Wild Death

The Buddhist’s Kashi. The Hindu’s Holy City. The citizen’s Banaras. Varanasi: the oldest city in the world, from the first millennium BCE. Named for the confluence of the Ganges with the old rivers, Varana and Assi, now the ghats known as the beginning and the end.

At midnight we are led from the airport to our hotel, Palace on Ganges, at Assi ghat, one of the main spiritual sites of the city, the place where one bath can eliminate 100,000 births, according to Hindu belief. Patrons and pilgrims, religious thinkers of all kinds flock here still, as they have for centuries.

We wake before dawn with smoke already filling our throats in the Himalaya-inspired room, tucked into the earth near the banks of the river. My beloved selected this room with a double bed (over the river-view twin) because he draws sustenance through touch. In the night I have dreamed of a baby newly walking who beckons me to leave the room, and I wake with a moan, the baby’s childlike fierceness as real as my own skin.

Before light our guide ushers us through the weave of tuk tuk drivers and beggars, and leads us through narrow alleyways to a waiting boatman, stopping to buy two lamps, candles nestled in leaves, marigolds around the wicks. We will light these as the sun comes up, and place them in the water, making our secret wishes for our loved ones.

We enter the long, wooden boat, and we are taken further into the fog, the lights from the distant ghats a misty gold, the ring of bells and throaty chants and the dip of the oars in the water both strange and familiar. In a few moments tourists will descend upon the river, along with boatmen hawking every manner of souvenirs, as they grab the sides of boats to place brass bracelets and rough-carved figurines in front of faces. For now, as we stream toward the Shiva side of the city (the other being the ‘karn’ or bardo side) we’re greeted by a sadhu on the shore, naked except for a loin cloth and gold-rimmed glasses. He raises a stream of smoke to the sky. Upon the platform that the sadhu stands, a street dog is humping a bitch whose teats haven’t yet receded. Nearby at a table, a couple prepares the flame for morning puja, and then with a stick broom, sweeps the dogs from their perch, but the pack barks and growls, their tantric practice a different sort.

Less than a hundred steps away a body is burning in a funeral pyre and the mourners move through the smoke -- talking, touching, singing. We find it difficult to offer them their privacy, for it is so unusual to witness the death of the body in this direct and oddly gentle manner. I think of my father cremated sixteen months ago, and I wonder what it would have been like to watch his body burn, to smell his flesh in the flames, to stand watch until the bones could be collected and taken to the Mother River.

When we’re back in the boat, rowing toward Manikarnika, the ghat that cremates 270 people each day, our guide tells us that some souls are considered so pure they are taken to the water directly – pregnant women, children, sadhus, and those who have died through snake bite, the mark of Lord Shiva. He looks in my eyes to ensure that I understand – a body or a limb can float by if the fishes haven’t consumed it completely.

On the excruciating twenty-two hour train trip to Varanasi (another story entirely) we have read the extraordinary contemporary novelist Geoff Dyer’s, “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi,” and so we are somewhat prepared for the insanity of the driving conditions, the seeming chaos of the alleys, the ever presence of death through all the senses. Still, we do not know the ferocity of Varanasi’s grip, we are not aware of what is ingested with the taste of ashes. We are not familiar with the devotion that will cause pilgrims to run to 98 temples (56 of Ganesha!) within twenty-four hours, to run from the first ghat to the Assi ghat, to run in the knowing that the soul is being released from 8.4 million rebirths (the math counts layers of atmosphere multiplied by a ghat’s particular power.)

When we leave our boatman and head toward the old city, we’re greeted by masala merchants, bony cows, armed soldiers. Near the Hindu Golden temple, is a Muslim mosque, and since this is a site of violence, before we enter we must deposit everything in a keyed locker, and then be searched. A woman soldier reaches under my bra, feels along my pubis. Later, I ask the guide if there have been terrorist threats in the news. “This is the way we do things since 9-11,” he says, “If they can do that to your people, what can they do to us?”

I don’t have time to follow his thought because we are soon pressed against the stone wall, chanting in the distance becoming louder as men move toward the Mother Ganga. “Ram nom seta he,” the voices chant, and I ask what these words mean.

“The name of God is the last truth,” our guide speaks.

Then the men are beside us, holding a body on a palanquin, a dead body covered in a gold cloth, with gold ribbons tied around the head and feet. After the mourners pass, an old man with a plastic box of cards thrusts a picture in front of my face. “Want memory card?” he asks, and I shake my head, a habit already, to decline the offering of things placed in front of us at every moment we are in the street.

“Want memory card? Want memory card? Want memory card? Want memory card?” he says over and over, his chant cutting into my consciousness. Every cell of my body is a memory card, a body whose remembering I can scarcely realize at times, for whose is this body, remembering? This body is the vehicle, the Varana and the Assi, my self, and yet not mine at all.

