Pickle Mistress

Wearing nurses whites
under fluorescent lights
she carries a glass gallon jar
of Freudian greens

Maple Syrup

I just made maple syrup from the partially boiled sap our neighbors down the street tapped from their front yard maple. The smell of it boiling down was so amazing it reminded me of the scent of a New England farm house full of books in winter.

Thomas Jefferson

I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.

-Thomas Jefferson

One More Cup of Coffee. . .

One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee 'fore I go.
To the valley below.

-Bob Dylan

Iced Coffee with Molasses

Have you tried iced coffee with a tablespoon of molasses? It is delicious.

Bring me the Head of. . .

Price Rite sells lowfat buttermilk--and so I make a salad dressing with it for the unending heads of cabbage that roll through my kitchen. I should name them after politicians like our friends who named their pig Kissinger in the 70's.

Montreal Chickens

Read.

Robert Anderson

The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.
- Robert Anderson, playwrite

Magnificent Minestrone

Today I simmered chick peas that had soaked overnight and when they were cooked I added olive oil, Adobo, salt, fresh garlic, two large cans of tomato puree, celery, carrots, onions, scallions, dried home-grown basil, parsley and red chili flakes. I kept it simmering while I took a long walk. When I came home the house smelled fabulous and we had this magnificent soup for supper.

Coffee with Maple Syrup

I have had coffee with molasses and liked it. Tonight I had coffee with home made maple syrup in it. Delicious!

Coffee Directions

For years everyone else's coffee tasted good and mine was lacking. Yesterday I followed the directions on the coffee can and my coffee came out exceptionally good. I used slightly more than one tablespoon of ground coffee for six ounces of water. So when measuring the liquid in my ten-cup drip machine (which is 45 ounces), I discovered that half a cup (8 tablespoons, or 4 coffee scoops) of ground coffee made a "nice" pot. Note to self: directions and recipes on product packages are generally tested and good!

Dream

I dreamed I was at a friend's family farm in Virginia and she offered me long shorts and an ironed 50's style blouse to wear. I put them them on over the clothes I already had on and everything clashed. Then she gave me a molded lavender-flavored chocolate lollipop.

Jerry Seinfeld

Jerry Seinfeld talks about discovering his new ritual of having a coffee.
Read.

Peace Pilgrim

Make food a very incidental part of your life by filling your life so full of meaningful things that you'll hardly have time to think about food.

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

I don't eat junk foods and I don't think junk thoughts.

There is something to that old saying that hate injures the hater, not the hated.

This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.

Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God.

The purpose of problems is to push you toward obedience to God's laws, which are exact and cannot be changed. We have the free will to obey them or disobey them. Obedience will bring harmony, disobedience will bring you more problems.

-Peace Pilgrim

Jon Frankel

Jon has an amazing post about his mom and her friend. Dorie-May and Marge in the kitchen. Here.
And another must see here.

Healthy is Delicious

Read.

Dream

I dreamed I was petting two live baby pigs on the belly and they were so cute, but they smelled like bacon.
I thought 'uh oh.'

Turkey Stock

The all day simmer of the turkey carcass led to an amazing clear stock. I had added the large outer leaves of my cabbage, celery tops, red chili, and four large black skinned radishes when boiling the turkey bones. Now the stock has been strained and it is so amazing. The smokey taste is there. Last night I added fresh spinach, mushrooms, onions, carrots, scallions, garlic, soy sauce and jalapenos for a quick soup. Each day I take some broth and add a few veggies for a quick lunch. I could smoke a turkey just for the stock. One year our friend Tony smoked a pig and we made stock from the skin. It lasted all winter. I love vegetables more than life itself and I like meat as a spice!

Today is the first day my clothes are drying on the clothesline in the sun. It is a good feeling to look out of my office window and see them swaying and colorful like Tibetan prayer flags.

Henry Fielding

Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.
- Henry Fielding

Flow

Csikszentmihalyi analyzed how a person enters the flow state, how one maintains flow (engaging in a task where the difficulty matches the ability), and the factors that cause one to leave the flow state — drifting toward other mental states of anxiety, relaxation, boredom, worry, arousal, etc. He was able to demonstrate that someone in flow loses a sense of self-consciousness: the activity is entirely rewarding in and of itself, as one gains a sense of personal control over the activity.
Source

Teddi Scobi

Haiku for Morning Rain

Now, finally rain
The moss garden says thank you
How about some tea?

-Teddi Scobi

Does the Truth Lie Within?

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Wendell Berry

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.
- Wendell Berry, from the essay Racism and the Economy, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Runner’s Commandments by Joe Kelly

The 53 Runner’s Commandments of the Pine Belt Pacers by Joe Kelly
Read.

Janice Taylor

14 from Janice Taylor

In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
- Ram Dass

We know what we are, but not what we may be.
- Shakespeare

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
-Jeanette Winterson

We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
- Albert Einstein

If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing.
- John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.
- John O’Donohue

Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.
- Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist. . . I am a person who does those things.
- Edward Gorey

I’ve tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.
- Stephen Dunn

I protect myself by refusing to know myself.
- Floriano Martins

Be not another, if you can be yourself.
- Paracelsus

How do you know you are who you are? How do you know you’re not simply a clone of who you think you are?
- Jarod Kintz, $3.33

We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core. Without them, we are empty.
- Daisy Whitney, The Rivals

Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, “There is always a day of reckoning.” The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting.
- Donald Van de Mark, The Good Among the Great: 19 Traits of the Most Admirable, Creative, and Joyous People