You are here: Home » IMspirit

Ready, set, go!

Written by on · Leave a Comment

As much as I intended to start the year out thoughtfully and slowly and not be a fool who rushes in… I did it anyway.  I don’t mind though, I am learning to accept myself as I am and give myself what I give others in life, the presumption of good.

I am diving into work projects, writing projects, making new contracts and contacts, revising my website and trying to decide how to re-launch it, singing every chance I get, participating in a fitness challenge and remembering to breathe.

Every year we have a tradition of making dream boards, some people call them vision maps, others intentions but the idea is the same.  You choose images and words from magazines that represent concepts and experiences you want to bring into this year.  It is fun and effective for learning what is really on your mind and heart.  I’ve been doing these boards for over 20 years and have loved seeing the changes in me as reflected in what I desire.

My first boards were full of material things in my twenties and gradually the material disappeared to make way for the experiences and circumstances of life.  Now you’ll find emotions, states of being and qualities on my board, the details have faded and I create a picture of health, joy, laughter, prosperity, giving and growing.  This year we will get to our group in California to late in the year to do this ritual with them so we’re going to invite some Ptown pals to join us and set up  a group skype with our west coast friends.  Should be fun, energizing and I’m curious what I’ll see on my brightly colored poster board this year.

Cheers to you!

 

Spending Time

Written by on · Leave a Comment

 

 

The first day of 2012 was spent… there it is …that idea of preciousness of time, spent and never to be regained or repeated.  The day started with expressions of love and affection and then a leap from bed into water proof boots and out to the flatlands to clam!  We picked up the bucket made of woven iron and the small rakes and trudged the few steps from our home to the breakwater.
I sloshed through the water through some soggy sand as Jane walked on the rocks above.  We arrived at a point about a quartermile out in the low tide and started digging.  The sweet click of the clam shell on the rake was music to our ears in just a few moments.  After an hour and a lot of raking, leaving a wide patch in our wake, we headed back home with another 40 clams for dinner.
Not wanting to miss our dear friend doing a sermon on laughter and silence at the UU Meeting house, we changed into less muddy boots took off our clamming gloves and headed to church.  What a wonderful community that you can come in from foraging and join in with song and prayer.  I went up and lit a candle to celebrate that this was so and we stayed and enjoyed the uniquely talented Diann Hamilton help us laugh and laugh and laugh and take our joy into the silence.
Unwilling to miss anything, we realized it was time to head to a friends for black eyed peas and brandy alexanders.  Yes you heard that right.  Wow were those beans cooked with ham hocks a great way to start the day, and the brandy alexander was basically a milkshake with brandy in it!  I didn’t learn all of what was in it until I slurped the last drop… our friends Gail and Dawn use Haggendaz  ice cream in theirs!
Okay, next stop a little football and the best chicken wings I’ve ever tasted, really, I’m not making this stuff up! These wings are crispy baked in a juicy sauce made with soy and balsamic garlic, yummy!  So we downed a few of those at Gabby and Marcy’s and finally decided it was time to head to the ocean side of the beach to meet Kate and friends for a ritual bon fire.
At the bon fire we wrote our annual discards on a slip of paper and threw them into the flames with the intention of letting them go, releasing them from our lives.  I know for me, some version of the same thing I confront each year was scribbled down and tossed into the fire with faith.  Faith that somehow this small act would make progress inside me.
Cold and exhilarated from the community, the fire, the water, and the God painted sky, we finally went home to bathe.  After washing off the clams, the smoke and the day, I got in my new Christmas jammies and poured a nice glass of wine.  Jane headed out for one more party but came home a little more than an hour later and joined me and our dear friend Laurie for a sweet movie and some home made popcorn.
Ok so I left out a few moments of disagreement, a quick jaunt shopping and some chats with family, but all in all that was how the day was spent.  Well done, I say.  Happy New year all.  May your days be joyfully spent in service to love and life itself.

TIME

Written by on · Leave a Comment


Last week I watched a PBS special on their NOVA channel, it was called “The illusion of time” with the physicist Brian Green.  He started out by saying that time is something that everyone knows about until you ask them to explain it.   I know how I feel about it but I probably can’t explain it either.  I feel  its preciousness, the moments passing , the end of a day approaching.  Sometimes its just the end of a time I’ve given myself to be free.

Today I have nothing scheduled on my calendar.  Nothing at all and this is very rare.  I am staying in my PJs  because I can…sitting cross legged in bed typing on my new iPad looking out on the Provincetown bay .   I am enjoying a cup of my Gano Cafe made with both coffee and special mushroom extracts ~not that kind of special~.  This is a perfect time.

Brian Greene talks about how we are obsessed with time, past and future especially, rarely the present moment.  The way we came up with our concepts of time was by observation.  As human beings we noticed that the light changed during the day and the sun seemed to move in the sky.  At night we saw the same configuration of stars and began to notice the moon rising.  Eventually our science let us know that the earth was rotating and we could call a full rotation one day.  Then by the appearance of the sun we could call its position in the sky a particular time.

The thing was, since we were arbitrarily naming certain positions of the sun as noon or three in the afternoon or dawn or six am, we began to organize ourselves around it and instead of just rising when the sun rose and tucking in when it went down, we  began  putting ourselves on an arbitrary schedule.

The arbitrary schedule was different in different regions and when trains came along we had to set a  clock that everyone followed so they could know in one town to the next when to expect the train.  And so our modern lives tied to being on the right track at the right time with no care for the sun, the moon , the stars or the tides all of natures ‘clocks.”

The program went on to delve into time travel through worm holes and black holes and time folding in on itself.   Apparently the math equations don’t rule out that everything is happening in the same moment and theoretically we can experience past as present and future as present if we understood how to access it.

