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Letting Go: The Christmas Edition

Earlier this week I wrote my version of “The Letter.”

Maybe you’ve been working on one, too. You know, the letter we send to our relatives explaining, pleading, guiding, reassuring, demanding, that they please just give one present, or a present that doesn’t make noise, or something homemade, or at least not made by a small Bangladeshi girl. We all have our particular conundrums to sort out, and are determined that once and for all we will do it. We will be brave and say our piece and save Christmas from turning into the atrocity we know is coming if we don’t act quickly.

If only everybody would listen to us!

I even sent my letter as far as my husband (it was destined for his family, after all) and he rolled his eyes. He said that maybe it needed a few revisions. We talked about it for a little while. I got sort of excited, threw the word “Crap” around a bit too freely. And then, just like that, it was out of my system. I didn’t want to send my letter anymore.

Here’s what I want to do instead: Control the things I can.

I want to make our advent season as blessed and rich a time as I can. I want to light candles each night and watch Mary make her way on the starry path. I want to celebrate the small, magical feast days of St. Nicholas and Santa Lucia with friends and songs and small treasures. I want to visit the mountains and make wreaths from pine and fir branches. I want creating small, useful gifts to be part of our daily routine, something that brings us joy in both the making and giving.

I realized, with the help of a few friends, that the mood we create in our home is what is most important, not the kinds of gifts our loved ones give us. If I want Christmas to be a time filled with reverence and simplicity, then the way we live, the things we do, the essence of our days will convey it.  No amount of gifts under the tree that I might want to use the C-word on can undo all that. (In fact, maybe, just maybe, that balance is actually exactly what we need.)

I don’t want Christmas to be about this tight knot in my belly worrying about how horrible things will be if I don’t take matters into my own hands. I want to let go of my need to control what isn’t my business. And you might argue that it is my business, and probably you’re right and I’ll regret this. I’m prepared for that and have made my peace. In the end, these are our relatives, our family. They know us and love us and are well aware of our feelings about plastic and clutter and consumerism and all the rest. I don’t need to tell them again. Let them find their own way to give.

And let me find my way to graciousness and gratitude.

::

Since writing this post, I have been filled with doubts: I should do something. Say something. I’ll regret this letting go business. I’m so going to regret this. It’s going to be terrible. I’ll definitely have to send a letter next year. Why don’t they just ask what we want? Why?

And then I find my way back to peace: Give them a chance, they will totally come through. Relax and let go. Every kid deserves a few toys their mother doesn’t approve of. That’s a good thing. How bad could it be? Seriously, is that really so bad? Really?

This is going to be okay.

I can always send the letter next year.

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Postcards from High Summer

Summer, that season of such bounty, unfolds before us. And behind us. Maybe even within us.

It’s been a good run, so far.

We’ve been known to leave home, a handful of times. But always in our home away from home.

Slowly as a snail, we go to the good green places.

We’ve watched our mountains burn down and waited for rain.

We’ve been missing the frequent trips into said mountains (closed till rain comes), but getting occasional doses of green when we can.

Our meals are simple-simple. With the occasional pie.

Pulling the bedraggled weeds from the bedraggled vegetable patches (oh, it’s so dry!), making a feast from twenty two green beans and thirteen kale leaves. The bounty of less? Everything is precious!

Getting uber organized, but mostly on paper. Which is a pleasure in it’s own right.

Maida’s been learning to sit, and then to crawl, to delight us all endlessly.

Cora is her constant champion.

I’m saying no to too much of anything that calls me away from these empty-full days, from the gentle way life unfolds when there isn’t obligations or deadlines or ambition for more than a clean sink.

Thinking that there is one ambition I plan to fully indulge: learning to spin the rolls of fleece we carded these last few weeks.

Saying yes to the simple, nourishing, celebratory things that come along–knitting night with my compañeras is heaven. Live music on the plaza with all the locals is a constant pleasure.

Not to mention swinging in the hammock.

Or turning Thirty.

And especially not to mention swimming in the kiddy pool under the apple tree each afternoon, and gazing up into the green canopy and feeling kind of sad that there won’t be an apple harvest this year, and also strangely elated that I can continue this lazy streak well into autumn’s habitual canning season (okay, I’m mostly sad).

Happy that the Man of the Place is not so lazy. Happy for all the amazing things he’s accomplished on our humble city lot sized paradise.

Spending evenings writing in my journal, reading novels, knitting this and that. Only occasionally remembering to read blogs, and much less frequently to write a post here. I feel as if I’ve been freed at last from the World Wide Web. It is lovely.

In essence, this summer has been like a long retreat at a Vipassana meditation center where the refrain is nowhere to go, nothing to do, no-one to be.

We’re just here, in the backyard.

Thanks for dropping by!


