"I CAN'T EVEN...": THOUGHTS ON DRAWING, & A SPUMA RECIPE

“I can’t even…” is a recent hot catchphrase, used by young people in their late teens and into their twenties, to allude to an impossible-to-talk-about kind of event or feeling. It’s a very useful tool, I find, especially as I plod away at my book project, nibbling at the edges, or sweating out recipe testing, or worrying about time and space, history and context. I’m often so enmeshed, “I can’t even…”

Meantime out in the immediate world we’re having a cool and well-watered summer. The garden is happy, drinking it up and greening. The exceptions are still the eggplants, which won’t set fruit without some assurance of warmth, an assurance only intermittent and thus not credible. The cucumbers and greens are thriving and continue to be sweet and appetising, at all hours and for every occasion.

I’m pleased because recipe testing for this Persian World book includes dishes that are traditionally accompanied by a plate of fresh herbs, such an easy task in summer time. The zip and zing of fresh tarragon and mint, basil and green onion is hard to beat. The mouth comes alive and everything tastes better, life itself in fact.

The other day a friend came by and I put a small plate of fresh arugula and tarragon on so that we could nibble at the greens as we chatted. They were so energising they made me feel as if my brain had added sparkle and energy.

What other ways are there of bringing ourselves to greater liveliness? Yes, yes, a good party, dancing, etc. I agree. But on a daily basis?

A number of close friends have urged me to try Vipassana meditation. They have gone to ten-day sessions, and each time return from them energised and radiant. I see the evidence, but just cannot imagine sitting still for ten days. Life feels too short! My attitude is short-sighted perhaps, but I’m stuck there.

This spring and summer I’ve stumbled onto a wonderfully accessible alternative, and that is drawing. I took a course in May-June, three hours every Wednesday afternoon for five weeks, and then a five days-in-a-row course just last week, both from Kelley Aitken, and both taught in the galleries at the Art Gallery of Ontario. A good drawing teacher, either in person or even in a book, teaches you to see differently. And once that happens, and you engage with looking and with transmitting what you see onto the page, well then you’re away!

It’s not about “I’m so terrible” or “See look how good I am at drawing!”. Instead it’s about concentrated focus on a non-verbal task. It’s like practising music, I suppose, or any other form of focusses attentiveness. I found I was losing myself in the process, in the best sense of “losing myself”.

And I found myself feeling relaxed and light as air (as wll as pleasurably tired) at the end of each session.

“Welcome to your meditation practice!” wrote a Vipassana-practicing friend on my FB page after I posted about the joys of drawing.

At the times when, as happens intermittently, I get overwhelmed by the scale of this current book project and all that I need to pull together, I can now opt out into a mind-cleansing place, and return refreshed, with better vision and insight (hopefully!).

And so, like those life-giving sprigs of fresh green intensity, my drawing pad and pencils can - and if I follow through they will - become an energiser, a wonderful option that is indescribably fruitful, in ways “I can’t even….”

RECIPE TALK: SPUMA

I bought some gooseberries at the market last Saturday. Dawn-the-Baker, of Evelyn’s Crackers suggested that I make “spuma” with them. What’s that? I asked. (She also suggested a gooseberry cake recipe in Jane Grigson’s FRUIT cookbook (a real treasure). And so I made both.)

Spuma is a real discovery for me, a chilled/frozen Italian dessert made with intensely fresh fruit syrup and egg-whites beaten to stiff peaks, that are folded together and then frozen.

My proportions were:

- 3 cups gooseberries (no need to top and tail them) cooked to softened with very little water and a scant 1 cup sugar, then pressed through a sieve into a bowl (discard the solids) and allowed to cool to room temperature;

- whites of 4 large eggs whisked (I used my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer) with ¼ cup sugar for less than 3 minutes, or whatever time it takes to get stiff peaks;

- a bowl into which I poured the meringue and then folded and gently stirred in 1 cup of the room-temperature gooseberry “syrup”/sweet liquid (I drank the remaining little bit of gooseberry liquid; what a tonic!);

- a plastic bag to cover the bowl tightly and a freezer to put it in.

After two to three hours you have a chilled cold dessert, delish over cake or fruit or on its own. There’s no dairy, so it feels light as air in your mouth.

AND A NOTE for next time: I found that the mixture had separated a little before it froze: there was more pale meringue on top and more gooseberry at the bottom of the bowl. Next time I will try stirring it gently after twenty minutes, when it’s partly frozen, to make sure it stays well mixed.

