Oh What A Time It Was...

I've spent the last four days in Marin and San Francisco and South San Francisco, and are my legs/eyes/brain/emotions/heart tired! I feel like I ran a multi-day race. We flew out to California and saw our friend, went to another family's house for dinner, then split up to respectively visit another person and go to an author event at a nearby bookstore.

The next day, Sunday, May 18, was the Olompali Heritage Day celebration. We got there just after 10 and drove up the road, a newer road a little south of the one that used to go straight out to 101, just outside the city of Novato, which had only been a town when we lived at Olompali in 1969.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this day. I had sent my Olompali story to the folks making the documentary Olompali: A California Story. I met Greg Gibbs, the partner of the film's producer, Maura McCoy, who was one of the founders of this chapter of Olompali's history as one of three children of her dad, Don McCoy was the man who had leased the ranch (all 690 acres of it!) from the State of California starting in 1966. The Grateful Dead had been the land's renters for a few months, earlier in that halcyon year of hippiedom, which also happened to be the year we arrived in San Francisco.

We entered the park, me marveling all the while at the visitor center apparatus (paved parking lot and fences) and finding things not quite as I had remembered. The visitor center is in the Yellow House but the lower floor has been gutted and remodeled, so was entirely unfamiliar, and I didn't ask to go upstairs, where things have been less altered since I lived there.

I then met Gregg and Maura in person. Maura would have been about 10 or 11 when my sister died and Novato shut the place down. Perhaps Maura and I didn't click back in the day, and didn't remember each other fondly. Testing my recall, I asked a couple of people if they remembered anyone named "Ivy" at Olompali, but now I wonder whether it is Maura I've renamed in my memory banks.

After showing the film trailer, an early Q & A with Gregg, Maura, and Noelle followed to let the overheating projector recover before we could all watch the film clip. During the Q & A I stood up with all the people in the room who had lived there then. Some people didn't know who I was, and I didn't recognize most of the other 15 people or so who were standing with me in the room. 

After seeing the 10-minute film excerpt, everyone in attendance was quite impressed. Many of the Olompali folks had been through the experience of working with an archaeologist who sorted out the things found in the fire that gutted the Burdell Mansion early in 1969 so they were used to a certain kind of examination of their past. But this snappy, hopeful, and well produced tale showed how the place is woven into the fabric of California history and validated some key elements of this chapter of Rancho Olompali's storied history. It focused on how the commune didn't start out as a grand experiment in utopian living. It was more that the kids in three families all liked each other and the adults said, "Hey, we have money -- let's get out of the concrete jungle and try living in the country all together." And they did.

Sister Mary, who had been the commune's schoolteacher at what came to be called the Not School, stood up and read a poem she'd written to commemorate the occasion. Everyone cheered and accepted the copies she handed around.

After the film clip, everyone walked around and chatted. I introduced myself to Buz, who was the ranch manager at the time. I would have been just one of the little kids to him, I think. Then I introduced myself to a fellow in a straw hat and wearing a bead necklace. "You're Flower?" he beamed, brightening. "I'm Hari. I knew you and your family well. You were my favorite kid!" We were both crying now. I'm crying again as I write this.

Hari said he remembered me well, and my family too. I was so happy to hear this! We had been friends. "You were so imaginative and free," Hari said. "I remember your mother, too. I think I had a crush on her. I was 'between families' then, and she represented everything that my first wife had not been. And she was so beautiful. And you, you were my favorite kid. And your father." Here he sighed and struggled with what to say. "I don't think he was a junkie," he said carefully, "but he was using." I was glad to have another of my memories corroborated by another witness, because I had confronted my father on this point and he'd disclaimed any memories of the events. I said my father is living in Mexico now and we are out of touch. Hari nodded.

