Making Almond Milk

Take 2 cups of raw, organic almonds (organic are recommended, but not required). Soak in a bowl of room temp water for 8 hours. The water should cover the almonds completely (the soaking removes protease inhibitors--which inhibit digestion-- and begin the sprouting process of the nut which makes the almonds more enzymatically "alive"). Rinse the almonds using a strainer or colander (notice the amount of excess "gunk" that is in the water--now you don't have to consume that stuff). Place almonds in blender using as much as 5 cups water and as little as 3 cups depending on how thick you want your final milk to be. A Vitamix or Champ blender is preferable as I blew out 5 regular blenders from making almond milk daily over a 3 month period. Blend until the almonds are completely pulverized--I usually count to 27. Place nutmilk bag over an adequately sized pan or bowl. Allow all contents to fill the bag. Carefully remove the bag from the bowl's rim, being sure to not let any of the insides come out. Cinch the bag at the top. Holding the top closed with your non-dominant hand "milk" the bag like you would a goat, or a cow, or a...well whatever it is is you have milked. Once all liquid is squeezed from the bag, squeeze more to get that extra rich almond yummy still left in the bag. Place bag of almond pulp in soaking bowl. Rinse blender of all first round remnants. Place clean almond milk liquid in the blender. Open section of real vanilla bean using a sharp blade to splice the bean in half. Scrape deeply at the beans inside shell to remove the precious, delicious brown vanilla seed. Carefully balance the knives edge on your way to the blender and place seeds in the liquid. Go back and scrape the bean more--its o.k. if some of the outer bean shell is used in the mixture (Sometimes vanilla bean seeds get under your fingernails--get them out and eat them). Add a generous amount of sweetner of your choice (soaked and pitted dates, raw honey, agave, maple syrup). Blend again until lovely white foam is prevalent at the top of the liquid. Pour, enjoy, refrigerate. (Raw cacao can be added for chocolate lovers at the vanilla sweetner stage). And what to do with the almond pulp? Make bread. That recipe is forthcoming.

Carefull

I'm srue it is perfectly normal. I emean, it is like movin from the infant stage right? Except at super rapid speed. Weeks are onths, and months are years and years are a lifetime. If I felt reborn then u=of course this is what would happen next. That process of differentiation. HTe freudian moment when one realizes that they actully are an autonomous unit. Not attached to the breast. not sucking a the the mother. So I caome here to write. And if anyone reads this, which i do not know, but if they do--be warned this is the post that comes from the place where nothing else is safe enough to be a mode of expression. Even the waterclor seems to small--my strokes want to be braod and beyons the tine card canvas I have chosen. I could roll out the Statesman endrolls but that would take too much energy and know this my body still feels week. Maybe that is the otehr explanation, I am just nerve frazzled. I mean I worked 5 hours today. i cleaned the ouse three times, I wnet to R's wninter performance--we had dinner out afterwards. Ihaven't done that much in the 3 weeks since my emergency entry into the hospital. I had this dream the other night. I know ishouldn't talk about my dreams at night, but maybe i can write about them and it will be o.k. one of the nurses took me out to dinner and gbasically tried to suck my soul out. enough with the dreams. if i go there i havae to go there. the scary dark cold buildigns and the hot deep pools. the hurt kittens. enough. so this ins one of those posts where i will refuse to fix the typos refuse. so allso it makes sesne. i am autonomous. and the hollow feeling it is mine and it is real. i am not sure about the sense of isolation thae sesne theat i havve sold out--myself. the sense that somehow the morphine toxified my brain into a state of dumb acceptance. dammit. so i have this alter. i have 4 alters. make that fivecause one is to Obama. what a totla wste of surface space really--but they are all beautiful and if you count the fire mantel taht is six. why son't i just stop this and pray? i thinkk i will. ithink i will sit and contemplate. tirshgave me a book in the hosipaital called the red scarf it is about stalinist russia and the labor campes oand love and starvation and love and death and love and toruture and love and it iwas hell to read in pain, but it was my friend by the tie=ime i left the hospital and it was so long and it draggdthrough snow covered russia and itit made me woander if marx wwas in on it. if he made his own opium on purpose. and that scares me. but it eneded. and now i don't have i itanymore and i have to say goodbyw to sophia and i am sad. i think i will pray now.

