ATTENTIVENESS & TAKING CARE OF THINGS AS NEEDED

I haven’t managed to settle down to write here since the end of July and I’m feeling a little guilty about the long gap between posts.

My explanation/excuse is that I have been making real headway on my Persian World book work, both recipe testing and writing. It's been engrossing and satisfying. Once in the groove I don’t like to interrupt it and strain away from it. On top of the book work there’s also been the prep leading up to the Grain Gathering this month.

The conference (the renamed Kneading Conference West) is August 21 to 23 this year, at the agricultural research station in Mt Vernon, Washington. As in the last two years, I am working with Dawn-the-baker (aka Dawn Woodward of Evelyn’s Crackers) to give three different workshops. But this year I am also giving one of the keynotes, the opening one.

Each time I have the honour and pleasure of giving a thematic talk, I find myself turning around and around, as I try to figure out what path to take: What do I REALLY want to communicate? What useful ideas can I contribute? How best to do that? Should I show images? and so on.

It seems to me that other people must be more efficient about all this than I am. I the process of feeling my way into a talk seems to take a long time, always. Some of the problem comes because l try to express fresh ideas each time I give a talk. It’s a little like cooking: my favourite thing is to improvise with what I have on hand, rather than following a recipe or repeating a previously successful dish or meal exactly. Variety and unpredictability, and the little adrenalin that kicks in as I struggle to find a new path, a new idea, a different way of expressing a familiar idea: these are pleasures.

I’m happy to report that I’ve come out the other end of this particular labyrinth of decision-intersections. I have images picked and I know where I want to head in my talk and what I’m hoping to communicate. It feels great. And now I get to go out to that lovely part of the west coast (the Skagit Valley in northern Washington), see people who have become dear friends, learn and work and eat, and do some baking too.

In the meantime though I want to try to write here about tools and keeping things, whether it’s my bicycle or my body or my head, in good repair. Thoughts and reminders about the subject have been accumulating recently. Some people stay on top of maintenance, but I am a bit of an avoider: When something in the house breaks, a small thing like a lightbulb burning out or the caulking round the sink shredding etc, I work around it for awhile until finally it drives me a little crazy - or perhaps it’s embarrassment that pushes me - and I tend to it. The same goes for clothing that needs repair or attention of some kind.

And my bicycle? I am ashamed to say that recently I was pedalling, for a good three weeks I think, on a back tire that was very soft, stupidly soft. Of course it takes way more energy to pedal on a tire that’s not fully pumped. There’s so much more friction. I started to wonder if I was getting way out of shape, for my usual quick pedal up the hill was feeling more onerous.

Yes, what I’m saying is that I entirely failed to notice that my tire was low.

It took a good friend telling me to make me realise. On the one hand it was a relief: oh good, bike riding has been feeling like hard work because my tire is almost flat, and not because I am terribly out of shape. But on the other hand, especially once I’d stopped at a gas station and filled the tire, I was appalled. Suddenly riding was an easy dream. And how could I have been so inattentive to it? Why had I wasted the chance to have smooth pleasurable rides?

Maintenance of our tools, whether it’s keeping knives sharp (I am NOT good on this front either, I confess) or maintaining a bicycle or a car or a laptop, is a responsibility we should enjoy. After all, not only did we pay good money for them, but, more importantly I think, we owe it to ourselves to not disable ourselves through inattentiveness.

I’ve come to think that not keeping out tools and toys and environment at their best is like walking around wearing heavy dark glasses or hobbled with leg-irons. It keeps us from tuning in to our environment and from making the most of our days.

Another form of maintenance is care of our bodies. And here too I have learned that I’ve been negligent recently, stupidly ignoring good practice. I’ve had strange aches and pains in my heels (plantar-fasciitis-like but not exactly) and aching knees for a couple of weeks, a very unusual thing for me. I went to see Xiaolan, my friend who is a remarkable TCM practitioner. She and her staff tut-tutted and basically told me it was all my fault for letting my feet get cold. You should wear shoes or slippers in the house, they said. The cold (it’s the tile floor in my kitchen, where I stand in bare feet cooking, sometimes for hours in this period of recipe testing etc) is making your muscles tight and that’s why you have pain.

