Month: July 2009 (Page 2 of 3)

where the good folks have gone

July 16, 2009 / Michele Minehart

today started rough. it’s been 6 months since H’s diagnosis and we still don’t have hearing aids – they’re not even ordered. there have been lots of requests, but red tape has won every round. today in the midst of 17 phone calls to anyone i could get to listen i just wanted to shout, “i DON’T know what the H i’m doing, can someone please just throw me a friggin’ bone?!” but alas, mike in the next cube over also does not know how to go about getting hearing aids for infants.

the largest frustration was that i felt as if i was being treated as a stupid, lazy mother for not having all my paperwork. (which, in my defense, is incorrect – i do have the paperwork, it was an audiologist that didn’t sign something and therefore led to another rejection). i’m going to guess that 9 of 10 new mothers can’t tell you what BCMH stands for let alone how to forward on a letter of approval to get a pre-approval for the hearing aid you need.

why, oh why, do we not have just an ounce of grace for one another? i do it too… i consistently make fun of resumes i find. spelling, dumb email addresses, funny phrases – there’s nothing really that’s not game for a copy / paste to a co-worker’s IM. but why? there’s a large number of people out there who haven’t put together a resume since… well, for some – ever. can’t i overlook the offenses of the few who haven’t been as fortunate as i to currently have a job?

i had a long, ongoing conversation with a friend today via IM. she is “good people”. funny, witty, smart and very talented. capable of having intelligent conversation about serious topics that run the gammet or sending hilarious emails about monkeys and cupcakes.

i’m a pretty avid reader of the soulemama blog (see my followings). there’s something that i find there that is rich, pure and good. i can’t always put a word to use in describing it. it’s just… good. it makes me want to live…. better. it makes me want to shed my pettyness of making fun of resumes and enjoy all the things the world has to offer.

one of my favorite verses in the message translation says, “Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!” (2 corinthians 6:11-13; yes for those of you who have been in my living room, this is the painting).

i think living petty, making others feel lowly, is one way of living a small, fenced in life. No one fences us in, we do it to ourselves by trapping ourselves in meanness, in selfishness. my coworker and SoulMama live large. their eyes see the whole picture, their world is bigger than their immediate surroundings. my day looks puny in comparison, but there’s no one to blame but me.

you prepare a table before me

July 12, 2009 / Michele Minehart

it was a whirlwind weekend and jj and i finished it by sitting out on the deck, making remarks that it feels like summer is nearly over. it is not, mind you – it’s barely mid-july. but the calendar is full and we have a pretty tight-packed week approaching, so i guess we’re just feeling a squeeze. he was looking around at the tinkering projects he was hoping to accomplish this summer while off of class, but i reminded him that those project can just sit there in exchange for taking henry to the pool, like we did today.

i finished my book, in defense of food. it really was a fabulous read, and if you’re not into nutrition biochemistry, i recommend just reading the last section. a particular angle i appreciated was that it’s not that the items on your current plate are evil and poisonous, but that they push the best stuff off the plate. example? in general, we’re over-meated. we need plants for several essential vitamins and minerals – we can’t live without them because we can’t produce them. however, there’s only one vitamin in animal meat that we can’t produce (and apparently we can get it from moldy veggies? i think i’ll go with a low-dose meat diet, please…). it’s not that meat is bad for us. but the more space on the plate we give meat, the less room for the veggies. i like this approach because a) it doesn’t necessarily villianize “sometimes foods” and b) it requires me to think about what i’m giving up when making a decision.

i think that as a culture we’ve shorted ourselves too much in this area. we go for what we think will fill us best, but without realizing it we’ve pushed the good stuff off the plate. if we’re not careful, the yard tinkering that we’re dying to do will eat away at the space necessary for taking henry to the pool. it’s not that the yard tinkering is bad. but life is not the sum of completed projects – when i reflect upon my life, trips to the pool will definately come to mind before the untouched flower bed on the deck.

i feel like we have been trained to consume. we take things in, allow them a place in our lives and never give much thought to why they are there. but slowly they begin to eat up space on the plate and our lives are suddenly full of cotten candy, that has the appearance of sustance, but quickly melts away and leaves you thirsty.

