FULL MOON BIRTHDAY REFLECTIONS

The huge moon that hung in the sky this evening, impossibly luminous and lovely, was a tad off full, for it was last night, in scattered dramatic trailing clouds that the moon was fullest. I had a lot of time to marvel at her then, for I was driving late at night, on almost empty roads, the two plus-hours from Grey County back to Toronto.

The dryness of my tired late-night eyes, painful and a little scary, drove me to close them at red lights (after putting the car in Park), and ask my travelling companion to tell me when the light turned green. That short respite, repeated several times, was enough to extend my stamina and get us back into the city safely. But the struggle to stay focussed and able made me think about all the times I have taken chances, and all the times all of us are pushed to take chances or choose to do it for a thrill. We get away with it most of the time. And then sometimes we don’t…and we and others suffer.

Yet still we push the limits. What is it in us that pushes us to take chances? Evolutionarily these tendencies must have been rewarded…but what purpose have they served? Well I guess they help us extend out boundaries and discover new possibilities. That kind of positive result in previous generations could have been advantageous in many ways to our ancestors.

But when we take chances and risks we’re not thinking about our forebears, we’re instead in the moment, either willing ourselves to come through despite discomfort or exhaustion (think of the soccer players, yikes) or choosing to take a risk for the thrill of it. And in the latter situation, is the thrill in the danger/risk itself? or is it also in the idea that we can get away with things we ought not to do?

Probably some of both…

I wrote those earlier paragraphs last night. Now it’s a bright grey Monday morning, getting more and humid, waiting to start into the promised rainshowers of late afternoon. Meantime the birds are tweeting and the garden is glowing green, the arugula sharp-tasting and inviting, the cucumbers twining and setting fruit. The eggplants are NOT flourishing though. It’s been too chilly at night, so they have not set fruit. The cayenne chiles on the other hand are already loaded and I have been picking their green shiny heat-gifts for two weeks now.

But back to Grey County… A lovely guy named Steve, a chef who has now turned to farming found himself entangled in a conversation with me about cardoons. He’s growing them, and globe artichokes too, even in Ontario’s tough climate. He’s promised me some in August, and I’m delighted, for I have a delicious Kurdish recipe to try.

The meal was anchored by a lot of food from our hosts (who were celebrating having lived on their land for thirty years) but it was also a potluck. Steve had brought over a big load of zucchini blossoms. He made a batter of egg and water and all-purpose flour, quite loose and liquid, dipped each blossom (with its handy and delicious stem) through the batter and deep-fried them in batches in peanut oil in a wok set over the wood fire. We’d used that fire earlier to grill loads of local beef (marinated round steaks) and a lovely lot of shiitakes that our hosts grow outside on maple logs. The beef we sliced across the grain and then dressed to transform it into Thai grilled beef salad, always a crowd-pleaser, flavoured mostly with mint rather than basil, and garlic scapes, as well as lime and fish sauce and a little chile heat. The shiitakes are so meaty that after a quick pre-grill dip in a mixture of oil and fish sauce (with some minced sage and garlic green tossed in for good measure), time on the grill, and slicing into strips with a squeeze of lemon juice, they were perfection and vanished very quickly.

There’s nothing like a potluck meal with people who grow their own food. (And this was even more wonderful because we had a fire and we were outdoors in a forest clearing.) The potato salads (ours with just a pounded pesto dressing of pistachios, mint and chervil, garlic scapes etc plus local vinegar; others with garden peas etc), rhubarb cakes, leaf lettuce greens…were all lively and vital on the tongue with freshness and familiarity too. Perhaps all that good food and good company were why I had the energy to drive back into the city (and I had been sesible about alcohol: I drank only water for the five hours before I set out home).

And so here we are already in mid-July, loving the summer and already noticing that the days have started to get shorter. It’s my birthday tomorrow, and that of a close friend today. We chatted yesterday evening, sitting outside sipping a delicious Chablis, about the stock-taking that July means for us because of our birthdays. What a pleasure to have time and ease to catch up with friends.

And today as I am thinking about all this, I sift through my birthday-time images in my mind’s eye, from childhood homemade birthday cakes heaped with blueberries and raspberries, to making the three day parikrama  round Mount Kailash in western Tibet, to swimming in the soft waters of the Gatineau River north of Ottawa, to last Saturday’s delicious swims in the clean waters of Grey County.

