variety{spice of life}

Last night, I participated in one of Nashville's dinnerlab events held at The Anchor Fellowship!  

Forbes.com contributor Adriana Lopez expressed the recent dinnerlab phenomenon best, 

summarizing the social dining start up as 

a membership-based dining club that connects adventurous diners 

with undiscovered chefs for rogue and unique pop-up dining experiences.

And just when I thought I was an adventurous diner...

Ecuadorian Chef Octavio Ycaza busted out seven courses that stretched my 

palate with such "finger-licking" delicacies as beef tripe, fried blood and coconut water 

(that somehow did not taste like water or coconut??!).

A quick aside on tripe.

For those of you who don't know, and in the interest

of protecting your eyes from the google images...

and I quote:

1. the rubbery lining of the stomach of cattle 2. something of no value; rubbish.

Yep, that about sums it up.

It was a fun evening exploring new flavors with familiar friends.  

If the old adage variety is the spice of life is true, then 

my dinnerlab experience was off the Scoville scale, yo!

taking care of #1

Tis the season for sickness. It's all over the news: wash your hands, get your flu shot, and cover your mouth when you sneeze. And sometimes, even when you do all those things, you still get sick. When we're sick it's easy to focus on all the negative things that are happening: the social gatherings we couldn't attend, the beautiful weather on the other side of the window, or how disappointed we are that we're missing out on work… well, maybe not that one.

I found myself in a version of that mindset  earlier this week, so, instead of grumbling and complaining about how poorly I was feeling, I decided to embrace the opportunity to comfort and take care of myself. I put on my favorite pajamas, ate my favorite foods (aka Cheetoh Puffs), and made sure that I took my temperature regularly. Wanting something relaxing to watch, I put in Pride and Prejudice, a movie that had come highly recommended to me and that gave me a visual reference to the book I had fallen in love with the previous year.

At the end of the movie I decided that  watching Pride and Prejudice would become a sick day ritual. And so I decided to watch it again. And again. And again. In one day I watched it four times. And that's exactly what sick days are meant to be. Days were we can listen to what needs our body is telling us we have. Sometimes it's rest, which means that we need to go to bed early and sleep in as long as we can. Sometimes it's to drink more fluids or to take medicine. And, in my case, I needed to sit back, relax, and get caught up in a love story (and also blow my nose a lot). So, at whatever point in the winter season you find yourself until the weather, figure out what stirs your heart (like Mr. Darcy stirs mine) and take care of yourself! 

love the questions

What do you do when you have no answers?  Seems like I rang in 2014 without that still, certain voice of "I know this to be true."  And each little question seems to open the door to more and more questions until my thoughts are just one incredibly long grammatically incorrect run on sentence.
Ugh.

Several friends have graciously listened to my emotional thought vomit over the past couple of weeks and kindly passed along encourging inspiration to my overarching blah-ness.  Topics included a devotion detailing "one of the most remarkable capacities of the human mind...the capacity to direct its own attention to something it chooses..." and an article that begins "Everybody wants what feels good..." and continues to propose to flip this want on its head and dig deeper into "...what pain do you want?  What are you willing to struggle for?  Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives end up."

So with all mulling over of these general themes floating around amongst the specific questions, I have to stop and be still.  I have to stop and be still because, I know truth is found in the stillness.  Once I finally exercised the capacity of my mind to look past these surface questions and dig deeper into the underlying fears driving those questions, then the questions became a conversation. 

What a beautiful evolution!  I am reminded of some sage advice from Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet:

"I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

 

snow day

Polar Vortex

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Breaking Bread

Lunchbox Buddies celebrated the New Year by breaking bread with old friends. 

  

Chapter One: January

And now let us welcome the New Year.
   Full of things that have never been.
            -- Rainer Maria Rilke
January, the month of new beginnings and cherished memories, beckons. Come, let winter weave her wondrous spell: cold, crisp, woolen-muffler days, long dark evenings of savory suppers, lively conversations, or solitary joys. Outside the temperature drops as the snow falls softly. All of nature is at peace. We should be, too. Draw hearthside. This is the month to dream, to look forward to the year ahead and the journey within.
-Excerpt from Sarah Ban Breathnach's Simple Abundance:  A Daybook of Comfort and Joy