There were no knives

I have noticed, since following my appendectomy, that there is a general conception that surgery entails traditional cutting devices such as knives. Many people have talked about them "cutting into me" and a few friends have mentioned the knives. In the moment it didn't even occur to me to clarify what was actually done to my body to remove my appendix (and a small section of my colon). While some "cutting" instruments were used, my abdominal surgery was performed laparoscopically In laparoscopic surgery they puff up the body cavity and make microincisions using special microscopes and lasers to conduct the operation. In my instance, the surgery was, what my father described (my dad is a retired physician), as the best laparoscopic surgeon in the Northwest if not the nation. That, was dumb luck, considering I had let the infection go for 4 days before ending up in the emergency room after working all day. When my surgeon told me about the operation he said there would be one small incision on my lower right side (very near my only tattoo). It ended up that when he went in things were a lot worse than he had thought. It took him a long time to clean up the infection which had spread throughout my body cavity. My dad said most surgeons would have switched at this point and made a large cut vertically up my abdomen. My guy didn't. He stayed laproscopic and made another small incision above my belly button (directly below what was previously my only abdominal scar from a hernia repair when I was 18). He then used this technique to remove a section of my colon and then stitched my colon back together. Because the infection was so bad, he had to insert a drainage tube that went into my abdomen from an additional circular incision on the left side of my lower abdomen, and then stretched across my abdomen internally to the are aon the right side where my appendix had been (removing that thing, btw, was not the most pleasant experience I have had). So "knives" traditionally defined, were not at play here. Nevertheless, the broader thing I want to write about, using this bit of Western medicine technology as a bridge to the miracles of Eastern medicine is the way in which any surgery, whether traditional or more modern, does in fact sever more than the physicality of embodied flesh. Immediately after my surgery I called my Chinese medicine caregiver. I have seen him, and him only with my family fr the past three and a half years. He explained that he had to wait till 1 week after my surgery to administer any care, but that he would be able to help reduce the severity of any scar tissue I experienced internally, namely on my colon (anyone familiar with nutritional health and digestion would appreciate how scar tissue on your colon could really mess you up). I was eager to see him, because I am really into proper passage of, well, fecal matter. My Chinese med guy does acupuncture on me, but on my visit to his clinic shortly after getting out of the hospital, I did not think he would do acupuncture. I don't know why, I just didn't. But he did and while doing it explained to me that in surgery one of the main issues, from an Eastern med perspective is that the body's energetic meridians are severed. In abdominal surgery this severing creates energetic blockages in all direction. He explained that many people heal physically fine from surgery, but because they don't heal energetically, they get a lot of scar tissue build up and never really feel the same. The way he practices is to find the mirror of the injured area in a different location. So, the needles he inserted were placed in my angle, leg, wrist and shoulder. After my treatment, even right as i got off the table, I noticed a big difference in what had previously been soreness in every part of my abdomen. The rest of the day the whole area tingled as blood flow was restored, by the next day I was at least 50% better. I was also lucky to have a friend who is training in Ama body work give me a treatment in my home and another dear friend purchase me an Ama treatment fro the owner of one of the best school in Boise. Both of these treatments focused on energetic repair as well. I just had my second acupuncture treatment today and will have 2 more. Last night I was reading from a really good book called, "Shaman, Healer, Sage" by Alberto Villoldo. I bought this book this summer, for mostly addressing emotional trauma. It has sat by my bed, virtually unread, until I returned form the hospital. When I had tried to read it before, I was very overwhlemed by the ways it pointed out so much unhealth in my life. Now, confronted undeniably with that unhealth, I am making a point of reading it daily. In a section where the author describes the body as a magnet which can be energetically shifted through attracting elements to move (like that cool think with iron nails and glass we all played with as children), rather than forcing them to do so he writes, " ...I understood that Western medicine, in an effort to change the physical body, was merely moving the iron filings around the glass. Surgery and medication often brought about violent, traumatic change on the body. This approach struck me as crude and invasive, like scattering the iron filings with my hand, rather than moving them by shifting the magnet underneath the glass." The author, argues that this approach takes little regard for the effect on the body's energetic field, and I would have to agree. Later on, Villaldo talks about acupuncture meridians , known also to the Inca in a different form. These embodied meridians are also present in the earth. he writes, " Along the surface of the planet run flux lines or cekes, similar to the acupuncture meridiancs, connecting the major chakras of the Earth. The meridians of the Earth traverse the globe, transporting energy and information from one part of the planet to another." We have all heard of the earth's electro-magnetic field right? Well, that is the same thing. And apparently we are currently living through a time where that field's potency is significantly declined. Villaldo continues, "Many people in our technological society are disconnected from the matrix of the Universe." Amen to that, I say. And it all makes sense really, disconnect from the earth, leads to disconnect from ourselves, leads to dis-ease. I feel incredibly lucky and to have experienced my illness within the frame of both these styles of medicine. I am so totally intrigued by the many lessons I am learning form this trial. And I am so grateful to have access to energetic healing as well as physical healing. if these two forms of medicine were more integrated culturally I believe we would be a much happier people on a much healthier planet.

