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Signs Around Town
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
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Reflection (Prakasha and Vimarsha)
At the Thillai Kali temple in Chidambaram, and at other temples I am sure, but that was where I particularly noticed this aspect, there is a mirror on the altar, so that one also sees one’s reflection when watching the abhisheka puja.
One is there, too, along with the priests and the gods—watching and a part.
Pickles
Soon after this article on making your own pickles was published in the New York Times, a friend and mentor sent it to me. Though she is a mentor for reiki and energetic practices, and I see her regularly for massages, I’m quite sure she wasn’t trying to encourage me to eat more raw food or get into the fermentation fad (but you can read lots about how some raw foodists fetishize fermented food by using your favorite search engine). I think she just thought I’d like making pickles, and she was right.
I’m now on my fifth or sixth batch. The first batch I did exactly according to the directions in the article. The second, I did exactly according to Mark Bittman’s recipe in How to Cook Everything, which I found used a few years ago at my favorite used bookstore in DC–The Lantern-A Bryn Mawr Bookshop. After that, I experimented with a little less salt, a change of spices, and different ways of slicing the cucumbers. The cucumbers for this most recent batch were a little older and seedier so I added carrots and ginger to improve the flavor of the cucumbers. I also added garlic, a few chili peppers, and some coriander seeds from the garden. A grape leaf or two helps make the vegetables stay crisper; they aren’t needed, but if one has a grape vine in the garden, as I do, why not?
For my birthday, though you don’t really need one, I just bought myself a nice fermentation crock. First up: sauerkraut and then when I’ve had an opportunity to go shopping in Chinatown for supplies, a big batch of kimchee.
This latest kitchen venture, is mostly because I’ve always loved the taste of pickled food, and because it is amazingly easy to make them. Pickles and other fermented foods are now added to my list of love to make foods that with a little attention and some planning and patience yield big results (like sprouting and slow cooker beans and stews). That my yogi friends who are crazy into raw food would also be excited about what eating fermented foods might be doing for my health is just a bonus.
When We Choose the Pleasure of the Beautiful (DWTD)
When we choose a tantric path, we choose to experience pleasure as an expression of spirit, rather than seeking to transcend such experience as would one who is on the classical renunciatory yoga path. The choice to remain engaged, to honor mind and body as divine, comes with great responsibility.
When we choose engagement, we choose to experience the divine reality not just of pleasure, but also of pain. The true tantric path does not turn a blind eye to ugliness and suffering. Just taking the pleasure without recognizing its opposite is not authentic practice. If the pleasure of the sunrise is “real,” then the garbage on the beach is just as real.
Recognizing the reality of ugliness and pain as part of the play of the real does not mean, though, that it should diminish our joy in the beautiful and in the dance of the play of opposites of life.
Rather, it is our delight in and engagement with beauty that invites us to serve as best we can to alleviate suffering, to try and clean up the garbage where we can. In other words, as we recognize that ugliness and destruction are part of the play (lila), we seek to be heart-full rather than heart-broken when we witness the suffering from violence to others or our living planet. If we let our hearts break, we become blind to the beauty. Like those who only see what brings pleasure, those who only see the painful are also not experiencing all of the real.
As I head back to the world inside the Beltway, I bring the deepened and replenished sense of beauty and the dance that I always get from collective study and practice. I will try to share the privilege of having this experience by doing my best to clean up what garbage I can, while still dancing and loving in the light.
Is this a gift of a lover to his or her beloved?
A reminder that : As I know you, I love you.
Or, perhaps it is a reminder from oneself to love oneself?
To remember that part within us that is so nearly perfect .
Maybe the words form a precatory command: Go forth! Love!
Yes…I think I like That one.