Primitive eating

This morning I burned a pan of potatoes on the stovetop. Yes, we occasionally eat fried potatoes at our house--but these are NOT your MacDonalds fried potatoes, they are garden-grown fresh-dug potatoes cooked in olive oil. They weren't all burned, just one side of some of them, but those were way too full of free radicals for a mid-life person who has used up much of his immune system's youthful resiliency to eat and besides the char tasted bad. However, being deeply steeped in waste-not-want-not I had to make the best of them and was not about to scrape them into the compost and start over. So I found myself picking through them with my fingers, taking the half-burned ones out, biting off the good part, tossing away the charred part, scrummaging around for more, nibbling little unburned pieces off large hunks of potato charcoal. The surprising thing was how SATISFYING that was! (Stop rolling your eyes about my sloppy male eating habits--there's more to this than that.) There has to be something anciently wired into our brains about eating with fingers, picking through a pile of stuff, putting this and that into our mouths. This is not the same as eating a bowl of popcorn where you grab big handfuls and stuff them into your maw, instead it is the picking through the pile, judging each piece, popping the good ones into your mouth, rejecting the bad ones, that is satisfying. Think ancient tribespeople sitting on the ground sorting through baskets of groundnuts. Or a raccoon, or a chimpanzee in a zoo; the nibbling and picking is as important as the eating. Maybe it uses a part of the brain that is underutilized in modern life (except for when you pick through the sale bin at the thrift store). Maybe it is an old style of human eating before grocery stores and before we could trust everything in front of us to be homogenous with no insects living in it. And the eating was way more satisfying than if I had just been able to put them in a bowl and munch away--I actually ate less and ate slower but felt more filled and felt I had accomplished something for my blood sugar level. When do we get to stop being animals?

YAY!

That says it all.
Om shantih.

Subway Strad

A while back the Washington Post did a little experiment. They took world famous violin virtuoso Joshua Bell down to a D.C. metro station and set him up busking for the crowds. He played his Stradivarius (worth 3.5 mil) and launched into a selection of the most amazing and difficult violin works known. He played for almost an hour, during the course of which exactly 1077 people passed by oblivious, 32 people tossed money in his case without stopping (he made a total of $32) and only 7 stopped to listen to him. The Post of course wrote this all up (probably to the chagrin of all those who had used that subway stop that morning) as a moral lesson ". . . if we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that, then what else are we missing?" wrote staff writer Gene Weingarten. True, very true. Smell the roses and all that. Perhaps though we should be a little more compassionate with all the Philistines in the subway--just how good did Joshua Bell actually sound against a soundscape of grinding subway trains, how many of them might actually strongly dislike classical music, how much time would a person actually have to enjoy a classical concert on the way to work anyway? (And besides, Joshua should be happy with the $32--that's a pretty good hourly wage in Montana.) This whole thing quickly becomes a parable tying in to stories we all know about the perils of ignoring the man dressed in rags you meet on the road who turns out to be the king, a powerful wizard with three wishes for you, Jesus, whatever. So yes, keep your ears open, listen, see, taste, smell, and feel your way through your life in a skillful, aware manner. But don't take it too hard if you missed Joshua Bell in the subway, after all it was a sting operation--they wanted it to turn out that way, the media literati always feel good when they can scold the rest of us for something we are perceived to be deficient in. I probably would have passed by too--I always feel uncomfortable stopping to smell roses and blocking traffic when people are pushing me from behind.