It’s a big stack of images… a lovely chance for me to appreciate being alive in this world.

CONSIDERING WOMEN IN THE WORLD

I have always hated vacuuming, ever since I was a kid, when it would fall to me occasionally to haul the Electrolux (a sausage shaped model from before the second war that my mother had inherited from her mother-in-law) around the living room. “But what is the point?” I remember saying fiercely to my mother once, when she’d discovered the less than wonderful job I’d done of vacuuming the carpet. “It just has to be done all over again in a week. So why bother?”

Why indeed. But we need to keep dirt and pests at bay, it’s a fact of living in houses, apartments, caves, any kind of fixed dwelling. And so we sweep and dust and mop and wash, and some of us vacuum.

Rather than growing out of my old attitudes, I have continued to dread the thought of having to vacuum. My mother’s hand-me-down Electrolux seems a miracle of efficient sensible engineering compared to the vacuums I have come across subsequently, which were either heavy and awkward, or lightweight, breakable ones which failed to suck up anything.

And so for some years now I have not vacuumed at all. I have limped along, with a not very clean house, relying on mopping, sweeping, and dusting. No, I don’t have anyone come in to clean; I take a stab at it intermittently and encourage my housemates (my grown kids) to tackle cleaning chores occasionally too.

But recently there’s been a revolution: a dear friend and I have bought a vacuum, to share, and it’s a miracle of good design and ease. I thought I’d never seee the day, but I have to admit that, while I don’t love vacuuming, I now take it on without dread, and with a certain satisfaction at the vanishing of the dust and dirt.

It makes me wonder about how many other things could be made easier or more enjoyable, with an improvement of design. I’ve already discovered the delights of a well-designed stove (two years ago, another revelation), but this vacuum thing is even more astonishing to me. I’m now casting my eyes and mind around to think about what other tools and daily tasks need reconfiguring. There’s wiring - cords and plugs etc - which is always a hassle, getting tangled and needing more sockets than many rooms provide. And then there’s lighting: the new fluorescents work fine, but the design of the individual lights, table and floor lamps in particular, is still aggravating, either inadequate or glaring or ugly, or a combination of all those.

Do I sound like a grump? I don’t mean to, in fact this list is coming out of my delighted realisation that with effort and imagination, small things can be improved in a way that makes a big difference.

All these domestic complaints and musings of mine are nothing of course, I mean they are “first world problems”, compared to the difficulties that face women who live in refugee camps in Syria or in Central African Republic or on the borders of Burma or many other places. They need to haul water, haul firewood, try to find a way to wash clothing, feed their children, and also keep a sense of dignity and order. They sweep and wash and cook and worry. A machine to do the work is the furthest thing from their minds.

So why do these mundane chores oppress those of us who live in comfort rather than out on the street or in a fragile temporary camp somewhere? What right have we to complain?

The fact is that most humans have in their minds an expectation of what the day will bring and what they are “owed” in a day. It’s the gap between those expectations and the reality that sets us up to grumble and feel hard-done-by. We don’t live with an absolute scale in our daily lives, at least most of us don’t. We don’t remember to think about the people who live in impossibly difficult and dangerous situations. Most of us are attached in our imaginations merely to our own expectations; they give us confidence and a kind of road map of who and where we are.

To let ourselves imagine a totally other possible life, one full of hardship and risk, is too frightening, too demanding, for most of us.

And so on March 8, the day that the international world has decided to set aside as International Women’s Day, let’s take a chunk of time to consider the lives of other women and to give them the respect that their valiantness and their persistence deserve. Where we’re born and what catastrophes we find ourselves in are both mostly out of our control. So the fact that you who are reading this are mostly NOT at immediate risk of attack or starvation or other extreme forms of violence (though I agree that any of us may, and many do, encounter anti-woman violence in words and deeds at any time, in any situation) is in many ways a matter of luck.

I don’t think I deserve my luck. If I thought I did it would mean that women born into pain and suffering deserve that, and I cannot accept that anyone deserves that birthright.

And so let’s be grateful for what we have, and spend some reflection time considering the lives of others and giving them help where we can, and respect always.