I then remembered that once before, about 25 years ago when my first kid was a baby, I’d had pain in my heels and another TCM practitioner had told me to keep my feet warm (again it was summertime, and the problem was cold tiles on unprotected feet). Duh!

A lot of acupuncture needles later, and with warm slippers on my feet, and presto! I have no aches, no pain. But how much better it would have been to have tuned in earlier!

So, attentiveness is vital, and then…maintenance. It sure is an uninteresting-sounding concept, maintenance/repair. But I’ve come to see that it’s part of having respect for ourselves and for what we’re lucky to have in the way of health and ability.

Waste not, want not, as they say.

GETTING MOVING, IN ALL KINDS OF WAYS

This last day of July has started with great energy… what a thrill. And it’s all because I’ve retrieved a strategy that I’d carelessly let slip these last couple of weeks. I feel so much the better for it.

Here in Toronto we’ve had a cool summer, with frequent rain showers. It’s kept the gardeners happy, including me. But it’s also meant that mornings have often been a little discouraging weather-wise, cold and rainy. During the day I’ve found myself less energetic and also feeling chilled, as I sit inside, with the doors open, working at my laptop.

How silly! I thought to myself last night as I headed to bed. I’m cold and a little lethargic because I’ve not been getting my blood moving. My time to exercise and get revved up has always been first thing in the morning. It was the time-slot for running, lovely early-morning trots, until the ligaments in my left foot gave way a few years ago and brought that to an end. I replaced running with cycling or brisk walking, but somehow lost the pattern recently.

What a pleasure to have it back, that early morning energy! I headed out in the chill with a jacket on over my Tshirt and biking shorts topped by a short skirt. The air was fresh (more like September than late July) and the traffic still mild at 7. The intensely -green grass glowed in the slanting sun, the gardeners were out tidying at the university, the road-works people were already digging and laying pipes and moving dirt, a parks guy was riding a mower in the ravine as I headed up the Poplar Plains road hill, joggers cruised along sidewalks absorbed in their earphones and their effort, and dog-walkers were trotting and walking and sauntering everywhere I went, accompanying their assorted pooches.

That landscape of early morning activity, like a gently animated Breughel, is such fun to ride through, a reminder of the layers of life in the city.

And my ride felt great, both the effortfulness of the uphill and the thrilling whoosh of the trip back down the long curve of Russell Hill Road. I topped up the endorphins with a short stop at a small local exercise park, where I did seated arm lifts.

And now sitting by the open door, with a cool breeze wafting in carrying the scents of the garden and the sounds of morning birds, I can feel my blood moving and my brain working, both much more vigorously than yesterday. A quick jolt of activity, call it exercise or call it labour, or call it pleasurable excursion, is such a gift.

Happy end of July everyone!

DEEP-DIVING INTO THE PLEASURES OF WORK

It's a humid morning here, the ground breathing dampness and fertility after last night’s torrential rain. I headed out early today for a quick intensive bike ride up a nearby hill. The route takes me through neighbourhoods lush and green, past morning joggers with their earbuds in, and labouring people whose work day starts at seven: garbage pick-up workers, construction crews, nannies.

Now I'm back, having had my airing. My blood is flowing and brain kicking into gear.

It's about time. I see from the date of my last post that it's been almost two weeks since I wrote here. Then we had just passed the full moon. Now we are waning and will soon be into the next lunar month. It's a big one, for this year the June new moon marks the start of Ramadan, the month of daytime fasting (no food or drink of any kind) and nighttime feasting, prayer, and celebration for observant Muslims. Going without food and drink for the long days here, when sunrise is early and sunset late, is an exercise in mindfulness I imagine, as well as a difficult physical feat in the heat.

How do people get work or any other chores accomplished? I wonder. It's hard enough to settle to a task in normal times, let alone with a grumbling stomach and low blood sugar. To fast well you have to be disciplined, and that means getting up early enough to eat well before dawn so that you are fortified for the long day ahead.

It's interesting to compare the different approaches to fasting in different religious traditions. For Christians fasting has usually meant doing without a particular kind of food: meat, or instead all animal products (no dairy or eggs and no meat). But somehow fish doesn't rank as animal, and so fish is permitted on fasting days. (Hence the classic tradition of European restaurants featuring fish on Friday menus, for Friday was the fasting day for Catholics, still is for some). 