Wild Mother

Photos by BBC

On the day before we are to take the bath at the Kumbh Mela, we discover that the town’s security situation has changed. Our guide, Mr. Parikshit Joshi drives us around the site so we can see what we are in for. The main ghat, Har Ki Pauri, will be inundated with sadhus and temple leaders, who bring their devotees by the thousands. We will be hiking toward Ashti Parvath ghat, directly south and across the Ganges River from where the sadhus will immerse themselves before dawn the morning of January 14th, the first bath of the months-long festival. Because of the need for high security in the region, 20,000 Indian military, state police, and the RAF, a rapid action force, has been brought in to deal with suppressing potential riots and terrorist threats. We soon learn that plans may change hour to hour, and that we will not know until the day of events what our approach to the site might be.

Mr. Joshi points to the long, fenced, narrow bridges and tells me that if the procession became too crowded they herd people onto the bridges and then lock the gates, sometimes for hours, until the bathers at the ghats move toward their homes and tents. My husband takes my hand. I have been claustrophobic for years. I avoid elevators, crowds and locked rooms. I close my eyes and listen for an inner voice I have learned to trust. Could I overcome my fear if this situation emerges? I look to the man sitting next to me, who I have been loving for three decades. Something beyond our intellectual understanding has brought us to the Khumbh Mela, and we want to complete the ritual, to understand something about why we have come. “Think you can do it?” my husband asks, and I nod, feeling safe knowing that neither of these men would allow us into a foolhardy situation. The holy bath calls to me beyond my fears.

Life sometimes sounds nonsensical when lived by instinct, those moments before too many thoughts arise. First impulse is the way we had children, and chose homes and healed cancer. As I come into the wisdom of an (ahem) older woman, I want more body-centered instinct and less mental chatter. I realize my inspirations are no Jesus on a naan, however, I consistently find direction from what arises in my imagination, and sometimes just by leaning into things. First impulse tells us to get to the Kumbh Mela at the beginning. Thus, even though we’d had rather a full day of Shakti Peethas and Shri Swaminarayan, we ask to leave the hotel at four in the morning, to be at the ghats when the sadhus are in attendance.

Pilgrims walk here for many days, often families carry one shared bag, wearing bare feet, or worn sandals. The weather is unseasonably cold in Haridwar, 4 degrees C at night, and so this is not an easy journey. The families save resources so they might come for a bath in their beloved Mother Ganga.

In the hours before dawn, we walk through the dark. Past the checkpoints no vehicles or bicycles are allowed, only those travelers on foot, and we walk down alleys so dark I cannot see the ground. People emerge from alleys and buildings, people come from everywhere, chanting, moving quickly in the blackness, no lamps or lanterns. Although I had prepared myself for what it might be like to be noticed as westerners -- we had a few days of acclimating to being the new ones in town -- I have no idea of the degree to which those effects are amplified at the Kumbh Mela. According to our guide, people coming from rural areas may have seen a western person in the media, and some have not yet seen one up close. And it is mostly the locals who have witnessed westerners bathe in the Ganga.

As we take off our jackets and Richard removes his pants and shirt, I become aware of the people around us, watching us while they make their own preparations. I walk down the steps into the freezing river just as I see my husband’s body fall below the churning waters. He holds onto the iron rail to keep his torso still for the current is strong. I lift my hands into the Mother Ganga and pour the stream over my head, my skirt flowing around me like a blood-red pool in the steel grey water. A glowing statue in the distance lights the heads of other bathers -- falling, rising, jumping, bowing, shivering, stilling.

I splash a river salutation. In my mind: Ganges! Ganges! as the loudspeaker blares instructions in Hindi. Over my body is flowing the ashes of the dead. Where we are standing in the River is the place of last night's puja, the ceremony we witnessed, with fire and flowers, and chanted by a son and a priest as they performed the last rites. I am swimming through souls. Something deep inside realizes a belonging I have never registered, like what Marabai has written:
“I came for the sake of love-devotion;
seeing the world, I wept.”

Before we leave the ghats, I ask for a moment to offer my gratitude at the place we took our bath, and as I bow and lift the water to my head, my lips, my heart, I become aware that a group watches my movements. My hair and skirt is wet from the dip an hour earlier, and my feet are bright red from the cold, and around my shoulders I clench a saffron shawl for warmth. I am aware of an elder man to my left, watching as I pray, and as I turn to follow my men back down the road we arrived upon, this old one meets my eyes and we nod to each other. What passes between us is something beyond language and culture. This poem of India: a Mother river, a long pilgrimage, a seeing in the dark.

Wild Pilgrimage

Tomorrow morning I board a plane for Mother India. The notion of traveling to this exotic country began ten years ago when my Zen master, Shifu, also known as Dr. Kim Han Suk, suggested that India was one of those places I could clear my familial karma. Not just my own lifetime, but those of my ancestors and children, and perhaps even their children. Damn that proclamation. In classic student fashion, I rebelled, argued, dismantled (all inside my own mind,) knowing that I had received wisdom in the form of what my friends, the Dakini Sisters, called The Big Hit. Like the Zen stick that could come down upon our shoulders when we slumped in meditation, The Big Hit was a way Shifu could shred my psychic comfort by making me rethink everything I think I know about who I am.