Hari's story had been that he was headed down a narrowing path when he decided to go to India on a spiritual quest. His wife and children wanted no part of his strange journey, and turned against him. He came back from India changed and still seeking, but still without family. When he landed at Olompali around when we did, he too saw the possibility of a place where children were encouraged to play and sing and dance and explore and be curious and interact with the people around them not just in an institution. But he also went to the Haight and saw what was happening, how harder drugs were sweeping away that peaceful, loving vibe and turning the Haight-Ashbury into a place more often than not hijacked by the gritty, greasy stew of junkies, drunks, dealers, pimps, and bikers displacing the flood of hamsterish and earnest stoned people and acid-dropping intellects. Hari later had a second family, two sons who love and cherish him and he them.

___

As one example of the examined life the former Olompalians have lived since that particular experiment aborted, it had become apparent that the archaeologist's assumption was incorrect: the concrete pad outside the yellow house was not for a family gazebo that had since been dismantled or destroyed in a gale. Rather, it had been built for the giant bread oven that was gifted to the commune by a baker who took a detour on his existential trail when he came to live at Olompali. Bread was baked by nudists in the large commercial oven (An oven, or a sweat lodge? You be the judge!) not only for the communards but also as part of the Diggers' self-appointed mission to hand out for free on Sundays in San Francisco. Someone asked about the recipe for the bread and the answer came, "It had a lot of molasses. It was more virtuous than delicious." But I remember that fresh hot whole-wheat bread with meals being filling and chewy. Some days it tasted better than others. Remember: these were the days when people were experimenting with everything -- you can just imagine what happened when a bunch of communally minded people converged on the kitchen!

I have to curb my storytelling for now but will pick it up soon. I am so grateful for the opportunity to take this trip right now, and to myself for taking it. It has been a revelation and a delight. For now, a couple more thoughts:

We were all just borrowing this place. But oh, the things we learned!  That with care and intention and energy it is possible to create an environment conducive to joy and music and discovery and movement and mixing things up. That a lot of dark stuff got mixed up in it the way PCP or the poorly named "angel dust" hit the streets of the Haight like a toxic tide that brought with it a thousand more ills and imbalances. Yet, before all of that, there had been a big idea that still animates all the hearts of the true hippies I know: that this kind of joy and openness is possible not just for small groups of individuals but in society at large. Which is but one of the reasons my heart swells about the maker movement and I have long dreamed of opening a place called The Craft Palace. I have always turned to making something when I am feeling sad or alienated from others. We had a friend stay with us a few days and teach me how to improvise on the piano, and anytime I had a keyboard at hand and needed to hear my own music, I had that to cheer myself up or remind myself of my basic creative and generative self. Doesn't every child deserve the access to that I had? That experience gave me the tools to get the education I wanted from the environment around me, not only take what was handed to me by my teachers.

For awhile, I struggled with PTSD. I got distracted by all those demons, that "evil life that's got you in its sway," as the Rolling Stones song goes. And all that came in a middle section of the story, so we'll put that idea aside for another essay or several, not letting that hijack this joyful tale, and return to May 18.

As I have said, the big surprise to me was that we all left Olompali around when our family turned tail and headed to Colorado. Noelle said "about 12 of us moved back home to my mother's house in Mill Valley." I believe the McCoy family went to a place just outside San Rafael in Terra Linda when the commune ended (but I'm still fuzzy on some of the details).

I learned that while my family arrived on the crest of the dark tide that arose about six months before Olompali was shut down, when singalongs started to turn sour and the drunk guys stole the spotlight again, it wasn't me anyone was objecting to. I was where I was supposed to be, the whole time we were there. When I was flipping through the records in the mansion, and picking one to put on and listen to by myself, I was supposed to be doing just that. This environment had been designed for me, and spread out for me to discover at my own pace, which I did every time I put on an album or tapped a tambourine to keep time with a song.