I was in Georgia last spring during Lent, the forty-day fasting period before Easter when all meat and dairy are forbidden to observant Orthodox Christians. The rule has pushed cooks to invent fasting versions of favorite foods, such as khachapuri. On fasting days these flatbreads – normally filled with fresh cheese - are instead stuffed with delicious cooked beans. Home cooks and bakeries were also making cakes and other treats during Lent, using alternative non-dairy ingredients such as margarine and alternative recipes that didn’t call for eggs. That strategy seemed to me to go against the spirit of fasting. I mean, the cook might have had to be mindful, but the greedy eaters still were able to have their luscious cant-tell-it’s-any-different cake even in the middle of Lent.

In Islam, and in Judaism too, fasting means not eating at all between sunrise and sunset, then breaking the fast with a feast in the evening. This sounds much more convivial than obeying rules and trying to work around them for forty days!

I’ve been led astray by these explorations of different approaches to fasting. Sorry!

What I want to explore here is the difficulty of getting down to work, into work, focussed on work, immersed in work… You get my drift.

I find that when I have a clear succinct to-do list, a series of tasks, a set of must-do’s, then it’s not too hard to just work my way through them. But when the first job of the day is to decide what the day’s goals or tasks are, then things can get a little messy. Distractions abound, there’s no clear necessity to get a particular task done, and procrastination takes advantage of every opening.

I’m thinking about all this because of my Persian World book project. (The deadline for delivery of the manuscript is exactly a year from now: end of June 2015.) Since getting back from Kurdistan and then the Beard awards in NYC in early May, I have had six weeks of home time. I had imagined, when I was thinking about the shape of the year, that I’d use these weeks for work on the book. I have done, but only piecemeal, testing recipes, writing the occasional story, and researching history (while also watching history being made in Iraq).

But it was not until this week that I was finally able to make myself deep-dive back into extended long-stamina workdays focussed on the book. Suddenly I am deep inside it, reviewing my notes, writing, and “wearing” it in a full 360-degree way.

What stopped me from doing this earlier? I think that while there are outside obligations to others (in my case teaching a food history course once a week for six weeks, and a few other small bits of writing work) as a partial excuse, there’s something else going on.

It’s too easy to stay on the surface of a project, to skate around on it, rather than committing to being inside it. And that is because it takes serious effort to immerse and commit. And somehow I failed to put that work in, or perhaps I knew that it would be wasted, since I’d be pulled back out and into other necessities, so what was the point?

All of this may seem like pointless meandering to you. You may be very successful at setting tasks and then completing them. But for those of you who struggle to shape your work days effectively, I assume you too have had these experiences I am describing.

Another piece of the explanation, something that I console myself with, is that I am mulling things in my subconscious, putting pieces together, trying to make coherent sense of the massiveness of my project, and that I shouldn’t feel that nothing is being accomplished in these weeks of bits-and-pieces work. Hmm

We’ll see. All I can say now that I am embarked again (the last time was in November-December after I returned from Iran) is that I am loving the project. It feels rich and promising, the food is delicious, the issues and geography and history are fascinating. And above all the human layers with their warmth and distinctive cultural necessities are so engaging. I just want to roll around in all this and luxuriate in it, for a good uninterrupted stretch.

If I manage to do that kind of sustained immersion in the project, I will probably be writing here less often in the next two months. My first plane ticket in over three months will be a flight to the west coast in August for the wonderful Grain Gathering (formerly Kneading Conference West) north of Seattle on August 22 to 24. And after that…well I will need to try to re-immerse for a bit, before heading out for more travel research.

STAYING CONNECTED THROUGH TIME AND SPACE

Here we are at the last weekend in March, with the equinox behind us, and yet it’s still chilly. At least I am now bicycling again. I took it out this morning to ride to Wychwood Market in a cold wind. It’s been four months since my old red Diamond Back bicycle, the one I rode from Kashgar over the Khujerab pass and down the Hunza Valley to Gilgit in 1986, has been out on the road. It could do with a cleaning and a tune-up (scheduled for next week), and this morning the back tire needed air, but everything else is fine. Not bad for a bicycle that’s getting on for thirty years old.