An eldest child who was invested in being a good student, loving mother and conscious citizen, while underneath simmered that wild girl, I spent the last decade resenting the possibility that I could be responsible for others, all while nursing my husband through a rare cancer, and going to my father’s bedside after his brain tumor, and helping my mother, son and myself through our family disease. All experiences that led me to ask – Who is it that needs healing? I no longer believed that karma had created my family’s fate – karma was one more concept, one more identity that I would cling to. Still, I was afraid. Would I lose my mind in India? And would I want to live in that emptiness?

It wasn’t until one of the Dakini Sisters said, “Well, aside from all that rebelling, what if you went to India to see what was there?” that I allowed the place to lure me. A year later, when we received a financial reward, we thought about the lands we could travel to celebrate: Spain, Italy, Ireland and Wales all captivated. Instead, when my beloved asked me where I wanted to be for my fiftieth birthday, my eyes teared, because I knew I was compelled to go to the mythical land of Kali and Lakshmi and Saraswati. A few Google searches later, we discovered that the world’s largest act of faith, the Kumbha Mela, was happening within two days of my birthday, and then a few moments later, that we couldn’t find any compelling reason to stop ourselves from attending this magnificent event.


The Kumbha Mela will begin this week, in Haridwar, where the river Ganga enters the plains from Himalayas. Organized in the holy cities of Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik, the Kumbh Mela (Festival of the Pot of Nectar) features the largest human gathering in the world. We’ve heard estimates of eighty million people, with half that number present at its pinnacle. The religious festival invites devotees, sadhus, rishiks, yogis and tourists from almost every corner of the world. We will be present for the opening baths or snans, January 14th and 15th, the latter a solar eclipse.

Hindus believe that the waters of the Ganges turn into nectar on the auspicious occasion of Kumbh Mela. And that a holy dip in the divine waters of Ganga eliminates all the evil and past sins from an individual's life. Astrologers believe that bathing at Har ki Pauri ghat during the festival purifies the inner-self of an individual. I don’t know if any of those things are true. Self realization seems possible in any moment. Yet what is compelling for me is the chance to become a pilgrim, to be in the sensation of the heightened moment, to be embodied by the strange journey, to be unafraid of this ‘I’ dissolving, to give up thinking and instead experience being thought. The Big Hit reverberates still.

You can follow our journey to Delhi, Haridwar, Varanasi, and in Rajhasthan -- Jaipur, Shahpura Bagh, Ranthambore, Udaipur – then on to Kovalam beach in Kerala via facebook and http://workingwild.blogspot.com (as long as I can get wireless where we are roaming.)

Wild Relating

Months after our basement was beautifully renovated by a group of wild craftsmen, we’re packed to the rafters with our two adult children, their beaus, and our family from Atlanta and their two magical children.

This is why we created this beautiful space – to share guest rooms and double showers and comfy sofas, to be together. We’re grateful to have little ones to bathe and feed and snuggle with again, and the company of newness in each other too, for we must introduce ourselves every time we visit – who are you now?

What I like about the way we relate in our family is the ability to tell the truth, our personal truths. I like where truths intersect, where the possibility of finding each other can happen. And too, I am beginning to like where my world can be upended in discovery of some aspect of life from another’s point of view. I don’t always enjoy the chaos – like when I screamed at my son in anger the other day over a sarcastic joke he made, because I had a dirty house and unwashed hair with guests arriving in ten minutes. Still, later, when I come to my senses, I will enjoy how a three year old scarfing my homemade divinity puts the prospect of domestic perfection in perspective; I will appreciate how my children feel free enough to describe their discomfort with my anger; I will like how my beloveds can give me spacious silence till I simmer down; I will investigate how an afternoon at the park makes me willing to see that I am fearful of not having it all together, a condition that will surely run nonstop when we arrive in India in a week.

The end of the renovation project happened with perfect timing, though it didn’t seem so when Joel Hester, an amazing welding artist lost all of his tools and materials when they were stolen from his truck shortly after we contracted him. Joel lives in Texas, and makes beautifully welded furniture from recycled cars. Our bathroom vanity is the roof of a Ford Fairlane, which has been molded, buffed and shined, so it now holds a laboratory style sink, curvy wall faucet and an ecohouse pressed paper counter.


I knew Joel’s work would be a great industrial-looking counterpoint to a rainforest marble that encases the double shower, and his work didn’t disappoint.


Strong, textured and masculine, the unconventional vanity balances the tree trunk and branch shapes spiraling up the bathroom walls.


Though we thought the theft would delay the project when it happened, there were other setbacks that caused delays, and the vanity arrived the same week that we were ready for it to be placed. The final decorating touches were completed in September, just in time for a series of parties leading right up to the holidays.

On the last day on the job, our contractor Michael Aaland relayed what had caused much of the delays on our job. The team had lost their main plumbing man when he committed suicide one week into our work, over a relationship issue in his private life. The contractors did not choose to tell us because they were worried that it would have affected our obvious joy in the renovation. I am not sure this is true. Losses, like anger and chaos, are as much a part of our lives as the beauty these wonderful men have created on our behalf. Though we didn't know this man, our hearts went out to every person on the team who worked here, in silence, through the loss of a beloved friend.