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Around the House, I See

Around the house, I see beauty:

The girl who won’t nap, but is instead whispering to herself and gazing out her bedroom window.

The mother who decided to see this as beauty, rather than insubordination.

The basket of onion peels getting fuller and fuller for egg dying. Wool roving in spring colors to needle felt an egg mobile.

Two new books of poetry by local poets I adore. I can just look at them and feel peaceful knowing that someone is writing poems. Happily, I’m not too bothered that it isn’t me. I’ve got babies to take care of!

Dishes, again. A reminder that we live and cook and eat here, in this home.

There, too, is the old broom. Thank you for these clean floors, broom!

The bouquets of lilacs and apple blossoms filling the house with scent.

The ripe cheeks of my baby, luscious child whose sweet exhalations are the very stuff of life.

The pages and pages of notes I’ve been writing in my journal about homemaking–sometimes rising in the night to add a new insight, often leaping up from the rocking chair just as we’ve gotten cozy because I left my notebook by the stove (where I’d also been taking notes). How shall I ever decide how much to say, or where to begin, where to end?

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Breathe, Friends.

My girls sleep peacefully, moonlight falling across their cheeks. Outside, crocuses push up through leaf mulch. Dogs bark. On my neighbors porch, a great white crane, folded as so many millions have been folded, hangs. A symbol of peace, hope, healing.

For days my heart has been heavy. It fills with fear and anxiety, leaves the present-moment sweetness of my days. It took me awhile to realize that I’m grieving. To remember that no part of this world is injured without affecting all others. It is impossible to not feel the tragedy of what is happening in Japan. The tragedy of our times. We are all connected.

I find a lot of comfort and courage in the words of Joanna Macy, a visionary elder whose work I feel none of us can afford to be ignorant of, especially as we raise children in these uncertain times. I wanted to share this video of her speaking on Uncertainty at the Bioneers conference a few years ago. May her words be a balm that gives each of us strength to feel our love for the world fully, even when it is painful. And may this love turn always back into gratitude, and service, as we strive to transform our world.

Much love to each of you. May our prayers for healing uplift us all.

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The Journey Continues

So as most of you know, last year we did this thing where our family didn’t buy any plastic. For four months, really more like six, we acquired only the teensiest amounts of plastic–exact amounts can be found at my end of month reckonings–during what turned out to be a life changing experiment. The posts from those months are a celebration of my joyful discoveries of Life Without Plastic.

Since then, though, I’m not even sure I’ve mentioned plastic at all on this blog. I just didn’t know what to say. Recently inspired by a number of posts written by friends in blogland ranging in topic from money to miscarriage to compromise, I have been thinking about transparency and figure it’s long past time to give a full accounting of our lifestyle these days, to reflect on life after no-plastic. Post-post-plastic, if you will.

So I have to just say it out loud: the fast that was so celebrated in this space ended in May. Since then, we’ve been buying plastic. Sometimes a lot, like when my in-laws came to town and I just went to Trader Joe’s and didn’t bat an eye at the cart filled with packaging (though I felt sick when I saw it filling our trash can, later). Generally it is a lot less than when the trips to TJs were a weekly extravaganza (that’s right, I was a pretty careless, if all-organic shopper before we started the fast), but certainly it’s more these days than when it was almost nothing.

There are various reasons for all this. Economy is one of them. I have been working hard to get our budget tightened up. I want to keep staying home with my kids, and that means really learning to live on just one income. Could I really keep spending over $10 for a gallon of organic milk just because it was in a glass jar (that doesn’t include the deposit). Did it make  sense to take a special trip across town to one of the big box health food stores for, I dunno, Braggs in bulk?

There was also my picky-picky little one, who essentially stopped growing once weaned. I needed to be able to buy her whatever I thought might help her eat more–whether it was a hot dog or frozen blueberries to top her (homemade) yogurt with. And then there was me, pregnant and needing to be able to walk into the kitchen and eat something right this second, which kind of interfered with my made from scratch ways. I started stocking the fridge with basics like tortillas.

Lastly, my attention was diverted from my extreme eco ways by the intensity of mothering a two year old. I devoted myself to finding my parenting legs (so different from the mothering legs we get when our little baby is in arms!) and this led me down a wholly new and unexpected road to a fabulous realm I call Steiner Land. Furthermore, I wanted to spend time learning to sew, making things, out in the garden, living. I didn’t yet know how to do all that and never buy a plastic bag.

I think I’m much closer now. I feel everything coalescing, all the skills I’ve spent the last year learning, the inner work I’ve done, the growth I’ve experienced as a mother, and the somewhat miraculous (and ongoing) organization and de-cluttering of our home. This has, happily, brought us full circle. I have the inner and outer resources–the drive and the skills–to go back to a life that is in line with my values. I have a sense of what is the right balance for us, the things we need, the things we don’t need.

