Day of giving Thanks

Thanksgiving day. 

A day for counting blessings. 

For loving family, both near and far. 

A day to celebrate food. And life.

Every year a day of feasting. Quintessential tastes. 

I am thankful for gamay  grapes, for husky love, for time spent in the kitchen. For tastes of memories past and futures yet to come. For my grandmother's silver and great grandmother's tablecloth. For the warmth of wood fires and of love. For the earth and all her bounty. I am grateful to a bird, to rice and celery and carrots and brussel sprouts, potatoes, grapes and walnuts. I'm thankful for ginger and sage and clove and cinnamon, marjoram, thyme, salt and pepper. For pumpkin and apple. For cranberries, oranges, wine. For vintners and farmers, for cows. For artisans, weavers, craftsmen. For truckers and planes and long dead  lifeforms' carbon. I'm grateful for the harvest. For abundance. For summer past and winter present. I'm grateful for joy and opportunities, for sorrow and experience. I'm grateful for abundance. 

I'm grateful for the presence of love, touching the lives of some of those closest to me. I'm grateful for health. Thank you earth, thank you sky. Thank you cosmic void, womb of beginnings. Thank you North. Thank you East. Thank you South. Thank you West. 

Thank you hot tub!!

Making Tea

It was a dear friend's birthday earlier this week.  She's been sick, so I brought her quarts of chicken stock for the making of healing soups, and a birthday gift of tea.  I blended red raspberry leaves with arctic chamomile, red clover and calendula (all harvested this summer) for a soothing mix.  Making herbal teas is like distilling summer sunshine into a cup of steaming winter warmth.

I found these awesome diy tea bags at the Co-op for a welcome reasonable price.  They're sealed on three sides, and you simply fill them with your own blend of herbs or teas.  I sometimes feel that brewing a whole pot of loose leaf tea is prohibitively onerous (at other times its precisely what I want) and so its nice to be able to go to the comfort and convenience of these little pouches.

Then you heat seal the open end.  A hair iron worked wonders.

And voila!

A perfect little pouch of comfort and warmth and healing energies.

Kitchen Living: Its alive!!!

See those 6 vessels?  Yep.  Six.  Count 'em.  Each is home to a thriving colony of micro-organisms destined for my intestines.  As the daughter of a microbiologist, recent studies showing that the human contains more microbial cells than human cells excites me to no end.  As a yoga teacher and healer, the idea of gut health influencing brain chemistry via the seratonin highway of the vegas nerve does likewise.  And as a whole/natural foods lover and advocate, the whole make-things-more-digestable-by-preparing-them-the-way-humans-have-been-for-thousands-of-years co-evolution of digestion and food processing theories make lots of sense.

So, we've gotten on the fermenting train.  By which I mean that I started fermenting things, after some epic failures, and my Darlin'Man has taken beautiful ownership of the whole process.  He eats alot, does my man who works outdoors all day even in the depths of 40 below winters.  And I feel so much better about it if he's eating a quart of lacto-fermented pickles everyday than a box of cereal every day!  So I've been encouraging his love of kraut.

What you see up there is (from left to right) : kombucha jar, crock of ginger carrots, giant kombucha crock, kefir quart, buttermilk quart, Saurkraut crock.
The buttermilk is a new experiment: I bought a pint of it to use in a chocolate cake recipe (delicious by the by), and decided to try to keep a culture going off of the store-bought.  We shall see.  If it works, I forsee many and many buttermilk biscuits.
I'm quite proud of the GIANT kombucha glass vessel - I found it at freds.  I think it was intended to be a cookie jar.

At any rate, I happened to start the carrots going yesterday, but otherwise, this is a piece of kitchen living that my Darlin'Man tends.  Its a bit like a garden: once its set up and going, there's the constant occasional tending : once a day kefir; once a week kombucha; somewhere in between for kraut.  And you get to harvest your fill!  It makes my heart sing, seeing him puttering in the kitchen, tending things.  Taking ownership is the best term I can come up with.  I might do a batch now and then, but they're still his.  I've always been a bit of a kitchen queen, and as we slowly learn to cook together, as he takes projects in the kitchen, I love the sense of partnership that continues to develop.

Snowy Hallows

The silence in this space has come from stillness in my life, but rather from the over-abundance of doing-ness.  I feel rather like I'm coming up on the homestretch of  a long distance endurance race, to be quite honest.

