Category: Philosophy

Food Poem – Summer Kitchen by Donald Hall

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This poem is a lovely reminder of the hidden magic of routine things taken for granted. It is an exercise of mindful awareness, of noticing the details with gratitude. May I experience such a miracle today and wishing you the same.

In June’s high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said.
“You light the candle.”
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.

“Summer Kitchen” by Donald Hall from The Selected Poems of Donald Hall.

From the Writer’s Almanac, June 22nd, 2016

Food Poem – Ode to the Pull-Out Couch by Sonja Johnson

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Eating supper instead of dinner, sleeping on a couch instead of a guest room. Check out how food and furniture convey messages of class difference in this poem.

Which once belonged to your great-
grandparents, but belongs to us now,
and still works, even if the cushions
are pretty well flattened and the stuffing
is coming out from one armrest,
and the color, which was probably
once cream with red stitching, has
become mostly a muddy rust —

and which is always called a couch
and never, ever a sofa, just as
a pocketbook is not a purse, a bureau
is not a dresser, and pants are not
slacks. Only snooty people on TV
would call a couch a sofa, or rich
people, or maybe people from away.
Which we are not.

Because if we were any of those,
instead of just a pull-out couch,
we would have a guest room, with
a comforter and duvet, which no
guests would ever sleep under
because they would be staying at
a five-star hotel, where we would
join them for a five-star dinner —

instead of the supper we cook
for our cousins up from Alfred,
which makes them still from here
and not from away, so they can’t
afford to go out to dinner, much
less afford a fancy hotel room
even if there was a hotel in town.
Which there is not.

And after our supper and before
we wake up early to take them
ice fishing, we pull out the couch
and give them pillows and blankets
and maybe even the granny-square
afghan, and they get to sleep by
the woodstove with the extra cats
and know that they are welcome.

From the Writer’s Almanac

Wobblyogi Wednesday- YTT Journal Week 20

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Graduation!

Where did the time go???? We officially graduated from our 200 hour yoga teacher training yesterday. I was just getting started. Yoga is so much bigger and so much more generous than I ever imagined. There is a path for everyone and the fun part is discovering your own. I came to yoga to calm my frenetic hungry philosopher mind. In the vast yoga terrain I like to roam Hatha yoga, Vinyasa and Yin. As Jacqueline would say “let your thoughts rest on your breath.” I have found my place of rest on the yoga mat in movement inside and out. Relief.

I was honored to have my fellow yogis at my home for a celebratory dinner. What a wonderful group of people! Our menu included

  • Chicken Kabobs [chicken pieces marinated in yogurt, almonds, saffron, ginger, cinnamon and cardamom]
  • Aloo Gobi [Potatoes and Cauliflower cooked in a raisin, onion, ginger, tumeric, coriander and cumin sauce]
  • Eggplant and pumpkin [cooked with indian panchforan/five spice, red peppers, tumeric and onions]
  • Three lentil Dal [ a combination of red/masor, yellow/mong, and yellow split peas cooked with tumeric and ghee fried onions]
  • White Basmati rice and store bought naan

We also had a delicious (surprisingly gluten free) brownies, a cake with nutella, a cheese platter, chips and dip, mango and malai ice cream and tiny samosas (the baked frozen packaged kind).

Most importantly, there was laughter. It was a great night celebrating our time together, full of gratitude, good food and friends. Makes any journey worth it.

More wobblyogi adventures to come!

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Yoga image from nobleworks greeting card

 

 

 

 

After an Absence by Linda Pastan

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An oblique food poem where dinner is mentioned as an example of the ordinary rhythm of life. Lovely poem. Enjoy.

After an absence that was no one’s fault
we are shy with each other,
and our words seem younger than we are,
as if we must return to the time we met
and work ourselves back to the present,
the way you never read a story
from the place you stopped
but always start each book all over again.
Perhaps we should have stayed
tied like mountain climbers
by the safe cord of the phone,
its dial our own small prayer wheel,
our voices less ghostly across the miles,
less awkward than they are now.
I had forgotten the grey in your curls,
that splash of winter over your face,
remembering the younger man
you used to be.

And I feel myself turn old and ordinary,
having to think again of food for supper,
the animals to be tended, the whole riptide
of daily life hidden but perilous
pulling both of us under so fast.
I have dreamed of our bed
as if it were a shore where we would be washed up,
not this striped mattress
we must cover with sheets. I had forgotten
all the old business between us,
like mail unanswered so long that silence
becomes eloquent, a message of its own.
I had even forgotten how married love
is a territory more mysterious
the more it is explored, like one of those terrains
you read about, a garden in the desert
where you stoop to drink, never knowing
if your mouth will fill with water or sand.

