I want you to Look

I want you to look down

Do you see mud?

If not

Move.

I want you to look up

Do you see birds?

Do you see sky?

Do you see the woman you love?

If not

Move. 

           

I want you to look in

Do you see your heart?

Do you like its color?

Do you believe in its strength?

Can you see it beating?

If not,

Change.

I want you to look in the mirror

Do you see yourself?

Do you like who you see?

I hope you do.

Beautiful Heartbreaking Human

It grew on crooked lumber and broken glass

It grew in potholes and highway divides

It grew in sidewalk splits and rusted drains

It will grow. Trust this. It will grow. Whatever we plant will grow, so make it worthwhile.

Our love and California poppies line the sides of the road and fill the spaces between hope and grief.

We must carry grief, gratitude, and grace. And we must do it humbly and nobly.

There is no greater gift and pain than the opportunity to be human.

There is no task more important.

Give your heart to itself and to the world. Learn the dance of space between and fill it. Keep your bones in your skin and keep your skin a part of humanity.

Believe in magic. It is the only thing that will carry you through. Bend your knees and say thank you, and then rise to your feet and give it all back.

The world is in the palm of your hand. It was placed there gently the moment you took your first breath.

We must carry grief, gratitude, and grace. And we must do it humbly and nobly.

There is no greater gift and pain than the opportunity to be human.

There is no task more important.

Eggs

We are beginning to create our home. As we nest into our space we slowly add pieces of furniture, hang bells and tapestries, light candles and put flowers in vases.
We also fill our refrigerator and pantry with food. I do not truly feel home until I have chocolate, butter and eggs. These are the three ingredients I need most for anything nourishing and until they have found their way into my cupboard, I am restless.

I find solace in eggs. They are extraordinarily adaptable, mixing their way into anything sweet or savory. They can be dropped in soup, mixed in cookies, they can be fried, scrambled or poached, they can be beaten and whipped and still hold their own. With eggs in your fridge, the world begs a creation.
So last night we experimented with eggs. We bought quail eggs for the first time!

Aren't they just beautiful?!

I had never quite understood why anyone would eat a quail egg, but they were relatively cheap at the magnificent Berkeley Bowl and so we decided to experiment. We boiled them for 4 min which seemed to be the perfect amount of time for a "barely hard" boiled egg. They are so cute and make the sweetest little boiled eggs, but I could hardly notice a difference in taste between this and a chicken egg. 

I concluded that they are beautiful and quaint, and appropriate for garnishing a salad or toasted rye bread with gruyere cheese on top. 

We had also heard that if you take an egg and encase it in a long sleeve shirt, and spin quickly, the egg will scramble within itself. Then after boiling, you can crack the egg and have a pre-scrambled egg. 

Although obviously a fun and exciting trick, our efforts were proved mute and our scrambled boiled egg turned out to be simply a "harder than usual to peel" regular egg. Perhaps we did not spin the egg fast enough, but either way our efforts turned out to be in vain. 

Eggs are entire worlds encapsulated in a fragile shell, but are also strong and hearty and hold their strength. I love eggs. I think they are incredible and an endless source of experimentation and nourishment. 

If left untouched, eggs would eventually hatch and fly. Let us then too hatch and fly and remember that we too can be coaxed into incredible things. Let the soft world of an egg in our hand remind our own hands to be gentle with themselves. Hatching is not always easy, and half the time we are thrown into a boiling pan of water. So too will our hearts be thrown into hot pans, but let us hold up against the heat. We too are meant to fly. So lets eat our eggs, fill our bellies, and throw our shells to the ground!  

Move

We moved to Oakland! 

That is the big news for this week and also the reason for the lack in consistent posts. Our time was packed with looking, driving, calling, and moving our small world of "things" into a new home! 

 We walked dogs. Big toad and little toad.

 We ate clams and oysters for the first time.

We played in the water

Gypsy played in the sand

All in all it was a whirlwind and I am still catching up to having a new home, my partner and dog nearby, and remembering that wherever my feet are planted the earth will always hold me. Here, there, and everywhere in between. 

Happy first week of April! I hope the showers and flowers find you warm and full. The earth is so full of incredible secrets and good fortune. Remember that there is always a flower or a feather, or perhaps you walked into a kiss, or a rainstorm, or even the sweet reminder that the world is always there to catch you. 

To falling, to finding, to loving, to diving, to laughing, to fighting, to prayers and to change. I light my candle to all of this. 

Even Gods speak of this

Look! Look hard! 

