Go Confidently...: April 30 - May 6: Inle Lake, Mandalay, Bagan

Go Confidently...: April 30 - May 6: Inle Lake, Mandalay, Bagan

Ablution

Since returning to school, my husband and I have had to make due with less. A lot less. And then, after Rohnan came, we had to divide his one income into 3 and this means that I have had to face quite a few demons. They are wily ones. They are selfish and bratty and impressively salient throughout my attempts to evolve into a gracious woman. There is the one demon who blames everything else but myself for all the things I want but lack. There's the other one, blame's best friend, who would have me believe that my wants are my needs. I could go on and name them all, but that would take years.

So - it's humbling.

There's a funny thing that happens on the stumble to humble. Grace.

Here's an example: We rent a teeny weeny house on a big (relatively speaking, for Westside Santa Cruz) plot of land. There is no bathtub. I repeat - no bathtub. I have a toddler and I ADORE my baths. Hmmm, conundrum, no? I'll say. I had my stages with this. I whined a bit. I made poor Rohnan take showers with me as he howled. I poured over internet pages looking for some cheap version of a Japanese soaking tub that might fit into the shower stall. The cheapest is $1500, which isn't exactly an amount I want to invest in my landlady, as interesting and Dutch as she is and all. I listened to my husband's well-intended but misguided plans to weld a metal tub into the stall, which were labor intensive and labor is money.

Then I went to Home Depot. Yes, I faced my nemesis of big store boxness and bought a plastic storage tub that's about 2 1/2' x 4'. And so far, while I'm not exactly Amphritrite, it gets the job done. With candles, Rohnan has his nightly tubby and I get to have my goddess time. By the same light I get to have exfoliation, shaving, masques - all the things I went without while Rohnan was very small. I was queen of the one leg shaved, one leg not for many months.

So taking the time to do these seemingly inconsequential, superficial things helps me to be totally present in my daily life. Okay, so "totally present" means nothing. I'm saying that there's a raging part of me (no, not that part) that is a complete bitch when I don't feel nurtured, and most likely, I'm going to be the one doing the nurturing. It took me awhile to realize that these are not mindless vanities or some huge indulgence, no, they are my tiny rituals to myself to remember that I can feel beautiful regardless of money or haggard schedules or the fact that I only get about a date a month with my husband.

Candles work wonders for the imagination. I can transport myself to almost any reality via candlelight! I have them lit for Rohnan anyway. It's how we transition into sleepytime. I actually have a personal belief that candlelight makes people smarter. During the winter months I try to wake the family with only candlelight as much as possible. It's my vigil to the universal desire to hibernate. It softens the day.

But to tie this into grace...

One of the HUGE things having a child has taught me is that everything is finite except love. There is this absolutely wonderful cartoon by Sam Gross in which two snails are looking at a tape dispenser and the one snail says to the other: "I don't care if she is a tape dispenser. I love her." That cartoon pretty much sums up the secret of life. When we pour love onto something, whether a person, place, thing, idea, what have you, it becomes whole. It becomes accepted. My shower stall is equal to a tape dispenser - love gives it grace - ergo, I am tape dispenser! I am shower stall!

I am Rohnan's laughter in the tubby, ringing off the tile walls. Humble me.

Run 'em Hard

So my fabulous, wild, break-the-mold child has an interesting metabolism. It's a lot like a Labrador retriever's. Efficient is the word I'm looking for. We literally refer to his need of excessive physical exertion as such: "running him." This is not to say that we take a collar to him and leave him on the lead line - no, no - we just simply can't get lazy, even for a day.
There are two reasons.

One, he gets waaaay crankier without breaking a good sweat (glow?) at least twice a day. He'll even say in his oh-so-cute toddler voice, "I'm cranky guy." Forgive the impulse to baby talk even on my blog, but jeeez, it's just so freakin' cute!

Two, he gets super picky about food. I mean, it's amazing. One minute I'll offer him crackers with avocado and sumac sprinkles and he won't have it. Take him to the park for even half an hour with the soccer ball, break open the (glass - yes, I'm ocd) tupperware filled with above mentioned treats and he's all over them!

