The Love of the Land

All over the pre-Christian world, the love of the land and appreciation for the food it yielded, was cause for celebration and thanksgiving. Perhaps we are not as far removed from this world as we might think---- perhaps it is echoes of these occasions that we sometimes hear, ringing in our ears, causing that vague sense of something being amiss about the way we live today. Perhaps our need to be a part of creation and connected to nature is not as dead as we think.

Like many people with roots in the countryside, I never felt completely tamed by the city and I still feel an outsider in urban environments, despite having spent many years living in both the larger and smaller cities of the world. Perhaps we cannot let go some subconscious tie to the land, still feeling its ancient, magnetic pull, like Yeats, hearing it 'in the deep heart's core', longing for some dream-place cabin with 'nine bean rows' and 'hive for the honey bee', far, far away from the 'pavements grey' of our diminished lives.


The Lake Isle of Inisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Inisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

----W.B. Yeats


Blessings on your table!
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

The Lost Sublimity of Food (2)

Occasionally, we might happen to pluck a pear in the garden of a friend we are visiting, or be the dinner guests of people who keep an allotment and suddenly, momentarily, we are returned to our other untame, primal selves, in relishing the full, vibrant flavours of fresh, natural food. Or perhaps we might find ourselves wandering, by accident, through some rural place, lost, in the heat of summer and we see a beautiful, golden field of wheat and we cannot resist walking into it and lying on the earth surrounded by the reeds. We smell their sweetness and look to the flute blue sky, watch swallows swoop and feel the pulse of the earth running through us. We breathe deep and drink in the magnificence about us. Our appetite for all that is not synthetic, comes alive and our love of creation and all it gives us, is re-awakened. And we think we understand the bond our ancestors had with this land and the pure, raw, instinctual joy, with which they feasted and celebrated nature’s goodness----we understand them, because their pagan souls are the same as our pagan souls. We are of the same essence.

On the way back from the wheat-field, we pick wild berries from the hedgerow and find we have a hunger for a home-baked cake of soda bread, or some garden-fresh summer salad, or wild salmon with young potatoes and watercress from the stream below. On a day as sublime as this one, it is not a sliced pan we yearn for. This is not the state of being in which we think to order a pizza. We feel too much alive for that type of food, today. Today, our tastebuds want the real thing. Now we see our earth as a garden of paradise and we think about why Eve and Adam had to bite that apple. How could they resist the exquisite fruit from the wild tree, sweet-smelling, sun-ripened, red-green-skinned, fresh-plucked, noisy, crunchy, juicy to the bite, at once sweet and tart, making mouths water, tastebuds tingle and senses come alive.

The bland, tasteless, waxed, chemical-sprayed imitations in our supermarkets, ‘fresh’ from factory-orchards and a year of cold storage, make it hard to appreciate how an apple could be so sublime and so seductive. But on rare days like this day in the wheat-field, when we remember not to forget our true nature, we can understand Eve’s genius and Adam’s predicament and we sense the sublimity of our pagan past----it is the ghost that haunts our artificial present.



Blessings on your table!

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

The Lost Sublimity of Food (1)

Today, our food is mediated and changed as it travels the line of production, from field to table, or even seed to table, as seeds themselves are mediated and changed by genetic engineering. The more developed our society is, the more separate we are from the natural world, cut off from the source of our nourishment, the earth herself. From the perspective of the early 21st century, it is hard not to conclude that we have lost something important in our alienation from both nature and natural food. As we lose touch with nature, we lose touch with the nature within us. We forget who we really are and what we really need. Having never dug a line of new potatoes from the ground, nor plucked a cob of corn, fresh from the field, we do not know the sensuous delight of such food. Years of eating processed meals, mass-produced vegetables and insipid fruit, have bored and dulled our tastebuds to indifference. We don’t care much anymore for apples, or cucumbers, or tomatoes, because they all taste of nothing.


Blessings on your table!

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Zen and the Art of Eating

If you are hungry,
Eat now!
Because further down the road
There is no food.
-------Songs of Kabir

I love that quote from Kabir, because even though its true meaning is metaphorical and refers to the spiritual journey of life, it also reminds me that eating is one of life's sensual pleasures, to be enjoyed only during the short time we are alive---that little window 'twixt womb and tomb', where we have a chance to be radiant and awake to all the wonders of this extraordinary world. The dead cannot eat. And, as we are physical beings, existing in time and space, the richness of life comes to us in all sorts of ways, including the physical realm, including through fresh, natural food and the ceremonies of food---now what could be more wondrous than a peach, sun-ripened and plucked from the tree. Perhaps this is the zen of food.

Blessings on your table!

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com