Salad-e Khiar-o Anar (Cucumber Pomegranate Salad)

To answer Vicky’s query on a previous post, my Google search taught me that scallions are not shallots. In the photograph of scallions on Wikipedia, they look like green onions.

Speaking of Vicky (My Local Food), it’s squash season, so I’m eating a lot of local squashes this month. The apples in my crisper are from around here, as well. I am excited about this new website that Sylvain found: you can search by food item and see a list of local growers. If you click on the grower, you get a map and directions to their farm as well as links to the other things they sell.

As much as I try to keep to locally grown fruits and vegetables in season, sometimes I do buy items that are not locally grown. Pomegranates are in stores now, and I bought one the other day in order to make up one of my favourite Persian dishes: salad-e khiar-o anar or cucumber pomegranate salad. The recipe is from New Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies by Najmieh Batmanglij, a cookbook I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone who loves to cook and explore the cuisine of other cultures.

The unique combination of flavours in this salad bursts and combines in your mouth in an indescribable way: the tang of the pomegranate arils, the zip of the salt and lime, the freshness of the mint, the thirst quenching cucumber. It takes a long time to free all the arils from the pom rind, but I find it well worth the work.

Cucumber Pomegranate Salad

½ cup chopped scallions
½ cup chopped fresh mint
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground pepper
½ teaspoon angelica powder (gol-par)
1 long seedless cucumber, peeled and diced
Seeds of two pomegranates
1 fresh lime, peeled and sliced, with inner skin removed

1. In a serving bowl, combine ingredients and mix thoroughly
2. Season to taste with salt. Nush-e Jan!

Makes 4 servings
Preparation time: 25 minutes

Oh, and speaking of this big, glossy cook book full of poetry and lore, worthy of display on your coffee table…last weekend I got an up-close look at a traditional wedding sofreh-ye aqt, something I had only read about and seen photographed in my cookbook until Saturday. Sylvain’s friend G, whose parents are from Italy, was marrying her long-time best friend A, whose parents are from Iran. It was beautiful.

Out Supporting the Arts

I didn’t make time for my usual library visit to blog and/or check email this week because Sylvain and I have been busy out supporting the Windsor International Film Festival almost every night. We have seen:

Un Été Sans Point Ni Coup Sûr (A No Hit No Run Summer) Canada 2008; Director:Francis Leclerc; French w/English subtitles; 104 minutes. We both really liked this one. It was showing at L’Essor, where Sylvain went to high school. It was fun wandering the halls before the film began and finding his graduating class photo on the wall. It was also neat to have the current high school principal introduce the film in French. French-speaking students sold us bags of mais souffle for a loonie each.

Deux jours à tuer (Love Me No More) (France 2008; Director: Jean Becker; French w/ English subtitles; 85 minutes), also showing at L’Essor. This time the principal came up and chatted with us in French. We enjoyed the film very much.

WENDY AND LUCY, USA 2008; Director: Kelly Reichardt; English; 80 minutes. We were not very impressed with this one. The way I see it, in order to make me want to know what happens next in a story, the writer and director have to get me to care about the characters. I knew the dog (Lucy) would be fine with or without Wendy, and I didn’t get to learn enough about Wendy to care about her at all. She had a very limited range of emotion and never smiled, even when playing with her beloved pooch. When separated from her dog, she didn’t get upset enough for me to feel she deserved to have this canine pal in her life. But we sat through it and are still glad we got out to support the festival that night.

LA GRAINE ET LE MULET (SECRET OF THE GRAIN) Director: Abdel Kechiche; France; 2007; French/Arabic/Russian with English subtitles; 151 minutes. This film was awesome and left both of us jonesing for some couscous. Unfortunately we had not made reservations at Mazaar and they were packed with a 25 minute wait by the time our movie let out. One of the film’s highlights was a deliciously long scene in which Rym (Hafzia Herzi) belly dances her heart out. I couldn’t help think of the Biblical Salome.