I have to say that the most powerful thing about our plastic fast wasn’t that we didn’t acquire plastic during that time, but that we discovered out capacity for change. That we broke out of a system that we took so for granted we didn’t think there was any other way to live. Plastic isn’t the point (which I think I made clear even back in the day). The point is to live as carefully and consciously as we can. This means balancing many different parts of our lives, of making sure we are  joyful in our efforts rather than resentful. It means resting when we are weary, and taking up the staff to keep walking when we are ready to keep walking.

::

ps–I just revisited the path we forged last year during our fast by meandering through the archives here at Old Recipe. Dang, did I really do all that? I’m so inspiring I just inspired myself. Cool.

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Mealtime Grace

 

Is there some unspoken rule that every blogger (with children under age ten) must write at least one post about meal planning? Let’s just pretend that there is, and that I’m meeting my requirement. My apologies to readers of the non-housewife, restaurant-preferred variety.

I’ve never been much for meal planning–while I loved the idea, doing it regularly never happened, so I opted to just have a general idea what kinds of meals I’d make in a week: something with chicken, something with beans, etc. It worked, more or less. But lately,  I’d go to the store and buy milk and eggs and chocolate and then come home and wonder what to cook.

With a baby coming, oh any day now, I’ve spent the last few months trying to find every way I can to get my kingdom running itself, as a friend of mine says. For me, that means not having to think about what’s for dinner. Fortunately for our family, I had a huge burst of I’m getting my act together. And I did, and it’s working.

I started by planning meals for a full four weeks instead of just one. I  could have kept going but was starting to feel compulsive (at one point my enthusiasm for the project was so great I almost made a super complex house cleaning chart, with each day of the week a slightly different chore. It was totally OCD, though I still fantasize about it.) Anyways, I came up with general themes for  weeknights according to our schedule: oven fare on my baking day, crock pot day for the day I’m out in the late afternoon, beans and rice on Friday, because that’s what we’ve done for years and years (and called it a feast, too.)

Then I got out my cookbooks and left them on the table for a solid week. I tend to only turn to cookbooks when I’m feeling kind of desperate, and it seldom works out because I don’t have the right ingredients on hand at the last minute. But I love these books and want to be guided by them more, both to expand my kitchen skills and to have a wider variety of flavors on our table. For instance, if I knew we’d be having a stirfry one night, I wanted a different sauce each week. I took notes on what recipes caught my eye, and made a rough outline.

I found that the menus were like a puzzle, and I had to move the pieces around a bit to find the right balance between rich meals and healthier ones, to make sure we didn’t have rice every single night one week, and to vary the amount of cooking required each day. Some days are full-on cooking affairs where the oven runs for hours straight, other days we have leftovers, still others it’s twenty minutes to fry some fish and steam the veggies. While some days are very detailed, others are open: We’ll have vegetables, surely, but I won’t know what they are until I pick up our CSA for the week (but a safe bet these days would be turnips).

By organizing what we are having each day, I’m able to use our food much more efficiently. I know that if I roast a chicken on Monday, we’ll be having soup on Wednesday. I know when to soak beans, and when to defrost meat. And most importantly, for my budget and dwindling brain power, I know what to buy at the store each week. Yep, once I had the menu ready, I made up grocery lists for each week listing all the major components of the meals. If I already have an ingredient I can simply cross it off the list, which I find easier than putting it on the list by pulling it from some imaginative, dreamy part of my kitchen brain.

And yes, at first I rebelled like a willful child: What? I don’t want chicken tonight! I’d cry. But you know what, there is something so comforting about just having that dang chicken since it’s chicken night, and not having to think about it for another minute. Though of course, one could always change the sauce. I’m now on round two of my month long menus, and this time it’s even simpler: much less meat (as I won’t be pregnant too much longer, I hope!), and more straightforward meals that involve less use of cookbooks.

What’s cooking at your place? Please share tips about cooking, budgeting, babies, and other kitchen related epiphanies.

Love,

Kyce

 

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Gathering Medicine

In the midst of harvest season, I remember to gather the last of the medicines we’ll need this winter.

Many of the herbs we gather, mostly tea plants, come from the mountains. It is one of the most important things we do each year, a pilgrimage of sorts.

And there is also much medicine to gather here in the garden. Some were planted intentionally for that reason, like the mint, oatstraw, and nettle patch (yes, that’s the kind of thing we actually cultivate in New Mexico). Some things were planted for beauty, like the roses and lavender and Echinacea.

Some things are volunteers, so humble and common I have to remind myself of the power in their small, dark green leaves. That’s the mallows, and the alfalfa. Potent plants that will nourish us all through the winter.

Wild, cultivated, and vagabonds from between the cracks: We gather them all.