One of my teachers, Byron Katie, says “To exclude anything that appears in your universe is not love. Love joins with everything. It doesn’t exclude the monster. It doesn’t avoid the nightmare—it looks forward to it, because, like it or not, it may happen, if only in your mind.” In this blog, as we move into the days ahead, I want to capture our selves altered by culture, circumstances and mistakes, not excluding the nightmare, only love; I want to relate with full-on monster intact love.

Wild Encouragement

Art by Teesha Moore

As part of my Wild Work, I pay attention to synchronicities. Words assert themselves into my life and tend to lead somewhere. In the past week, I’ve heard several people discuss concerns with ‘writer’s block.’ Last night, in my new writing group, we talked about the ways we have been shut down by criticism and judgments, how someone’s ideas for our work have cost us our work.

I had writer’s block for years. Reading through a decade of my journal writing recently, I was reminded about how long it took me to develop the confidence to begin. During this time, my friend, the photographer Carole Harmon, said, “When you have something to say, then you will write.” This was the truth, and over those years, I learned that my voice was essential, worthy and capable.

I no longer believe in writer’s block. In my mind, there’s no such thing as a ‘block’ in the sense of experiencing an obstacle that prevents me from my writing. Living with our home in construction all summer, (see my next blog The Wild Build) I have been watching how the craftsmen make progress one ‘block’ at a time. When they make mistakes, they don’t abandon their project. They step back, refocus, call for help, try something new. The builders are practiced in using a variety of strategies to manifest the architect’s drawings. With artists and entrepreneurs, the lack of a plan can result in an uncomfortable standstill, when we really want a wildly creative life.

First, question the ‘blocked’ thinking. The antonym for ‘block’ is ‘encourage,’ to give hope, confidence or courage. There’s only one person who can offer you the courage to write, and that’s you. And you build the courage by seeing things clearly, or as Byron Katie might say, by noticing that reality is kind. Your first drafts may be very far from where you end up. Annie Dillard says, “original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen.” So start already.

This week, as I tossed out most of my journal pages, (bye-bye self concepts!) I was made aware that getting good at a craft is a process. The current state of my writing is what I’ve got, and there is no perfection other than this. Even my rejections from publications have been ideal because my work clearly wasn’t ready or right for a particular magazine. Encouragement isn’t a false buoying up of one’s fragile artistic sensibilities; encouragement is seeing things as they are, including our very flawed (yet perfect!) writer selves, and choosing to create anyway.

Second, surround yourself with allies. Confidence comes from aligning ourselves with others whose brilliance is clear. For the past few years I’ve taken classes from Priscilla Long, Waverly Fitzgerald, Pilar Alessandra and Warren Etheredge -- people who are masters in knowing how to bring the writer to self knowledge and adept craftsmanship. Apprentice yourself to someone whose process you trust. Whether they’re a great writer is less important than their ability to help you understand character, voice, structure, setting, point of view, themes and so on.

I belong to three writer’s groups. In each of them, I write, and I am required to produce material for critique and to edit every other member’s work. Just like twelve step programs and weight loss buddies, other writers and the structure of the group keeps us accountable.

Stories are also allies. Read works that make your heart sing and your mouth fall open and your eyes read the same sentence six times with a sigh. One year I set a goal to read 52 books, and achieving it changed my limited view of myself. Priscilla Long has her students study stories by classic and contemporary authors and asks us to discuss what makes each a masterwork. Pick up a book, discover for yourself -- what makes a great sentence sing?

Third, just write. Write thirty minutes a day. Or write five pages a day. Or write 1000 words a day. Consistently write. Take your journal to the café and write what you see. Steal dialogue from the people in the park. Wax poetic on the story that eludes you. From that rambling, you will mine your future material and discover your voice and most importantly, learn to trust that this happy meandering is leading you somewhere.

Wild Taste

An excerpt from this essay, "Good Enough To Wait" can be found in Living in Season.

