THE CHALLENGE: BEING PRESENT IN THE PRESENT

When I went out on a brisk walk (my replacement for jogging now that my left-foot-ligaments are not up to the job) yesterday morning, I started with a short sleeved sweater on over my T-shirt. No, it wasn’t cold, strictly speaking, but twenty degrees Celsius and overcast IS chilly after the weeks of heat and drought we’ve had this spring-summer. The sweater soon came off, of course.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a morning jog-walk here. I’ve been away a lot, that’s part of it, but also, for the past eight weeks or so getting on my bicycle and pedalling up a steep hill on an early morning loop has been much more enticing than walking. Even in the heat a bicycle is cooling because of the breeze of movement, and it feels so rewarding to cover a lot of ground quickly.

Later on yesterday I cycled to have lunch with a friend, a pleasurable speedy adrenalined trip to College Street West, but when we got there the restaurant (a Portuguese churrasquerria with a leafy terrace) was closed. So we ended up at Golden Turtle on Ossington, a Vietnamese place of some renown that I had never been to. Lovely to sit outside in the shade, warm and comfortable - good second-best to being in Southeast Asia - eating crispy-edged banh xeo, beef pho with tendon and lung etc, and pork kho tu (spiced deep-flavored slow-cooked pork),

  

Back to the bicycle vs foot thing though: The disadvantage of being on my bicycle moving quickly rather than walking is that I see way less, especially since I’m often focussed on traffic and road details rather than on my surroundings. On the other hand, even on foot it's possible to miss a lot.

Today I headed out on foot early, this time to the passport office downtown to renew my passport (in Canada it’s every five years, so it comes up inconveniently often). There’s an energy and purpose to most of the pedestrians at that hour, primarily office workers by the look of them. They are all headed somewhere, and often hurrying to get there on time. 

Of course others had already been at work for an hour or more: the policemen, the road workers, the guys doing construction (tearing out and rebuilding the skating rink) in front of City Hall, the staff at the coffee shops, the streetcar drivers, the doctor coming off shift in scrubs. 

The exception to all the movement and purpose was the guy sitting on the sidewalk not far from City Hall with a tidy sign that said, “I don’t smoke or drink; I need money for food.” He was middle-aged looking, pale and tired. I am not proud of the fact that I was so entrenched in my goal of getting to the passport office ASAP that I passed him by. And then his sign reverberated with me for several blocks. I wish I had stopped and made a contribution to his day.

The failed encounter with the street guy makes me think that it’s not so much the speed of one’s passage that matters in many cases, as the quality of attention we give to the world we are moving through.  Though I took in the content of the guy’s sign as I hurried past, I was being more attentive to my need to get to the passport office than to what I was seeing before me. I failed to reflect on it, to really pay attention.

In contrast, on my previous day’s brisk walk I had had time and attention for the passing scene. I looked and looked and noticed changes and people and had time for thinking too: I wondered about a mismatched couple, she young-looking, and he, older, frowning and lumpy, walking down the street holding hands; I was shocked to see the big apricot tree on Robert Street gone, a tree that used to bear loads of golden fruit, but then sickened, and has now been cleaned out; walking past the flower-garden-framed house of a friend I caught sight of her through the window and had time to knock on her door and then go in for a coffee and a chat...and so on.

It’s a tricky balance, having ambitions for the day, future goals, and at the same time trying to be present to the present. One way is to take hold of each day with a slightly firmer grip. Am I saying I should be more responsible about my time management? Perhaps. Certainly more disciplined with myself.

After seeing a friend’s disciplined way of working (when I was staying in Cape Breton), I’m realising that I should try to manage my days a little more effectively. First thing in the day he gets up and writes (sits at his computer and works steadily) for about three hours, starting very early in the morning. And then the rest of  the day can happen in any way, for his hard work is done. 

A clear unambiguous early-in-the-day-before-interruptions kind of goal is the only sane way to be reliably productive, it seems.  And it should work for people like me, whose clearest highest mental energy time is the morning.

In general I am too apt to get distracted by email and small bits of tasks whenever I sit at my computer. Those are fine, and necessary (especially as I get ready for book tour) but I should leave them until after I have done my more difficult thinking. Instead, perhaps to avoid hard work, or road blocks in my writing or thinking, I let myself slip too soon into email multi-tasking and dealing with the bits and pieces debris that gets generated by e-media of various kinds.