His body needs to get hungry, not just his taste buds. This is not rocket science, I know, but it's a subtle thing that happens, and I get the brunt of it when I plop down my hard work of a dinner or any other meal or snack and he promptly refuses whatever it is, only wanting some lame empty carb or something with honey on it. I get frustrated, he's pissy b/c he's hungry and we end up having some kind of face off. Yes, I have often just compromised and had him eat the soup w/ an uncured organic turkey hotdog cut up in it, but that's cool with me.

I wonder if there are levels of hunger, and this is the superficial one - the empty carb/sweet one. The next one is meat/protein and the next one is the one that craves whatever whole food is available. When I'm on a cleanse and I see a plate with quinoa and parsley pesto w/ cucumber diced throughout like I did at the AMAZING River Cafe and Cheese Shop http://www.rivercafecheeseshop.com/ I could care less about the ridiculous hazelnut chocolate cookies that are an otherworldly combination of an airy, crumbly, nuttiness and succulent chocolate ribboning its earthy sweetness throughout. Um, but to use an overworked addage, I digress. Oh, one more digression, I LOVE places that have al fresco as a choice for seating. That means my son gets to run even harder!

Regression: Watching the pure level on which my son runs, especially in terms of instinct, gives me a good barometer for how out of whack I may have let my household's rhythm get. Getting off beat is inevitable, even on a a daily level for most of us because we are trying to balance way too many elements in our lives. And then my son says to me, "I have a good idea! Let's make playdough cakes for monkey and bear!" Oh, yeah. There's lots of levels of spiritual hunger too, huh? I'm freaking out because I have to get an article in on time for deadline, my little saddle bags are starting to jiggle more than I'm comfortable with, I have to finish two papers for school, my husband needs a massage - but Rohnan is saying let's go out and PLAY! And I am reminded that he is the absolute living symbol that the body and soul are one and the same. If I get through the superficial layers of hunger on either realm, I get to hunger for the real thing, whether that's a leek and chard frittata or a whole half an hour of nothing but play with my son. Amen.

Imagination

Like everyone else, I've been reading Eckhart Tolle lately. However, unlike everyone else (although I'm sure there are a few), I've been applying it not only to my own life, but to my life as it is with Rohnan, my son. And unlike every other self help book I've read, he seems to be able to break through my campagne crust of a cynicism I've been nursing since about puberty.
Living in Santa Cruz, my cynical self lives in a state of perpetual flux because at one point I desire to be more authentic than all the wide loving, outdoorsy types here, and on the other hand I wonder if perhaps they are on to something. Is that why I'm still here after 8 years of saying I'm going to leave?
That something is what Tolle talks about in The Power of Now and it's what Joseph Chilton Pierce talks about in Magical Parent, Magical Child. It's also what I get glimpses of for myself in my yoga classes. The moment suspends and spreads out wide, horizontal, and beauty refuses to be overlooked. The mundane isn't an option. The snags of "don't!" and "no!" and "stop!" leave and I can let my son throw tea packets all over the floor and let him really believe they are snow. And then I sing the tidy away song, and it's absolutely effortless - he had snow, I let go, we picked up together, and the tiny heartbreak I have from watching him grow up and away from me is gone because we are bonded in that moment through the song, through my letting go, as much as when he was a tiny babe at my breast. It's an ease that feels long in my bones. I think I'm honing in on it....enter scene from last night.....
my husband and I went out on a date to see Charlie Hunter, jazz/blues/funk guitarist-bassist extraordinaire, and he really had that *now* thing going on. And I found myself wondering, again, how could I take all these messages and synthesize them into a way of being a better parent? How can I provide the platform for Rohnan to have Charlie Hunter juju inspiring his world?
Music would be a good place to start. There are a lot of good - and expensive - baby music classes out there that I could take him to, and when I'm making more money at being a mother, maybe I will. But for now, when his toddler ways have me just about to snap, I bust out the old Bjork albums, the Stevie Wonder, heck - the Raffi, and just start dancing. Soon, he's up in my arms and we are just laughing away all of my NOs and learning about rhythm on some benthic zone of our oceanic souls. His name means "little seal," after all, and we ride.