In My Immanence

There is a theme I follow. I have written of it here before--the dichotomy of transcendence and immanence. In my feminist training this became a foundational theoretical paradigm. Not in the sense that I adopted that paradigm as a reality, but in the sense that it is one of the most critical dualisms to deconstruct in any feminist work. The body, traditionally, is associated with the feminine. The origin of this association is understood as linked to childrearing for the most part and the way in which the female body has been historically perceived as a receptical. (Women learn to know this is not true and that their search for pleasure is not passive, but nevertheless this understanding comes from opposing the dominant norm. Male is associated with the cerebral, the thinking, the rational, the knowing. Men are physicians, scholars, lawyers, etc. they use their heads once the needs of their bodies are met through penetrating women's immanence. Or, something like that anyways--I am a little rusty at this stuff. Of course there is also the whole critique of the two sexes themselves and the descriptive clarification between gender and sex...but none of that is relevant to what I would like to say right now. I am at an interesting place in my healing. In the hospital I was uber-immanent. Grounded, literally to a bed, held there by tubes and machines that would go with me, even to the bathroom (I would have to unplug my little techno friend for any trip from bed). And for a few days going to the bathroom was a heavy task. Only five feet from my bed, each time I would spend several minutes mustering the nerve to raise my body, place my feet on the ground shuffle into the bathroom and sit down. The first day after surgery the nurses aid told me we needed to go on a walk and I really couldn't fathom donig any such thing. Because she was insistent and sweet I sat up and really tried to stand, but it made me feel sick and sore and I said "Please, can I wait" and she said "Of course, just the fact you sat up is really good. " Totally immanent. And this was me, the me who used to train for marathons (even if my shins never allowed me to actually race in them). The me who always moves more quickly then my size leads people to expect I will. The me who loves to walk and run and ride and hike. I simply did not want to move at all. One night, I felt pretty good. I managed 3 laps round the floor and paused at the fishtank. Feleing very zen and meditative I tried some calf raising and a tiny little bit of knee bending. Boy did I pay for that in the morning I was sore, and sick and grumpy. Immanent. Once home, my mobility increased significantly. Whereas the first night home I really needed help getting out of bed (the hospital beds automatic recline and raise function is definately the only thing I miss) soon I could raise my body on my own. After my birthday celebration with family at my house, I was very spent and could not get in the bed. C had to bring the step stool that the boys use to reach the sink and that is what I have been using ever sense. it just makes it much easier. At night I become profoundly immanent. All my nerves seem to collapse after the boys go down and I fall into the sensation of the wounds that are healing. My heart races and I find it hard to breathe--I get scared and have some series of irrational fears about being alone and not able to be, well, capable of transcending the limits within which my body is currently required to function. I am alone with the kids this week (but not really as family and friends are ever present it seems.) But in some ways I am, as only another parent holds the same responsibility for the care of the children. My immanence scares me in this case. What if they need me to transcend the limits of my body and I can't? Today the boys and I actually ventured out on a walk. For the first time, I was, by far, the slowest pedestrian. I had to be conscious of how far we went, not so that my youngest would be able to make it back, but so I could make it back and make it back without him wanting to be carried. It felt so good to feel my feet on a foothills trail. I could sense the uneveness of the ground penetrating my loafers contributing to my body's healing via stimulating the meridians on my soles. I could see myself at the interchange in the dualism. Standing in the cool sun with my boys, unable to scamper up the hill, but still so much further from that bed and those beeps and needles and tubes. Already moving away from the requirements of basic bodily functions. But this is the trick: Those requirements are always present. We never do transcend them. Sure, we may bridge the divide in a daily synthesis where the hierarchy of the rational mind takes precedence over bodily need. But nevertheless, they are not mutually exclusive phenomena of life. They are mutually reliant processes of living. To re-member such a thing seems to me one of the greatest lessons of this most recent corporeal trial I have experienced. One I hope to hold onto as my desire to transcend becomes stronger each day that I do.