Preserving food is the extended foreplay of the gustatory world. Especially for city-dwellers, it revives a sense of connection with wild nature, and rejuvenates senses dormant from over-reliance on the fast and the cheap. If drive-thru is the dining equivalent of the quickie, preserving fresh, seasonal produce for later supping is tantric bliss.
The last week of summer I drove out to the local farm and purchased boxes of coral peaches, firm pickling cucumbers, banana and pasilla and sweet Anaheim peppers, ripe red and fleshy green tomatoes and plump blackberries. It didn’t look like promiscuity until the saleswoman sized me up and down behind the mountain of produce stacked in eight large boxes. “Well, you’re sure going to have your work cut out for you,” she snarked. And the old man in line in front of me offered a wide grin, as if he knew what I would be up to, and said, in a wistful tone: “Me and the missus used to put up. Oh, I miss it so.”
By the time I unloaded the car and began washing the long, nubby cuke, I realized I was going to be days in this kitchen – days immersed in the sweet perfume of fervid juice and musky field; days with my fingers in slippery seeds, days nudging the ruby pit from its fleshy center. I filled the sink with cool water and stripped to my bare feet, and brought a berry to my lips, tracking its nib with my tongue before biting into its succulent drupelets.
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Canning, freezing, drying, curing, fermenting, pickling, jam and jelly making – preserving holds the genius of our earliest people. Preserving developed between 5500 and 3500 BC, creating villages, and vessels, and livestock, perhaps even the very urge to civilize in the way we experience it today. (Though it seems strange to this acculturated cook, one of the ways historians categorize societies as being ‘civilized’ is when the primary purpose of food gathering, preparation and storing has been diverted to allow the pursuit of other, more ‘complex’ activities, such as war, religion, bureaucracy.) Homo sapiens found he could manage his stock, and digest proteins better when food went over fire, and intentional cookery followed, leading to food as a social engagement, as taboo arbiter, as identity-maker. What we keep can communicate our sense of frugal sparseness or our abundant beguilement: the heirloom we shelve can be our strained broth or our rose-drenched honey. We preserve what we wish to have known as the common good.
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The world’s greatest preserved city, Pompeii, (smoked, as it were, by layers of volcanic ash) put up all manner of food, especially in the town’s restaurants that served such salt-preserved brews as garum, a sauce made by fermenting fish entrails, a flavor whose closest modern equivalent would be Thailand’s nam pla. (In another paean to eating out, Pompeii also featured one of the world’s earliest monuments to cunnilingus in a famous fresco. While phallus-centered Romans found use for many household objects shaped like the male member, the town was open to all manner of sensual influences. One wonders what it would have been like to live and dine constantly in the midst of erotic art.)
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Like discovering lips and tongue can travel, drying food was quite likely a happy accident. Fire made food easier to trek, as well as store over the lean season, which soon changed the tribe. It allowed people to settle in one place, gather their resources, plan their next adventure, maybe even provided time for other desires. Whether preserving first occurred by hanging meat over a fire or leaving some fruit to dry in the sun, it opened the imaginative impulse toward adventure. The Sumerians were the first to combine drying and smoking, and the South Americans, American Indians, Celts of Armorica and the nomads of Asia each had a favorite method of drying and reducing meat so it could be reconstituted on the trail. Still, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century, and the discovery of sterilization by Nicholas Appert (Americans deemed his process ‘appertizing’) that the use of heat guaranteed food safety. At the time of Napoleon’s conquering, and British scurvy, the press proclaimed the brewer-inventor had “found a way to fix the seasons; at his establishment spring, summer and autumn live in bottles…”(1) Some say historically, a full pantry preceded sexual adventures because, from an evolutionary perspective, survival had been assured, before there was time for play. Now we’re more likely to preserve to escape the mundane. We want concoctions that happily tempt the tongue, and an environment that allows us to be tempted by food and each other.
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Gastronomy, being lingual, and sometimes seductive, as M.F.K. Fisher knew, pleasures “one who with cunning and deliberation prepares a meal which will draw another person to her”, (2) and the one seduced by the beauty of the feast is also wooed by the appearance of abundance. Such “wanton women” and courtesans have “studied the appetites of their prey” (3) and can “placate his earlier inhibitions and flatter his later ones” (4) both in acquired taste and carnal performance, one could assume. And there is a breed of lover for whom a full pantry is like having a lustful bedmate: pickles and relishes and chutneys and sauces and vinegars and oils and confit and curds and ketchups and jams and marmalades and mincemeats and mustards and butters and leathers and patés and cured hams and smoked fish and peppered salamis and herbed cheeses and sugared fruit and all manner of dried fruits and canned vegetables make a horny cornucopia. Even a simple split biscuit loaded with berry preserves brought to the morning bed can tantalize the beloved in a manner that state fairs and 4H clubs have little in common with. And in our desire to please, we expose the body to the rigors of the preparation – we sweat and strain, we create the fleur de sel that those we live with grow to know as our scent.