EXPECTATIONS OF LIFE

I’m sitting on a comfy version of a sofa, but it’s an exec class seat on Air Canada, a result of having the good luck to be upgraded at the lat minute. I’ve been fed and watered and I’ve had a long nap. It’s a strange thing to be out of time and place like this. Far below in the dark lies Siberia, with its great rivers, its harshness and beauty, but up here in this compartment of cocooned people, there is no sense of the real world, just the sound of fans and a sprinkling of dim lights where people sit reading or watching their individual screens.

This gated community in the sky is a zone of privilege. I feel lucky to have been able to upgrade, using my accumulated points. But what about everyone else? I am much more often in economy, trying to sleep sitting up and feeling cramped, wondering when I dare disturb the people next to me so I can get up and have a pee. The difference between the two is a matter of small degree though.

For everyone travelling by air, in whatever “class” is still immensely privileged. We’re all in the  of people with enough access to resources (our own or others’) to buy a plane ticket. It’s humbling to think that a huge proportion of the global population will never be on an airplane.

The above was written on my flight to HongKong a few days ago. I’m now in Chiang Mai, getting shed of my jetlag. My head is clear enough, I think, to at last finish this much delayed post; apologies for the long gap since my last one:

Those earlier paragraphs reflect the fact that I’ve been thinking about the things we take for granted, and how that affects our view of the world and our expectations.

I’m now trying to imagine my way into my next book project, The Persian World, as I am calling it for now. I’m travelling in my mind’s eye to Georgia and Armenia and Turkmenistan and more, as well as to various places in Iran… There are political impediments and technical problems with some of my travel ambitions, but basically I can and do imagine going to these countries and spending time there trying to understand the warp and weft of the food traditions there.

It’s only when I’m out and about (for example on tour with the Burma book last fall) meeting people who hold down responsible jobs, etc, that I get reminded that for most people there are many obstacles in the way of imagining travel. I’m not talking about money, strictly speaking, for many, especially in the developed world, could if they put their minds to it make travel a priority and save for that rather than for a car or other tangible purchase. What I’m talking about is the settledness that comes with meeting day to day responsibilities to family and friends. We tend to fall into patterns. It’s the obvious way to cope with responsibility, and patterns can also be familiar and comfortable.

And one thing about travel, especially budget travel, is that it reduces predictability and works against pattern. It demands a certain preparedness to go with the flow that is very difficult for most people, especially once we get past our first youth. And I know this because it happens that sometimes I am reluctant to leave. If ever I am tired or feeling low, especially when I am in Toronto and comfily settled in with family and friends, I sometimes feel that I’d like to just stay put.

I think that the pleasure I take in NOT knowing what tomorrow will bring is a sign of perpetual adolescence. Somehow I want to find out each day rather than knowing ahead of time what it will bring. And when I am tired I don’t have the energy for adolescence!

There’s a bit of a disconnect between having responsibilties, for example the need to meet deadlines, and my perhaps immature liking of unstructured days. Luckily I hate being late – whether for appointments or meet-ups or with writing assignment deadlines – so my sense of obligation will always trump my wish to shape my days and months freeform. That sense of obligation keeps me adult enough to function responsibly, is how some might put it!

Where does that leave me right now? Well I have a small article to finish in the next couple of days, and there’s the work of preparing for the next immersethrough session, which starts here in Chiang Mai on Sunday. But otherwise this week I’ve got time to catch up on this blog, at last, and to do some reading too.

Then on February 2 I fly to Rangoon and the next day the fifteen people arrive who are coming with me on the first Burma Food Tour. We have an itinerary: Rangoon – Bagan – Inle Lake area – Rangoon. It’s eight days in three places, joined by short airplane hops.

But the exact way we’ll be spending our days, though planned, is also a little unpredictable. The reason is partly of course that tourism in Burma can still be a little bumpy. But it’s more that we are trying to engage with Burma through food. The local guides are used to rather set itineraries, and to people wanting restaurant food, a certain predictablity in other words. But we want to improvise, eat street food, explore markets… and to be open to possibilities that present themselves.

All this means that I’ll be reporting back here on how things go, and that I’m hoping the people who come on this tour get the same pleasure I do from the unexpected. Burma is coming out of a long isolation. It’s a difficult time of transition and we have the privilege of being there to see the country as it evolves. But a work in progress is not a finished sleek production; it’s a work in progress, fascinating and frustrating too, and richly interesting.

A slice of life, in other words…