"useless" praise

Word for the Day from Gratefulness.org

The more alert we become to the blessing that flows into us through everything we touch, the more our own touch will bring blessing.

Brother David Stendl-Rast

summer in the garden

Some of denizens of the medicinal herb garden at Bastyr University (top is Arctium lappa/Burdock and bottom is Angelica archangelica)

basil for breakfast

Chris W replied to my email this morning, saying,

"i have cooking metaphors coming to me. i think i'll write a poem:

isn't every cook
a culture of her own,
how she knows mushrooms,
how she knows salt,

the lifelong gathering
of living ingredients, each one
its own astounding self, each one
a culture of its own, yet
in her hands
an ingredient

(ingredient is not a beautiful word
until i decide to make it so
by imagining a sprig of seven basil leaves
in your hands)

the other day i met someone
who cooked with many of my ingredients
in a completely different way
because her living had taught her stories
about what comes before and what comes after
the time of cooking, stories
i had not lived or seen or been taught before

and i let myself be a dry sponge
in the curious clear waters of her ways
and, delight of delights,
she experienced me the same way:
(wow, yes, look what you do, look how:
a way that no one ever taught you, your own
accumulation of ways, so precise to yourself)
so we're bartering mentoring time
hanging out in one another's kitchens
not a moment too soon, as we are called
to do our thing at the big ceremonial feast
whose wild glow is visible in the night sky
over the next small ridge"

all the ways home

"Dig anywhere deeply enough and it will take you Home"

~My friends Joel Levey, PhD and Michelle Levey, MA, during their presentation to our "CAM camp" students on Meditation and Healing, about the infinite variety of spiritual paths.

kingdoms of resonance

Homeopathic medicines are infinitesimal and potentized dilutions made from just about any substance medicine-makers can get their hands on (including plant, mineral, animal, microbial materials) and some that they can't (moonlight, X-ray radiation). Just as with any medicine, there are commonalities amongst remedies that are derived from related substances. Categories such as the Plant, Mineral and Animal Kingdom remedies have some broadly distinguishing traits and patterns--and theory is that the patterns and themes of a particular substance are reflected in the physical symptoms, personality characteristics, the world-view, even the dreams, of a person who would benefit from the medicine made from that substance. I don't know what my homeopath friends would prescribe for me these days--in the past I've benefitted from two remedies that derive from sea creatures...but one is categorized as a mineral, because it's the shell that's potentized, and the other is categorized as an animal remedy. You can read some interesting notes about remedies made from sea animals here.

Bombay master homeopath and physician Rajan Sankaran has said that in this time of great extinction, the essence of the animals and plants that are disappearing is showing up more and more in human beings.

Another expression of the way humans and the "more-than-human" world reflect one another: one of the enchanting aspects of the world created by Philip Pullman in his series of books, called His Dark Materials, is that every human being there is born with a "daemon", an aspect of their soul who appears in animal form, inseparable from the person, their visible essence. (Another enchanting aspect is the two male angels who adore each other and have been together for eons.) The daemon plays with changing from animal to animal all through childhood, and then at puberty settles into the right stable form. Pullman says (in the interview linked to above) that a person can't choose what their daemon is; and for us here, who can't (usually!) see our own, we have to ask others who know us to tell us what ours is.

And then, there is our own internal resonance. A homeopath might match me to one aspect of this world, and in Pullman's world I might cleave to another aspect; in my own imagination, I feel most at home in the kingdom of the plants. And I'm pretty sure that if I were a plant, I would be a vine. One of those vines that climbs up things with curly tendrils towards the sun, and sprawls into all of the available space and slides between and into other plants, and flings out new growth when it's whacked back to the roots. Oh, and has flowers that attract hummingbirds!

The vines I have in my small yard: red honeysuckle, clematis (5 kinds), wisteria, two kiwis (a fuzzy male and smooth female), passionflower, jasmine, cardinal creeper (and usually I have annual morning glories and cup-and-saucers and sweet peas, but I didn't get around to planting them this year), and unfortunately there is also perennial morning glory (otherwise known as bindweed). And in the house I have two hoya carnosas (the photo at the top is the silhouette of one of my hoyas, when it was in my office).