every so often i feel the push for some self reflection (in the past i’ve been fortunate enough for that to coincide with Annual Advance, when i can dig out my Life Plan) and i’m feeling the familiar tug. what in my life is just taking up space, offering little to encourage a healthy life (not just of the body)? what is filling the plate simply because i’ve mindlessly put it on, not because i’ve intentionally decided this is something that would add to my experience (rather than thinking “well, it won’t hurt anything”)?

to live deliberately, in the true sense of the word, is to live “from freedom” (thanks, pollan). i’d like to begin the adventure of living in a way that i don’t feel compelled to mindlessly accept things, but rather to choose what is going on my plate.

a gastrotheology

July 5, 2009 / Michele Minehart

I’m reading yet another fabulous book, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (also author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which will likely move up my reading list queue), and need to share some thoughts. I hope i’m not infringing on copyright here, I have no idea what percent of the total book I’m going to be quoting, but i give all credits to Pollan and maybe he’ll sell another book or two and we’ll call it even.

First, the premise: Pollan is discussing the “American Diet” and the health consequences of our recent tradition of mass producing everything we consume. He alludes to the common practices of eating alone or in the car – not enjoying a meal as experience as our predecesors have. For Americans, it’s about consumption, not food (the subtitle of the book is: An Eater’s Manifesto. i’m totally an eater, so i dig it). He is a proponent of whole foods for several reasons, of which i will leave to the book. But, unbeknownst to me before i read, generally we talk about food now in terms of nutrients instead of foods, something that has a deep impact on our view of food and our eating habits. Not to mention our biblical interpretation. Keep reading, it’s good.

“Most nutrional science invoves studying one nutrient at a time, a seemingly unavoidable approach that even nutrionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. ‘The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,’ points out Marion Nestly, a NYU nutritionist, ‘is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet and the diet out the context of the lifestyle.’
“If nutrition scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done. Scientists study variables they can isolate; if they can’t isolate a variable, they won’t be able to tell whether its presence or absence is meaningful. yet even the simplist food is a hopelessly complicated thing to analyze, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutrition scientist you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: Break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring subtle interactions and contexts and the fact that the whole may well be more than, or maybe just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.
… it encourages us to take a simple mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient, get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways…”

i don’t think Pollan needs much explaining here. By looking at the little things outside of the big picture, we may miss something. He gives examples of the FDA advising people to increase intake of a particular vitamin, yet when this is done in isolation, rather than by ingesting the whole carrot, there is actually an increase chance of heart disease (or other named-by-Pollan malady, i’m not going to look it up).

it’s funny that when it comes to food, we’re trying to get the smallest form of the good thing. we’ll buy cereal with added potassium rather than eating a banana or potato. Why? There’s nothing wrong with the nana or the tater. (Pollan has his hypothesis in the food industry…). In fact, the nana and the tater are actually better than the marketed and labeled cereal with added in “nutrients.”

i’ve seen a similar approach to living the quote/unquote christian life. we have some reductionist tendencies when we read the scripture, minimizing things down the smallest letter of the can and can-nots rather than enjoying the whole of the life we’re directed to live – one of love, faith, charity and peace. when you live in such a manner, you will naturally fall in line with they nitty gritty details that eons of church history has split hairs over. if we’d just eat the carrot, we’d get what we need.

i woke up the other morning quite perterbed about an imaginary discussion i was having with a friend over a social issue upon which christians have a tendency to pounce. regardless of my view of said social issue, i have real qualms over the way it’s been handled by both congregants and leaderships alike. maybe we need to stop worrying whether s/he is getting enough vitamin X and just offer them a carrot. and make sure we’re eating our carrots as well – maybe we’re not vitamin X deficient, but there are plenty of vits and minerals that we could be lacking. however, that is not our habit. instead, we offer them artificial supplements, trying to change their vitamin intake of something we only think would fix their life. but what they need is a carrot. we’re no different than the Pharisees trying to stump Jesus with “but who is my neighbor?”. Reductionist theology in it’s finest.

we have no idea how the whole picture fits together, we only know how to enjoy the whole food, in a whole diet, in a whole lifestyle. and if it’s manufactured and labeled healthy, it’s probably not. the real stuff doesn’t need a label because a carrot doesn’t lie (though the ones in my garden taste much better than the ones in the grocery store!). and you can’t manufacture love, faith, charity or peace. there is no substitute or supplement.

Month: July 2009 (Page 2 of 3)

where the good folks have gone

you prepare a table before me

a gastrotheology

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