Just as I by complete coincidence was making ghee, the mail carrier misdelivered my neighbor’s Time magazine.
The debates will no doubt continue. We hunger for simplistic rules that apply equally to all. So much easier than conscious and responsible moderation.
I admit it. A couple of years ago, when a friend was waxing poetic about the virtues of pressure cooking, I was skeptical. Shortly after the second or third conversation on the topic in a short space of time, I came across Lorna Sass’s “Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure” at the Lantern (used bookshop). Seeing it as a sign, I bought the book and a pressure cooker (an Aeternum — pricey, but sturdy and easy to use).
What I like best about the pressure cooker is that it cuts the cooking time of beans or soup from 1-3 hours to 20-35 minutes. Kitcheree (indian rice and lentils) cooks in 15 minutes. I’d estimate that in the two and half years I’ve had my cooker, I have saved over 200 hours of cooking with gas time. Not sure how much cooking gas I’ll have to save before I’ve made up for the energy to manufacture and ship the pot to me, but I should cross that at some point in the life of the pot. Even better is that I can come home after a full day at work and cook dishes with dried beans or slow to cook grains without staying up all night.
Once you put the cooking ingredients in the pot, get it up to pressure, turn down the flame, and set the timer, there is no need to watch the pot. So today, for lunch, with only about five or ten minutes of prep time, I have rice (with saffron and amaranth made in the rice cooker) and pot beans (coco rubico from the Dupont Farm market, seasoned with celery, onion, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, dried chiles brought back from Tucson, and dried bay leaf, epazote, and mexican oregano from my own garden). Start to finish about a half hour (I did presoak the beans). Able to continue working except for the minor prep time. Wonderfully content to have nourishing, delicious food to warm and inspire my day. I do better work (I do work better) when I eat well.
A brief afternoon nap is one of the benefits of working from home.
When I was meditating this morning, the last lines of Keats’ ‘Ode on A Grecian Urn’ welled up in my thoughts: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” How odd, I thought, for this to appear, as if out of nowhere. I have been contemplating this week on what it means to be refined, but not in the way of an aesthete. Rather, as I have been concentrating on the Anusara alignment principle of “ankle loop,” I have been thinking about how deepening our practice with repeated exploration and study we are able to refine our understanding and the flow of energy within us so that we can be more connected to ourselves and each other.
As I understand the essential structure of the Anusara principles, the “loops” are really tertiary principles. The primary principles are those of “attitude, alignment, and action,” which are the principles of how we practice. The secondary principles are the fundamental physical and energetic principles — “opening to grace, muscular energy, inner/expanding spiral, outer/contracting spiral, organic energy.” The loops serve to refine the secondary principles. Ankle loop, for example, which starts at the base of the shin bone, travels down the back of the heel and then back up through the arch, energizes the foot, lifts the arch, supports our stance and helps us focus muscular energy. When we are feeling challenged finding as much muscular energy in our feet and legs as would be optimal for a full expression of the pose, we can use ankle loop to refine our understanding and practice of muscular energy in the legs. Keeping in mind the primary principles of practice, though, the refinements should also always lead us towards the heart and not just get us into details. Getting more sophisticated and refined, likewise should not lead us to disdain for that which is unrefined.
Funny, then, that the aesthete’s call to beauty should arise in my meditation while I have been consciously thinking about refinement. What does it mean to appreciate and study refinements, but still honor and delight in a novice’s full expression of “attitude, alignment, and action” as much as an impeccably aligned and skillful pose that does not reveal a yearning for spirit? Beauty may be truth, and truth beauty, but what is “beauty?”
Avidya–ignorance or delusion.
Very roughly stated, the yoga philosophies and guides to practice teach that it is ignorance or delusion that is the root cause of evil and suffering. When we act from ignorance of our essential nature–it’s divinity (whatever that might mean to you)–then we act in ways that move away from spirit rather than towards it (one way of describing evil).
As I interpret the teachings, the point of the practices for a householder is to help us act and respond informed by consciousness of this essential “divinity” in everything we do, including how we care for ourselves, our community, and the ecosystem that we inhabit. The closer we come to achieving this state of acting consciousness, though there will still be pain and loss in this human embodiment, the less we will be the cause of suffering for ourselves and others.
Note: You might say or think it, but I will refrain from actually articulating why this is the word that comes to mind for contemplation today.
The changes in my neighborhood over the past several years take some getting used to; there are so many new businesses opening up where it was once abandoned and dangerous to walk. This fabulous mural was on my walk to 2nd and M Streets, NE to the new flagship-sized REI at the U-Line building to get new hiking boots. On my extended walk home to break in my new shoes, I bumped into neighbors outside the Atlas Theater.