Here is my friend and relation, the passionflower (Passiflora caerulea) out on the deck behind our house:

world o' books

Andy sent me this fun thing to do, a consideration of books in my life. Because the set of questions is being sent on from blog-person to blog-person, it's kind of like a chain letter, or a contagious virus; or like a game of tag. (I guess "technically" it's called a "meme" which is "an idea or behavior that spreads through a culture" and which seems to be related to "mimic" and to the French word for "same" which is "meme" with a little accent over the first "e" which I don't know how to type in Blogger-text.)

I think it is also an opportunity for rediscovery and praise, as well as a very good way to avoid tackling the piles of work spread all over the dining room table (I've even managed to accumulate a pile of stuff to do under my laptop).

How many books I've owned
I would be surprised if anyone I know who is over the age of 6 knows how many books they own. Just lots, and lots. Lots. Even after selling big boxfuls and giving piles away. I do love and appreciate the Public Library system, but I can't write in those books. Once I have a relationship with the ideas or fall in love with any of the phrases or passages, I want to have my own copy so that I can write back, in the margins.

Reading style
During spare moments, and at night. My husband and sons and I take our books with us when we go to restaurants, and if we're not talking, then we're reading. I always have a magazine or journal or article to read in my briefcase, and always take a book (sometimes just a blank book) when I'm carrying a backpack or purse. I also often read in the hottub. So, my books not only have handwriting and drawing in them, they often have water spots too (I don't do those things to books I borrowed, though, honest!)

The last book I bought
Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It by Thomas de Zengotita, on the recommendation of Toyce at the Integral Education Center. I haven't started it yet--it's in the "next" pile.

The last book I read
Hmm. I guess that means the last book I actually finished. There are many many books on the floor or on my desk or in one of my bags that I have read part of and then put down, either for a while, or for pretty much ever.

So, the last book that I read all the way through (and didn't even skip the boring parts because there weren't any) is called Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness, by Marc Ian Barasch. He explores the nature of human (and animal) compassion and altruism from the perspectives of neuroscience, spiritual teachings and practice, psychology, evolutionary theory, and through interviews with people who have forgiven unthinkably horrible crimes, and with people who have gone way out of their way for total strangers, wondering: what is the essence of compassion? Can it be learned? Is kindness counter-evolutionary, or the ultimate evolutionary force?

It's written in a personal style that in itself is elevating. Here's a bit:

"Something within us already conduces toward heartfulness, and its nature is to grow with the merest effort. Aldous Huxley, asked on his deathbed to sum up what he had learned in his eventful life, said, "It's embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder." And though I set out to write a more hardheaded, less softhearted (and perhaps les softheaded) book, I can onloy conclude the same.

People living in arid countries have found a simple method of collecting water. They spread out sheets of fabric at night and siphon off the dew that condenses on them each morning. Like moisture, love really is in the air. It will settle upon the thinnest reed, scintillate on a bare tip of grass, free for the taking. It is an elixir that can heal, drop by drop, all the sorrow and separation in the world. It changes pretty much everything."

Five books that mean a lot to me
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard
Coming to Life: Traveling the Spiritual Path in Everyday Life, by Polly Berrien Berends
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, by David Abram
The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India, by Rodger Kamenetz
His Dark Materials (a trilogy that includes The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass), by Philip Pullman

I love the language and the ideas and the perspectives of all of these books so much, and don't think I can describe then well enough to even try.

(And these are the books I'm reading now--a new category that wasn't in the original recipe...)
Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy: Modern Herbal Medicine by Kerry Bone and Simon Mills
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Future Through Conversations that Matter, by Juanita Brown with David Isaacs
Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, by Karen Armstrong
Consciousness & Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine, edited by Marilyn Schlitz and Tina Amorok with Marc S. Micozzi

Invite some more to play
I'll see if Open Space friends Ashley, Chris, Jeff and Michael, and new-to-blogging, long-time-friend, Brad, are interested--particularly, of course, I'd like to know what their "books that mean a lot to me" are, so that I can read them,too.

kumquats and radishes

Playing with my new camera!


Kumquats and Radishes
Originally uploaded by Christy Lee-Engel.

intensified sky

Ah, not to be cut off
not through the slightest partion
shut out from the law of the stars
The inner -- what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

~Rainer Maria Rilke
Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

the lord god bird

Chris wrote quite a while ago (I have a lot to catch up on) about the re-discovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (who's been dubbed "Elvis") in Arkansas under the title "Never give up on anyone".

