Fun Stuff – Page 7 – Karen's New York Love Affair

Mixed media and more sex for the New Year

Happy New Year, dear blog readers o’mine. Before I continue with the story of my medicine walk, a few amazing things have come through my inbox that I’d like to share with you:

First is a mixed media music video by cartoonist Doug Savage (music by Laura Veirs), a friend of a friend from writing school. The linked page describes a few incredible things about how the images were created. I like the forest theme with lots of my favourite animals in it. The sequence with all the animals actually reminds me of a dream I had on the vision quest trip I’ve been writing about, which I may describe later. The music is haunting and the images are hypnotically archetypal. Anyway, check this out:

July Flame

Another cool thing that has come into my inbox is some pictures from a reader named Amy, showing claw marks on a tree. Amy lives in Willamette Valley, Oregon, and found this tree during a hike with her family in the hills on the edge of town. Amazing! I’ve never seen such a group of regular marks. And I love the power of the cell phone. Where would we be without those mini cameras?! Thanks Amy! They could be cougar scratch marks, but I’m betting on the Sasquatch, myself!

Erotic Fantasy Seminar

As a final bit of news, I am varying a bit from the theme of this blog, but I wanted to let you know I will be teaching an evening workshop on erotic fantasy on Monday, January 11, 7:30 PM at the Art of Loving, 1819 West 5th at Burrard. The cost is $30. Here is a link to the details:

Erotic Fantasy Seminar

Start the new year with some juicy energy. Come alone, or with a partner. I’d love to see you there!

Blessings for the winter solstice – pecan fudge pie!

May the trees rest peacefully this winter, under their blanket of snow. May the earth continue her turning, gently nudging the darkness toward light. May all beings be happy, fed, and warm.

The winter solstice gathering at Monkey Valley was cancelled due to early snow and overworked snow plowers. I drove out of the valley last Saturday evening, through 7 inches of sparkling, light, fairy-dust snow. I was very proud of the Tracker, in 4WD low and with new winter tires, for driving out of there like a tank, over 12 KM of unplowed roads! It was -15° Celcius, and the snow was still falling. Truly a magical drive, with the roads completely drifted over, and the snow-laden boughs of the pine trees hanging low on either side, giving friendly wishes for my safe journey.

So instead of having a gathering on the land, I will have a small tea party in Vancouver, taking tea with my friends Geoff and Azusa Blake. In honour of the solstice, I am going to bake a pie (instead of the traditional bread). I’ve never baked a pie before, so this is quite momentous! I’ve been inspired by my expert pie-making friend, Devona Snook. And just today my friend Tim Kelly gave me a fantastic book for travelling vegetarians, called Vegan A Go-Go, by Sarah Kramer. I’m going to try her Fudge Pecan Pie. If it works out, I’ll let you know! Though if it doesn’t, I will probably blame it on pie babyhood, not the recipe.

So I invite you to take a moment to notice the deep darkness of the longest night. Feel that brief moment when the earth makes a tiny shift in rotation. Wish her blessings on her journey. And then celebrate with friends, with or without pie. Happy winter solstice.

Basic Flaky Pie Crust

1.25 c flour
.25 t salt
.5 c vegetable shortening
3 T very cold water

Stir together the flour and salt. Cut in the shortening until well mixed, then add the water. Mix until a dough forms. On lightly floured surface, knead for 1-2 minutes, then roll into a ball. Wrap dough in wax paper and chill for 30 minutes. Roll the dough into a pie crust with floured rolling pin.

Fudge Pecan Pie

.5 c water
.25 c vegan margarine
2 T unsweetened cocoa powder
.75 c chocolate chips
.33 c flour
1 c sugar
.175 t salt
.5 c soy or rice milk
1 T vanilla
1 c pecan halves
1 9″ prepared pie crust (see above)
2 t soy or rice milk

Preheat oven to 350° F (175° C). Bring water to a boil in a pot, then remove from heat. Stir in the marg, cocoa, and choc chips and whisk until melted. Add flour, sugar, salt, .5 c milk, and vanilla, and whisk until smooth. Stir in pecan halves and pour into pie crust. Bake for 55-60 minutes, until a toothpick or knife inserted into the middle comes out clean. Brush top with 2 t milk. Let cool to room temperature before serving.