Its been a weird fall.  There's no other word for it.  Hints of snow, and then weather in the 50's through October.  Yesterday it finally snowed.  Big puffy flakes that coat the ground.  I feel so much more settled.  Calmer.  With winter truly under way.  We shall see what it brings.  I always envision winters spent near a fire: knitting, weaving, baking, reading, writing, hibernating.  But I look at my calendar and I see workshops and classes, with so little space between them and the office job.  So we shall see.

But tonight, I celebrate the Hallows.  I burn a fire of spruce roots, and send blessings to those who have passed through the veil between this life and what we call death.

Happy Samhain.  Blessing to all souls and all saints.

Michaelmas

Equinox marked Michaelmas - the traditional (medieval england) festival that marked the end of the farmer's year.  The end of the cycle of husbandry.  I feel at times that the rest of the world - away from the arctic circle and with their long seasons and mild winters - is out of joint with season change I recognize.  Its nice to know that in Europe in  the little ice age, the active seasons of growth ended at the same time mine does.  That culture produced traditions and folklore that resonate in other ways too :-)  Michaelmas was when the harvests were in, the plows were put away, and the people began to work with linen and wool.  The long slow beauty of spinning and weaving.  Feeding a fire to keep warm and making manifest. 

I've been feeling the inward turning of energy for a while now.  So much time working on developing workshop, teaching class.  Needing and wanting to balance that with internal nurture.  Deep exploration.  Art.  Meditation.  Fires and tea.  I pushed myself to harvest the last of the garden, pick berries in the woods (both activities and rituals I love and that feed me!), but found my heart anticipating the winter dark.  I love the long dark winters, hard as they sometimes are.  I love the time to turn inward, turn to my loom, my mat, a book, the fire.  Warm myself.  Hold myself.  Nourish.  It is required by the cold and the cold and the dark.  Pratyahara.  Inward-turning.  Cultivation of energy.  A time for inner growth and exploration. 

I let Michaelmas mark that shift for me this year.  Despite this last week or two of nice weather, of golden leaves.  I allow myself to shift my energy.  Not for one last hurrah, but for the long deep exhale.

Cutting Calendula.

I believe I counted 96 calendula seedlings planted this summer?  A couple of them are still blooming, under two snows, in the garden.  Many of them are valiantly surviving the cold in their pots on the porch steps.  I was afraid I would loose them all at the first sign of frost.  I didn’t'.

Most of the ones from the garden I pulled up last week, and out of time, let sit on the kitchen counter – a giant pile of plants.  Between the freeze and the undignified heap they sat in for a few days, I lost a bunch of the leaves...  but I still managed to dry a quart Ziploc bagful from them.  I grow calendula for the flowers, because they are beautiful and because they are healing.  Bonus: they attract aphids away from other things you are growing.  But I also harvest the leaves.  They're edible, did you know?  Calendula is the classic "potherb."  My leaves though, are dried and sent with instructions on poulticing and plastering to my father – he with the varicose veins the size of golf balls in his legs.  They're good for that, the leaves.  I hope he actually uses them.

I think I must have a love affiare going on with my herbs.  Affaires are mutual things, you see.  I love them.  And I think that efficacious herbs, the healing ones, must have a truly deep love for humanity.  They could have evolved in so many other ways.  The amount of phyto-chemicals and trace nutrients and good energy that healing herbs put into their herbal parts is astounding.  When you think that all of that energy could have evolved to have been directed towards something else... or towards the same plant parts, without creating the effective herbal medicines...  There is so much love right there.  Calendula has been giving me flowers ALL SUMMER LONG.  Now she gives me her leaves.  And in exchange, I save her seeds.  I've got some collected already, from seedheads accidentally collected before their time.  From some recent seed heads, fully mature.  The seed head its self will appear dried and ready to harvest long before it really is.  It is not until the vital energy has withdrawn from the stem, leaving it brittle and brown, rather than strong and lush and green, that the seeds have absorbed all the procreative energy they can hold. 

I'm leaving the seed heads on the plant, on the porch, out in the cold, even after harvesting another giant basket of leaves.  I want to see if next years plants will remember the cold.  Will they grow more fiercely in the early season?  More vibrantly?  Be even less susceptible to frost in the fall?  How does evolution happen anyway?  There is an intelligence in seeds.  In plants.  I feel we all too often vastly underrate that intelligence.  If I contemplate the possibility that our human DNA carries with it some load of karma from our ancestors, why should I not entertain the possibility that the prana (life force) at work in seeds can remember the cold, and tell next year's plant to prepare for it?  How else do we get cold-hardy varietals??

Chilly Mornings

I do love me a husky-ball