I had so long carried the feeling of being exiled from that place, where heaven went along without us while we had been dashed back down to earth to suffer and shuffle along among the other mortals, an experience that set us apart from angels and humans equally. So what a revelation it is to feel that we belonged there. What a relief no longer to take it personally when someone like Noelle says, "We didn't want just anybody coming here." We belonged there despite the existence of cliques of drunk men or mean kids (who pop up in every crowd, right?). We belonged there because we were ready and willing and able to be genuine and free and true to ourselves, and once you've seen that, no one can take it away from you: It's yours. It's yours to keep in your pocket, to wear the way a superhero dons a cape, or to stick on a pole and fly freak-flag high, or to twirl like the streamer of a rhythmic gymnast. I feel I have given this great gift of belonging to myself, a direct result of taking this trip.

As I met people around the reunion, I saw that we are all still here, and still carry some of that joy with us. It's not always easy to remember amidst the chaos and demands of now, and the pain of losing so many of our fellows along the way. But we all shared and cared how it came out. My sister's death didn't just affect our family; it affected our whole community. It's too bad my family for whatever reasons could not stay and grieve with the others around us, who would have helped us process what happened and grow to accept it over time. We had to navigate that on our own in a way I wouldn't wish on anyone. But we made it through and for that I am grateful. There are so many times we could have not made it for one reason or another, but we did, and we're not victims of our past but survivors, one and all. It's a miracle each one of us is here. So I figure let's make the most of it and celebrate being in it all together. Oh, what a time it is.

OK go!

The End of Olompali

We had lived at many San Francisco addresses in 1966 through 1968, among them a church rectory filled with hippies on Julian in the Mission, a couple of flats in Noe Valley, and a flat on Cole, just a couple of blocks from the busy epicenter that was Haight and Ashbury, and four blocks from Golden Gate Park, where we went to Be-Ins and spent many hours on the playground's swings and concrete slides. In the evenings we went to concerts and film happenings at the Straight Theatre and other nearby concert halls.

It was with the name of a new friend, Michael Morningstar, on our lips that we arrived at Olompali, maybe on a sun-kissed February day in 1969, one of those fine, pre-spring California days when you want to swim in the ocean or sow some seeds in turned soil. By the time we got to Olompali, commune life was in full swing and open to all comers, so it turned out it didn't really matter who we knew. Michael was friendly and relaxed and stayed in his room in the yellow house when he was at the ranch. I remember flipping through the records in the living room of the yellow house, and playing instruments there by myself. Once I asked Michael if I could have some money and he said yes, go ahead and help yourself to any you find. I did, and always felt fond of Michael for giving me that hundred dollars. He had sincerely offered it to me, and he had to talk my parents out of insisting I return the money.

The hardest thing to do at Olompali was sleep. I started out trying to sleep on a flatbed trailer with my father, mother, and little sister, but the cows snuffled at our heads during the night. We tried sleeping under the trailer, but the ground had been tilled and was horribly lumpy. We'd wake up cold and wet with dew in the early morning. (Maybe this is one of the reasons I've never been a big fan of the Grateful Dead's song “Morning Dew.”) My sister didn't mind sleeping outdoors as much as I did, but I went in search of a way to sleep inside. I got permission to sleep under a kitchen table a few times in a cabin where one couple lived, but the nights its occupants had noisy sex were not so restful.

I didn't like Olompali so much at night, but during the day it could be like a festival. The pool was cool and clear and I was learning to swim pretty well. We had friends and music and food – so much good food! My mother liked the communal cooking and baking, and found it the easiest way to get to know the other women and do something useful.

At first my sister and I spent a lot of time together at Olompali. I was sixteen months older than my little sister Audrey, who was called Baby then, but I was the more introverted one. Baby was a mimic. I can pull off a decent impression or accent now and then, but she was so funny and could capture it all: tone, facial expressions, and speech rhythms. We loved each other most, but we also liked having kids our ages to run and play with. Olompali had so much for us to explore: fields of tall grasses, gnarled scrub oak trees, a lawn with a gentle slope for sitting at mealtimes and rolling around on, the many intriguing houses, outbuildings, and encampments all over the property, and lots of interesting adults like Vivian and Laird (when he wasn't drunk or weird) who weren't afraid to talk and interact with children.