Because of his post, I noticed and read the little article in our local Audubon Society newsletter that pertained, called "If It Doesn't Want to Be Found, How Do We find It? And How Many More are Out There?". Dr. James Van Remsen, curator of ornithology at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, writes the following about trying to verify a sighting in the Pearl River swamp in Lousiana in 1999 (the last verified U.S. sighting, before the one this past April, was in the 1940's!):

"We conducted that search with the cocky attitude that, regardless of how wary, Ivory-billed Woodpeckers would make enough noise (calls, double-raps, or bark-scaling) that our black-belt field commandos would find them just by getting within earshot. That attitude comes from plenty of experience with other rare and hard-to-find birds. Hard to see, yes, but nonetheless always revealing themselves by sounds to those who tune in. However, if Arkansas Elvis is any indication, we could have missed dozens of birds in the Pearl. Elvis is not only incredibly wary, seldom allowing more than a glimpse before flying off not to be relocated, but astoundingly quiet. If our birds behave like this, finding them wil require the stealth skills of a turkey hunter...It is tempting and perhaps reasonable to speculate that the last Ivory-billeds, under intense hunting pressure from humans, survived only because of the behavioral changes required to regard humans as deadly. If ducks and turkeys can develop such behaviors seasonally, longer-lived and probably smarter big woodpeckers could get this way fast."

convergence

Wow. I began this post many weeks ago, and haven't had time to revisit it till now. Too much converging to fill my days to overflowing.

(Which brings to mind a movie I was meaning to see, called Short Cut to Nirvana --do watch the trailer!--about the mammoth Kumbh Mela festival, a convergence of 70 million people at the place where the Ganges and Yamuna rivers converge, every 12 years. Well, and, that's just it: big convergence, not quite enough time to get to everything I've been meaning to get to, and every single thought and conversation reminding me of something or someone interesting and/or important.)

Alternately, I have felt for the past few months as if I am carrying around, or wearing, a big heap of threads and fuzzy strings. They're multicolored, bright and dark, a little tangled where their unraveled edges catch, and weaving themselves into strange patterns and textures when I'm not watching. Lately I've gotten to toss some of them into the center of various circles of comrades, colleagues & friends, and then I always find myself coming home with even more than I started with!

Some of the streams/threads:
Business: dissolving one and creating another one, all at the same time; the dozens (maybe hundreds!) of practical and logistical details (because we're also moving our practice location), as well as all the karmic and energetic ties we leave, and the new ones we generate.

Teaching, learning: & their relationship to hosting and inviting, to opening space for passion and responsibility in the midst of a very linear, accreditation-shaped curriculum; the notion of integral education; the "teacher formation" work originated by Parker Palmer.

Opening space for giving, receiving, flourishing (and teaching and learning...) (link to be invented soon) and the Open Space Practices that Michael & Chris are languaging & polishing

Torah: learning to read Hebrew, along with the mystical interpretations of each letter, experiencing more and more Rabbi Ted's intersection of mystical (the path of perceiving underlying radical inclusiveness) and prophetic (the call to social justice mandated by that perception) Judaism and the community that has grown, and continues to grow, around that intersection.

Medicine: working with the area of the "determinants of health"--those conditions that allow for optimal health to be realized (or not)-- because it's only partially useful to alleviate/palliate someone's anxiety or exhaustion or insomnia or neck pain when it springs from their reaction to the current state of our culture and of the world (and sometimes it's actually suppressive to do that.) Even with "natural" methods rather than anti-depressants. How, instead, to vitalize that reaction to support participation in healing of society & culture, and ecological healing?

And these are some of the books I'm reading, which somehow also seem to be converging (though I have no idea how, yet...)
Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search of the Soul of Kindness by Marc Ian Barasch
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Towards an Undivided Life by Parker Palmer
Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
and re-reading: The Four-Fold Way by Angeles Arrien

OK. Time to fill the hummingbird feeder and deadhead the rosebush. Or, take a nap!

leaves as pages in a secret text

Here is another Edward Hirsch poem, courtesy of the wonderful poetry subscription list Panhala, which I learned about thanks to Andy.

Poet, essayist, literary critic, English professor, Edward Hirsch is currently president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and is the author of two of my favorite books, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, and The Demon and The Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration

I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,
each a station in a pilgrimage--silent, pondering.

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of mysteries.

