May 18, 2010
Given what a cold and damp Spring it has been here is a recipe that I have been perfecting to accompany the drizzlyevenings when you need something warm and nourishing to take the chill off! Enjoy.

RED LENTIL SOUP WITH GROUND PEPPERCORNS, CUMIN AND SWEET RED PEPPER

Makes 6- 8 generous servings
3 T olive oil
1 lg onion, chopped
2-3 stalks celery, finely chopped (I like lots of veggies in this soup)
1-2 carrots, finely chopped
3 C red lentils (can use French lentils instead)
1 sweet red pepper, finely chopped
50 + peppercorns, ground, add more if you like peppery flavor (Tellicherry are nice)
1 t cumin seed, ground (use ground cumin if yu don’t have seeds)
1 t turmeric
½ t or more to taste, crushed red pepper
3/4 C chopped cilantro
8-10 C chicken broth (my favorite is “Better Than Boullion” brand)
2-3 cloves garlic, finely minced

In a large pot or dutch oven sauté , over medium heat, onions, celery, carrots in 2 T olive oil until softened, (5-8 mins). Add the garlic at the end of the sauté.

Add the rinsed lentils and chicken broth. Cook 30 -40 minutes (longer if you like or need) uncovered over medium- low heat, stirring occasionally.

Meanwhile, grind the perppercorns, cumin seed and crushed red pepper in a coffee grinder. Heat a small sauté pan and add the remaining T of olive oil. Add the ground spices and raost until fragrant and yet not burned. Add the spices, chopped sweet red pepper and turmeric to the simmering lentils.

Continue to cook adding the cilantro about 5 mnutes before serving.
Blend 1/3 of the soup (optional) to create a creamier consistency.

ENJOY! Great for a damp, chilly early Spring or Fall evening. Excellent the next day for lunch!!

May 18, 2010

I hardly know where to begin. My last blog entry came shortly after I had arrived back home having traveled to northern Arizona, visiting Flagstaff, Navajo Country, Canyon de Chelly, and Sedona. I was all set to write about our time in Sedona…to share my impressions of a place of extraordinary beauty that I’d not visited in some 15 years.
Yet somehow, in the wake of things that have occurred since then I became stuck, thinking that my small impressions of my trip seem so minuscule in importance compared to what we are in the presence of now: the oil gush disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, executives of BP, Transocean and Haliburton falling over each other to place blame and point fingers anywhere other than their own culpability; the ongoing suffering as Haitians struggle to rebuild and reconstruct their lives, their county, their economy; the daily suicide bombings and killing of innocents in Kabul, Pakistan, Baghdad; the failed car bombing in Times Square, the perpetrator having been caught only moments before his flight was to take off from Kennedy Airport, apprehended due to of a lot of luck and some fast investigative work; the volcanic eruption in Iceland which underscored our frail vulnerability compared to the immense force of Mother Nature; the ongoing fighting and blood on the streets of Bangkok; the absence of a capacity for civil discourse which makes it seem as though our government and Washington is profoundly broken.

I could go on and on. Each morning, as I, like millions of others who wake up to listen to the morning news or read the morning paper, am met with events that can feel like we, as a culture and a civilization, are cascading out of control. I move through my days with a sense of heaviness and sadness, and perhaps most disconcerting of all, a feeling of powerlessness. It is Spring outside, the season of birth and rebirth, yet in some ways I feel I am in mourning. So I do what many others do: try to add something positive each day, something to the side of ‘light’ in the small part of the world I touch. I am reminded of the quote from Mother Teresa, when she said “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

Meanwhile, in the garden it’s been a ‘herky jerky’ Spring thus far: hot summer temperatures one day, and cold and overcast the next. The blueberry bushes are setting fruit, my pea plants are waist high, the newly planted raspberry plants are doing beautifully, much to my delight. The asparagus are coming in faster than we can eat them…so I have the pleasure of giving them away. The same is true for the lettuces and spinach. Yet, last Friday, while I was not paying enough attention, the afternoon temperature rose quickly and I lost four small Japanese cucumber seedlings, fried to a crisp inside the greenhouse which I had failed to properly ventilate, and earlier in the week the night time temperatures produced an unexpected frost that nailed two peppers plants and a small zucchini plant which I had thought were safe to put in the ground. For some reason the other squash plants survived, thankfully. And thanks to a long growing season I will be able to start over again with the cucumbers. Life and death in the garden.