But to take a step back, getting down to work on hard stuff first thing in the morning requires an ahead-of-time plan. What work? In what order? I need to make a list at night, then stick to it. So easy to write or to say; so challenging to follow through on.

I like the idea of embarking on new patterns and resolutions in this still green and growing time of year, rather than waiting for the classic New Year’s resolution time of year with its dreary dark days. 

I have no excuse for not following through. And yet I know I’ll need a kick-in-the-pants reminder of this resolution from time to time!

Meanwhile, to end on a more sensual note, I had a wonderful breakfast this morning after my passport excursion: some mixed grain bread I’d made a few days ago, toasted, then eaten with whey butter topped with slices of ripe tomatoes from the back garden and sprinkled with salt mixed with kelp and dulse flakes (a treat from Cape Breton). All the best kind of eating: home-made and fresh and rich with flavour.

RICE IN VERMONT & THE BURMA BOOK TO CELEBRATE

Here it is already a full week into August. I am very happy to be eating fab ripe tomatoes from the garden, heritage varieties with black or dark green shoulders and distinctive flavour; it’s my consolation for time having flown by so quickly. But I’m not ready to be done with July. It’s my fault really, that time has flown this summer. That’s what happens when the weeks get broken up into short chunks by travel and other intense obligations.

I’ve landed back in Toronto after various gallivantings, the most recent a long car drive to and from Vermont. I was there, near Putney in southern Vermont, to speak at a rice conference held at a rice farm there. Yes, that’s not a typo; people are growing rice in the Northeastern US, in Vermont, New York, New Jersey. The fields are small, some flooded paddy, some not, and the rice is Japanese-style rice, generally varieties bred to withstand the short growing season in Hokkaido in northern Japan.

And it’s delicious, at least the rice I ate last Friday night in Vermont was wonderful. 

How could it not be? It was locally grown, organically and with care, and recently husked, and I was eating it with the grower, the cook, and a bunch of people who are committed to rice, including some very interesting scientists from Cornell. Talk about rice-geek heaven.

It was a treat to be talking about dryland rice, paddy rice, different varieties, with people who really cared, and who were way more rice-knowledgeable than I am. I learned a lot about rice breeding (not GMO rice, just breeding the good old way, crossing varieties). The only difference is that in the greenhouses the scientists can grow rice in the winter and speed up the generations, so they get true seed sooner than a farmer could who was selecting seed from a single crop each year.

One of the things I learned is how well plant scientists can deliver new rices tailored to specific conditions. This is going to become increasingly important as the threat of climate change becomes a reality and changes the crops that are appropriate in particular locations. 

Rice does well in wet areas. Low-lying wet patches that can’t be used for wheat or most other crops can be ideal for rice. And so the scientists at Cornell are helping the northeast US rice farmers develop varieties that can thrive there, and may do even better if there’s a warming. 

I also got more of a sense of the destrucive impact of the current legal situation around plant material: Since 1980 companies and individuals have been able to patent which rice seed and other seed (for example all the Monsanto GMO seed etc). The result is that corporations develop seed and patent it to make profit from it. Farmers can’t save those seeds from the harvest for planting the following year, but instead must buy each year. 

And critically, it also means that plant genetic material is no longer generously shared between countries, but instead is held back. This could be tragic if food sustainability becomes threatened in the face of climate change or other catastrophic changes... It’s a huge subject; I only caught a glimpse of a small part of the issue.

Out at the Akaogi farm I saw rice growing tall and green, heading with rice grains, some of them just beginning to ripen. When you look at plants up close, as you do when the area planted is small, you notice distinctive characteristics, you see the varieties as individuals rather than staring with a generalised gaze over a field of green.

That process of looking closely applies not just to crops of course, but to many other situations. We can generalise about people or countries or cultures, or we can see them as individuals. Sometimes it’s necessary or convenient shorthand to generalise, but mostly it’s dangerous, for it allows us to forget the individual strengths and the humanity of each person. And that in turn allows us to make war against or feel belligerent or paranoid about whole groups of people.

This is all pretty obvious stuff. We see it in action when there are hate crimes. We also see it in the political process, when specific groups or populations, Muslims for example, are demonised by those who capitalise on fear.

And so I conclude that the more we can know each other, the more understanding we have that all over the world there are people like us trying to live their lives and do their best for their families and their community.