Sugarplum Miso

It's winter. Yup. Well, alright, we're just a week shy of the official turn of the cog, but as far as I'm concerned, if my son is hacking up a lung, it's here.
Luckily, he's as husky as they come (the birth, his HEAD) and doesn't get sick too easily. And no, I didn't vaccinate. I didn't, but I still may. That's for another blog.
Here's the reason I'm bringing all this up. I firmly believe that living green inside and out help my little family of three stay as healthy as we are.
I was in Portland, ME a few weeks ago, shopping at Whole Foods as a commodified antidote to the boxed mashed potatoes of in laws I have, when a woman in my same aisle began lamenting. No, truly - she lamented. It was on par with Rossini. Oh, Ninetta, where is the golden spoon? For her, she would have stolen a spoon to make her son eat healthy food. Ah, here we are - my reason for writing: FOOD.
My 2 year old son was in the cart, happily eating some gim, or Korean sesame roasted nori seaweed, and this lady was just staring like she was watching him eat champolines (grasshopper/Mexican delicacy/one of son's faves).
"HOW are you getting him to eat that?" she asked.
"Well, I'm not making him..." I trailed off. I really couldn't think of an answer straight away.
As usual, lack of words only plagued me for a moment.
Well, for starters, I ate with gusto while pregnant. I had a midwife who gave me wonderful, colorful charts on nutrition in all kinds of whole foods that were headed with titles such as 'Did You Eat A Rainbow This Week?' It's hard not to love healthy food with that kind of unabashed hippie love of it all.
A baby in utero knows where you're eating. He or she can hear it. They can also feel your hormones change in conjunction - so if you're blissed out eating a tangerine, they get that signal, however oblique it may seem to you or me.
A synopsis of what I told "Ninetta": Everything is an adventure or journey. We plant seeds in the garden. If you don't have a space, call your city parks and recs to see where they might have one for you to use. If that's too much of a pain in the ass, buy some pots, throw some dirt in them and buy some seeds. Follow directions on seed packet. We call our seedlings "babies," but you can pick your own child friendly name. Growing things is one of the hallmarks of human evolution. Claim it!
Make a soup every week. Even if you don't cook, soup is your birthright. It's called H2O and stock or broth, garlic, onions, celery, carrots, chard or cabbage, and whatever else you deem worthy of your bubbling brew. Kids need veggies, yes, but most they cannot digest, not until about age seven. Cook it down well. Go fishing for carrots. If you must, put Elmo crackers in the soup and entice them at first with your shameless commercialism. The point is EVERY WEEK! No wavering. And, in the spirit of "Like Water for Chocolate," do it with love, lest they get a bellyache.
Try to get to the ocean and look at seaweed. If it's clean where you're visiting, let them lick it and see how salty it is. Kids love salty greasy things. Gim is salty and greasy, so that's not hard to figure out. Make a seaweed soup put fish in it. Buy a whole fish at the market and explore that fish together with your kid. Make a fish print on newsprint paper. Let them identify with the food in a way that is full of fun and nothing else. p.s. you can also do the water vegetation thing at the river or the stream.
If you make pancakes in the morning, let them help you. At two, they can crack an egg as well as you can, if you let'm. They're pretty proficient at stirring, too. You can use arrowroot powder, rye flour, whatever - pancakes are easy and forgiving, which any parent needs a good dose of, right?
Eggs are truly one of my beacons of light. You can make an egg into virtually anything! I take a ridiculous amount of fresh herbs, chop them until they resemble powder, and cook them into the scrambled eggs w/ sea salt. Voila! Green eggs! I haven't gone for the green ham yet, but my son hasn't caught on to the discrepancy, so that'll be our little secret.
If they have a sweet tooth, go for dates, raisins, B grade maple syrup, molasses, raw honey (after 1) there are SO many ways to appease that sweet tooth AND get vitamins and minerals. Plus, check in about the protein factor - I know I want sweet when I don't have enough protein. Kids are the same.
Pasta - I try and use rice pasta a lot, and that is another great place to add the herbs and almost every kid I know likes pesto.
I could wax poetic on this subject, but let me just say that the woman seemed to walk away with a little more allegro in her voice.
My son was covered in seaweed and promptly asking me for some almond butter on apple, please. Yeah, he's a Waldorf baby, no doubt about it.