‘Creation Spirituality’
The last week in April I had the pleasure of attending a weekend workshop offered by the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation which is located in Bethesda, Maryland. (http://www.shalem.org/ ) The guest presenter was Matthew Fox, (http://www.matthewfox.org/) a former Dominican priest who was ‘silenced’ by the Catholic Church for his 'radical writings', author of 28 books, a true visionary and proponent of “Creation Spirituality”. I had purchased a copy of Matt’s book Original Blessing in 1989, yet had never actually read it. (His idea being that we don’t come into the world with ‘original sin’, but rather ‘originally blessed’.)So I was very excited to hear what he had to say. As he spoke about our interconnected to all of nature and quoting from the mystics,theologians and Native Americans,(Meister Eckhart, Hildegard de Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, Chief Joseph) and many others who believe that the Divine exists in all of creation, it suddenly occurred to me ‘so THIS is MY spirituality’. Having navigated away from the Catholic Church by the age of 13, I didn’t have a name for the beliefs I so cherished and held to so firmly, yet here, in the words of Matthew Fox and the others, was precisely what I had been cultivating through my own direct experience for the past 30 or 40 years! It was a theology with deep roots, that organized a cosmology that viewed all life as sacred, and placed human actions in it's midst, not apart from Nature, hence pointing to an ethics of behavior and choice. (My words) For me this was an epiphany and I felt so comforted and confirmed to be in such profoundly good company!

So what about that trip to Sedona? Well, very simply I was appalled, no, aghast, at the rampant development that has occurred amidst the fragile environment of the beautiful red rocks: million dollar adobe style homes built way up into the hills surrounding the rocks, a Hyatt and a Radisson ,complete with ‘water features’ lining the once scenic highway that meanders through the rocks as you come into town, downtown clogged with new construction and bumper to bumper traffic, T-shirt and ice cream concessions, and sidewalks filled with tourists. No longer a sleepy ‘new age mecca’ for those seeking the curious influence of the magnetic vortices and the sacred stillness of the rocks and canyons, Sedona has become a tourist attraction, a sad example of a lack of thoughtful planning and zoning that could have preserved something beautiful and irreplaceable. Fortunately, you can leave all that behind as you wind your way out of Sedona on Highway 89A, climbing up through White Oak Canyon, as breath taking and splendid as ever!

Next stop: ‘Camp Gone to the Dogs’, June 6-12 , 'TEDDY’ and Mary go on the road!

Greetings!

It has been several weeks since I posted anything- and alot has been happening. So this may be a bit long and I hope you can hang in and bear with me.

First, Spring has arrived here in central Maryland in a big way! The first week in April saw record high temperatures that soared to the low 90s...which caused a big acceleration in the trees leafing out and the blossoms arriving. Not only did the famed cherry blossoms peak a good week earlier than predicted, the maple leaves are fully leafed out two weeks sooner than normal, the usual early May azealias are here, the red bud and dogwood, which typically follow one another, are in bloom simultaneously...

Since then, temperatures are back to what we would expect this time of year, upper 50s and low 60s. My garden is liking this just fine: the peas have doubled in height in the last two to three days, the asparagus are coming up faster than we can eat them, spinach, swiss chard and lettuces are growing like....well, weeds....and the tiny kale and broccoli seedlings that I set out in early April are beginning to look like pre-teens. The potatoes (red Kennebec and Yukon Gold) are beginning to push curled up green leaves through the soil, the blackberry canes which were barren canes a few weeks ago are bushy and leafy, and the canes in the new raspberry patch I began a few weeks ago are beginning to show little sprouts of leaves telling me that the compost and loving care I bestowed on the plot is beginning to make a difference. I feel like a mother watching her babies grow up - each with different habits and requirements. Back in the basement under grow lights melons, squashes, tomatoes, peppers and basil are ready to go in the garden once they are hardened off. Yet my experience tells me to be prudent and wait until the last danger of frost is passed....about May 5th around here.