Tonight we still have one final film to see: DERRIÉRE MOI (BEHIND ME); Director: Rafaël Ouellet; Canada, 2008; French with English subtitles; 87 minutes.

Even though it has left me without time for much else all week, I am glad we decided to support this festival all week. The way I see it, if we want more stuff like this happening in Windsor, we have to get out and support it with our presence and our pocketbooks. I thank all the volunteers who work so hard to organize artistic and cultural events like this one. And who knows? If enough of us patronize festivals like this one, we may encourage an entrepreneur to open an indie cinema in the city. Wouldn’t I love that!

Sunrises

We are in Toronto for a wedding this weekend, so I’m using the hotel wi-fi. I still don’t know if I want internet at home. I am rather liking not having it because when I have it, I go online too much. I somehow think I have to Google everything. The produce fellow told me a shallot is the same as a scallion, but I’m not so sure. “Google it” I think. Just to find this out, I boot up the laptop. Next thing I know I’m checking email, reading blogs, posting to my blog. Suddenly it’s past my bedtime and I didn’t swim.

Being online starts to feel the same way television was starting to feel before I gave away my set. It starts to feel like it is eating up too much time.

Lately I am feeling a strong drive to get out into my community and do A LOT more face-to-face stuff. If we weren’t out of town for a wedding, we’d be torn between several fabulous events happening in Windsor today. There’s the BIG WALK, a health fair at which my new friends Sheila and Gerry are doing a Tai Chi demonstration, and the opening of the Windsor International Film Festival.

I also am feeling that I want to get back to writing letters. You know, on paper. I haven’t done that in a very long time.

And books! Oh, my gosh. So many books, so little time.

So I just don’t know yet how much internet I want in my life. For now I’ll stick with dropping by the library a couple nights a week to check email.

Not being as present in our little blogosphere is making me feel conflicted. I want to devote more time to a Slow life, but it’s hard to withdraw from here.

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Not sure exactly why the shift, but now my body tells me to get up just before the alarm goes off. I set it each night to a different time based on when I’m going to sleep. I set it to allow 20 minute to fall asleep plus 8 hours of sleep. At around the 7.5 hour mark, my body doesn’t want any more sleep. This is new for me, as I’ve always been able to sleep in.

One of the first things I do is open the blinds in the living room to see the lake. Every sunrise is so different. Some days the sky dawns in this subtle pink and you can’t tell where the water ends and sky begins. Other days there are these clear bands, colour strata like ribbons: red on magenta on purple on blue. Amazing. I find I need to take a photograph almost every morning.

Some are blurry because I didn’t use the tripod.

Finding Sangha

I have been toying for weeks and weeks with the idea of dropping in on the Windsor Meditation Group, who meets Wednesday evenings across town. Every week it’s the same scene in my head: “not this week” and “Oh, darn, that was last night, wasn’t it?”  I ‘ve been doing the same thing with the monthly Sacred Harp meetings in Ann Arbor for over a year now.

I finally said to myself, “This is it. It’s time.”

One of my biggest areas of anxiety is around doing something new for the first time. ESPECIALLY if it involves walking into a group as the newcomer. Everyone else knows the ropes. I’m the one who is most likely to make a fool of myself through some faux pas. Those are the very situations that make me freeze up and procrastinate that maiden voyage for months on end.

But everything has been converging. Today I felt serene and calm, none of the usual low-level anxiety under the surface. If I was supposed to bow to the monk, I would just have to figure that out when I got there.

I printed the map. I left myself just enough time to get there from work even if I made a couple of wrong turns, which I always do.

I found the street but there were no parking places left on the whole block. I kept driving onto the next block, but had to turn around in a driveway due to no parking signs on both sides. As I was turning the car around, I saw a man standing in the middle of the street back in front of the meditation house. He was holding his hand above his head.