(From Lay Back the Darkness)

uncertainty

We couldn't tell if it was a fire in the hills
Or the hills themselves on fire, smoky yet
Incandescent, too far away to comprehend.
And all this time we were traveling toward
Something vaguely burning in the distance --
A shadow on the horizon, a fault line --
A blue and cloudy peak which never seemed
To recede or get closer as we approached.
And that was all we knew about it
As we stood by the window in a waning light
Or touched and moved away from each other
And turned back to our books. But it remained
Even so, like the thought of a coal fading
On the upper left-hand side of our chests,
A destination that we bore within ourselves.
And there were those -- were they the lucky ones? --
Who were unaware of rushing toward it.
And the blaze awaited them, too.

Edward Hirsch
from Earthly Measures (Knopf, 1994)

that which connects

I sat in the hot tub in our rainy backyard the other morning, with my computer wrapped in two towels against the drizzle, and listened to an a conversation between philosopher Ken Wilber of the Integral Institute and Reb Zalman Schacter-Shalomi (grandfather of the neo-Hassidic Jewish Renewal movement). You can download here it from Integral Naked if you become a subscriber (the first month of subscription is free!).

At one point Wilber says: "Buber talked about the I-Thou relationship--and the Big Mystery is that hyphen."

moleskine

I am in the habit of carrying around a blank book and using it to write down anything I might want again later (impressions, phone numbers, thoughts, dreams, notes from lectures and meetings and conversations, phrases I like, an occasional striking shape or contour) (but not appointments--those go on the calendar; and no grocery lists--those go on a scrap of paper destined inevitably to be lost somewhere after the produce section and before the cereal aisle).

I fill it up in the order of things received, till I get to the end, and then I get a new book that looks different from the previous one. I know which part of my life, which months, are in the yellow book with the calligraphy on it, which part is in the book with the red rubbery cover imprinted with a Chinese poem, which part is in the hardcover spiral notebook with the coffee stains on the front (and back). Etc. But my current book is a Moleskine journal, a black hardcover ("moleskine" oilcloth cover) that has a built-in accordion pocket in the back, a ribbon for a bookmark, and an attached stretchy band to go around the whole thing and keep all the collected loose scraps inside. It has graph paper pages (usually I like blank pages, and definitely don't like ruled pages, but have been enjoying the geometricness of these pages underneath my far-from-geometric jottings).

One book, full of a lot of different stuff, and yesterday I took to pasting Post-It flags throughout so that I could find things more easily. There are four colors of flags, and I found that I could shimmy all the pages into one of four arbitrary categories, pretty easily, though the groupings might only make sense to me!
Red: Rabbi Ted's teachings (Torah study, a class on the Kabbalistic wisdom of the alef-bet) and my Israel journal. Also, all of the Five-Element and Traditional Chinese Medicine notes I've taken in the past few months.
Yellow: Business/work plans, projects, musings.
Green: Everything that has to do with Bastyr & naturopathic medicine. Notes for the Determinants of Health course I'm teaching next quarter, conversations and meetings about Bastyr's vision/mission reworkings, meetings about the Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine textbook that I'm peripherally involved with.
Blue: The wider conversations; collective exploration; notes from when Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute came up to Seattle and talked about his "five favorite large-group collaborative practices" (out of the dozens that he's familiar with, he finds the most effective to be World Cafe, Open Space Technology, Future Search, Dynamic Facilitation, and Citizen Deliberative Council); phone numbers such as those for Open Space friends Avner, Tova, (you could have their phone numbers, too, by seeing Israel on the Open Space world map!) and Chris; and most recently a preliminary mind-map for an Open Space for Giving and Receiving and Flourishing (a sprout seeded at the first such Giving Conference held in Chicago last year), that Ashley's begun to concoct. Dream and poetry fragments get this flag, too.

I like this book, a lot! I think my next one will be just like it (but maybe I'll get the Post-It flags with the purple and pink ones next time).

and then You are

And then You are like this:

A small bird decorated
With orange patches of light
Waving your wings near my window,

Encouraging me with all of existence's love--
To dance.

And then You are like this:

A cruel word that stabs me
From the mouth of a strange costume You wear;
A guise You had too long tricked me into thinking
Could be other--than You.

And then You are...

The firmament
That spins at the end of a string in Your hand
That You offer to mine saying,
"Did you drop this--surely
This is yours."
And then You are, O then You are:

The Beloved of every creature
Revealed with such grandeur--bursting
From each cell in my body,
I kneel, I laugh,
I weep, I sing,
I sing.