ANOTHER NOTE, for other fruit: If you are using raspberries or cherries, or peaches or plums, which are sweeter than gooseberries, try using only 1/2 cup sugar for 3 cups fruit. You can taste the syrup and adjust it of course, so go lightly on the sugar to test what you want. I like spuma on the less-sweet side. I find it more refreshing.

A CLEARING HEAD UNDER A CLEAR BRIGHT-MOON SKY

The waning moon, still bright, fat, and full-looking, has made its way up past my line of sight as I look out my east-facing windows. The sky is clear now: gone the haze and high cloud of this morning and afternoon, swept away by a short torrential rainfall just after sunset this evening. I’ve never seen rain here in January before. It’s almost unheard of. And no complaints, for it has freshened and brightened the air and washed away the dust. I expect tomorrow will be crisp and clear.

What a wonderful prospect, especially since I’m heading north to the countryside not far from Fang, about three hours’ drive from here in Chiang Mai. I’ll be with the people who have joined me for this year’s immersethrough session. It’s a congenial and collegial group of people, so conversations are wide-ranging and interesting. Yes there are food questions and questions relating to what we come across in the markets (the huge wildly lively and crammed-full wholesale market – Muang Mai – this morning for example), but we also end up talking history and politics and travel, finding cross-connections between our interests.

And so the journey north past rice fields (where there’s irrigation) and plots of garlic and shallots (where there’s not), and towering green limestone hills, will have layers of idea and conversation and story too, the landscape of the group travelling through the landscape of northern Thailand. It’s a pleasing idea.

Tonight we walked back from a restaurant on the west side of the old city, after a supper of issaan food that included grilled fish, grilled chicken, greens, som tam, and a brilliant tom yum soup aromatic with fresh herbs. The air was humid and there was the smell of wet pavement. The old city was very quiet, with only a few people walking apart from the seven of us, very little traffic, and a mere scattering of people at various restaurants and cafes. Chiang Mai is so liveable…

I haven’t written here for a disgracefully long time. I’m not sure why that is. I mean, yes, I have been busy with various deadlines and with preparing for the immersethrough session. But that can’t be the whole answer. Somehow my head has been full of details in a way that hasn’t allowed for the thinkng, mostly unconscious, that seems to be what lies behind the posts I usually write, and that I enjoy writing.

This isn’t the first time this subject has come up here. But it is a reminder that we seem to need to catch up to ourselves. What I mean by that is that if we draw too heavily on our resources – not getting enough sleep or downtime or whatever – then eventually the debt, the arrears, will have to be made good. We’ll be forced, by illness or incompetence or whatever, to let our bodies or minds heal or rest or catch up, whatever the appropriate term might be in the circumstances.

And so it is that I think the busy-ness of last fall’s BURMA book tour, plus the lovely intensities of the holiday season, are still reverberating in my head and memory, taking up space if you will, and not allowing fresh and new thoughts to form and create themselves.

I hope this phase is over and that I can return to the easy assumption that there will be time in the coming days for reflection and for generating new thoughts. I sure hope so.

None of this should be read as a complaint, more as an acknowledgemnt of incapacity. It is strange to think that even with the airings-out and exercise that have come with several long energetic bicycle rides with friends recently, I still haven’t managed to find a clear productive head, at least until now.

One of the immersethrough people said to me tonight, “By the end of the day you must have a lot of narratives going round in your head.” Yes, he hit the nail on the head, though I had never thought of it in exactly that way. It’s other peoples stories which I find fascinating. They go on reverberating for me. And I guess when I’m in changing and peopled situations, as I was on book tour, I end up with a lot of stories that reverberate and take up space.

This is why people meditate, or isolate themselves, to get clarity. But I do love the society of others, their stories and ideas and emotional reactions.  And that’s why the idea of sitting and meditating for ten days at a Vipassana retreat, something that a number of friends have done and have urged me to do, just doesn’t appeal.

Does it mean that I am in flight from myself? Are other people’s stories just a way to hide from my own realities and weaknesses? Perhaps. But they’re also an endlessly interesting and warming reminder of the textures of human existence. Nothing beats that! 

LETTING THE BRAIN REST...

The western sky is an extraordinary pale green shading lower to warm yellow and further down into almost orange, with dark purple trailings of cloud here and there to give it contour. Here in Chiang Mai it’s just past six oclock and time for night to fall.

Many people here have already closed the shutters or sliding metal doors on their shops and businesses and headed home for a well-deserved rest. Others, especially bars and restaurants, are just opening for business. 