“After an Absence” by Linda Pastan from The Imperfect Paradise. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.

from the http://writersalmanac.org/page/8/

Arts of Oliver Winery – Summer 2016

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DSC_0064.jpgCheck out my article in the summer issue of Edible Indy Magazine about Oliver Winery’s unique art labels. You don’t have to go to a museum for the best of local art!

Kevin Pope and Ken Bucklew are masters in painting the cultural and natural landscapes of Indiana. Conversations like these make such short pieces well worth the effort. Even if you don’t get a chance to read the article please look up their work. You’ll laugh, you’ll relax, most of all you’ll find Indiana to be much more interesting than corduroy corn fields (although that too is quite mesmerizing!)

 

Hungryphil eats Cincinnati, Ohio 

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I was drawn to Cincinnati by the International Zizek Studies Conference and it’s keynote speakers:  Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, himself and Graham Harman (a pivotal figure for Object Oriented Ontology), a philosopher now teaching at Southern California Institute of Architecture (after having taught at the American University  in Cairo for 18 years). I was drawn by the promise of philosophical convergence and confrontations between materialism and idealism. Also, where else could I speak about Zizek’s uncomfortable coupling of charity and sanctimony? In their keynote lectures, Zizek asked and answered the question “Am I a philosopher” while Harman responded to Zizek’s critique of OOO in Objects, objects everywhere. Both deserve more than a quick blog post, so I’ll stop here. I continued to see such convergences and confrontations everywhere in Cincinnati. Here are a few examples:

The beautiful Fountain Square Fountain (1871) depicting a farmer and a firefighter/ citizen who flank an allegorical water goddess. The fountain  that now functions as the practical center of queen city was moved multiple times and renovated. A literally and symbolically moving Cincinnati center aimed to “represent the blessings and benefits of water.”
The American Sign Museum displays a history of signs from 19th-century wood carved signs to 20th century of light bulb, neon and plastic signs. The signs that advertised the value of gold-leaf and handcrafted signs were particularly fascinating. Advertising, advertising….my head hurts.

The commercial and public application of arts and crafts principles appear in examples of Rookwood Pottery. Their work can be found at the tearoom at the Union Terminal, a grand train station built as the economy fell and train transportation declined. The second largest half dome in the world after the Sydney Opera House, it is worth a visit.  Awe-inspiring in scale, exuberant in color and ironic in fate as a temple of transportation turned museum. Note the murals depicting the story of transportation evolution on land and water. Like the subway tunnels built for the city that were never used, the grand station shows that sometimes the best of human intentions are not fulfilled. Things happen. I feel for Cincinnati.

The now  Cincinnati Hilton- Netherland Plaza has a wonderful story. Historically named St. Nicholas Plaza, the hotel boasted it’s brand on all things, only to be sued for having used an existing name. The new name of the hotel had to fit the already branded dishes. Hence, St. Netherland Plaza. Like Union Terminal this grand structure opened in depression era 1931, created a lot of jobs and kept it’s owner out of bankruptcy.

Along with these grand ironies, Cincinnati also hosts vegetable races for the media at the annual Taste of Cincinnati.

A diversity of food traditions,

and opinions…..

Graham Harman, in his talk, mentioned that real things are able to hold contradictions. If so, Cincinnati is certainly a real city where beautiful birds fly out of an empty parking lot.  There are murals everywhere highlighting the ever evolving struggle of a city historically poised at the edge of freedom (The National Underground Freedom Center is there too). I learned as much from the city as I did from the conference. Wonderful trip.

Wishing you nourishing travels,

Hungryphil

September On Jessore Road – Food Poem by Allen Ginsberg

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This is not a celebration of food poem but rather about scarcity. Allen Ginsberg was writing about famine and war in Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, 1971.

Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road–long bamboo huts
Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts

Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go

One Million aunts are dying for bread
One Million uncles lamenting the dead
Grandfather millions homeless and sad
Grandmother millions silently mad

Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A Million girls vomit & groan
Millions of families hopeless alone

Millions of souls nineteenseventyone
homeless on Jessore road under grey sun
A million are dead, the million who can
Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan

Taxi September along Jessore Road
Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load
past watery fields thru rain flood ruts
Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts

Wet processions Families walk
Stunted boys big heads don’t talk
Look bony skulls & silent round eyes
Starving black angels in human disguise

Mother squats weeping & points to her sons
Standing thin legged like elderly nuns
small bodied hands to their mouths in prayer
Five months small food since they settled there

on one floor mat with small empty pot
Father lifts up his hands at their lot
Tears come to their mother’s eye
Pain makes mother Maya cry

Two children together in palmroof shade
Stare at me no word is said
Rice ration, lentils one time a week
Milk powder for warweary infants meek

No vegetable money or work for the man
Rice lasts four days eat while they can
Then children starve three days in a row
and vomit their next food unless they eat slow.

On Jessore road Mother wept at my knees
Bengali tongue cried mister Please
Identity card torn up on the floor
Husband still waits at the camp office door

Baby at play I was washing the flood
Now they won’t give us any more food
The pieces are here in my celluloid purse
Innocent baby play our death curse

Two policemen surrounded by thousands of boys
Crowded waiting their daily bread joys
Carry big whistles & long bamboo sticks
to whack them in line They play hungry tricks

Breaking the line and jumping in front
Into the circle sneaks one skinny runt
Two brothers dance forward on the mud stage
Teh gaurds blow their whistles & chase them in rage

Why are these infants massed in this place
Laughing in play & pushing for space
Why do they wait here so cheerful & dread
Why this is the House where they give children bread

The man in the bread door Cries & comes out
Thousands of boys and girls Take up his shout
Is it joy? is it prayer? “No more bread today”
Thousands of Children at once scream “Hooray!”

Run home to tents where elders await
Messenger children with bread from the state
No bread more today! & and no place to squat
Painful baby, sick shit he has got.

Malnutrition skulls thousands for months
Dysentery drains bowels all at once
Nurse shows disease card Enterostrep
Suspension is wanting or else chlorostrep

Refugee camps in hospital shacks
Newborn lay naked on mother’s thin laps
Monkeysized week old Rheumatic babe eye
Gastoenteritis Blood Poison thousands must die

September Jessore Road rickshaw
50,000 souls in one camp I saw
Rows of bamboo huts in the flood
Open drains, & wet families waiting for food

Border trucks flooded, food cant get past,
American Angel machine please come fast!
Where is Ambassador Bunker today?
Are his Helios machinegunning children at play?

Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?
Smuggling dope in Bangkok’s green shade.
Where is America’s Air Force of Light?
Bombing North Laos all day and all night?

Where are the President’s Armies of Gold?
Billionaire Navies merciful Bold?
Bringing us medicine food and relief?
Napalming North Viet Nam and causing more grief?

Where are our tears? Who weeps for the pain?
Where can these families go in the rain?
Jessore Road’s children close their big eyes
Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?

Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?
Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul’d lair?
Millions of children alone in the rain!
Millions of children weeping in pain!

Ring O ye tongues of the world for their woe
Ring out ye voices for Love we don’t know
Ring out ye bells of electrical pain
Ring in the conscious of America brain

How many children are we who are lost
Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?
What are our souls that we have lost care?
Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare–

Cries in the mud by the thatch’d house sand drain
Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain
waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!
whose children still starve in their mother’s arms curled.

Is this what I did to myself in the past?
What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?
Move on and leave them without any coins?
What should I care for the love of my loins?

What should we care for our cities and cars?
What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?
How many millions sit down in New York
& sup this night’s table on bone & roast pork?

How many millions of beer cans are tossed
in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?
Cigar gasolines and asphalt car dreams
Stinking the world and dimming star beams–

Finish the war in your breast with a sigh
Come tast the tears in your own Human eye
Pity us millions of phantoms you see
Starved in Samsara on planet TV

How many millions of children die more
before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?
How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild
Armed forces that boast the children they’ve killed?

How many souls walk through Maya in pain
How many babes in illusory pain?
How many families hollow eyed lost?
How many grandmothers turning to ghost?

How many loves who never get bread?
How many Aunts with holes in their head?
How many sisters skulls on the ground?
How many grandfathers make no more sound?

How many fathers in woe
How many sons nowhere to go?
How many daughters nothing to eat?
How many uncles with swollen sick feet?

Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children nowhere to go

https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/specials/ginsberg-jessore.html

Wobblyogi Wednesday – YTT Journal Week 16

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I am a wobbyogi and I am scared of head stands. There…..I confessed. I don’t enjoy being upside down, never have, even as a kid. Struggled through gym class unable to do a forward roll or a cartwheel. Last time I tried hanging upside down in an aerial yoga class I felt nauseous and dizzy. My dislike and distrust of almost all inversions run deep.