April 9 to the 13 John and I traveled to northeastern Arizona to visit what I was to come to learn was the epicenter of Navajo culture: Canyon de Chelley (pronounced de Shay) situated on an 18 million acre Navajo reservation. The Canyon is incredibly beautiful with astounding rock walls,beautiful colors, fields, orchards and pastures that are cultivated to this day by the local Navajo...farming in the traditional ways. However this canyon is home to a terrible history which I was to slowly learn during the three days we were there exploring this amazing monument to beauty . A bit of history here: the Canyon was first occupied by the Anasazi ('the ones who came before) about 300 or 400 A.D. They built numerous stone dwellings situated safely about the canyon floor protected from the seasonal flooding that would course down the Chinle Wash....which meanders along the canyon floor depositing valuable nutrients.In addition, they carved sacred symbols and drawings on the walls of the canyon which are easily seen today. The Anasazi left abruptly in around 1200. The Canyon was occupied by various others groups/tribes until around 1650 when the Navajo drove out the others and settled there making it their home.

The many tribes that occupied various parts of the southwest warred upon one another for hundreds of years, taking each others' land, stealing their livestock, burning their encampments. I have no romantic illusions about native Indian culture. However, what the U.S. government did to the Navajo is unspeakably cruel. In the 1860s the U.S. government, in the person of Kit Carson, drove the Navajo out of the canyon, destroying their homes, crops and peach orchards and forced them to walk 300 miles west to Fort Sumner. 8500 Navajo, those remaining alive, were detained there in horrid conditions only to be freed in 1868 to return to their home, or what was left of it. Today we would call this terrorism...or genocide.

This was my first exposure to native American culture , an experience filled with paradox. Modern Navajo culture is an interesting blend of traditional practices and ways of life married to contemporary American culture: Burger King, pizza joints, a Coca Cola plant is a prominent fixture in the tiny town of Chinle a mile or two from the opening to the Canyon. Rural Indian poverty is very evident. Lots of public housing, lots of trailers, lots of debris and trash laying all over. Yet what struck me, and was hard to understand, was their ways of caring for their live stock. The animals, based on tribal regulations, are allowed to 'free range', seen grazing along roadways, medians, parking lots. Yet other animals, horses, sheep and goats spend their entire time confined to small round pens, hanging out all day with no place to roam. Certainly they were fed yet no place to move, to be the herd animals Nature designed them to be.As an outsider seeing this for the first time it was hard to witness and I don't begin to understand the practice.

Next stop: Sedona, 'red rock country'

Early Spring

Early Spring

It was barely one month ago that we were still recovering from February's back to back snow storms. The snow drifts were beginning to recede revealing huge wet, muddy gashes all along the sides of the roads where the plows had shoved the snow, branches were strewn across lawns, and the poor shrubs were revealing just how much damage they had sustained, bending beneath the weight of so much snow. It was hard to take it all in. Yet I remembered that just as our own bodies know how to heal from injury, so too, the Earth, given a little attention, can do the same. Still, it was hard to look upon so much destruction without some dismay.

Here in my neck of the woods, central Maryland, Spring is clearly here! and not just because the calendar says we have crossed the Vernal Equinox. The 'peepers', i.e. the little tree frogs, have been trilling their presence on warm afternoons and evenings since March 15th, and of course the early daffodils and crocuses are in full bloom. Thankfully, the forsythia made it through the winter and the maple trees are showing their 'red fluffies' in deep crimson. And my horse 'Andrew' (more on him later) has been shedding like crazy!