I’m very attached to my bicycle. It’s got scraped-off paint here and there, from being hauled on trucks and busses etc while it traveled with me in Tibet and Xinjiang and Pakistan and Nepal, and also from being locked to bits of railing around town in the years since. So it’s not a thing of beauty. And it’s also very old-style of course: no suspension (no-one was doing that in the early mountain bike era), and the gears are not synchro-mesh. I think braking systems have also improved in the intervening years, so the brakes too are very retro, and probably less effective than they could be.

When I dropped by last week on foot to Urbane Cyclist, not far from where I live, to make an appointment for a post-winter tune-up, the person in the repair shop, hearing that my bike was old, suggested that rather than getting a major tune-up, which can run to $200 plus, I might want to consider buying a new bike. I didn’t have my bike with me; she said I should come by with it and get a sense from them about whether it was worth maintaining.

Of course I was a little shocked. Abandon my bicycle? Just because it’s old and a little out-moded?

It’s true that in Chiang Mai I have a more modern bike, white and black, a Giant brand (made in China) which I bought in the fall of 2012. It’s got suspension and synchro-mesh gearing, it’s comfortable, and a pleasure to ride. When I first ride it after arriving in Chiang Mai, each time I am struck by how sleek and easy it is, how user-friendly compared to my old red Diamond Back. I feel guilty, sort of disloyal, for even thinking this way.

The suggestion that I move to a newer model here in Toronto is a reasonable one, on its face. But I don’t intend to do it. Why leave behind all that history when the bicycle is perfectly functional? I don’t care that it could be more comfortable or easy or whatever. I’m not interesting in optimising my “stuff”. I live in a house that is draughty and imperfect, a house that I keep repaired more or less, but that I don’t abandon for newer more “practical” lodging. It’s the same with clothing: I hang onto certain coats and jackets and other garments that I’ve had for ages. They get worn now and then, but even when they just hang in the closet the sight of them reminds me of places and people and stories, and enriches me.

It’s the same way with friends. I don’t like to lose people, to let them slide away, though it does happen. I like to keep the fabric of things knitted together if possible. The bicycle is part of that effort, a conscious preserving and keeping alive of a now long-past time in my life. And by using the bike and keeping it integrated into my current patterns of travel and connection, I keep a long thread going, a thread that began ages ago.

The interesting thing for me is to see how threads of place and people and idea come and go in importance. For example, when I get on my bike, or just see it sitting in the front hall waiting to be taken for an airing, I flash on central Asia, stacks of flatbreads, dry air, the scent of smoke, and more. It’s a long time since I was last in Xinjiang, but these days, as I immerse in my Persian World project, central Asia is again on my mind a lot. The bicycle gives me a little Proustian kick back to central Asia, so that my time there doesn't feel as remote. That perhaps explains why, when I was in the rolling grasslands near Mashad last October, the landscape was immediately familiar, and so was the feeling of exhilaration at being back in a central Asian environment. 

The memories and ties from the past, be they an old piece of clothing, a longstanding friendship, a scarred bicycle, are precious connections, cross-ties to the warp and weft of our lives. It seems to me that as we race around, in physical ways, or just mentally and imaginatively through the miracle of internet access, we are in extra need of grounding. I want to not lose track of who I am, and that means staying in touch with a sense of who and where I have been as I traveled to this point.

And so when I take my bike in to Urbane Cycle, I don't imagine I'll be looking longingly at shiny new bicycles. The new and perfect is highly over-rated, don’t you think? I'm sure that I don’t want a newborn bike, with no history, no associations, no resonance. I want to go on riding the  memory-laden red bicycle I’ve lived with for so long, with all its imperfections.

REFLECTIONS ON ADVERSITY AMID CHIANG MAI PLEASURES

As I sit here thinking about where to begin this post, I’m a little paralysed by several issues: first, there’s a lot to tell, because the couple of days since my arrival here in Chiang Mai have been full of incident and interest; and second, perhaps more problematic, I’m in the middle of a book of short pieces, segments that are story-telling and reflective memoir, by the brilliant Tony Judt, whose thinking and writing are both so clear that I feel my writing and thinking to be muddled, predictable, and inelegant in comparison.