This is exactly why, maybe I should practice towards a head stand. I may never get there. I am no spring chicken. But, the process of building up my arm and core strength is worth the effort. At the beginning of this training, even a chaturanga had been difficult. I still can’t roll my toes but I feel stronger and able to lower down into the pose slower. A crow and a head stand are the two poses I want to work towards. Having tangible goals might give my practice the consistency and direction it needs. The deeper yoga trick is to not let these soft goals feed ego-centric victory or self-defeating doubt. Finding that balance between ease and effort, like any asana practice or meditation takes practice. It is all about….practicing an intent-full instead of a task oriented life.

As a part of the teacher training four of us students offered a karma yoga class last night. We lead a yin yoga class to benefit our local food bank, Food Finders. We looked into books and websites by Paul Grilley, Bernie Clark and Sarah Powers. Debra Steinhauer, who teaches Yin at Community Yoga offered much needed advice. We considered issues like talking and silence, timer chimes and music, props and modifications, lighting and more. This is really a beautiful time in our yoga teaching journey where we are getting comfortable yet still remain very much aware of all the details. When we started we didn’t even know the details or the questions to address. Next step would be to drop the nervousness that goes along with awareness of all that could go wrong. From my other teaching experience I know that teaching can easily become mechanical like a reflex. In such cases, challenging oneself to present material in new ways becomes the challenge. For now, how nice to be able to thoughtfully plan and semi-comfortably lead a session together. It was most satisfying to hear that our yogis felt relaxed and didn’t pick up on our inner anxieties. Next step, for each of us, is to lead an hour long session on our own in the coming and last few weeks of yoga teacher training. What a trip!

I didn’t begin this journey with the expectation of teaching but it soon became apparent that my own path depended on sharing the road with others.

Here’s one way to get into a head stand and a crow pose. Wish me luck!

Much love,

The wobblyogi

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Image from: http://www.memecenter.com/tag/headstand

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wobblyogi Wednesday- YTT Journal Week 15

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We are at 15 weeks! How fantastic that our yoga training keeps broadening into an endless horizon. I’m excited about exploring this sense of an internal landscape with high points and low, movement and stillness, sunshine and rain. For the first time in my life instead of looking outward for answers, in books, in art, in movies, in experts, in philosophy, I am looking inward. It is tremendously empowering to feel self-sufficient. I don’t feel this euphoria all the time but I do see glimpses more often than I used to. I know it is there and some days I can coax it out of hiding through asana practice, meditation, walking or just taking a few slow, intentional breaths.

We’ve been covering anatomy for a while. Today I am fascinated by our bony architecture. How strange that the weight of our hands, arms and shoulders are carried back through the scapula, clavicle then the sternum in front to release into the ribs and then down the spine. Our weight doesn’t just move directly downward but moves through us in circuitous ways. What amazing joints we have in our hips and shoulders that are able to rotate AND support. The universal elegant dance of “Sthira” and “Sukha” or stability and movement plays out within us, literally in our bones. The spine, itself, such a wonderful example of strength and flexibility, of softness and structure, of squishy and rigid. No wonder the spine is such a good indicator of emotional and physical well being. In the clip below Leslie Kaminoff talks about how we physically suppress emotions, how we “hold” anger, worry, resentment, and anxiety.

Sending uplifting thoughts that might lessen the burden on your bones,

Wobblyogi

 

 

The East Berliner, 1989 – Food Poem by Ginger Murchison

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The humble banana becomes an expression of welcome, joy, defiance, transition, love, plenty and evidence in this unlikely food poem. Enjoy!

They didn’t come for the bananas,
but everyone who came through
that hole in the wall wanted one,
the West ready with its Welkommen!
mountains of yellow.
After twenty-eight years of concrete-cold
days and only those few flowers
defiant in the cracks of denial,
imagine the yellow-fresh sight,
that spike on the tongue,
the fireworks and flares
shot through the half-language
of heavy machines shattering
the cold Baltic chill, the half-song,
half-wail of horns, sirens and shouts
and behind it all, Beethoven’s 9th,
then that East Berliner, shuffling out,
hatless and dazed in a worm-eaten brown coat
to see it, and not believe it—
the bright yellow word he’ll take home
to his wife, tight in his fist.

“The East Berliner, 1989” by Ginger Murchison from A Scrap of Linen, A Bone. © Press, 53, 2016.

From: http://writersalmanac.org/