Poem: The Guest House

I found this poem here and have been finding it helpful this week.

<--The Metacomet-Monadnock Trail up Talcott Mountain.

















This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

By Rumi, Translation by Coleman Barks

This Time of Year

really gets to me. It's not the cold or the snow ... those have actually cushioned the ugliness a bit. It's the dark. And the long stretch of nothingness until Memorial Day. The endless string of mornings of getting up in the dark, showering in the dark, getting dressed in a cold bedroom, and trudging off to the bus before sunrise ... it saps my enthusiasm, motivation, cheer. I don't want to do anything and I have a hard time making plans. I don't have any good ideas.


This is a picture of our living Christmas tree, the newest member of our family, which I had intended to write about, but I just didn't have the energy (see above). It's also to break up the text, because an unnamed critic likes this blog better than its sister blog, Blogging Saddles, because it has more pictures. :)

So I'm going to steal other people's ideas. I was reading the New Yorker on the way home the other day and found two very apt descriptions. I'm always struck when someone is able to describe an idea or event in a way that really conveys an experience to someone who hasn't experienced it. I guess that's why some people make their living writing for others, and the rest of us don't.

The first is an article about two guys who were in the Peace Corps in China at the very time I was in the Peace Corps in Armenia. Peter Hessler seems to have given it a lot of thought and come up with how living in another culture for two years affects us. Or perhaps I just had a very similar experience of Peace Corps. He writes:

The experience changed you, but not necessarily in the way you'd expect. It was a bad job for hardcore idealists, most of whom ended up frustrated and unhappy. Pragmatists survived, and the smart ones set small daily goals: learning a new Chinese phrase or teaching a poem to a class of eager students. Long-term plans tended to be abandoned. Flexibility was important, and so was a sense of humor. There had been nothing funny about the Peace Corps brochures, and the typical American view of the developing world was deadly serious--there were countries to be saved and countries to be feared. That was true of the Communists, too; their propaganda didn't have an ounce of humor. But the Chinese people themselves could be surprisingly lighthearted. They laughted at everything about me: my nose, the way I dressed, my use of their language. It was a terrible place for somebody stiffly proud to be American. Somtimes I thought of the Peace Corps as a reverse refugee organization, displacing all those lost Midwesterners, and it was probably the only government entity that taught Americans to abandon key national characteristics. Pride, ambition, impatience, the instinct to control, the desire to accumulate, the missionary impulse--all of it slipped away (Jan. 12, 2009, p. 32).

The other bit that I thought was dead-on, and helped me understand what I've found so troubling about the u-rah-rah response here in the U.S. to events in the Middle East (I couldn't find a way neutral way to say it without being this vague!), was by David Remnick in the Talk of the Town section:

As in so many instances in the past half century--the Lebanon War of 1982, the "Iron Fist" repsonse to the 1988 intifada, the Lebanon War of 2006--the Israelis have reacted to intolerable acts of terror with a determination to inflict terrible pain, to teach the enemy a lesson. The civilian suffering and deaths are inevitable; the lessons less so (p. 18).

The more terrible pain inflicted, the worse things seem to get, and at least 1,200 Palestinians have been killed. Nobody seems to learn anything. Or perhaps it's just mid-January talking.

Take Heart, Localvores

We hit the New Haven farmer's market yesterday morning, and the fresh produce pickins were slim. Last year this time, I recall that the Yale farm had a mountain of parsnips, and the guy from Waldingfield farm had a few winter squash at least. But it's been a snowy and cold winter in Connecticut so far, and all we found yesterday were some soft looking apples, potatoes, and winter kale mixed with spinach. We wheeled and dealed with the pork guy, and got 3 hocks, a belly, and some tantalizing looking ribs for a ridiculously low price (that is, for a pig that lived the Good Life). The beef guy comped us a generous sirloin tip, perhaps out of surprise that I had made good on the $60 I owed him for the fantastic standing rib roast we had for Christmas/Solstice/Hannukah (we made it like this, and enthusiastically recommend the recipe + sauces). So by the time we left, we weren't feeling terribly disappointed.

Suppertime rolled around, and I inspected my Waldingfield farm potatoes. I cut into them: brilliant purple. I chopped them into big chunks and made my favorite farmer's market potato dish: 40 minutes in a 400-degree oven, tossed with sparing amounts of light oil and sea salt, stirred every 10 minutes. Made a salad of the spinach and kale, supplemented with some non-local red leaf lettuce, topped with my favorite tahini dressing. So tasty! (I know what you'll say: anything is good with salt and oil. Not necessarily! These potatoes positively effervesced with wholesome, local, potatoey goodness.) A hearty winter meal, with mostly fresh local produce, in front of the fire as the snow fell outside.