Motherless Child

My essay, "Motherless Child," appeared in the Humanist this month. Here's the link if you are interested in reading it:
Motherless Child

The Amaranth Bloom and Kafka’s Metamorphosis

Many of the themes in Kafka’s Metamorphosis are explored in The Amaranth Bloom. In particular, I have used Kafka's metaphor of a human turning into an insect to describe the way we can become victims of war. In my book, my characters are tortured by the circumstances in which they find themselves, just as Gregor is tortured. They live in crowded rooms, eat disgusting food, and are visited by men who are in control of their fate. I use the biological metaphor of a grasshopper turning locust as follows:

Normally the desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) lives the peaceful solitary life of a tantric Buddhist monk. He chants, eats, drinks and even has sex in slow, purposeful, meditative moderation. But if you rub him up the wrong way, by overcrowding him and touching the back of his thigh too many times, he and his cronies—all former monks in the monastery—will renounce this life of solitary loving kindness. They’ll exchange their soft green robes for a black and yellow uniform and turn into one of the nastiest, greediest, most obnoxious gangs on earth: a plague of locusts.

“In humans this switch from nice to nasty is a gradual process,” Pa taught us. “It comes from losing confidence your descendants will have the resources they need to live a happy life. The cost of war is so great, though, that we would have used volition to evolve a much better way to build confidence, like we did with farming, if the great spiritual leaders hadn’t taught us that waging a war against evil, greed, cruelty, hate, and jealousy is the highest duty. So instead of thinking we’re fighting for confidence, we think we’re fighting against evil. But what you think is evil depends on the stories you hold in your ancestral memory. If you go back far enough you’ll see that sometimes your ancestors were right and sometimes they were wrong.”

As the protagonists in my book struggle with their own metamorphosis from child to adult and from white to black, they fight to use volition to avoid becoming insects. But after Gerry is beaten up by Letty’s father, he wakes up to find that he has lost his volition and has become an insect.  

In Metamorphosis, the food is used to represent the way his family is disgusted by Gregor. I used the recipes to show the cultural differences between Letty and the Dernison family, but also to show how what can be considered grave oppression—being reduced to eating tulip bread during WWII, for example—can be embraced as empowering, and that if we want to end war, we must stay confident and that means not allowing ourselves to be victims.

Adventurous Eating!

Ever tried tortoise tonic? How about Walkie-Talkie soup, made from the feet and heads (the "walkies" and "talkies") of chickens? Here is the Walkie-Talkie soup recipe from my book The Amaranth Bloom. If times are hard and you can't afford to eat organic, go to your local organic farm and they'll be happy to give you the feet and heads for free. When I was testing this recipe, I got my chicken feet and heads from Maureen Knapp at Cobblestone Valley Farms.
Maureen raises the healthiest, happiest, most humanely-raised chickens and turkeys in the world, but, I must admit, it would take a very hungry winter before I would ever make Walkie-Talkie soup again.

WALKIE-TALKIE SOUP

Wash and pat dry five chicken heads and ten chicken feet and put them into the bottom of a pot. Cover with water and add some salt. Boil the water and skim off the scum. After a while add some chopped onions, some carrots, some whole unpeeled garlic cloves, and some chopped parsley. To enhance the healing power of the soup, add some wilderwingerd leaves if you have them, or else use spinach. Simmer covered for three hours at a very low temperature, and do not lift the lid under any circumstances. Then take the pot off the fire and let the soup cool without opening the lid. The next day open the pot and skim off all the heavy fat, strain the soup. If you are suffering a hungry season keep the vegetables otherwise throw them away because their goodness will have already gone into the soup. Pick the meat off the heads and feet and add it to the soup. Bring the strained broth to a boil and add chopped onions, chopped carrots, small whole onions, chopped parsnips, celery plus the leaves; and a sprig of rosemary. Boil the soup with the lid on for one more hour. Again do not lift the lid!

It's time ...

FREE NELSON MANDELA!

He has lived a life of service. It's time to let him go.

May your journey to the end, whenever it is, be soft and peaceful and may you be comforted by the memories of your purposeful life of a thousand hills, our precious Madiba.

Lifted

Life can slam you down into the darkest sinkhole and the narrowest creek, but it can also lift you high above waterfalls. And that flight—it’s giddy, y’know! Soaring down, down, and shuddering down, but then… and acrobatically then… up and up and still lifted higher.

Beautiful Meditation

When winter digs deep into bone, it’s time for a two minute summer meditation.

Check your posture. Are you curved around like a question mark? Straighten up into an exclamation point. Let your shoulders relax down, allow your spine to lengthen, and lift up through the crown of your head. Now, start to visualize the sun shining through your window, suffusing you in a soft halo of warm energy. After you've read this, close your eyes and bathe in the warmth of summer. As you enjoy the feeling of the warm sun, let your arms and legs become warm and heavy and let your breathing become deep and relaxed, like a baby sleeping.

And that’s it… enjoy your trip to summer.

Spring Fever

In South Africa the frogs at the Lily Pad Hotel are in full croak on this early autumn evening while half the world away in upstate New York beneath the crystal swathe, frozen ice-cubes flicker in their spring dream of awakening. As the darkness folds into the southern hemisphere and the icicles melt into green meadows in the north, we remind ourselves that the earth is a living, changing being made of many different parts evolving together. As gravity binds us together, so do the strings of volition vibrate within every organism like a song, giving us free will to choose our actions. Whenever we make a choice to act, there is a change; because of the change from the choice, life begins to evolve in a new form. This is how we achieve immortality. Our actions create the world for our descendents.