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It’s possible that salt was the first additive used as a method to preserve food. Used by ancient communities close to the sea, salt preserves by inhibiting toxin-producing bacteria, making it essential for forms of flesh – meat, fish and the human body, as for mummifying. Those who wielded the salt wielded the power, as the Emperor Claudius knew when he strolled into the senate one day asking if man could live without salt meat. Before it was the Eternal City, Rome was a staging post where local marketers exchanged their goods for precious salt. Leaders and merchants preserved their own futures along the Via Salaria, the salt road; when unforeseen circumstances meant there was little access to fresh food, salt could define a government’s rule.
Indeed, whoever holds the keys to the pantry holds the power. None knew this better that Mahatma Gandhi, who emerged from his six-year prison confinement to protest the exclusive British licensing of Indian sea salt. When he marched from the ashram to the beach at Dandi, he placed salt crystals evaporated by the sea into his small palm, enacting a potent ritual that defied the authorities in one simple act. Indians followed, breaking the law en masse, literally assuming worth of one’s salt, until the Brits relented and asked Gandhi to represent his Indian Congress Party at the 1931 leadership conference.
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At Indian rituals, Roman feasts, Athenian festivals, Chinese banquets, Middle Eastern merry-making, and Egyptian sacraments all manner of seeds, plants and flowers were preserved with sugar. After the fourteenth century, the master confectioners of Paris made their fortunes selling to the aristocracy, and since gifts of preserves were considered luxurious, these sugared treats became a regular expense of anyone who had a role with the law. (Used as chamber spices for ‘dispelling wind and encouraging the seed’ these sweets, often called sweetmeats, were at least poetically-perfect: a candy by any other name would surely not have prefaced lovemaking.) Sugar was brought to the New World after Columbus’ affair with Canary Island’s Governor, one Beatrice de Bobadilla, who sent him from their month-long tryst with cuttings of sugar cane. From that sweet union, came America’s love affair with all things candied. Jams, jellies, syrups, sugared fruits, sugar-wine (rum) – sugar was once an international currency, with labor rewarded in casks of syrup, and millions paid for its becoming a standard with their very lives, including creating a caste of slaves from Africa who would do the back-breaking work of sweetening up the colonist’s diet, and his pockets. Even though we now have more sugar than we know what to do with, we continue a romance with the saporous temptress: we call our beloveds ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ and ask them to give us some ‘sugar’ when we wish to be kissed. “It must be jelly,” says the blues singer, “Cuz jam don’t shake like that.” We cut into the virginal white cake after our nuptials, in a ritual symbolic of intercourse and of promises for a sweet future. Our nursery food – puddings, custards, purees – become, like breasts, a reminder of the comfort we once had at our mother’s side. At the Smell and Taste Research Foundation, pumpkin pie was the scent most likely to stimulate blood flow to the penis (offering another potential meaning of the Thanksgiving spread.)
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Because aroma can have compelling aphrodisiac aspects, spices have long been a food served at the altars of the gods and offered up to lovers. We place basil in our marinara sauce because it is a fine compliment, and perhaps, because it stimulates fertility and the sex drive. Chili peppers spice up our pickles and chutneys and when eaten, they simulate the physiological responses – heartbeat, sweating, heat -- of having sex. It is said that Tibetan monks were not allowed to have eaten garlic before entering the monastery – the passion of this bulb (and its ability to increase circulation) being reputed. Though there are Chinese herbals dating 5,000 years old, the Egyptians date the first aromatics, at 2800 BC, which was likely a papyri recipe indicating the use of mint, juniper, frankincense or myrrh. Cinnamon, used widely in preserves today, was utilized “lavishly” by Indians, and cinnamon was also valued by the Greeks and Romans as “a medicine, cordial and aphrodisiac...To the Taoists it was the food of the immortals, a kind of ambrosia.” (5) Ginger, the ambrosia of chutney-makers, was said to provide African men “insurance for their old age by siring a great many children.” (6) Spices of all kinds were mixed with wax and worn as perfumes, or pinned onto the clothing or hair, to entice the suitor. Before the commercial scents of lotions, oils and creams masked our body’s sexy aromas, Aphrodite’s spices complimented our natural funky state, generating heat on the skin, lips, fingers, and providing warmth to our insides. Scent in our food is so titillating that the Puritans “barred spices from their tables on their belief that their use ‘excited passion’.” (7) Preserves cooked with bold spices -- chutneys, harrief, masalas -- like the dominatrix of the world, assume the ascendant, assertive role on the plate. The seal is lifted from the jar and we are entered, first by means of this fierce and risqué fragrance, and then through the reawakening of the tongue and our organs of desire. We are transformed by what we have saved.
*
There is no savings in preserving food at home. The costs of labor and equipment and of what will break or go rotten through experimentation is high compared to what we can stroll down to the store and buy for a dollar or two from Smuckers or Kraft or Heinz. Still, there is a part of our relationship to food we are buying back when we agree to follow the transformation from field to table. In grocery shopping there isn’t the kind of bond to the elements, the land, the season, the home, the kitchen; there isn’t the connection to one’s memory, or history or intention; there isn’t seasoning or sensuality or seductive surprise that can come from becoming present to food as it changes, or even likelier, as we are changed by its presence in our midst.