Hafiz, from The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

essence prayer

Like a maker of rare perfume, Rabbi Ted distills the essence of traditional Jewish prayer to:
Bless (from the Barchu, the call to blessing)
You (from the typical blessingway that begins "blessed are You")
One (from the Shema, whose first phrase is the foundational declaration/recognition of Oneness)
Love (from the V'ahavta, the continuation of the Shema that begins "and you shall love your God")

In another reflection of the Shema ("Listen, O Israel/wrestler with God: the Eternal is our God; the Eternal is One") and in the same spirit of entering the deep-to-the-bones essence prayer, Jeff Aitken offers the practice of "...kissing mezuzah* and saying listen: there is only God--following Saniel Bonder."

*mezuzah is the tool of mindfulness affixed to Jewish doorways.
Here is an essay by Rabbi Laura Geller called "Being a Mezuzah"

the treasure of seed

The Three Taoist Treasures are Qi (energy), Jing (essence) and Shen (mind/spirit).

Jing is stored in the Kidneys and belongs to Water. This is some of what I learned from Thea about Jing:

Jing is Potential. Resource. Blueprint. Seed (see Chris Corrigan's telling of the Sky Goddess creation story: in it, Seed holds the roaring power of transformation, which can require deep endurance and sacrifice, and the prospect of that often evokes terror -- all Kidney/Water attributes).

Jing is "the thing you can't change about yourself", your individual uniqueness given through family, lineage, ancestry, everything that's come before. You can fight it or embrace it, but it's innate and it unfolds over time.

The transformation to virtue is from Fear, to Wisdom. The wise person is deeply attuned to the inevitable unfolding, to what is going to unfold/emerge from the seeds planted now, deeply attuned to the song whose opening notes are just starting to be sung.

We have two kinds of Jing: Original Jing, which is passed to us by our parents and all of the ancestors before; and Postnatal Jing, which we make from Kidney Yin (sleep) and Kidney Yang (from the energy of the Sun -- in the air we breathe, and in the food we eat). One of the main ways to deplete Jing is to be other than what we're meant to be, to deny our authentic nature. We are given quite enough Jing to realize our True Nature, but it uses up more Jing to be/do something other than that. "Are you going to will for yourself what Heaven's willed for you?"

Original Jing is irreplaceable. When we kick into "willpower" (effortful striving) to live our lives, it means we've surpassed the amount of Jing we acquired from eating, breathing and sleeping for that day, and we are squandering Original Jing. "It is OK to tap your Jing for immortality" -- for that which will live beyond you: your child who needs you in the middle of the night, your life's devotion; just be aware of what you're choosing to use it for. Teaching is a Jing activity, relying as it does on the ability to understand the authentic Nature of each student.

A "Jing crisis" will put you into what Dr. Ted Kaptchuk calls "existential vertigo": it's "looking into the pit" or looking at the night sky and feeling like you're falling in, it's "losing your place in Time". People in a Jing crisis will visit their home town or people who knew them "before they got lost", wondering "who am I now?"

Jing tonics and medicines can't replace Original Jing, but they can help us attune to our "Jing vibration" so that we will be more likely to move in accordance, and not squander.

cafe botz

My schedule at work got confused the other day, and instead of being blocked out after 4:30 for a meeting, I was blocked out for the whole day. Oops! Oh, well, might as well go home, sit in the sun on the deck, and have baklava with a cup of sweet, hot, turkish "mud coffee" scented with cardamom, which my "adopted kibbutz mother" Judy gave me as a reminder of Israel.

Here is my current favorite baklava recipe, which I have smushed together and modified from the recipes in Joan Nathan's Foods of Israel Today, and Gloria Kaufer Greene's The Jewish Holiday Cookbook.The parts of the recipes (in parentheses) are my helpful tips ;-)

Filling:
mix together & set aside:
4 cups (about a pound) of shelled and finely chopped--but not totally ground up--walnuts or combo of walnuts and/or pistachios and/or almonds (if you are chopping them in a food processor, do the almonds first since they're so much harder)
1/4 cup sugar (so far I like the organic freeze-dried sugar cane juice best--it has a brown-sugar taste)
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp. ground allspice
1/4 tsp ground cloves

Pastry:
One box (one pound) of phyllo dough from the Greek or Middle Eastern grocery or the co-op. If it's frozen, let it thaw in the refrigerator overnight the day before you need it and then let it come to room temperature the day you're going to use it.
1-1/2 sticks butter, melted. Add a tsp of warm water to the melted butter and brush some on the bottom of a jelly-roll pan (10" by 15" by 1" pan); keep the rest warm/melted till you're ready to use it.

