* Queen *
all about me
news from my life
Wow, what a week! Through work, play, and interesting bits in between, I have been learning and pondering a lot! First on the list is helping two of my housemates with their business production of Kimchi, a delicious Korean fermented vegetable mix. In short and simple overview, the process is as follows:
Step 1: chopping vegetables...LOTS of vegetables
Step 2: Leaving them to sit for a week or more in salt brine, a process called Lacto-Fermentation, in which a good bacteria called Lactobacillus consume the sugars in the vegetables, turning it into a lactic acid that is extremely beneficial to the digestive system, and which gives the kimchi a yummy, tangy-sour flavor! 
Step Three: Delicious Kimchi!
Not to mention, the packaging into jars, labeling, boxing, and taking them up to the Portland farmer's market to sell!
Next on the list is my visit to a nearby sheep farm belonging to some friends I was kindly introduced to. I got to meet the amazing Jacobs' Breed Sheep, (classified by being roughly 80% white and at least 15% brown). After bringing them in for the night, an exciting chore that involved merely opening the gate, calling out "Sheep food!" and watching them race into the barn, I got to see some of the wonderful ways that their spring-shorn wool is used! The cleaned wool is carded (by hand or by machine) into poofy sheets of roving, which can then be dyed with color. Strands of colored roving can be blended together for lovely color varieties, which can be described as variegation. Using a spinning wheel, strands of roving are then fed to the pedal-treadled loop, whose spinning motion twists the fibers of the roving into a sturdy thread of yarn. Multiple yarns can also be spun together to add more variegation and strength. Depending on how many threads are incorporated, the yarn is called a single, double, or triple ply, and so on. Oh! The part that blew my socks off completely, (nicely cotton knit socks, I might add), is when she showed me how a large, double-bottomed sock that looks like an elf shoe, knitted with wool, can be felted by putting it in the dryer for a little over 10 minutes. I was stunned to see how it had transformed into a sturdy felt shoe! Perhaps only durable for use as house slippers, but incredible nonetheless!
Lastly, my sweet cousins visiting from Arizona/working part-time in Portland drove out to McMinnville to pick me up, and we spent three days adventuring together! We hiked in Silver Falls, through a trail of ten gorgeous waterfalls, including one with a huge cave behind it. I caught a sliver of the golden light of sunset as I sat in that cave, and as its light touched the misting cascades of a million waterbeads in flight, I felt that I was sitting behind the eye of the World.
The second part of our trip was touring the coastlines, all the way up from Lincoln City to Canon Beach.
In the wavering reflection of moonlight on a waning waterline, I stood still as the thrusting force of an outgoing wave cast endless argyles of water around my sinking ankles. I looked out past the edge of my home continent and felt reconnected to a sense of hope for my life; the waves seemed to rustle through my ears with the sound of all my inmost dreams, forgotten, remembered, and rekindled with inspiration, bright as the bowls of light from burning campfires along the shore. Thank you, Cousins!
Thank you, Ocean!
* Worker Bees *
for do-ers and make-ers
practical skill, tips, or tasks I have learned this week
The word this week is: Thyme
A housemate kindly invited me to sit in on an Herbalism class he is helping to teach, and the herb of the night was Thyme. We learned about its healing properties for colds and coughs in a very timely manner, because the next day, I woke up with a tight chest and cough. So here's a remedy, which proved to be quite successful!
- For a deep, persistent cough, boil thyme over the stove
- Make a tent by putting a towel over your head, taking care to keep it safely away from the burner
- Breathe in the vapor from this aromatic plant and enjoy the soothing touch of its steam
- Another way to take it is by making a simple infusion by brewing one Tablespoon of Thyme in 8oz of water, the way you would with looseleaf tea, letting it sit for 10 minutes (you may even use the water you used from the steam session!) This infusion is nice with some honey and lemon
- When choosing thyme, it is always preferable use a freshly grown plant stem. If you or someone you know is not growing Thyme, though, the store-bought cooking spice version of it will do better than nothing!
(I wish I would have known about this a few weeks ago, when my poor Mamma was coughin' up a storm! Thankfully, my friend had Osha root from the Sandias, which seemed to help too).
A couple more things that are good to know about Thyme are:
- Thyme is an anti-spasmotic, which means it is not used to prevent you from coughing when you have a bad cough, but rather, it helps you to have productive coughs that actually clear out the infectious mucus from your chest cavities
- Thyme is an emmenagogue, which means it helps to bring on menstruation for women who are not regular. This means it is not a safe herb to be taken in high quantity for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding
- One of the nicest things about Thyme is that using this herb can help remind you that the most important thing you can do for yourself when you are sick is to take the "thyme" to rest!
* Gatherer Bees *
for savorers of the sweet stuff
sticky, juicy, colorful, sweet stuff that serves as inspiration
One Swaying Being
Love is not condescension, never
that, nor books, nor any marking
on paper, nor what people say of
each other. Love is a tree with
branches reaching into eternity
and roots set deep in eternity,
and no trunk! Have you seen it?