Having a relationship with our medicine, even if it’s just some alfalfa tea from the front yard, is a powerful way of re-localizing our habits and connecting with seasonal rhythms of our home.

It empowers us as healers, deepens our sense of place, and reduces the harm we cause to the planet in our quest for natural remedies.

We become healers of the landscape as we tend the stands of herbs that surround us in spaces both wild and domestic. And the herbs, of course, take care of us in return.

It is an ancient partnership. One each of us can claim and celebrate in these last days before winter.

~Be well!~

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Getting to Work

This fall is so glorious, so endlessly beautiful and warm, that I sometimes get a tinge of sadness. It’s not my usual fall melancholy, which is as delightful as the season itself, but something with a twinge of fear in it. Is this just a warm, dry La Niña year, or a taste of what the future holds? Who can say, really, but either way it makes me want to get to work to change our world a little. Not necessarily to alter the course of the future, but to prepare to live in it in a sustainable way.

 

Fortunately, lot’s of people are feeling this way these days. When I see what the 350 folks are up to this weekend, it fills me with a much needed blast of love for my fellow humans, and carried me away with the zeitgeist of collective action. Take a look for yourself to get a taste of what these amazing communities are doing this weekend during 10/10/10 work parties happening all across the planet. Find out what’s happening in your own town, too. Maybe even join in. (Santa Feans can head down to Frenchy’s Field from 1-6 on Sunday for the Fe version of it all.)

Did you hear that there’s going to be solar panels at the White House? Well, over here in the barrio we’re going to finish installing our crazy huge water tanks (yes, that’s enough plastic on there to warrant a few more years of a plastic fast, or enough to hold 3,000 gallons between four cisterns). Setting up a rain catchment system has been this summer’s very slow, but hugely satisfying project. I suppose the bright side of a dry winter is not much pressure to finish.

Other things to do around your own home might be hanging up a clothesline if you don’t already have one. Winterize. Make those muslin bags you know you want for the bulk aisles. Build a compost pile. Spread sheet mulch on your garden or wannabe garden with an eye towards spring. Begin, and the land will take over. If you’ve already got a micro farm happening out back, find a friend to help get started.

What are some other simple tasks we can do in our homes and communities to get to work changing our lives to put an end to the madness that has led to climate change? Think on the small things that will make a big difference to not only the way we live, but also the way we think. Whatever ideas you come up with, and end up doing, take pictures and send them to your representatives at all levels of government.

Let’s show them the world getting to work, and let our example lead them to do the same.

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Homemade Sun Cream

Disclaimer: I wouldn’t trust this cream at the beach, above tree-line in the mountains, or even on a hatless hike at midday. But as my summer cream, put on under a hat to spend a morning puttering in the garden or for a walk in the late afternoon, I think it’s splendid.

Apparently, the oils used in this cream have a bit of an SPF value–some say as much as 15. I don’t think they offer any UVA/UVB protection, and how that reconciles with the claim to an SPF I cannot say. I’m not a huge user/abuser of sunscreen, though I do use it when it seems necessary. This cream is for the rest of the time. When I’d probably not have anything on at all.

I also wear a hat. And believe in light tans. I confess to having an inordinate amount of faith in the power of chaparral oil to protect the skin from sun damage on nothing more than ethnobotanical evidence. Beyond that, common sense in the sun must prevail.

I made this recipe with a friend, and it yielded a lavish summer supply for both of us.

Melt in a double boiler:

3 1/2 T Shea butter

3 1/2 T Coconut oil

(And 1T beeswax if a creamier thickness is desired.)

Add:

1/3 C Sesame oil (raw, un-toasted)

1/3 C unrefined Jojoba oil

1/3 C unrefined Avocado oil (we used chaparral oil instead).

Let this mixture of oils set until room temperature, and partially solidified.

Into blender pour:

1 C Aloe vera gel

1/2 C green tea

Set blender whirring on high-ish. Pour partially solidified oil mixture sloooowly into center of vortex. Blend away.

Watch and listen–the cream will do its alchemy of marrying oil and water and that moment is amazing and miraculous everytime. It will thicken and turn creamy colored. Give it another couple seconds, then stop. If there is any loose oil or water, blend it in by hand–over beating will not improve things.

This cream is nourishing, soothing, and possibly slightly protective. For me, that’s all I was after. When I run out of store bought sunscreen, I might add some zinc oxide to this lotion and call it a day.

Be safe in the sun, friends.


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River Blessing

The River Blessing is my favorite community ritual.

It’s been happening for a couple hundred years in this same spot–San Isidro, the patron saint of farmers, is brought to the river in a procession. There’s lot’s of singing, and flowers.

Some years, there’s no water in the river. Some years, there is.

I can’t help but wonder if maybe it’s us who are blessed by the river, and not the other way around.