I’ve been spending frequent but short amounts of time outside tending to the garden. I’ve been trying to establish a daily practice of caring for it. I hope to keep it’s wild ways in check this year and stay in charge (which is hilarious really), I’m nowhere near in charge, but the daily attention is having it’s effect. I’m not sure if the daily attention has me noticing more, or if I’m being shown more, which comes first?
While prepping veggies in the kitchen, for some reason, I had to leave what I was doing and go outside. Earlier it had stopped raining and the light was hitting the view just right. This is what I found.
These are hostas, they grow in the shadiest part of my garden under the branches of a sugar maple tree. They don’t show their flowers until much later in the season. They quietly add light to the shady areas through their vibrant foliage and deeply grooved leaves. After the recent rain the remnant drops reflected a passing cloud. These quiet plants are not quiet at all, they may be in the shade but they certainly make themselves seen and seem to say who needs flowers? I’m in favor of anything that reflects the light.
May is vasculitis awareness month and many of you know I am currently doing well, however many are not. I have yet to talk to someone about my disease from outside of the specialty medical field who have even heard of it before. When I was diagnosed I certainly hadn’t and I have since met many nurses & doctors who have not been familiar with it either. Here’s a hint, if you can’t get a pulse in your wrists or a blood pressure reading in your arms and you’re still upright, then you might have Takayasu’s (it used to be called pulseless disease). Awareness is so important for timely diagnosis and early intervention. Once damage is done to arteries, it cannot be reversed and surgery is often a bandaid. Read the rest of this entry »
I get asked quite regularly what is a macrobiotic diet? I never know how to answer, I feel people want to hear what I do and don’t eat, but that is never accurate because macrobiotics isn’t all about what you eat. It is more of a philosophy than a diet, a way of life rather than a temporary fix, it is perhaps best described by Warren as an orderly approach to diet and lifestyle. I’ll often launch into a description about eating for energetics without mentioning yin and yang which makes peoples eyes glaze over pretty fast. I find though that whatever I say people still want to know what I do and don’t eat. So I’m starting a collection of the best descriptions and explanations about the macrobiotic diet here, so that I can get better at explaining it all in a few sentences.
I have made a playlist on youtube called mythbusting macrobiotics, which has the following video featuring Lawrence Kushi the son of Michio and Aveline Kushi. He is a professor of etiology at Columbia University and I enjoy his balanced description of how he found an avenue of science that met his criteria of ethical inquiry and also matched his personal interest in nutrition after being raised in a macrobiotic household. He describes how science is reaching similar conclusions to those of the macrobiotic community about the relationship between diet & lifestyle and disease occurrence across populations. It is interesting when he modestly states that many major natural food companies in the United States were founded by people who initially studied macrobiotics.
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