Honey Syrup:
1-1/2 cups water
1-1/2 cups sugar (I use the freeze-dried sugar cane juice here too)
1 cinnamon stick
2 whole cloves
a few cardamom pods
Juice & finely shredded zest of one lemon
1/2 cup honey
a few drops of rose water or orange blossom water (I like to use both!)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
OK, now open the box of phyllo dough. There will be 18-25 very thin, tissue-paper-like sheets in the box. They are fragile and dry out easily (and if they dry out they become very aggravating to work with) so you have to keep them covered with a damp (but not wet) cloth between lifting off each new sheet and arranging it in the pan. They should be easy and fun to separate from one another and not stick together in a clumpy mess (and if they do, they are not salvageable. Toss them and get a new box)
Lay one sheet of phyllo on the buttered pan (it will overhang). Brush it lightly all over with the melted butter + water mixture. Lay a new sheet of phyllo on top of the that, and brush with the butter mixture. Repeat till you have 5 sheets in a buttered stack. Scatter about 2/3 cup of the nut filling over the whole thing. Stack two more sheets of phyllo on top, buttering each (some recipes say that you can skip buttering every third sheet but I think, why bother pretending there's a low-fat version?). Scatter another 2/3 cup of the filling on top. Repeat, sprinkling 2/3 cup filling on every two buttered sheets, till you've used up all the filling. Then keep stacking sheets and buttering them till you've used them all up or until you get bored (if you have left-over sheets, wrap them back up in plastic and they will still be usable for another few weeks). If you run out of butter, you can use oil.
Trim the edges that are overhanging (& put them in their own little buttered pan, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and bake till brown and crispy)(or discard them)
Then, score the baklava by cutting with a very sharp knife halfway down to the bottom of the pan. Cut diagonals both ways to make diamond shapes, or cut triangles or squares, whatever size you prefer.
Bake it in the upper half of the preheated oven for one hour. If the top gets too brown too fast, cover it with aluminum foil.
While the baklava is baking, combine all the syrup ingredients except for the flower water in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer gently, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Add the rose and/or orange blossom water.
When the baklava is done, it should be crisp and golden. Take it out of the oven and immediately pour the syrup over the top of it, and it will make a lovely hissy crackly sound. Cut all the rest of the way through where your scored lines are to separate the pieces. Let it rest uncovered or covered just loosely with aluminum foil for several hours or overnight before eating it, with strong black coffee or earl grey tea with lemon.

(thank you to the new israelity.com for the coffee in Israel link)

Turkish coffee photo originally uploaded by Joseph Robertson

our own true size

Some more notes on Spring time, the season that corresponds to Wood and to Growth. This info is from deeply vibrant teacher Thea Elijah  who offered a rich and lively seminar called Transforming the Spirit: A Five Element Perspective on Herbal Studies, combining both information-packed lecture and direct energetic transmission of knowledge.

Each of the phases/elements/seasons/organ systems pertains to a particular aspect of the human psyche-spirit. The aspect that belongs to the Liver and thus to Spring is the Hun, the Ethereal Soul.

What Thea says about Hun: (filtered through my own mind and hands, and I apologize for any mistakes...)

The Hun is the aspect of Spirit that is completely unfettered by time and space. It's utterly free and can go anywhere, because it is the power of imagination, of creativity. It's the part of us that allows us to be always larger than our circumstances. Because of the Hun's ability to go anywhere, we can know that our own true size is the Whole Universe.

Sometimes if we can't see the way ahead, we lose hope and put the Hun in a box of preconceived restriction.

First the Hun flies,
then it figures out where it's going.

Hope does not rest on seeing the future.

Hope must precede vision.

Moses was a prophet of the Wood element: someone who, in an external situation of slavery, refused to be a slave internally. The untameable part inside is the Hun, is Hope, is like a bird circling, waiting for opportunity. It's the one who sees the problem in the first place who can be the greatest visionary, the one with the greatest solution, the one with the greatest Hun. Their tendency to anger is a sign that their soul is acutely aware of fairness and how often it doesn't manifest, and their route back to alignment with Tao is to transform excessive or stuck anger into visionary creativity.

"Our deepest pathology is our only hope of redemption."

photo source

circling for a thousand years

Lindsey sent this yesterday:

I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world
perhaps I can never achieve the last
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years
and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.

~Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Robert Bly)