Me? Was he signalling to ME? The little voice in my head with its unceasing chatter about “ohmyohmynow he’swatchingmeturnthecararound wherewillIparkandwhatifheisnotsignallingme?” was easy to shush and in its place rose in me a warm feeling of knowing I was being welcomed.

As I approached and rolled down my window, the kind man said, “You’re here for the me meditation group, right?” “Yes I am” I said. He directed me into a parking spot snug next to his car and on his neighbour’s grass, which he assured me was okay and if it wasn’t, well his neighbour could fuss at him and not at me.

“Go on in and someone will make you some tea,” he said. “Oh, and my name’s Gerry.”

I have to tell you that Gerry’s outward appearance made me realize that I had a very fixed idea (based on the website) of how the sponsors of this group would look and dress. I was expecting a Thai monk. I was expecting formality and stiffness, ritual.

Instead I got Sheila and Gerry, two of the most genuine, down home folks I could ever hope to find in any corner of the earth. Oh, and a room full of people just like me. Ok, there WAS a Thai monk for nine years, but he passed away this summer and a new teacher is still being arranged. In the meantime “we carry on,” Sheila says, assuming the teacher’s chair for now.

The next two hours were surreal. I felt more at ease with this small group of ten or twelve people gathered in a living room for a dhamma talk followed by guided meditation than I have felt in any group possibly ever. It felt a lot like Quaker Meeting in Little Rock or in Waterloo, except without the preponderance of university profs. I know this will sound crazy, but there’s something just a little bit Arkansas about these people. And if they were from Arkansas, they would be from a small community where people have good hound dogs. Gerry and Sheila don’t have hound dogs, but they have a yellow cat who decided not to join us for meditation.

“He’s already enlightened,” Gerry offered as explanation for the cat not joining us.

Mind you, I walked in there feeling pretty hungry. Starved, you might even say, for the company of anyone who is at all familiar with the path I’m on right now. To look across the room and see on the library shelves the very books I’ve just finished reading (Wherever You Go, There You Are; The Miracle of Mindfulness…). In so many ways, it felt like a homecoming.

Missing Sangha

When I first got into this space of my own, it didn’t fill me with joy. I’m no where near as OCD as I once was, but change still rattles me. I feel anxious and unsettled until I am fully moved in, fully out of the former residence and fully established in a new set of routines.

The anxiety has been blessedly mild, but still there in the background.

I wasted no time stocking the fridge and pantry with good food. I have already started some routines as part of good self care. I go to bed early and rise early. I do not rush through dressing nor through eating nor through bathing. I have plenty of time to watch the sun come up over the marina, do my stretches and sit in meditation.

Saturday I do shopping and laundry. Sundays I cook up big batches of healthful, yummy things and divide them into portion-sized containers for my suppers and lunches through the week. Oh, I’m having fun with that! Last week was curried veggies, brown basmati, lentil soup. This week is spaghetti squash, red bean soup, more veggies cooked in coconut milk and garam masala, pomegranate salad (amazing recipe to come). I baked gluten-free muffins for my snacks. Dessert tonight was Iranian-style sheep’s cheese and figs. There are always raw broccoli and apples on hand. Raw almonds, too.

Still, even with all these blessings and the sweetest boyfriend in the world going out late at night to bring me Ricola and Kleenex for my cold…still I felt something holding me in. I even found myself asking, “why am I not happier yet?” Isn’t this what I’ve been yearning? The alone time, the space to myself, the time to do whatever I want, hours to loll on the bed with good books?

Even though I stopped addressing any deity a while back, I felt driven to go back to prayer these past days. I’ve been feeling desperate. I’ve even felt a pang of guilt because this is so unfair to Sylvain… after all, this moving out thing was supposed to help me feel better.

In the face of not feeling a lot better, I’ve decided I just have to do what I have to do and have faith that my outlook will improve in time. Faith is a good word for it. I’ve just committed to the idea that I have to do the right things for my health and sanity whether or not I can feel any instant payoff. The payoff will come over time, I tell myself.