*
This is how it happens in our home – we weave food preparation with the events of the day, with the weather, with the quiet and the conversation, watching movements and mistakes as they assert themselves, upon us and upon our food, asking for our attention. This is how dried lavender gets shaken into the sugar canister for lavender-scented sugar; this is how the lavender buds get dumped into the peach jam, when the sifter is forgotten; this is how it gets stirred in with a jam-coated spoon; this is how it drips onto my breasts when I lean over to sample it; this is how my lover, walking by, missing no entreaty, turns me around and licks it from my flesh; this is how the fire leaps into me and my peaches while we’re dancing and kissing above the flame; this is perhaps what you also taste when I make you toast from fresh bread and chunky fruit and violet sprigs of calming flower. We are preserving passion, which is, I believe, able to be ingested as nourishment, as earth-muse, and for us, as remembrance of a moment’s lovemaking.
*
As Proust knew, food is our strongest form of remembrance – we can be transported to our childhood or to a lover or to another land through scent and taste. What the home cook preserves not only reveals how she feeds her family, but what she desires to hold onto, what she values in method, in memory and in meals. Show me a cook with a mouth set in a grimace, and I will show you fodder for heartburn. It is the heartfelt connection to, say, a ripe tomato, how it burnishes plump under the hot sun, how it is splattered with droplets on a summer morning, how it gives, gently, when it is taken from the vine that can provide the inspiration for a recipe. We preserve because “…a taste of a coming season in the wind can sweep your whole life past you, rich in portent.” (8)
We preserve in a way so we can open up that jar and know what it was we felt on that day, the qualities of the food, the way the house smelled, the way our lover leaned against us as we stirred the pot. We preserve food in the same way we engage in other arts – it is an impulse that stirs us, that compels us. In these the domestic arts, we long to make meaning from small acts. Wendell Berry, farmer and writer, reminds us we preserve to explore that rewarding bond – “from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of the land to hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts are as demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing, as the so-called “fine arts”. To learn them is, I believe, the work that is our profoundest calling.” (9)
*
We seek to preserve food with the same integrity in which we preserve our relationship with the land. The land is humus for apples and ancestors. We cannot hold dear our harvest without regard for the terra firma -- the same ground receives our forebears and feeds our children. For those committed to such movements as Slow Food, our very urge to eat is being compromised by ignorance of the connection between harmful food production and perilous consumption systems, the recent deaths from spinach being a tragedy likely to reoccur until the costs of not eating locally are reckoned. We preserve both food and land for the common good, and when we are disconnected from the locality of the harvest, we cannot trace disease, and we cannot receive our food in a nourishing way. (Have you ever been filled up by or understood the food origins of a Twinkie?) We’ve become like Zen’s hungry ghosts, gorging at an ever-groaning feast, without truly tasting it. By slowing things down enough to locate a farmer, connect with a recipe, mull in the kitchen, preserve on behalf of our community, we enjoin the fruits of our labor with the promise of wholesome meal-making, ensuring biodiversity and cultural diversity through conscious choices.
We ‘put up’ what we like, especially what we wish to devour midwinter when the tomatoes are without scent, when the berries have no grassy must, when the roll cries out for ripe infusion. At such times, we’re not prying lids off jars sealed for months just out of desire for fuel, but to be nourished by the people who made them for us; we’re eating to feed the deep hungers that reside within, including the desire for community, for union, for comfort. Hospitality enters in the moment our senses link with the sensual experiences of the preserver, the repast a link to that specific past, and also, the imagined past – those interested in the domestic arts long to preserve the beautiful, historical traditions of the table, even though we might have only known frozen food from TV trays. Like the Beatitudes reveal, we hunger and thirst for righteousness, and in the virtue that comes from right growing, right harvesting, right preparation (meaning, in part, that we produce and consume in a good, clean and fair manner), indeed, we shall be satisfied.
*
On the Sunday after I’d been at the farm, a box of enormous tomatoes sat on the kitchen table, their pulp so ready to burst forth they practically split sitting in the afternoon sun. It was time to get ready for dinner, and my man had lit a fire of mesquite and hickory on the smoker just outside the kitchen door. As he came and went, smoke infused the house, leading us straight into an ancestral domain. Before long we had gathered those beefy reds and laid them on the grill and waited until their skins split from heat and flame. I let them cool on the counter, then quickly cored and peeled them, sliding eighths into a large pot, simmering slowly, before adding grainy salt and a handful of fresh basil. An hour or so later, I lifted a wooden spoon to my mouth and felt another woman enter from the balls of my feet to the curve of my belly to just below my throat. And then she was yelling a phrase I knew I’d heard my grandmother say a long time ago, -- “Oh. My. Lord!” – a gusty, guttural call of a blues woman, an expression coming more from kinetic core than mental knowing, the smoke-dazed freshness of the fruit a memory of a time I hadn’t had, couldn’t know. The man looked inside from the fire, smiling. He didn’t know who this woman was yet, but he was about to taste her.

