Animals, Vegetables, and My Soulful Life
25th Anniversary Issue I can’t remember a time when spiritual exploration didn’t seem like the reason for being here. Just before I turned three—I know this because we moved on my third birthday—Dede, my nanny, took me out in my stroller late enough that I could see the stars. I looked up at them and thought, “That’s home. I’m here now. It’s fine. But it is not home.” Now, some 73 years later, I’m still entranced by points of light—those in the heavens, in my fellow beings, and in my own heart. Having a spiritually eclectic upbringing helped. I was supposed to be Catholic, and although I loved the stained glass and incense, I found the theology, at least in its 1950s Midwestern iteration, confining. Once in catechism class, I tried to make a point for interfaith reconciliation when I raised my hand to share, “Buddha and Zoroaster had virgin births, too!” Sister Mary Xavier was unimpressed. Dede, grandmother-aged and a student of mysticism, consoled me by saying, “The nuns mean well. They just don’t get out much.” When I was five, I brought home from first grade my new knowledge of the 4 Food Groups. Once the USDA nutritional standard, its groupings were meat, dairy, grains, and fruits and veg, Dede, not one fond of governmental edicts, said, “There are people who never eat meat. They’re called vegetarians. I could take you to the Unity Inn and get you a hamburger made out of peanuts. You’d think you were eating beef.” That was the moment it hit me that there would be a lot to learn in...
The Four Healing Habits
20th Anniversary Issue My grandmother could transform a garment with her needle and thread. “It’s my mending day,” she’d say. I found the process intriguing and her talent singular. My mother couldn’t do it, and my only contribution to the process was threading the needle, because I had “good young eyes.” This association is probably why I filed away that phrase “to mend one’s ways” the first time I heard it. If people could fix frayed lives the way my grandmother dealt with errant hems and seams and buttons, nothing was irredeemable. We could remake ourselves and restore ourselves as we went along. It would be half a lifetime later before I connected this mending process with wellbeing, turning “MEND” into an acronym for healthy living: Meditation, Exercise, Nourishment, Detoxification. Personally, I’ve had a checkered history with self-care. I learned binge-eating in childhood despite (or because) of my dad’s being a diet doctor and both my parents’ near obsession with staying fit. I, on the other hand, avoided recess whenever possible – “Miss Rogers, may I stay in and wash the chalkboards?” After my parents divorced and my mother remarried and moved to Spain, I mostly learned “girl stuff” from magazines: Seventeen, Glamour, Mademoiselle. It made sense, then, that by my early twenties I was writing for magazines myself. I believed that if I interviewed enough experts and relayed their wisdom with sufficient intent, I’d come to do by nature what the lean, amazing women on those pages did, the ones with the sculpted arms and flawless skin. In my early thirties, I went into recovery for my...Our Sponsor
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