“I’ll have more energy when I start swimming,” I told Sylvain after a short trip to the mall wore me out last weekend. “Exercise gives you more energy,” I told him, though I was mostly talking to myself, since he knows this to be true.

Three times a week now I swim in the warm salt water pool.

I’m feeding my spirit with the dharma books and meditation. I’m feeding my body with good food and regular exercise and stretching.

What’s missing? Why was I still feeling this strange weight holding me down? Not a huge weight, mind you. But there was still this feeling that even with such a wonderful man in my life and a wonderful place to nestle into each night and a job I absolutely shouldn’t complain about (very hard to stop comparing it to what I once had)…

Even with all this…

Your boyfriend, no matter how great he may be, cannot be a substitute for a small circle of friends. Even one girlfriend would be okay. One who gets me. One who shares my values and understands the path I’m on. I left just such friends behind in Waterloo and I miss them so much.

Sometimes I think about my online community and just wish we could teleport into the same room, you know? Just long enough for hugs all around. That would do me.

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Last night I finally had AN EXPERIENCE while listening to Holosync. It’s different for everyone, but for me it was like a very nice happy drug. I think those endorphins Bill Harris was talking about really were being released.

I woke up this morning and my meditation was very different in quality and flavour. Easy. Transcendent.

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I walked into the hallway and (remember I have neither telly nor radio) peeked at the newspaper in front of my neighbour’s door in order to know how the election in the U.S. had turned out.

“President Obama” said the front page. I gazed down at an upside-down picture of Obama smiling and waving next to his wife and daughters. Tears coursed down my face.

Butterfly Effect

I was walking along and I found some books. That’s how it started. I found eleven newish books on spirituality and eastern philosophy all tied up with twine in a blue box on the curb. The Power of Now was one of them.

The 19^th of November will mark the end of my one year of mindful breathing.

One year ago I was reading The Power of Now. Or perhaps by then I had finished The Power of Now and was reading A New Earth. In any case, I came upon a passage in one of those two books in which Eckhart Tolle related a conversation he had with a friend who was consulting him as she poured over a spiritual retreat catalog. Which workshop did he think she should take? He said they all looked quite good. However, he suggested that if she would undertake to become aware of her breathing as often as she could remember to do so every day for a year, it would prove more transformative than all the workshops in the catalog. And it was free.

Wow. Think of that. Something more transformative than thousands of dollars’ worth of retreats and workshops with master teachers…for free? I’m a sucker for a good deal. I decided to try it.

One thing led to another, which led to another. The place I was at in my life was very conducive to my turning more toward–and tuning more into–a spiritual path. I was struggling. I knew I was creating suffering for myself. The idea of training the mind became not just very appealing, but at times felt like a matter of life and death.

Since that day in November of 2007, so many teachers have found me. So many gifts have been laid at my feet.

TrueHope’s EMPowerPlus formula has drastically diminished what I call my “crazy head,” the incessant mind chatter, obsessing and worrying that feeds anxiety in my body.

Most recently, I sent off for the free demo CD of Centrepointe Research Institute’s Holosync Solution audio technology. What did I have to lose, after all, if the sample CD was free? My interest was very piqued by Bill Harris’ promises that these special sound waves fed separately to my left and right ears could produce deep meditative states, trigger the release of all sorts of groovy chemicals and even reverse the ageing process. When someone I know and trust came forth and told me she’d been using these CDs for four years and they had delivered all that was promised and more… well, that sealed it. I was on board for the free demo.

About the same time my bed was delivered, allowing me to start sleeping at my new place and listening to the sample CD every night before sleeping, I also was turned onto the book “The Holographic Universe” by Michael Talbot. Talk about synchronicity. All of a sudden everything is tying into everything else.

It’s funny to think that all this started with finding The Power of Now in a blue bin on the curb on a morning when I decided—on a whim–to walk instead of take the bus.

Butterfly effect, indeed.