My sister and I started to become pals and run around with some of the kids who lived there, but I remember one girl who seemed to see me as a rival when I showed up. Somehow, though, my sister out-toughed Ivy. When Ivy was being mean, I would get scared or mad, but Baby could keep her sense of humor. Maybe she mimicked Ivy and made everyone laugh. Even though I was older, I knew precious little about being tough or funny, and learned a lot from watching my sister defend my honor. How I loved her.

In addition to the frequent and freewheeling after- or before-dinner music-making at Olompali, I also remember hearing the Beatles, CSN&Y, Bob Dylan, Richard and Mimi Fariña, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. John Mayall was someone's favorite, and I remember hearing the ubiquitous sounds of Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, and Jimi Hendrix. People also listened to other music: jazz, Indian music, folk. My mother liked the Everly Brothers and The Beach Boys, and I took notice of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (the Flowers album was a favorite since I had changed my name to Flower back when we lived at the rectory in the city). Lots of people went to concerts and listened to The Grateful Dead, and people played Dead songs on their guitars and at fireside singalongs. The Grateful Dead played at Olompali a few times and the back cover of the Aoxomoxoa album features a photograph of them taken at the ranch, but I don't remember seeing the band when we were there.

We started getting comfortable with some of the routines at the ranch. My mother cooked and baked, and we ran around with the other kids. But just when we felt we knew what to expect, things started getting weird. I don't believe we were at the ranch when the big fire destroyed the mansion in February of 1969, or when that freaky drug raid happened, but looking back I remember feeling that these raging wars that were going on in so many other places – in Asia, the culture wars in America – were finally creeping into our own environment despite our attempts to escape them

In what I think of as the “rap time” after dinner, men brandished guns and pacifists pleaded with them to calm down. People who were inclined to point to astrological signs of impending chaos, darkness, or conspiracy became agitated and spewed their paranoia, in turn stoking others' fears and visions of doom. More than once I saw someone plunge a knife into the ground while ranting and raving about some anguish I didn't understand.

I wonder now: Were there returned Vietnam vets among the young men at Olompali, men who had been psychically wounded in combat? Where did the firebrands in our group come from? My father didn't serve; he had babies instead. But we knew people who had come back with that haunted gaze I later recognized when I heard the term “thousand-yard stare.” Some of these men were angry, and some seemed to need a lot of grass or other drugs and liquor to quench all that pain.

In June, we visited our friends the Pennys at their sunny place in Winters with the persimmon tree. I stayed with them for a few extra days on my own. We still have photographs of my little sister from one happy weekend in Winters when she was sitting in a shaft of light and reading the Sunday funnies. I think Bob Penny took the pictures – he always had the best and most up-to-date stereo and camera gear, and could develop his own photos.

That weekend after my parents and sister had gone back to Olompali, one of the Pennys answered the phone and learned that my sister was in the hospital. I vaguely remember a blur of activity and the tense drive to the hospital, Marin General. It might have been evening when we got the call, but I think we arrived at the hospital after dark. The Pennys vanish in my memory after this. I don't know where they were or if they stayed with us for a while and then went home, or if they took care of us in any way. I don't remember anything of the next several days but seeing my little sister lying in that little warmed crib in that gray room, pretty much naked but all stuck full of plugs and catheters and tubes. I remember and hoping and wishing and praying she would wake up and be the person I had known all her life and most of mine.

While my father flipped out in his own way and disappeared for the most part, ultimately getting thrown out of the hospital when he got caught trying to steal drugs, my mother asked some Buddhist monks to come into Baby's hospital room to chant for her when the doctors told us she would have permanent brain damage if she did wake up from her coma. I don't know why it helps me so much to remember that these kind people were chanting for my sister, and for me and my mother and father, but it does. Perhaps the chants helped us move through those awful moments without getting completely stuck.