In the meantime, down in the basement under a growlight, my broccoli, swiss chard, kale, romaine lettuce and spinach are a good inch tall! The warm days over the past weekend offered the perfect opportunity get out in the garden. My husbandJohn cut back blackberry canes,we put a torch to the excess mulch and weeds on the asparagus bed, Itilled a few beds and planted onions sets, more spinach and more lettuces, and two wide swaths of peas (snow and sugar snaps) and turned the compost piles. The 'green manure' crop that I planted last fall in sprouting nicely and will soon be tilled under to provide extra nutrients as the season progresses. The buds on the blueberry bushes, plum, apple, pear and peach trees are all beginning to swell and in no time there will be fruit blossoms!

To those whose lives are not much dictated by the seasons, all this could sound a bit 'quaint'. Next to over hauling the health care system or NCAA's "March Madness", musings on the appearance of the peepers sounds rather, uh, beside the point. Yet I have found that attending to the rhythms of nature and the seasons , regardless of whether one lives in the city, the suburbs or the country, contributes substantially to an overall sense of health and well being.

So I ask you....where or how is Spring happening in you? What new growth is happening inside? What part of your own 'inner garden' might benefit from clearing out to make room for the next cycle of seasons? What new harvest will be the result of your efforts?

"You are the garden and the gardener of your life."

Welcome to my blogging world!

"Faith is believing inspite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change."

Welcome to my first attempt to enter into a new kind of relationship to you, my reader, and to my writing...as in this format I can share with you...
...notes from the gardening year, seasonal recipes...
... poems, essays, favorite quotes and passages from my own journal...

Emily Dickinson is quoted as saying "Life is so astonishing as to take all my attention!" So it is with me sometimes and this is what I am wanting to share.

So here goes...

Soon it will be Day Light Savings Time...March 15th? - a change I so look forward to. I love the light lingering in the Western Sky. This time of year so speaks to 'possibility' - of utilizing the creative spirit that is so present this time of year. It's a time of year oriented to the future, to give life to plans that have laid dormant throughout the Winter. Now, as the soil warms and the sun lingers, I feel a quickening inside of me and a burst of ideas, new projects, new endeavors wanting airtime.The light this time of year is so thin, so white and translucent, so in contrast to Late Summer when the light is a golden yellow, the air heavy and often damp, while everything is so still and slow. No! This time of year - Spring time- even the name is perfect- calls us to spring into action - movement.

Yesterday, as I was driving home, I passed a small farm with a hillside meadow beside the house where sheep are kept. Lo and behold! I saw a small black lamb, all long legged and fragile - so barely new- being nudged along by its mother who was trailing behind, instructing the little one as to the ways of the herd. My heart lept at the sight... for I'd forgotten - it's lambing season!

News Flash!
The gardening season has begun! From now until next November tending to a rather extensive family vegetable garden can feel a bit like running a marathon.So as to not run out of steam by mid July, it is important to pace one's self. The list of activities is rather extensive:seeding, composting, pruning, tilling, fertilizing, weeding, watering, harvesting, reseeding, more weeding, mulching, cultivating, putting up.

My seed order arrived last week! No wonder they have names like: Ace, Hurcules, Defender, Fortex,Bright Lights! This past Sunday I started my seedlings in the basement under a simple grow light: brocolli, swiss chard, romaine lettuce (first time for this), kale, and spinach. Later that warm afternoon, I went out to inspect the garden after the heavy snows we have received.The garden has been buried under a thick blanket of granular white stuff for weeks, so deep I couldn't have gotten the gate open if I tried. Left over from last Fall were five kale plants, stems so thick (and inch a least) I'd had difficulty wrenching them from their strong grip in the soil. This day, however, the soil gave way without a lot of effort on my part. Coming back inside I marveled to myself how the seeds I'd just planted, about the size of a small crumb, had the capacity to result in such a hefty and hearty plant!

"Locked in a seed the size of a speck is the mystery of the universe." (Adrian Higgins, March 11, 2010, Wash. Post) As I said...'Life is so astonishing!'