State of the Garden (Summer Lunch Working From Home)
Similar Posts
- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Body | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation
Eating Local, Annamaya Kosha, and “Human Landscape Dance”
When my friend Mac asked if I would let my readers know that his dance group Human Landscape Dance will be performing at Dance Place on Saturday and Sunday, July 9th and 10th, I agreed without hesitation. As I was contemplating what to write, I found myself thinking about the koshas–the energetic sheaths of the body. The yogis claim that the individual has five koshas. The outermost, the annamaya kosha, is the “food body.” “Food” in this context encompasses everything that comes into our body through all of our senses–touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell. I thought about what it might mean to “eat local” if eating meant everything that we encounter with our senses.
I am not a locavore (I too thoroughly enjoy avocado, coconut and, in winter, citrus), but I do try to emphasize local food as the mainstay of my diet. I do it mostly for energetic reasons. I want fresh food to have been picked as recently as possible and not to have grown weary from travel. I want as few hands as possible to have touched the food I buy, and those hands to be those of a person who is happy with farming and is paid a living wage by the sale of the produce. When your food growers, transporters, and preparers live nearby you are getting to know your neighbors and community, and not just getting food from a faceless corporate entity. Over the years, you get to know each other a bit and learn what friends you have in common. More threads are woven into the fabric of your community.
Just as knowing the person who grows and sells you food means you can be more certain that it was raised and offered for sale with nourishment intended at every stage, so too having the art and entertainment we bring into our senses be created within our community creates a network of connection and support that we do not get when we only consume commercially prepared entertainment (though I cheerfully buy music from my favorite “stars,” go to the movies, and enjoy trips to Lincoln Center,and London’s West End, etc., just as I get avocados and citrus along with the greens from my garden and the fruits from the local farmers’ market).
I feel blessed to be able to connect with Mac as a neighbor (Mac, his wife Jennifer Mueller, who is a student of mine and fellow yoga teacher on the Hill, and their delightful daughter live several blocks from me) and others who are performing next Saturday as fellow dancers at the Sunday Contact Improv Jam. My dancing and personal explorations are raised up by the company of the wonderful dancers and friends who share that space, including those who will be performing next weekend.
Why wouldn’t I want to both support my friends and learn more about them by going to Dance Place to receive the dance offering they are so lovingly preparing for all of us? Such is the nature of feeding mindfully the annamaya kosha to help lead us to the opening and nurturing of our innermost spirit, finding and creating more bliss in ourselves and in the very essence of our community.
FYI. I’m looking for company to carpool or walk together to and from the Brookland Metro (for safety on the way home). Perhaps Sunday CI Jam, dinner on the Hill, and the Sunday night show?
Photo courtesy of Human Landscape Dance.
Harvesting and Replanting
This weekend’s work in the garden continues on removing summer plants that are no longer productive to make way for cold weather planting (various greens and root vegetables).
The cherry tomatoes and a couple of the hot peppers are still flowering in addition to fruiting. Those I will leave in place as long as they are producing or until a frost, whichever comes first.
I ruthlessly pulled up all of the other pepper plants, gleaning the last of that cycle of the harvest (some years there are lots of peppers to pickle and roast and enjoy into winter, but not with this summer’s weeks of blasting, arid heat followed by the flooding storms).
With the limited space in my tiny garden, frittering away time or space from sentimentality, attachment, neglect, or lack of knowledge, has a significant impact on the possibility of flourishing. Sometimes I relish my ability to be ruthless in the garden–to tear things up that do not serve, let them go, and invite in new and more nourishing and productive things.
When thought about in relationship to the vastness of possibility, my life is not unlike a tiny and limited garden, the limits being space and time and the particular and peculiar collection of quirks, challenges, and talents that came in this incarnation. Oh to be as ruthless in discarding what does not serve in this life as I can be in the garden.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
State of the Garden
After almost none all summer, now they’re ripening in abundance. I’ll roast and then freeze most of them to eat in the winter.
I attended yoga class by zoom this afternoon. We worked on the poses that benefit from attention to engaging the major muscle groups of the trunk. And we thought about acting from our center, and finding center so we can better act.