If you haven’t come across Tony Judt - he’s most famous for his writing on twentieth century European history, in his book Postwar, and for his reflections on contemporary society, in his book Ill Fares the Land - then you have a lot of wonderful reading and thinking to look forward to. And if you have, then I imagine you’re as big a fan as I am. The tragedy is that he died in August 2010, of the horrible ALS (aka Lou Gehrig disease), in his early sixties. The book I’m reading, The Memory Chalet, was written when he was incapacitated physically, partly as a way of staying sane. In short vignettes and reflections we travel through rooms in his life, from his early childhood memories of postwar London onward.

As I read I can’t help visualising his situation at the time he was “writing” (by dictation, since of course ALS had robbed him of the use of his fingers), and marvelling at his clarity.

It’s  form of solitary confinement and torture, ALS, but of course it makes me aware of all the different incapacities that lie ahead for most of us as we move from full health into older age. Some of us will drop dead, but many will have to figure out how to live well with diminished faculties and capacities. And it’s that goal of living well, with positive energy and a feeling of accomplishment and forward momentum, that is so important for our mental health, and so difficult to achieve.

The Tony Judt book, and the underlying circumstances, are thus a good solid reminder to make each day count, and to figure out how to maintain my equilibrium even when circumstances don’t go my way. I’m not being namby-pamby here. I really do believe that the hardest thing is maintaining grace under fire, or positive equanimity, or whatever other way you wish to phrase it, in situations that are harsh, hurtful, “unfair” or just plain horrible. They come to us all, at one time or another. And we want that for everyone, don’t we? that we all keep our dignity and self-respect even when things are dire or painful.

How to manage it? is the question. Nothing worthwhile is easy, it seems, and this surely isn’t easy. But we have the chance as we pass through various rough patches in our lives, to practice and become more skilled at managing how we cope with adversity. It’s a life-skill we need to develop, in the same way as a child’s learning to fall asleep on her own is, or learning how to calm ourselves when we’re feeling anxious or fearful...

Meantime, when I’m not reading and being amazed by Tony Judt, I’m out and about in Chiang Mai. I’ve seen friends, had time with a New York friend who left this morning for Burma, and eaten some of my favorite treats. 

On Friday morning we went early to the weekly Haw Market, in the parking lot opposite the mosque. It was a reminder that even as things stay constant (the market is always on Friday morning) they also evolve: the market has changed its geography, because part of the area it was in is now slated for a building. The two soup places I usually go to in the corner were somewhere else entirely, for example, and so was the Chinese pickles stand. The market is spreading south along a lane now. I wonder whether development pressures will eventually force it to move elsewhere entirely. That would be a pity, for it exists because of the mosque: Haw (Chinese muslim) traders set up there when they were in town for Friday services at the mosque. The market is much more than Haw people now of course. There are Burmese of various cultures (Shan, Burman, Karen, etc) and also hill people of many kinds, selling their oh-so-fresh and healthy-looking fruits and vegetables (huge avocados yesterday, pink radishes, and lots more), and a wonderful array of rices.

I took my friend to eat what I call (in the BURMA book) Silky Shan Soup, unctuous and comforting, and then after awhile we shared a bowl of mohinga too. In between we bought samosas, beautifully fried, and also black rice donuts, chewy, darkly almost-sweet with palm sugar syrup, and oozing deliciousness. It’s a filling morning, Friday morning, always.

On Thursday evening we went to Huen Pen, the North Thai restaurant in the old city that has been consistently good for a long time. My friend is pescatarian, and even though Northern Thai food uses meat as a flavouring in many dishes, we found lots of choices to order, from a great som-o (pomelo) salad, a joung jackfruit salad, a fish curry, nam prik num, and more. Yum. 

This morning as I pedalled up Thapae Road, I found myself behind one of the old Chiang Mai cycle rickshaws. It was early and still cool, so the driver’s hat was still tied onto the back of the rickshaw. His passenger was an older Thai woman being pedalled home from her trip to the market to buy meat and vegetables for the day. I caught a quick whiff of her scented powder in the breeze and was reminded of my grandmother. The woman turned her head, caught sight of me pedalling behind, and gave me a nod and a smile as we glided along. 

All this is a lovely welcoming landing-pad, from the food and the markets, to old friends and cycling through the streets, to the look of Doi Sutep, looming northwest of the city, its mountain bulk sometimes blue-green, sometimes purplish (especially in the evening), and always a reassuring reminder of where I am, right here, right now.