Baby died on my mother's birthday. I was not with her at the ends of her life. I was not with her at the end of her conscious life when she fell into the water at Olompali when riding the tricycle in her long dress around the pool with an even littler girl, her friend Nika. They must have been riding the trike in circles around the pool. Later everyone figured the trike caught the loose stone at the edge of the pool and the trike and two girls tipped into the water. Neither of them knew how to swim, and they had the trike and my sister's long red dress to tangle them up. I wasn't with them so I couldn't help them swim to the edge. I wasn't with them so I didn't see how long they were in the water before the girl who was supposed to be watching them but wasn't paying attention emerged to find them and send up the alarm. I've read people's recollections saying none of the vehicles would start, so getting them to the hospital took forever. She lived another nine days but I didn't get to hold her as she was without the tubes and machines that last time and tell her how much I loved her, that I would never forget her, and I would miss her forever.

Reading other people's accounts on the internet, I discovered a lot of mythology around this moment at Olompali. Some said, gruesomely, that it was weeks before they were found because the pool water was murky and covered with leaves. But I remember the pool being well cared for, the water clear and clean. Some say the girls never made it to the hospital, but I know that was not the case. One article says they died shortly after getting to the hospital. I think Nika died earlier than Audrey did, but I honestly don't remember.

My sixth birthday was marked by a little party at Olompali six days after Baby died. My mother made me a beautiful and delicious cake, vanilla with vanilla frosting and decorated with shiny dark green leaves. People sang to me, and everyone cried and thought of my missing sister the whole time. A few days later my mother, father, and I left Olompali and did not return for years.

Only recently, when combing the Internet for Olompali recollections, did I realize that Baby's and Nika's deaths ended life as we knew it at Olompali, not just for us, but also for most of the people we knew there. We moved back to Colorado within a few weeks, and most of the people at Olompali also dispersed within that few weeks.

We still had a few connections to people we had known at Olompali. A few people we had known in California came out to Boulder around that time. Others visited occasionally, or we went to visit them on our road trips to California. I spent some lovely time with our friend Vivian in Northern California (in Rio Nido I think, and later she moved to Sebastopol). For a while, Vivian was a dedicated and prolific pen pal, exchanging letters with me about the turbulence of my friendships and my shifting relationships with my parents. Once in a long while someone would bring news of someone we knew from Olompali, but after a few years, we lost touch with everyone. 

This is an excerpt from a work in progress, tentatively titled "Flower Child: My Tales of Growing Up in the 1960s and Beyond."

Post-Dramatic Stress

Sometimes when I read the morning's news in the paper and on social media, I am also scanning for a current writing prompt, and this morning's leapt off the page at me: PTSD.

I wrote recently that we were like the vets returned from Vietnam when we returned to Colorado shocked and shattered. My father, mother, stepmother, sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents – everyone in my family has suffered so much trauma, which means sometimes we still suffer from reactions to those traumas, just like those war veterans.

One of my aunts recently said she had no idea what we were going through when my sister died in California and we moved back home immediately. “I lived such a sheltered life,” she told me. She is right that I never shared that luxury, but the truth is: her life was sheltered in some ways, but not in others.

My daughter's life seems so sheltered now that it is painful for her to learn about some of the harsher economics of human transactions. I am grateful every day that she didn't have to contend with the hectic pace of change in daily life that I did as a child. Her life is so predictable compared to mine, and for her, that is a good thing.

Recently I learned of the experiments on fairness done with capuchin monkeys in which they give two monkeys grapes for doing a specific task, then give one monkey grapes for that task but the other monkey gets cucumbers, and watch how mad that second monkey gets about receiving a different and less tasty reward. As a child in school, I saw how my friends lived and knew something wasn't quite right in my world. Now I see I was always working on the trajectory of my life, trying to change its course, make it come out a little better.