And that leads me to my latest book, BURMA: Rivers of Flavor. I now have my first copy, one of a small batch that was air-shipped over late last week to New York from Hong Kong. In fact it was then Fed-Exed to the Akaogi Farm, where I found it when I arrived last Friday evening.  So thrilling to open the package.

And WOW is all I could say when I first saw it. 

The long and interesting process of editing the manuscript into a book, and working with designers and editors to get it to where everyone thinks it should be, takes time and patience, and a preparedness to feel your way sometimes. This time all that effort and thoughtfulness has produced a lovely book, very inviting, very beautiful in all kinds of ways.

I hope that it succeeds in transporting readers into the specifics of people and places and food in Burma. I want them to be able to visualise life there, to gain a taste for the food - so delicious and inventive and accessible. I want them to gain a respect for the people of Burma, who have been through so much and now look forward to a brighter future.

TIME FOR PLANTING & OTHER OPTIMISMS

Writing here feels like playing hookey! I should be editing the Burma book, since I'm in the last ten days before I submit the manuscript. Well I've been doing a lot of that book-work, so it's time for a break.

Procrastination and avoidance are such interesting phenomena. How we justify them, or just fail to admit what we're doing, is a whole study in human behaviour! I have managed several great breaks in the last few days, each time telling myself that I need to clear my head. That may well be true, but I'm not sure that taking a whole day off was necessary!

I'm talking about Sunday, when Dawn-the-baker and I drove out of town at 7.30 in the morning under a grey and overcast sky, headed for Grey County, but not directly. First we had to go to Listowel to pick up some maple syrup; Dawn uses it in the granola that she makes as part of the Evelyn's Crackers line of locally made crackers and shortbread etc. And just south of Listowel are the Hoovers, who make organic syrup.

What??!? you say, how could maple syrup NOT be organic? The answer is that it depends on how the equipment is cleaned. The Hoovers use no chemical agents, just the sap itself, to clean the pans and pipes. It's an amazing operation, using sap from the trees in their bush, and wood from that bush to cook the sap. Talk about sustainable and local!

Because it was Sunday, on our way between Waterloo and Listowel on small country roads we passed Mennonites, old order Mennonites in their black horse carts, driving to Sunday service. In one yard there were over forty carts, drawn by one horse or a matched pair. The fields were such an intense green under the overcast sky, and the carts shone black against the green, the men clean-shaven in black hats, the married women all in black with a bonnet, and only the girls wearing a little colour, perhaps some purple or intense blue. We felt lucky to be out and about in Mennonite Country with eyes to see its loveliness, and time to admire it.

From Listowel we headed north to Grey County, via Ayton and Neustadt, and eventually to the small town of Elmwood. The STC, Saugeen Trading Community, which I've written about before, was having its spring Market Day. It's a chance for members to buy and sell, for trading community credit or federal dollars, or a mixture, and to catch up on news. I came away filled with news and warmed by friendship. More tangible loot included a ceramic bowl, a pair of gently worn yellow pants, some rhubarb, and a load of plants/starts: tomato and basil and chile peppers.

It really is time to plant now that the warm weather has come (as of yesterday). All the starts I bought (including some cumin plants from a small nursery) are now in the ground except the tomatoes. I came across lots of fat worms as I dug today, very encouraging. The tomato plants will go in bags of soil (to avoid the blight in my garden), perhaps tomorrow, when I take yet another break from the Burma bookwork!

And in the neighbourhood as I go for my morning run the chestnut trees are in full magnificent bloom, the irises are coming out, and the city's cyclists have now all got their bicycles on the road it seems. What a great sight, people in business clothing pedalling to work instead of driving in a car. The university of Toronto is now in full Convocation/Graduation swing, with lawns all mowed and a huge tent set up opposite Convocation Hall. Today there was a lovely crowd of happy parents and graduates out on the green grass looking delighted, and a straggle of academics in red and black and all kinds of coloured robes and hoods making thier way back to their offices from the ceremony.