*
SEXY RECIPES:
Peach Lavender Jam
Smoke-Infused Tomato Sauce
Fig Chutney
Ginger Chutney
Spiced Whole Oranges

1. History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, U.K., 1992, p. 738.
2. The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher, Wiley Publishing, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1937, pg. 706.
3. Ibid, pg. 706.
4. Ibid, pg. 708.
5. History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, U.K., 1992, p. 485.
6. Ibid., pg. 497.
7. The Sex Life of Food, Bunny Crumpacker, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2006, pg.66.
8. “The Fruits of Memory,” Corn Bread Nation 2, Amy E. Weldon, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004.
9. “In Distrust of Movements,” In The Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World, Wendell Berry, Orion Books.


Peach Lavender Jam
Sugar:
4 cups granulated sugar
large bunch lavender buds+
Shake buds into sugar and let rest for two weeks, shaking a few times each week.
Jam:
2 1/2 lb. peaches, peeled and pitted
juice of one lemon
1 cup water
Prepare peaches, cut into chunks, then sprinkle with lemon juice and stir.
Bring the sugar and water to a bowl; sift the lavender out, or not – your choice! Stir until the sugar is dissolved, and boil rapidly five minutes. Add the peaches, return to boil, and boil rapidly, stirring often twenty minutes, or until jell stage. Remove the pot from the heat and let cool for ten minutes. Skim well. Ladle into hot sterilized jars and seal. Process according to recommendations.
Makes three pints.
+(if you don’t grow and dry your own, purchase buds from a botanical store locally)

Smoke-Infused Tomato Sauce
4 lb. beefsteak tomatoes
large bunch basil
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon cider vinegar
Prepare a grill or smoker and soak wood chips in water. A few minutes before placing the tomatoes on the grill, let the chips begin to smoke. Quickly place the tomatoes, cover and peek every few minutes to see if the skins have burst. Take them off the flame (use the grill for a kebob or steak to go with the sauce.)
Peel the tomatoes, cut into eighths and if you prefer, remove most of the seeds. Place in a heavy bottomed pan, and bring to boil. Add salt. Simmer 45 minutes, or until the sauce thickens. Take off the heat and stir in the vinegar.
Add a few basil sprigs to each hot sterilized jar. Pour the sauce over. Heat process, cool, and check the seals. (If you prefer not to heat process, you can refrigerate up to one month, or freeze for two months, but cool the jars first before refrigerating.)
Makes 5 cups
Use in pasta sauces or on pizzas.

Other recipes I recommend here should be from Preserving, by Oded Schwartz, which is the most beautiful preserving book ever created. (DK Publishing, Inc., New York, N.Y. 10016) 1996.

Wild Triumph

Richard on Mt. Rainier

A few months ago I sent out a note to clients asking for their most amazing triumphs of the last year. 'Toot your own horn!' I said. One person sent something back. And that was my daughter. It got me to thinking -- are we used to sliding past our achievements in our urge to live ever in the future? Do we only see the past as the ways in which we tried and failed? Are we missing out on the gratitude and recognition of our most glorious gifts?

I purposely didn't specify or define 'achievements' because what we're most proud of may be very different from how others see us, or what the world says is successful. Our triumphs may not be about manifesting new cars or high-paying jobs (unless they are.) Success may be about being absolutely secure and loving whatever reality brings us. But if we can't see or acknowledge our triumphs, if we only we see what we haven't done, or can only acknowledge our flaws and half attempts, then aren't we skewing reality?

As I work with clients in planning their new year, we start each session with claiming the triumphs. It is the source of many tears and gasps -- how people are surprised by what they consider their victories!

What wild triumph are you rejoicing in? How can you add a moment each planning cycle (monthly, quarterly) to reflect upon your successes?

My own greatest triumph would have to be witnessing my two children graduate from college, and knowing that these last ten years especially I have been such a steady, creative presence in their lives. And as the photo above notes, surging back out into the world with my beloved being well enough to travel with again. We continue the exploration together.

Here's a few from my Wild Work clients. Add your own triumphs in the Comments section. Go ahead, get real with all your amazing accomplishments.

"In the past week, I moved to NYC, conquered the subway system, found two jobs, and continue to feed my curiosity through this wild and exciting new place."
--dylan nichole

"I have several treasured successes this last year:
1. the continued and healthy growth of my ministry
2. the launching of our youth program therein.
3. I finally began writing my book! (thanks to you, Sonya!)
4. My lover and I finally went on vacation alone for a week (after 17 years of being together)
5. This April I will have stuck to my fitness program for two years.
6. I had a breakthrough about my financial worth."
--Rev. Judith Laxer

"2007 was a breakthrough year for me. I moved across the country to a place that has always enchanted me, Santa Fe, and I am enthralled with a new body of my creative work. This has been one of the most interesting, joyful, passionate and intuition-honing experiences of my life. The process has given me the trust and confidence to go for some of my larger life goals."
--Melissa Weiss Steele

"My most treasured success of 2007 was organizing and presenting, in partnership with my husband, Gary Sill, the performance of three orchestral works by Sufi composer Hidayat Inayat Khan, in part as a celebration of his 90th year. In the audience were mainly his students and long time friends, most of whom had never heard his music performed live before. The Orchestra was drawn from Vancouver musicians who perform in the Vancouver Symphony, CBC, and Vancouver Opera orchestras. The three symphonic works were Poeme en Fa, Suite Symphonique, La Monotonia, and the Royal Legend. All three are drawn from incidents and historical events in the composer's life and ancestry and musically illustrate the themes of peace, spiritual and personal liberty, and freedom from opression which are the ideals he lives his life by. My husband, who is a wonderful pianist, and a brilliant violin virtuoso named Talia Marcus also performed several of the composers smaller works. The Orchestra was conducted by a brilliant young conductor from Munich, Andreas Pascal Heinzmann who will no doubt one day be known internationally. For everyone involved this was a transcendent evening."
--Carole Harmon