Tipping point

There comes a time when your relationship with your animal companions shifts. When it switches from them caring for you – welcoming you when you come home, accompanying you on walks, reading at the beach, and wandering through galleries – to you caring for them. When they can no longer run with you to the post-office, jump into the bed, or sleep in that extra hour (or two or three) because they move slowly and with care, or need to get up – to go out, drink water – and you change to accommodate them. Because they have been so good to you for so many years. And you love them. It is a natural switch, not a sacrifice. One you realize only after you have made it. For love. For friendship. For grace. Every day.

The Raw and the Cooked

In The Raw and the Cooked, Claude Levi-Strauss discusses the structures of myths as basic frameworks by which to understand cultural relations. The theory goes, that you can understand the structures of a culture by understanding the binary oppositions present in the culture’s mythology. In a simplistic reading of the title of this book – raw is associated with nature and cooked with culture.

Which brings me to today. I have been struggling with the anti-social (read, away-from-culture) nature of being raw. The difficulties going out to dinner as a “normal” (read, member of my culture) person only to get wilted lettuce, tasteless tomatoes, and the discomfort that comes from being dissatisfied while everyone else at the table is enjoying their cooked (read, part of culture, society) foods.

So I’ve been experimenting eating cooked foods. And I feel like crap every time. I get bloated, puffy, congested … so the challenge question is, how to develop some sort of continuum, a conversation within the binary system that enables you to remain raw (natural, healthy, feeling good in your body) while participating in the cooked world. What types of ccoked foods enable you to share (to break bread together – a symbol of friendship, connection, and trust) without making you sick … ?

Celebration

Yesterday was Nessa, my labrador retriever’s, 15th birthday. She is REALLY old for a lab, and I have this acute awareness that we are on borrowed time. And I am deeply grateful for every day that I have with her. Because there is not a day that we are together, that she doesn’t teach me – to be present, to be content, to be amazed, to be open to possibilities, to love unabashedly. So I threw her a Quinceanera – a full-on 15th birthday party with her dog and people and little-people friends, filled with fun, Mexican foods, a pinata, and gourmet doggie pastries (thanks Nina!). Everyone was there for her, and she knew it. Last night on our walk, she moved with a little more spring in her step. xx