I was on my bicycle threading my way through them, for I was headed to a Women's Culinary Network event late this afternoon. It was a potluck. I took some incredible wide flat crackers made by Dawn-the-baker, beautiful eight by eleven inch flats, and to go with them, a big block of old cheddar, and a jar of freshly-invented "chutney". The crackers were a hit, and the chutney and cheese too. Here's the chutney story: I had some stewed rhubarb, slightly sweet, made from the fruit I'd bought in Grey County. So I heated olive oil, added mustard seed and fennel and a little turmeric, and some dried red chiles, then tossed in chopped dandelion greens and garlic chives from the back garden. Once they'd wilted with a little salt, I added the rhubarb and cooked it all down a little. The combination of bitter and sweet and tart with some chile heat too was great, essence of springtime in one easy mouthful!

APRIL SUN & SHOWERS & THE PROMISE OF NEW LIFE

In the warm optimism of yesterday's sunshine, springtime finally announcing itself, I drove out of Toronto and through the swooping hills north to Grey County. I had a great visit with my lively and wonderful aunt in Markdale and then headed over in the sunny late afternoon to Durham.

There was a contra-dance last night in the town hall in Durham, a lovely chance to catch up with friends. We danced and danced, to lilting music by Scatter the Cats of Owen Sound and area: fiddle, mandolin, double bass, irish flute... instructed and called to so that we found ourselves moving pretty confidently through the complications of the dances, getting hot and sweaty and happy as we did so. "We" were about 75 people, maybe more, of all ages, from small children to grandparents, of all descriptions, all there to have fun and also to help raise money for a local Waldorf-ish school called Edge Hill.

I spent the night at friends' whose house is in a forest. This morning, instead of yesterday's sun we found ourselves in dripping rain, with occasional flashes of lightning and rolling thunder. There are still no leaves on the trees, so the forest was all vertical lines and soft autumnal tones. Well, not entirely autumnal. There's a quickening in the trees, heavy buds on branches, a warmth to the bark on the willows, the occasional strand of green peeping up already from under the damp brown-tan-purplish layers of last year's leaves.

We had a sauna this morning, seven adults sitting on benches in a hot wooden room, the stove hissing when we tossed a little water on it. Every so often one or more of us would go out to stand in the cool dripping rain radiating clouds of steam. Fun! And such a cleansing feeling, all that sweat and open-pored skin in the cool moist air.

After a huge drink of water I headed down the misty road in the little red Honda Fit, feeling light as air. The last patches of snow were brilliant white against the soft tones of the damp fields. And rising from each snowy patch was a fine mist, the moisture in the air condensing in the colder temperatures above the snow. It's an eerie effect, that trailing mist. In the low-lying patches, at dips in the road, and over pools of water still ice-patched in places, there was swirling thick fog. Fields of corn stubble were rows of pale yellow on dark, like some ancient hand-writing on the curving landscape, with gleaming black crows as punctuation. And there were newly ploughed fields, the soil not brown, not black, but again that purplish brown-black of spring, promising life and fruitfulness.

I know that when I drive those roads again in two or three weeks there will be brilliant colour, not the muted tones of today, and no mist, no snow, no skims of ice still floating on shaded small ponds.

It all got me thinking about impermanence. Of course as I drove through it, my view of the landscape was constantly changing. But even if I'd been standing still, my view would have been melting and moving and transforming before my eyes. In these northern climes all of nature is change, especially at these "shoulder" times of year, when we lurch out of the grip of winter and into the promise of new life. It's miraculous.

Back in the city now I know that I must start digging up the back garden, feeding it some manure, and thinking about where to plant the early lettuce seed. I had problems with tomato blight last year, so I need to move things around. The tomatoes have to go somewhere new. But how to do that? there's a very small space, and not all of it with good sunshine. hmmm

My cousin Jennifer sent me a link about blight and suggested that I could grow tomatoes in bags of soil, so they don't come in contact with the infected soil in my garden. That takes more planning and discipline than I'm used to putting into my gardening. My approach tends to be more haphazard. But I should be treating the garden with more respect.

I had a conversation last night at the dance with a friend named Diane who is part of the seed-saving movement. Her task this year is to grow more than twenty plants, tomato plants of a particular heirloom variety, in a place at least 100 feet from any other tomato plants (to ensure the seeds from the new crop are not-contaminated by cross-pollination). She's on a farm, so she has the space, but she still has to cultivate and develop a whole new area of garden, a huge amount of work. If she can do that, and the other seed-savers can put their efforts into protecting heirloom varieties for the good of us all, then the least I can do is take good care of my small tomato crop. Right?