All of which perhaps explains those episodes I think about – those things I had been calling tantrums but were more likely bouts of mania, in which I tried to blast past some apparent restriction. Why? I don't know how otherwise to explain my desire to get out of my house and ride to St. Louis on the back of a friend's motorcycle when I was six or ride to Poughkeepsie, New York with a dad and his two sons (I have good memories of that trip except for the one about maybe starting a brush fire by sliding down a grassy hillside on pieces of cardboard). I don't know how otherwise to explain my midlife-crisis-y need to go to London and go to Chicago to see my favorite band. There was something in me that Would Not Be Denied. 

I of course have seen this force in my parents, too, and my mother saw this in her mother, and so on, and so on.

While my genealogical research is helping me put some of this in perspective, it doesn't necessarily disappear the PTSD that lingers on. My child is sensitive to a whole other set of concerns and perceptions than I am, and has a lot to teach me a lot about keeping my inner self calm, getting enough sleep every day, and acting instead of reacting. When I'm hangry, though, all that good intention goes out the window and I am short-fused and reactive.

Every time I think about this and write about it, though, I feel more compassion for myself and for everyone who struggles with their feelings and reactions to trauma. Our culture often tells us to keep calm and carry on instead of letting ourselves feel our pain or grief or anger, which are bad enough on their own, without the frustration at the injustice of continuing to experience these reactions to wrongs done long ago. Breathing and noticing what we are grateful for helps, too, yes, but so does feeling our own feelings as they come, whether that means spending quiet time in nature, meditating and observing them, writing them down to pull them out from the dark shadows and into the light to be examined, or expressing yourself through some other medium that gives you peace and perspective.

The other day I heard an NPR story about the Sherpa community after many Sherpa died in a recent ice slide on Everest. One Sherpa said, "Normally, when we climbing, we just pray: 'Om mani padme hum.' That mantra is very powerful mantra, and that protects you [with] safety and long life. But ... if there's a wrong time, even the mantra cannot protect them."

Communication saves

Communication saved my life.

Yesterday my mother asked me about my experience of our traumatic end to our time in California in 1969 and our dismantled skulk back to Colorado. I told her we were so isolated by what we had been through. Think of it: we were in the midst of a circus in San Francisco in 1966-68 and Marin in 1969.

I was fortunate to have a float in that parade, in getting to see and feel those many amazing instances of peace and love and beauty that could occur between total strangers, individually or in groups. As a very young child in the late 1960s, I also remember seeing and feeling neglect, physical abuse, drug abuse, hypersexuality, and so much incomprehensible human strangeness. Fortunately, I was a resilient and adaptable, easygoing little person and had a family who wanted to treat me as a person. My feisty littler sister was sensitive to issues of fairness and justice, and was a great mimic. Then I lost my sister to a babysitter's carelessness (or lust, or participation in some moment that didn't involve watching my sister and her friend tricycling and running in circles around the swimming pool at the commune where we lived in Marin).

When we moved back to Colorado, we were shattered. Apparently we didn't talk about what happened. I can't imagine what it must have been like for my parents to come to the door of my grandmother's house and have to tell her and then the rest of the family that one of our family was gone, erased, as if she'd never existed. As her bereaved sister, I could just be sad and sleep a lot, which I was and did. My parents carried a horrible burden of shame and regret, sorrow and rage, disappointment and disillusion. We could no longer say with that innocent certainty that things would all work out in the end. That was no longer possible. 

In a way we became a lot like the Vietnam vets who would return to the States having seen far more than they'd ever dreamed of, read about, or bargained for when they'd shipped out, green and innocent, having been nurtured by their families and friends right up until being thrust into that horrorshow of human experience and humanity/inhumanity.

