Tea Time #2

I love taking the time to enjoy a cup of tea.  There's something inherently calming about imbibing a warm cup of herbal essence.  Even more enjoyable, is when the tea in question has a meaningful bit of wisdom or inspiration attached to it, as do the Good Earth varieties.  Today's quote is:

"Art is either plagiarism or revolution."  - Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French Post-Impressionist painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer.  He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement, and his experimentation was indicative of the Synthetist style of modern art. He also paved the way to the appreciation of primitivism. Gauguin styled himself and his art as "savage." Although he began his artistic career with the Impressionists in Paris, during the late 1880's he fled farther and farther from urban civilization in search of an edenic paradise where he could create pure, "primitive" art. Yet his self-imposed exile to the South Seas was not so much an escape from Paris as a bid to become the new leader of the Parisian avant-garde. Gauguin's rejection of his European family, society, and the Paris art world for a life apart, in the land of the "Other," has come to serve as a romantic example of the artist-as-wandering-mystic.

 

You Are What You Eat

A saying so cliched we've come to ignore the wisdom in it.

I was so impressed by the changes I felt after my cleanse at the beginning of the year, that I've decided to do a 2-week cleanse biannually.  One of the most pronounced changes was in my perception of food.  Not just something to stuff in my mouth when I'm hungry, or to enjoy simply for the taste, but the conviction that food is medicine. 

Americans are bombarded with information about "healthy eating," but we suffer from higher rates of obesity and chronic disease than ever before. We are told one year to avoid fat and the next to avoid carbohydrates. It's enough to make anyone distrust nutritional advice altogether, particularly anything that claims that "food is medicine."

If we're honest with ourselves, we don't really need much advice because we already know what we should do: eat a variety of foods, especially whole grains, fruits, and vegetables; minimize or eliminate processed foods; and be mindful of how much we eat. And, do some physical activity each day. If we know all this, then why do we have all the complicated nutritional advice, contradictory research studies, and endless health diets? In part because they give the food companies a way to sell more products. And for us, it is often easier to read about what we should do, then actually change our eating patterns. As a result, our standard American diet is ruining our health.

As a nation, we're doing less cooking and increasingly eating more processed foods that have little to no nutritional benefit.  We're also eating less variety of foods. Ironically, while 17,000 new products are introduced each year, two-thirds of our calories come from just four foods: corn, soy, wheat, and rice.  It's easy to fall into the pattern of eating fast, convenient, prepared food, especially in our often frenetic lives. But we are not nurturing ourselves by doing so. 

A John's Hopkins study found that only 10% of Americans eat the recommended "five a day" of fruits and vegetables. At least 50% don't eat any vegetables. Shocking statistics given that the people surveyed considered themselves nutrition "savvy". (American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2007).

Diet and exercise have long been two important ingredients to staying health and living longer, but now there is a belief in using food as medicine. Foods may appear healthy because the sugar content is zero or it's “low carb.” But real health cannot be found in synthetic foods which falsely promise health by focusing merely on numbers.  We need real food to thrive. Depriving our bodies of basic nutrition is more an attempt to fool our systems, not heal them!

"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food"  - Hippocrates

Eating well is not just about putting good food into your body, but also about enjoying the experience. People complain that healthy food doesn't taste good.  This has a lot to do with the fact that we've become accustomed to the excess of salt, sugar and fat in our daily diets.  Every year, the average American eats 33 pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and 70 pounds of sugar (about 22 teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. It’s no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. It’s no wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year. (excerpted from Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss)

The good news is that taste in a food can be changed. People often dislike certain foods because they’re not used to them. Once you’re used to a food, it can taste great . And when you know that that food is actually good for you, and is healing your body from the inside out, it can taste magical. Here's a great A-Z list of healing foods.

There are so many benefits of a healthy diet, but the primary one is that you only have one body. Does it make sense to harm the most precious thing that you have? Don’t wait until you have no choice but to become healthier. Adopt a healthy lifestyle that makes you look and feel better. A healthy lifestyle shouldn’t be something for the short term - it's a “lifestyle”. Head to your local farmer's market this week - it's never too late to start being healthy.

"To keep the body in good health is a duty... otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear."  - Buddha 

Lessons from the Wild #10

hum·ble (adjective)

1.  not proud or arrogant; modest
2.  having a feeling of insignificance, inferiority, subservience, etc.
3.  low in rank, importance, status, quality, etc.
4.  courteously respectful
5.  low in height, level, etc.

Is humility practical?  How do we practice the virtue of humility in such a competitive world?

How can anyone achieve success without ambition and a competitive spirit? Who doesn't feel elated and proud after accomplishing something great?

On the surface, humility appears to be a foreign concept in our modern world.

We can all agree that humility is an admirable quality in others, because we feel comfortable around people who are humble. But when it comes to ourselves, we may consider humility a hindrance to success and a by-product of failure. Perhaps, humility seems to make sense only when we feel defeated. Then, we can at least claim that we've learned the important virtue of humility, until we are ready to get back on our feet to fight yet another battle. Though it seems rational, this line of reasoning actually prevents us from achieving a deeper understanding of the virtue of humility.

Real humility means having a healthy perspective of one’s own abilities (suffering neither egotism nor low self esteem) as well as one’s own limitations and a value for the importance and abilities of others.

In most religions, humility is a sign of respect for a higher power -

• Christianity provides the classic religious statement of humility, "Blessed be the meek for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5).
• In Islam (which itself means surrender), humility is a primary virtue.
• Taoism focuses believers' thoughts on the awesome beauty and wonder of Nature. As you ponder the magnificence of Nature, you learn to respect our place relative to the stars and the seasons - a humbling experience.
• Buddhism teaches that, through humility, one can release anger and learn to live a life free from attachments and suffering.

For me, wandering through a vast and majestic landscape is incredibly humbling.  It's where I feel most a part of something larger than myself, and where I also feel most vulnerable.

I've recently been reading an interesting biography of Howard Zahniser, an early American environmental activist and primary author of the Wilderness Act of 1964.  Zahniser was a gifted writer and eloquently wrote about the importance of nature, and wilderness:

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

In preserving Wilderness we are essentially preserving an endangered experience, and an endangered idea — the idea that self-willed landscape has value and should exist.

Wilderness offers the opportunity to experience a relationship between humans and nature that is increasingly rare in our modern world, a relationship in which humans do not dominate, manipulate, or control nature but instead immerse ourselves as a member in the larger community of life. 

“Without the gadgets, the inventions, the contrivances whereby men have seemed to establish among themselves an independence of nature, without these distractions, to know wilderness is to know a profound humility, to recognize one’s littleness, to sense dependence and interdependence, indebtedness, and responsibility.”  - Howard Zahniser

Keeping the idea of Wilderness alive requires our participation in a special relationship with these landscapes that is very different from the utilitarian, commodity-oriented manner in which modern society generally interacts with nature. Preserving the idea of Wilderness requires humans to exercise humility and restraint, not dominance over the land and its natural processes. The opportunity to experience this kind of relationship with nature is an increasingly rare experience in our modern world. Designated Wilderness is the only landscape where this form of interaction between humans and the rest of nature is written into law.

“A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land.”  - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Embrace the virtue of humility and all it can offer:

• By remaining humble, you are receptive to opportunities to improve.
• Humility is a virtue for inner well-being. Frustrations and losses don’t have the same impact if you don’t get your ego involved. If you combine humility with motivation, you have the ability to drive towards successes without letting the failures knock you out of balance.

“By seeing the seed of failure in every success, we remain humble. By seeing the seed of success in every failure we remain hopeful.” - Unknown