and berries, this would more than keep us well nourished for an extended period of time. Even if we ate only what grew in Washington state, wheat, apple orchards and grapevines growing just east of the Cascade Mountains would add plenty of variety to our menu.

This is the practice in many parts of the world. When I was in Italy visiting family, I was served local wine. Local meaning the wine made from the grape vineyards growing in the backyard and fermenting in the cellar. On the way home an article in the Northwest Airline magazine pointed out that while Americans are continually searching out the best wines for pairing, Italians always have the very best wine for the menu because it comes from their own district.

In India I lived with Brahmans. The breakfast table was set with homemade bread, jam and yogurt. For dinner there were two kinds of vegetables in a spicy sauce, rice, lentils, and flat bread. Sometimes yogurt was available. Sweet rice pudding was an after dinner favorite. The meal made a complete protein. Lunch was a luxury. I lost my interest in food. While my tongue was deprived of the cornucopia of diversity that we have in the States, I was wildly distracted, consumed by the profusion of other sensual delights, golden sunsets, women wrapped in orange, blue and pink cloth, piles of marigolds gilding temple stairways, melodic Hindu chants drifting through store front doorways, scent of saffron and jasmine, cardamom and cloves wafting from the spice shop. Consumption is not only for the mouth.

It is not as easy to eat local in the United States. There are so many aisles in the grocery store lined with tempting imported specialties, sweets and treats. Actually it is helpful to remember that we are spoiled if it makes us more grateful or generous.

Eating local eliminates the cost and waste of shipping food in refrigerated trucks over long distances. When we buy from local farmers relationships are formed and communities are strengthened. This is a good thing. As much as we can, we ought to practice preparing the bulk of our meals from fresh organic local sources. Of course indulgences with out guilt can be an expression of generosity if they keep us from becoming too grumpy, sweet cream in the coffee, a slice of Marion berry pie at Wagner’s.

We can set our own comfort level and pace ourselves as we step more fully into a lifestyle mindful of our habits of consumption. Any change begins with awareness, simply slowing down to notice how we feel about what we are eating and really tasting our food. We can think gratefully of all the people who helped bring it to the table, the plants and animals that sacrificed their lives for our sustenance. Whether we eat organic and local or not, this practice will shift our relationship with our community and ourselves.

Mother’s Day

Life is filled with many interesting and often unexplainable events.

I always remember my father on Mother’s Day.

The year my father died, on a sunny January morning, he went to the store to pick out my mother’s birthday card. Perhaps at the time he felt rushed or more likely at eighty years old his eyesight was failing. He may not have taken time to read the card. With an eighth grade education and long career as a carpenter, he was more attune to numbers than words. He drew diagrams with precise measurements; anything he drew he could build, furniture, cabinets, remodels, houses. In any case when my mother opened her birthday card she found a Mother’s Day card instead.

The morning of his death my mother was sitting by his side in the hospice ward of the VA nursing home. She remembered the card he had given her and left the room to get it. She wouldn’t be gone long. Oddly, after four months, the card was in the car, just outside his room. While she was gone my father slipped away. He died on Mother’s Day May 9th, 2004.

This could be explained as one of those odd coincidences, two events accidentally colliding into each other. Still it is difficult not to wonder if my father wanted to communicate the event of his death. It is not a new idea that, whether we are conscious of this or not, we live on many different time-space dimensions, simultaneously.

On the first leg of my journey to India, the flight from Seattle to Chicago, I was seated next to the only Indian on the plane. He was an elder Brahman who discussed much of his culture with me. These words I never forgot, “Anatha, there are many plains of existence. This is the land [plain] of death.” True enough, everything here dies.

Before I boarded the plane for my five-month stint in India, I learned as much as I could about the country. My Lonely Planet guidebook was invaluable, but I was delighted to be introduced to a couple who had just returned from Rajasthan, the district where I intended to spend most of my time.

My new friends invited me to their home, showed me hundreds of colorful photos from their trip, shared travel stories and fed me lunch. Their home was about an hour’s drive from Olympia. On the way back I stopped at a gas station convenience store to fill up my tank. I pulled out my wallet and stepped inside the store to buy a granola bar for the road. One step through the door and I was aware of a profound energetic shift. Nothing changed visually, but I experienced a place saturated with harmony and love.

While I searched for my granola bar simply observing this strange phenomenon, two men entered the store. They spoke with the proprietor behind the counter and made their purchase. There was nothing uncommon about their words, which were simply to facilitate an exchange of product and money, but a curious connectedness and familiarity between the three men. In fact it felt to me that we were all as family held in a web of harmony and love. What an odd and unlikely place to have this experience! I knew this service station on a busy road between two towns probably saw a daily stream of strangers buying fuel and a quick bite to eat. I was certain the men and the proprietor had not met before. After the men completed their transaction and left the store I walked up to the counter to pay my bill. The proprietor was from India. As I was leaving he said to me in the tone of a father to his daughter, “Be careful crossing the bridge. The winds up.” I took one step outside and immediately was returned to my everyday reality.

Several times while in Rajasthan I had similar experiences, a visceral awareness of being in a profoundly familiar place and time with people of remarkable kinship. In one clear and sudden shift the world changes, is seen and felt with a new, fresh awareness and known to be filled with love and beauty.

If you were to ask me if I had a past life experience in Rajasthan I’d have to say I don’t know. I’m more inclined to believe that we are always living on this dimension of love and harmony only we don’t see it. For some reason our vision is obscured from the truth. Grace opens a door as often at home as abroad. We don’t have to leave the country to step onto an alternate plain of existence. A service station can become a window to heaven.