Instead of being curious about my past or my future, I find myself in this moment loving living in a place where low tide means on friday’s and sundays you can go out clamming near the breakwater.

 

Assignment: Nepal, an Irene Adler mystery and fun read!

Written by on · Leave a Comment

Assignment: Nepal, an Irene Adler Mystery. I loved this book, I read it in a few days and you would find me with a slight smile on my face and occasionally a burst of laughter when I wasn’t crumpling my forehead with tension about what would happen next. I’m generally not a big mystery fan because they often take so long to lay out the plot that I’m already bored! In this case you are swept immediately into the adventure.

Our lead is Irene Adler and she has quite a conversation with a committee in her own head which is funny and I can completely relate. She is a straight forward academic anthropologist who is bored with her less than inspiring students and her less than inspiring life so she takes an assignment to solve a mystery for her former professor and the location is Nepal.

I am an avid traveler and love to read about places before I go. I am intrigued by the sights, sounds and happenings of this mysterious part of the globe. In the main story you have Margo who was an academic but is now caught up in the religious practicies and civil disobedience of the more progressive society. She has lost her objectivity and Irene is concerned .. maybe even her mind, as she goes on a search for an ancient goddess and the trail of death that seems to surround her.

Have a good time with this book, its characters and the wonder of a place that is rich with the ancient, the modern and the wisdom of the Hindu and the Buddhist alike. I even appreciated the travel tips.. I will drink bottled water when I make it to Nepal!

Christie Hardwick

Food II

Written by on · Leave a Comment

After shamlessly sharing my bourgois personal concerns,  I thought I’d take another reflection on food as part of our history and evolution.   I recently attended a workshop with the head dietician/nutritionist at Kripalu in the Berkshires.  He reminded us that agriculture as a practice is still new (10,000 years or so) compared to our estimated millions of years history as hunter/ gatherers.  Like every other animal we ate what nature provided.   As the anthropologists assert- we were omnivores, we ate 60-80 different wild types of vegetation and meat as was possible.

Transport yourself to today and we eat food that is not naturally available, not naturally grown, not naturally digested and we are living in a nutrient deficient world.  Some of us are privileged to get organic foods or grow our own, but the vast majority of the world has their food supply controlled by a few corporate giants.  In essence our move to agriculture as industry has resulted in a decline in our food supply.  A decline in quality, in access and appropriateness.

The key is to get the most nutrient dense fresh foods to those who need them and to avail ourselves of the abundance where we are fortunate enough to have it.  This requires those with education, means and opportunity to be demanding consumers to change the food industry which seems to be hard of hearing.

On a lighter note,  apparently my love of all things Italian is justified.  It turns out that the Medici women who married french kings brought the first Italian chefs to France who in turn were the beginning of what we now consider “French” Cuisine!

Food

Written by on · Leave a Comment

.

I’m on a fast for the next week.  I’m not sure what you’d call it, vegan sort of with a splash of cottage cheese, vegetarian for sure except what exactly are hemp hearts?

My morning begins with a huge salad, spinach, fenuch,radish,cucumber, tomato,carrot and five to six tablespoons of hemphearts.  The dressing is lemon or lime with garlic and cayenne pepper.  Sound delicious?  Exactly.  It’s actually not bad its just that I have trained my mind to want stuff thats not so simple.

I don’t know about you but I was raised on my family’s comfort food.  For us, on a great day that was fried chicken, greens and hot water cornbread, on my least favorite day it was meatloaf and peas.  The peas always ended up in the orange plastic bowl in the center of the table.  The bowl was filled with plastic fruit, the bananas looked pretty fake but the peaches had realistic fuzz on them.  My mother never mentioned the peas so I imagine that bowl never got cleaned and maybe peas just become green dust at some point.

I digress.  For the longest time I tried to fight putting on any weight.  I would eat lightly and never took a bite after 7 p.m.  But over the years my weight would fluctuate 20-30 pounds and I associated being slim with being without.  I knew how to loose weight– I just needed to not eat or drink everything I wanted to eat or drink.  Now all you weight watcher groupies don’t get  your panties in a bunch!  I know I can count points and have what ever I want until it adds up to 27, but the trouble is –a dirty martini is already 10 points, I mean come on!

Ok.  This is not going well.  Somehow my relationship with food was never about feeding my body.  It was always about feeding my emotions, my mind and my heart.  Food feels good, wine tastes good and cocktails are just lovely.

I confess this because I know this is a very privileged problem and its not about food or drink or even body image.  It’s about luxury and having a life that is still so free and abundant that I can put on weight.  It’s about reaching for something to soothe when life seems challenging and you can’t catch your breath.  It’s about being afraid to die and afraid to fully live at the same time.  I probably should not publish this, it is not uplifting or even helpful,  but it is where I am in this moment.

I read that many people in the U.S. are suffering from consumptive malnutrition.  This means we eat a lot of stuff that has no nutritional value.  I on the other hand eat mostly good stuff  (organic, local etc..) except for when I eat salame and sausage and other ridiculously yummy things that bring me joy and make me fat.  So I will do a fast and lose some pounds and feel good for a while and then I’ll want some food that I love and we will begin again.  Me and my body, me and my comforts and me and my fears.

And what is the great fear? That really I am a child of  the Universe, no less than the trees or the stars and I am endowed with characteristics of intelligence, beauty, light, love, health, peace and prosperity.  This makes me want to swallow…because if I’m all that, I’m probably supposed to get out of the way and let it flow from me and take me where my soul needs to go.  If I really am made of divine stuff then I should act like it…The thing is– I have a lot of work to do ..to really trust that which created me more than I trust home made Italian sausage with fennel seeds.  Sigh.