Easy-peasy! (As my old friend Bev Lytton used to say. I hope all’s well with you, Bev.)

Thanksgiving and appreciation

My Diamond Approach group met in September and we explored the topic of appreciation. Have you ever felt an upwelling in your heart as you think about a person, appreciating him or her, or perhaps appreciating something they’ve done? Appreciation can cause an open warm feeling in the heart. It can be tender and sweet, light and delicate, or deeply yummy like a baby whose cheek or arm you’d like to bite.

At the DA weekend I was mostly resistant to feeling this kind of sensation. My heart was pretty closed, well-protected, and I felt like keeping it that way. As it happened, there were moments working with others where the vulnerability of the exploration we were doing just naturally caused my heart to open. In some case to myself, and in other cases to the other. But at the close of the weekend something happened that irritated me and that I allowed to close and harden my heart again. This is just the nature of the work! At the point in my inner journey that I’ve been occupying this year, I’ve been letting myself be hard, closed, irritated, or whatever is there, with a little bit of clear space around the experience that’s big enough to hold it. There is a gentleness about accepting my experience rather than rejecting it and trying to change it. There might be some self-indulgence too. But no one can force their heart to open.

Perhaps the recent DA weekend was still working in me the other morning when I read a 2006 article in the Globe and Mail, part of a stack of papers my friend Geoff Blake saved for me a few years ago, for use in starting fires in the wood stove. The article was about parents who send their kids to summer camp. It was somewhat sentimental and also humourous, about how parents enjoy having the time to themselves while the kids are gone, but worry about them until they know they’re having a good time. It made me remember that my parents sent me to summer camp one year. And suddenly, for the very first time in my life, I understood and appreciated how much my parents had made the focus of their lives caring for my sister and me (and later for two more sisters and a brother).

I’ve heard the Christian crap about honour thy parents, and due to various childhood events that hurt me I never bought it. I thought my parents did not deserve to be honoured. That they had failed me so utterly I would never forgive them. I’ve done a lot of work to get through this. Therapy, spiritual work, and wilderness work including vision quests and other nature retreats. I’ve made conscious choices to heal, and done a lot of that. But suddenly, this Sunday morning before Thanksgiving, I was able to understand and appreciate my parents in a new way. To open my heart and feel the love and caring they showed in their choices and actions as parents. I cried for a while, and moved by this experience, cried many times throughout the day.

Wow, so this is what it feels like to be a normal person who feels her parents cared for her! I feel moved by so many aspects of the parent-child relationship and bond. With this comes a feeling of fragility, though. A poignancy about knowing these relations all come to an end. My dad died in 2000, long before this understanding blossomed in me. I shared my appreciation with my mom though (on Thanksgiving Day), and, due to a friend’s mother dying recently, feel the tug of fear and loss that will come with my own mother’s death. (Unless I die first, of course.)

We are so fucking vulnerable as humans. I don’t know how we manage to stand it. I think closing down the heart a little is probably a pretty popular defense.

Anyway, in closing this musing about thanksgiving and appreciation, I want to mention a few other things I am thankful for.

The black ghetto-blaster my sister Kim gave me in my early 20s. It has been working for several decades now! Lately I’ve been using it to listen to DA teacher Karen Johnson’s tapes on relationships while I do crunches. I feel grateful to Karen for the tapes, too.
Our dear earth mother, for nourishing me from her body with the food and water I enjoy every day. And all the people who raise, transport, and sell the food. And myself for preparing it.
My sister Katherine, for offering to come to Monkey Valley to spend my birthday with me.
My cat Donald, for his companionship, purring, and never being fake with me. If he doesn’t want me to pick him up he growls. If he doesn’t want to come home, he stays out!

I could go on… I spent a lot of the day on Monday thinking about things I am grateful for. Probably the warm humanness that keeps us all struggling on, doing our best, is what moves me the most in this moment.

Thanks to you, too, for reading and having your own response to what I’ve written.

Saturday morning cookies at Monkey Valley

$Karen\'s chocolate brownie cookies$ I woke up this sunny morning with a yen for chocolate cookies… for breakfast. With a cup of decaf… served on the porch.

