small as a spoonful

Despite the snow falling on my tomato blossoms, there was an used book to be enjoyed and nickel found.

the weighs of food

(Body Shop ad)

Was watching a two-year-old eat this weekend and wondered where we lose our delight and sheer joy in eating.  As I spend this time reading about food on all levels--from the political to the cosmetic, I am having trouble remembering the last time I just simply ate.  With no guilt, no promises of working it off, just simply enjoyed every single bite.  

From where does this craziness spring?  Every year, as we fit/ordered choir dresses, almost every single girl would wail about how fat she was.  And these, for the most part, were itty-bitty size 2 and 4 singers.  Even now, I have 4th graders in choir who talk about being too big. 

Yes, I believe in exercise.  Yes, I believe in eating produce (day three of my five-a-day--woot, woot).  And yes, I know airline seats and stadium seats are larger now to accommodate American girth and today's paper announced that US youth are too fat to fight.   And I know that there are myriad inner reason for which to follow a reasonable and moderate diet.

 

I don't know if you remember when Jamie Lee Curtis did this photo shoot, but with the reaction by/from/in the media, you would have thought she had cured cancer.   This is all a meandering through my own path to finding peace with food and hopefully a mental shift in focusing more on things that actually matter than some arbitrary numbers on a scale.

(I can't find the image, but I used to have a great poster up at MCHS that said "A Woman's Worth is Not Determined by the Pound.)

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

so begins Michael Pollan's food and dietary advice.  While his books have been around for several years, winning awards and fans, this new pocket book is an amusing and pithy read.  (The last book of his I read was actually on architecture.)  Some of his common sense approach is to not eat anything that your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food, or if there are ingredients that a 3rd grader cannot pronounce--you probably oughtn't be putting inside your body.

Why all this chatter about food and diet on a blog that is supposed to be looking at the teeny daily delights?  I've decided that May is going to be my personal pondering of diet, food, energy, and overall health.  If you're bored, you're welcome to wait until June where I'll delve into another topic. 

I've a stack of books from the library and will kick off this month with these tidbits.

The teeny thing I'm doing this week is what I call five-a-day.  Yes, it's pathetic that as a life-long vegetarian, my diet contains limited fresh produce and I'm changing that.  That is my challenge.  What is yours?

finale

hard to fathom that it's already the end of poetry month; have barely tapped into my collection of poems.  Ah well, next year.

Waving Goodbye
Wesley McNair

Why, when we say goodbye
at the end of an evening, do we deny
we are saying it at all, as in We'll
be seeing you, or I'll call, or Stop in,
somebody's always at home? Meanwhile, our friends,
telling us the same things, go on disappearing
beyond the porch light into the space
which except for a moment here or there
is always between us, no matter what we do.
Waving goodbye, of course, is what happens
when the space gets too large
for words – a gesture so innocent
and lonely, it could make a person weep
for days. Think of the hundreds of unknown
voyagers in the old, fluttering newsreel
patting and stroking the growing distance
between their nameless ship and the port
they are leaving, as if to promise I'll always
remember, and just as urgently, Always
remember me. It is loneliness, too,
that makes the neighbor down the road lift
two fingers up from his steering wheel as he passes
day after day on his way to work in the hello
that turns into goodbye? What can our own raised
fingers to for him, locked in his masculine
purposes and speeding away inside the glass?
How can our waving wipe away the reflex
so deep in the woman next door to smile
and wave on her way into her house with the mail,
we'll never know if she is happy
or sad or lost? It can't. Yet in that moment
before she and all the others and we ourselves
turn back to our disparate lives, how
extraordinary it is that we make this small flag
with our hands to show the closeness we wish for
in spite of what pulls us apart again
and again: the porch light snapping off,
the car picking its way down the road through the dark.

And after several days of no cents (and nonsense, truly), found four pennies.  Now my need is of a fountain.  Happy Friday, happy May.

savage creative storm

As I've been crafting and creating an Arts Guild in my community this season, a snippet from Rilke's Duino Elegies has been running through my head.  Here is an excerpt from the first elegy.

Do you still not know how little endures?

Fling the nothing you are grasping

out into the spaces we breathe.

Maybe the birds

will feel in their flight

how the air has expanded.

Can you see?  Springtimes have needed you.

And there are stars expecting you to notice them.

From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you

the way the strains of a violin

come through an open window

just as you walk by.

Man Creating Bird

As if it were all by design.

But are you the one designing it?

Were you not always distracted by yearning,

as though some lover were about to appear?

Let yourself feel it, that yearning

It connects you with those

who have sung it through the ages,

sung especially of love unrequited.

Shouldn't this oldest of sufferings

finally bear fruit for us?

Is it not time

to free ourselves from the beloved

even as we, trembling, endure the loving?

As the arrow endures the bowstring's tension

so that, released, it travels farther.

For there is nowhere to remain.

Je ne demande rien a personne

From my beloved volume from a beloved aunt, Prayers from the Ark.

The Prayer of the Cat
 Carmen Bernos de Gasztold


Lord,
I am the cat.
It is not, exactly, that I have something to ask of You!
No--
I ask nothing of anyone--
but,
if You have by some chance, in some celestial barn,
a little white mouse,
or a saucer of milk,
I know someone who would relish them.
Wouldn't You like someday
to put a curse on the whole race of dogs?
If so, I should say,



Amen.

(Sorry for the no photo layout.  Blogspot has evidently changed it's photo layout and it won't allow me to access my own photo album.  It may take me a couple of days to figure this out.  Anyway, you were spared more darling Bogart photos.)

Tweeting/Twittering

iPoem

George Bilgere

Someone's taken a bite

from my laptop's glowing apple,

the damaged fruit of our disobedience,

of which we must constantly be reminded.

There's the fatal crescent,

the dark smile

of Eve, who never dreamed of a laptop,

who, in fact, didn't even have clothes,

or anything else for that matter,

(Joe Bar, my favorite neighborhood coffee shop)

which was probably the nicest thing

about the Garden, I'm thinking,

as I sit here in the café

with my expensive computer,

afraid to get up even for a minute

in order to go to the bathroom

because someone might steal it

in this fallen world she invented

with a single bite

of an apple nobody, and I mean

nobody,

was going to tell her not to eat. 

(la nuit)