My mother tells me how we came to an acquaintance's family's house in Nederland, above Boulder, and told them our grievous tale. The wife burst into tears. "I can't believe you brought this to us," she said and ran from the room for the rest of the evening. (They ended up letting us stay in their tipi and use their kitchen and bathroom facilities for the next couple of months.) It seems to me that after that, we kept our hurt private. It was too heavy for anyone else to carry. It took years to get comfortable talking about Baby, but later we learned to reminisce about her: her precociousness at aping people's expressions, verbal and physical, and about her fearlessness compared with my caution. My mother said she felt she was often butting heads with Baby, and thought she had been our father's favorite child.

Now, I know that some of the things that happened around me when I was small could easily have caused a social worker to whisk me away from my unstable environment and plop me into foster care. But it breaks my heart a little now to think that today, if a child lost her sister -- and a family lost a child -- to a tragic accident, that child and family would all be plied with grief counseling services and offered help to process what had happened and move forward. But no.

We didn't have a funeral for my sister. Some of the mysteries of human experience remained associated with San Francisco forever, and I think as soon as we left I was always trying to find ways to get back there, to where I had last seen and played with my sister.

Things shifted when I started to realize that there were resources to help me, such as music, to lift my spirits and soul; the library, full of books where I could learn about other ways of doing, living, and being; and movies that showed me up close things that people around me didn't talk about. I had friends, people who listened when I talked, and who wanted to help me. One of our friends from the Olompali commune days, Vivian Gotters, reconnected with us when I was a teenager, and she was my wise pen pal through some rocky moments. I had counselors at school who helped me talk about the bouts of alcohol and rage my father cycled through, gave me reality checks that the injustices I suffered were indeed not normal, nor right; and helped me keep my head up (and down) at the same time. I kept seeking ways to speak my truth. As a student of self-defense I went on to learn more about the boundary between me and everyone else and found ways to say no that I had never comprehended were possible for me.

I think everything I have worked at in my life has been about opening channels of communication so that information can flow freely. It was isolating and stifling to be told, “We can handle our problems inside our own family.” That wasn't true. My father mishandled our feelings and drank his own into oblivion. I did appreciate my mother saying to me, “If you can't talk to us, you know a lot of people who love and care about you whom you can talk to.” I took full advantage of that (some might say too much – I think I could be kind of a leech when I really liked someone).

I would not be who I am today without the strength of my desire to keep information and love, energy, compassion, and curiosity flowing better and more freely everywhere I turn. I am grateful for feeling connected, not isolated, and for my many open channels of communication. They have truly saved me from many fates far worse than this.

That's what I'm dancing about!

At last! I am seeing around me what I've been believing over the last few years: movement is medicine.

In retrospect, I can see that over the past decade I've made over many of my habits.

I stumbled across a dance class when my daughter was in her gymnastics classes and remembered having attended a couple of classes when she had first started teaching at my local rec center. The class was even better than I had remembered, and the music blew me away -- some days I knew 90 percent of the music we danced to and other days I knew hardly any of it, but the rhythms were good and the class always made me feel happy and loose by the end.

I tried to ride my mountain bike to work at least a couple of times a week. I'm a wimp in the winter, though. (Turns out this is probably a good thing. My sweetie crashed his bike on a patch of black ice on his way back to work at the beginning of the year and had surgery on his hand as a result. He's getting better now--phew!) One of the things I was excited about when I went back to work was my five-mile commute. I bought a hybrid bike and started riding back and forth, or when it was windy or stormy I'd put my bike on the bus home, and ride the last mile or so home. Then one day I rode my mountain bike and had so much fun riding but had this notion it was slower. So I timed myself on both bikes, and it turned out it took me exactly the same amount of time to get home on my mountain bike as it did on my hybrid -- but it felt ten times as fun to ride the mountain bike, so I hung the hybrid up on the garage wall.

Despite my few days a week at dance classes and my occasional rides to work, I was still having a lot of knee pain and decided to have my second meniscus surgery last year. I'd had one tear cleaned up about a decade earlier and now the other knee was yelling for mercy. I tried physical therapy but the exercises I was doing just weren't helping enough. One night I fell asleep weeping with pain and decided it was time to call the orthopedic surgeon. The rehab following my surgery made me feel like a fresh new human, stronger and more stable.