The wonderful thing about Saturday mornings is there’s time for indulging such fantasies. So I got out the silver mixing bowls and baking sheet, and the delightful measuring cups and spoons of all different sizes, made of white plastic. These things must conjure up sweet memories from childhood, for I feel happy whenever I see them. I gathered ingredients from their various hiding places: the mouse-proof wood chest in the hallway where I keep dry goods, the top shelf of the cupboard, the fridge.

Now, as a single person usually living alone, if I bake cookies it’s me who’s going to eat them all! I still usually make a full batch, but today I was limited by the Earth Balance Whipped Buttery Spread—I only had about ¼ cup, plus a little extra for greasing the sheet. So there was no option but to make half a batch, and hope they would last long enough!

Here’s the recipe for the full batch; you can see it’s an easy one to cut in half.

Karen’s chocolate brownie cookies (*Adapted from The Joy of Cooking’s quick oatmeal cookies*)

Sift together:

1 c sifted whole wheat flour
½ t salt
½ t baking soda
½ t baking powder
½ t cinnamon
4 T (heaping) cocoa powder

In a separate bowl cream together:

½ c Whipped Buttery Spread (or other margarine or butter) + 1 extra T because it’s whipped
½ c brown sugar, packed
½ c white sugar

When smooth, mix in:

1 egg (try to use a small egg if making a ½ batch)
1 t vanilla
1 T rice milk (or milk or soy milk)

Turn on the oven to 350°. For me anyway, this is plenty soon enough to start preheating the oven!

Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients, mixing until smooth. Mix in:

1 c quick cooking oats

Mix in:

¾ chopped walnuts

Drop the cookie dough onto a well-greased baking sheet, in lumps of about 2 T or a little more. A dozen should fit on most baking sheets.

Bake for 10 minutes. While the cookies are baking, make a cup of coffee, wash up the dishes, and take your vitamins.

Remove from the oven, and let set for 1 minute. Remove to a plate to eat immediately(!) or to cool further. Store in an airtight container to keep the soft chewy texture.

Substitutions:

– icing sugar instead of white sugar; the resulting texture is slightly softer, very good.
– spelt flakes instead of oats; these cook up slightly more chewy than the oats
– omit cocoa and use raisins or dried cherries instead of nuts

Basically, most substitutions will turn out well with this simple, adaptable recipe.

The final step is to take 3 or 4 cookies outside, along with a cup of coffee, and enjoy this incredibly yummy treat in the sunshine on the porch overlooking the creek and meadow.

And that’s exactly what I did!

Soapberry Indian ice cream

Indian ice cream—a gift from the land

At the August vision fast at Monkey Valley, the spot where our council circle met had some translucent reddish-orange berries that looked very succulent. I licked one and found it to be very bitter. The faster asked what they were, but I didn’t know, and didn’t even recall seeing this type of berry before. After the faster went out on her two-day quest, I looked up the berries in Roberta Parish, Ray Coupe, and Dennis Lloyd’s Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia. I discovered they are soapberries. I remembered that my friend Pam told me soapberries are the stuff Indian ice cream is made of.

While the faster was out, my co-guide Kim Ashley (a different Kim than my sister, Kim Rempel) and I decided to try making the ice cream. We gathered the berries in the traditional method, by spreading a cloth on the ground and then beating the bush with a stick! (Following the instructions in Nancy Turner’s Food Plants of Interior First Peoples.) But we used electric beaters, not so traditional, to whip the berries with a little water into a beautiful pink foam. We didn’t have the traditional whipping implement—a piece of cedar bark—on hand. The mixture was still quite bitter even with brown sugar and a few wild raspberries added. An unusual but interesting taste. The whipped foamy texture is wonderful—a real treat.

This treat was part of the welcome-back-break-fast feast. It was really neat, to offer the faster some food gathered from the land. It strengthened the feeling that the spirits of this place welcome us doing the old sacred ceremonies here. Ho!

Recipe

Mix 1 cup berries with 1/4 cup water and 4 tablespoons brown sugar, until all the berries have dissolved into a stiff pink foam.