And finally, on the Burma book front: This evening i retested the balachaung recipe (a great side-condiment, with tamarind, fried shallots and garlic, lots of dried shrimp ground to a powder, all cooked together into an umami-laden must-have condiment. My mouth is watering as I write this!). And I made a deceptively simple staple I learned about in Kengtung, in the Eastern Shan States (just near where the earthquake was a few weeks ago). It's made of rice and peanuts cooked together and then ground into a smooth texture, rather like a polenta. Tashi loved it.

A couple of days ago I printed out a draft of all the recipes, organised by chapters and looking pretty complete. It's thrilling to have the recipes in a three-ring binder, easy to annotate as I retest. I feel I've turned a corner, and am on the home stretch.

As I write this Dom and Tashi are also on a home stretch, a different one, which is made up of exams and term papers, as the university year comes to an end. I'm on cooking duty for these weeks, my small contribution to their efforts. And they thank me and say they'll take good care of me as I get really close to my June deadline. I'll keep you posted!

ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS IN A GUST OF WIND

It happened overnight, the end of summer. Suddenly we were being blown and chilled tempestuously, by winds that gusted and shifted, sending clouds racing and people hurryng to find their wool sweaters and their windbreakers. That was last Friday night, after a week of hot heavy days. I had a restless sleep, and so did many others, I gather. I've been leaving my door open all summer, the door from my top-floor bedroom out onto a small balcony. It's given me a sleeping-outside feeling, free and airy, on the hot nights we've had since June. But sometime in the middle of the night what felt like howling gales through the door drove me up out of my bed to close it, with a sigh of regret and relief, both: regret of course at the end of the soft warmth of summer, and relief once the chilly winds were shut out by the firmly closed door.

Saturday morning's early bicycle ride to the Brickworks Market was windy and blowy, and at the market people who had looked out and seen sun, but not read the paper or looked at the weather forecast online, were shivering in T-shirts - brrrr! - as they bought their bread and meat and end-of-summer tomatoes and plums, and tried to warm themselves with hot coffee. I was in three layers topped by a scarf wrapped round and round my neck, and still I was barely warm enough. But the balancing pleasure to all that cold was realising that it was time to start baking, so in went a skillet cake, this one topped with chopped peaches, chopped but not peeled. (That cake has already vanished, and a second, made last night, is well on its way too.)

Saturday evening after supper and cake with mint tea, with the winds calmed back down, I went for a walk with friends through the University of Toronto campus. It was beautiful, but empty of people, a stage-set just before the curtain rises.

And sure enough, on Sunday morning before eight, as I ran through campus, there were the first signs of renewed life. A woman walking toward me near one of the residences carrying an armload of clothing smiled at me in the sunshine as she said, with delight, "What a beautiful first day at university! She's so lucky!" She told me they'd driven in early from the Niagara peninsula to move her daughter into residence, then she carried on down the path, followed by her daughter and others, each of them loaded with "stuff". As I ran on under the intensely blue clear sky I could hear the leaves rustling, that sound that starts in early autumn as the leaves dry out in the cold. How does it happen overnight? I thought, that suddenly the leaves are getting ready to fall rather than working on photosynthesis and making life?

Once more the reminders pour in, that change is a constant, with the scales weighted on both sides, life and death, endings and beginnings of all kinds. At this time of year, as summer warmth and life is dying, a different kind of life is starting afresh for so many...

it is the start of a new year this week, not just Rosh Hoshana in the Jewish calendar, but the new year for all of us who live with or near schools or universities or live with people who are engaged with education. There's that feeling of hope and sense of optimism and promise in the air, in the voices of the students, on the faces of parents and teachers and students alike. Our four-year-old friend E is headed into junior kindergarten, wriggling with anticipation. Our friend N is starting her first year at university, delighted to be done with high school. And so it goes, in thousands of households.

For me it's a thrill every year, it's each time a fresh pleasure, to watch the new year begin.

Meanwhile in the garden my tomato plants are yielding less and less (some of them because of blight as well as shorter chillier days), though the mint and basil is still vigorous, and I tell myself each day that I must plant some salad greens (should have done it several weeks ago in fact). I found the seed packages today, mixed salad greens and leaf lettuce, and they'll go in tomorrow. With any luck there will be time before the snow falls in any serious way to pick some tender lettuce. I hope so!