The mind cannot. Your desiring
cannot. The longing you feel for
this love comes from inside you.
When you become the Friend, your
longing will be as the man in
the ocean who holds to a pice of
wood. Eventually, wood, man, and
Ocean become one swaying being.
~ Rumi
* Drones *
for lovers
short essays and stories about things that are important to me when it comes to creation and sustenance of Life
Food: A Matter of Life and Death
To begin to try to share my thoughts on food feels like an overwhelming task, because it branches into so many areas of life with such complexity and such a deep root system of beliefs. I could say that food is why I came to Oregon, that food is actually at the heart of every single conversation that is ever had, that, in short, food IS life itself. In a very basic way, beyond the 40 or more days that humans can survive on just water, to be talking about food is to be talking about the only way that we can go on living to talk about anything at all. No matter what your beliefs about the spirit or afterlife, there is a very real way in which the body will one day die, and depends on food to stay alive. Sometimes, nothing connects me so immediately and powerfully to the fact that I am alive and have a body, than to remember that there will be a day, one way or another, when this very same body that I and others are so familiar with as being Me, with all of the little details like my little nose and freckled arms, green eyes and in turning pinky toe, will also lie utterly still, never to live again in this way. There may be a sense of morbidity in our culture that says this kind of conversation is creepy, unwanted, unnecessary: "yes, yes, of course you're going to die, we're all going to- but let's not think about that now!" I think this repulsion from the "grossness" of death is what leads us to embalm, to turn our dead into dolls that look prettier than rot, but only in a way that many find to be innately unnatural, covering the faces of our dead with makeup so it is not quite so startling. If these words turn your stomach- LISTEN TO YOUR STOMACH! This conversation is about food, remember. Could it be that this plasticky fakeness, this obsession with image, seems disgusting to us when we talk about corpses (bodies that are no longer animated by functioning organs, including the neuron-firing brain, blood-pumping heart, digesting and excreting stomach, kidneys, liver), but that without even realizing it, we are reacting to our LIVING bodies with the same kind of fear? What I learn from looking at the death situation, the process of dealing with corpses, is that many times when we humans are afraid of something, we cover it up. Just as pumping human veins with preservative chemicals to make the skin look like a waxy replica of a living relative may turn our stomachs, we are currently pumping our food with toxic chemicals, and the look of it is so repulsive that we are covering it up with the makeup of colorful packaging and fancy labels in attempts to feel a little more comfortable about it.
This particular train of thought was sparked for me especially by a conversation I had this week. A friend told me at one point in our talk, "Yes, I'm glad you're experiencing God through contact with nature, especially through natural food processes, but you know, that's not the only way that people experience God. Some people can't afford to eat all fresh organic produce and locally produced foods, and God still loves them." This sentence pained my heart in some excruciatingly deep way that I didn't know how to explain at the time, to my friend or to myself. Now, I say: this sentence of words hurts so much because it puts God outside of the health of our human bodies. To speak of God, to speak of Love, as a parent who would wag the "naughty" finger at us for not buying organic foods, feels like a view of our Life Source as something outside of the Life Process! When we view eating organic "natural" foods as a trend followed by rich people who think they're better than everyone else (or praise ourselves in such a fashion, if we do eat that way), we are still disconnected from the very physical and very alarming fact that a terrible majority of the food availabe or purchasable at the stores is filled with chemicals and made by processes that simply aren't good for us! To me, this means that the phrase "God still loves people who can't afford to eat healthy" could really be reduced to: "There is a portion of the population of people where we live (in this country and in this earth) who cannot afford to not feed themselves toxins." THIS is a problem!
On a more manageable (and hopeful) scale, there are actually great, affordable ways to eat healthy foods without being "rich." One small example is the way some food stamp programs are collaborating with local farmers markets to turn EBT money into tradable tokens that farmers can then cash in. Additionally, the more people who are able to grow food in their own gardens (and learn how to cook with all this raw material), the better!
I would like to pull this back around by suggesting that the change that needs to take place for people to thrive can begin taking place on a deep ideological-level and close belief-level way. When we turn away from the beautiful life that literally courses through the veins of our living bodies, giving us the ability to run on the beach, to take in deep breaths of fresh autumn air, to savor a lovely meal, in short, to live and really love life, we may come to see spiritual beauties and truths as somehow outside of the bodies that allow us to be here. That God Loves is not the part of the conversation that I disagree with- I believe God is Love and that Love and can be found in every aspect of life. I welcome a time when we spiritual-physical beings can come to experience communion with our Life Source through the beautiful process of this earth feeding us with grains, vegetables, fruits, fish, and animals, sharing its own life with us so that we can continue to be alive to experience and enjoy it. I welcome a time when we can experience Divine Love through this sacred exchange of food as much as we ever have through texts, doctrines, or theologies (and perhaps even a little bit more).
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