I am Nothing, I am Everything

My head is sagging with the exhaustion of it all. My belly aches with soreness from a laughter that seems to have accompanied the removal of my appendix. Suddenly the simple seems so funny, for so many moments since, I have been filled with smiles, the air brings whispers of constant thanks. Thank you for my children, my husband, my family, my home, my life. Thank you. You, spirit, light, earth, mother, all that is and was and never was but somehow is. I hear you. There were nights (really only one) of excruciating pain, like my body was being twisted and pulled and not enough air was reaching my lungs. Each time my head would raise, I would reel shattered, broken. For a day, after that night, I staired listlessly out the window, the pain and nausea too much, the tubes too many, the beeps and bandages and pokes and prods, too much. I felt too vulnerable. I was scared. I thought I would die. I did think that, and now I believe parts of me did die, thoughts and sections. For moments only, then I would try to find a distraction, mostly in memories, but the memories would contradict and clash argue with each other for primacy and leave me confused and feeling trapped. Morphine dreams were the most relieving part, swimming through seas of cool reflection a body freed from all immanence, yet immanently feeling not the pain bu the tingling of embodiedness. They would end to wake up a request for surveillance, a need to be measured and recorded, and I would wish for my eyelids to help me return to that daze, that daze of sweat and rest. There is something to be said for the cultural aspects of what it means to be perceived as marginal in regards to nutrition. No meat was the banter of the docs, holding me to the bed like protein laden chains. The army needs to build up to fight this war, and since when did I need to see my corporeality as a battle ground? Do you not know that I studied the ways in which your medicine used colonialism as a metaphor for the medical notion of immunity? I see through this, but you see me as small and female and unable to grasp the largess of your gift to grant life. I am. You saved my life sir. Thank you. You are so skilled sir, thank you. Without that skill and those medicines it is true I would be gone, just barely short of the next passing of my birth, leaving my earthbound children motherless, leaving my own mother grieving. And so it is clear in so many ways what I am receiving. A chance to find balance and a new accord with the ways my job and ambitions has gulped me up from the simple joys of watching two children grow and holding my partner close, smelling his skin, feeling his chest, where other organs that I took for granted now seem so precious. I would too fight for them like he held to me, fingers clasped in a grasp I have held for nearly half my life, holding on and saying there is more. Trust. Home, please, let me go home, enough of these nights of endless aching and longing, enough of the voices that hide in my head waiting to bite, threatening to take my life away, telling me it is short, nearly gone. Transform this, other sounds tell me. It is not about living long and hard, it is about living well and now. I am nothing, I am everything, and as the light shone on me in my exit and the air rushed in and about, my mouth opened in a painful, joyous laughter.