Isn’t this heart, this world, the pain and the joy of it all, the most incredible thing you can dream of? To me it is. To me the world is an offering and I can only walk with humility to be given this gift. Present. It seems perfect to me that the present moment is called present. Can you think of any sweeter gift?

The world dropped this heart into my palm and I have been carrying it around haphazardly.

I dropped it in the dirt and brushed it off. I shoved it in my pocket, and I stuffed it in my glove compartment. I lay it underneath my pillow, I lit a candle for it, and I baked it a cake. I found the key, unturned the lock and hastily shut the door again.

I ask for imagination and I ask for creativity. I ask for life to be breathed into my lungs so that my heart can continue beating. I ask for my heart to continue to beat, and yours too.

I ask for apple pie and warm chocolate chip cookies. I ask for milk and honey and coffee in the morning. I ask for your heart too and maybe we can put them in a hammock, swaddle them in flannel, and let them rest for awhile.

My heart is a muscle and it aches. It is sore from pumping and beating and continuing on day after day. But luckily, we are so much stronger than we believe we are. Keep breathing and place your heart tenderly in your chest. Open your arms wide and trust that the pain will only carve greater canyons for flash floods of joy.

Remember cracked black peppercorn, Orion’s belt, dark chocolate, wolves, and magic. Remember to swirl, swerve, and dive into it all! Then come up for air when you need to.

 

 Remember beauty and I will do my best to remember it all too. 

This is one of my favorite poems and the beauty of the words ask my heart to rise.

Self Portrait

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

  -- David Whyte

Extraordinary Mexican Hot Chocolate

This was my first recipe. Saved from an unfortunate truffle mishap, it melted into a rich, sexy hot chocolate that is to be savored in demitasse. It was the first time I felt like I could call a recipe “my own” although it has been so poked and prodded by teaching hands that it is just as much mine as it is the world’s.

This is one of my favorite desserts, along with a variation of chocolate chile cream pots. It warms me from the inside and feels equally nourishing to give away as to drink it myself. I am fairly certain that it is this dessert that has kept my partner Aaron and I together throughout the years.

This is for heart aches and bone breaks.

This is for late night candle light.

This is for falling in love, over and over again.

This is the dessert I ask for when the world is right and when the world is upside down.

This is the dessert for extraordinary moments.

Mexican Hot Chocolate

10 oz dark chocolate

3 tbl butter

3 cups cream

¼ tsp cayenne pepper

½ tsp cinnamon

2 cups (or more) milk

Melt the chocolate, cream and butter together. As soon as it is melted turn the heat down as low as possible. Scoop out a small amount of the chocolate, cream and butter into a cup. Add cayenne pepper and cinnamon to this cup and mix thoroughly, then pour the mixture back into the pot. This is so the cayenne and cinnamon mix evenly throughout the melted chocolate instead of clumping in one spot. Add the 2 cups of milk, or until you reach the consistency you like. Serve warm with a dollop of whipped cream and a sprinkle of cinnamon.

Mental Nourishment:

The world offers itself up to your imagination. Our job is to offer ours back.

I cannot imagine a more incredible world. We do not always combine the raw materials with grace, and more often than not, our combinations bring more grief than beauty. But each oak leaf, each eucalyptus branch, each plum blossom, and each fallen woodpecker feather is individually so incredibly perfect, that I cannot imagine a more incredible world to create with. 

I want to fill this week with creation. This blog, this moment, these words have never happened before, and perhaps I do not know. But my hands know and my heart knows, and today I want to focus on listening and acting with both. 

My hope is to hold each other with strength and tenderness, to remember how strong and capable we are, alongside how tender and gentle our hearts are. 

With gratitude and grief flowing through me, this poem created space for a shift in my heart. A friend shared it with me, and I love it!

The Dakini Speaks

My friends, let's grow up.

Let's stop pretending we don't know the deal here.

Or if we truly haven't noticed, let's wake up and notice.

Look: everything that can be lost, will be lost.

It's simple--how could we have missed it for so long?

Let's grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,

But please, let's not be so shocked by them.

Let's not act so betrayed,

As though life had broken her secret promise to us.

Impermanence is life's only promise to us,

And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.

To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild,

And her compassion is exquisitely precise:

Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,

She strips away the unreal to show us the real.

This is the true ride -- let's give ourselves to it!

Let's stop making deals for a safe passage:

There isn't one anyway, and the cost is too high.

We are not children any more.

The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost.

Let's dance the wild dance of no hope!

--Jennifer Welwood 

Thank you for listening and reading, and I send wishes of love on the wind!