It’s “well-deserved rest” that I want to talk about here, “down time”, to use another term. Several days ago I read a posting by a meditation guy about our brain’s need for down time or repose. His argument is that our brains are designed for long pauses where nothing much happens, a time to reflect and be centred, rather than engaged in active “seeking”. He’s starting from the premise that the way humans lived in the time before cities developed involved long periods when nothing much happened, and where there was no stimulus for the brain. He says if we time-machined back to that time, we’d be bored silly.

And he argues that meditation techniques were developed by the great religions precisely when humans developed cities and started living in  stimulating environments. He says we are born with the urge to seek stimulus. And in the modern era we can go on doing that 24/7. Just as the modern easy availability of sugar (another thing we are genetically programmed to want and seek out) leads many to over-indulge, so the easy availability of distraction, of things to want and seek for and obtain, leads to over-indulgence and is damaging to our health.  The article is here: http://www.wildnessandwonder.com/2011/06/downtime-for-the-brain/

I’m not sure of his science or his reasoning from the Paleolithic, but I do agree that taking a pause from the hamster wheel of running in endless circles checking Facebook and links and then Twitter then circling back around to Facebook with perhaps a stop in to check personal mail, and so on, can dull the mind and lead to a kind of self-loathing. And of course it also cuts deeply into the capacity to get any original thinking or work done. At least that’s the case for me.

A long while ago I wrote about the need to allow ourselves “buffer days”, days when we don’t work and don’t put pressure on ourselves to produce. I’d argue now that there’s an urgent need to give ourselves a holiday from the button-pushing stimulus seeking that our laptops or smart phones entice us into. There are days when I have lots to get done, and so I am not tempted into the round-robin described above. But on days when I’m at a loose end, or procrastinating about getting started on a project, I’m vulnerable to getting sucked into the whirlpool. And then an hour or two later I realise how much time has passed, and I feel a little nauseated. 

I wrote all the above two evenings ago.

Since then I have taken several breaks from the hamster wheel, and it has felt so good. The most outstanding brain rest was the long bicycle ride I went on yesterday with three guys who pedal a lot here in Chiang Mai and know good countryside routes. We ended up covering about 110 km (over 65 miles), on what was a beautiful but very hot-in-the-early-afternoon day. Whew!

I was immersed in conversations occasionally, but was mostly in a nice undemanding zone of pedalling and looking at the places I was passing by: fields of rice stubble with lean lop-eared white cattle grazing, often with an egret perched on their shoulders; hamlets and villages with shady trees and wooden houses and small village markets; clumps of tall graceful bamboo; and in the distance beautiful hills/mountains, cleanly etched on the near horizon. A perfect day, except when the heat bouncing back up off the tarmac at around 1 pm started to make me feel a little queasy.

(Perhaps I wasn’t coping as well with the heat because of our lunch. We stopped at “the pig place” as they called it, on a small road off the road to Pai. There the poeple roast/grill whole pig, one at a time, then cut it in portions and charcoal grill it a little more. Unbelievably delicious, as was the nam jiim sauce they served in it (a touch of coriander seed in it) and the som tam. Meat at midday is not recommended when there are over 50 kilometres to cover in the hot afternoon! But it was so special that it was worth the discomfort of a little queasiness an hour later.)

I cannot imagine sitting still for long periods and meditating. But moving meditation, being out in my body and centred there rather than in restless thoughts, sure seems like a good way of having brain “down time”. 

Other options, pleasurable ones, are a little less kinetic, and also wonderful: singing, drawing or making some other creation, walking, swimming... Even getting lost in a good book can still your brain’s searching.

While I was on book tour this fall I failed to take the pauses I needed, I got swept up in the buzzing to-and-fro of schedules and other people’s expectations. The one exception was when I was in St Helena for the CIA’s Worlds of Flavor conference. The conference itself was intense and charged, but each morning while I was there I was able to swim lengths in a lap pool, getting up at 5.30 to swim in the calm California-scented darkness. It was healing in ways I didn’t realise at the time.

Now as I pack up for a short trip into Burma and then a flight back to Toronto for a month there (I’ll be back in Chiang Mai in mid-January), I’m imagining forward as I try to decide what to pack and what to leave, and at the same time in a small way mourning the fact that I am leaving just as I’ve found ease and restedness. 

AFTERTHOUGHT: It’s the King of Thailand’s 85th birthday today. When I went out for coffee near Chiang Mai Gate this morning, almost everyone was wearing yellow in his honour. I read on Twitter and elsewhere that many people are lined up in Bangkok to see him, or planning to watch the ceremonies on TV this morning. And on the King’s birthday the rule is that no alcohol is served, so though restaurants are open, straight bars will not be.