After I had done my knee rehab I was finally strong enough to go to the fitness training classes held at work (during the work day, amazingly), taught by personal trainer Judd NeSmith of Ser!ous Fitness. "I'm an exercise scientist," he would say humorously when he answered questions or explained a concept, such as why you work complementary muscle groups during exercise sessions. But seriously, in Judd's classes I learned so much about strength and stability, heart-rate training, and working complementary muscle groups with squats and band-walks. The fun and varied whole-body workouts incorporated freeweights, TRX straps (straps affixed high on the wall to support your weight as you use them for a variety of exercises), medicine balls, elastic bands, and foam rollers. I learned about raising your heart rate quickly and working toward intervals of high cardio output. I left the workouts sweaty and strong, the hour having flown past in a blur of exercises and playful banter between Judd and my endorphin-soaked coworkers.

On NPR's Science Friday radio show last week, Ira Flatow interviewed Jordan Metzl, M.D., who argued that exercise is at least as effective as many medicines but doesn't have the side effects of so many medications, and should be prescribed -- and dosed -- to support health. Dr. Metzl said exercise supports body health and brain health by reducing cholesterol, reducing depression, reversing hypertension, and reducing inflammation. And no side effects (except for the occasional injury).

Recent research supports the notion that exercise is at least as effective as medication in many instances. A recent story by Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times poses the next logical question, which is why doctors don't prescribe exercise as much as they prescribe pills. Is it because doctors think it's easier for people to take a pill than change a habit?

Here are a few ways I changed my exercise habits:

• I put all my dance classes and workouts on my calendars. This meant I got reminders for each one. It also meant I had the times blocked out, for others who can see my schedule. Sometimes if a meeting was scheduled during a workout class, I had to miss the class, but all those reminders help me prioritize the exercise as a nearly daily activity, and also nudge me to pack the workout clothes I'll need in the morning.
• When I was just going to the gym to work out, I thought of it not only as fitness time, but also time to catch up on music or podcasts I wanted to listen to. I love grooving through my workout with my headphones on. (I did have to spend about $30 on earbuds that fit my ears better -- the standard earbuds that came with my mobile music player did not stay put through workouts.)
• On days when I thought about skipping class, I tried to think about how I would feel after the workout. Often this was enough to get me there, and 99 percent of the time I was glad I'd gone after about 15 minutes of any given class or workout. 
• I started using an online fitness tracker app on my smartphone. This motivated me in a surprising way: On days when I work out, I see how many calories I've used and feel free to eat a little more of what I like that day. 

Have you changed any of your habits? How did you do it? Did the changes stick? Tell me in the comments.

It's exciting to me to think more people are learning how to move for their health. Movement seems to bring with it so many benefits beyond stronger muscles. I am looking for ways to support folks in moving more. Stay tuned for new developments!

Blurred Lines

It was the grief in the voice of the crying – no, wailing – young rhinoceros coming over my car speakers that put me over the edge. NPR reporter Frank Langfitt warned that the next segment contained graphic and disturbing sounds and 30 seconds later I had burst into loud sobs at the shocked and bereft sounds of a young animal who had just lost his or her mother to a terrible death. A poacher had killed her for her horn.

As I sat in my car weeping through the story about African rhino poachers, the questions came: “How can I eat chickens and cows if I feel this way about a rhinoceros? If my cats are so precious and intelligent” – each one has his or her own cat-ality, I like to say – “how can I justify taking pigs' lives for the sake of my tasty bacon for breakfast?” I knew then I had to stop eating animals.

I had once tried being vegan for a month or so, about 15 years ago. My senses seemed sharper. Flavors were brighter, less murky – I didn't need to add so much spice or jazz everything up the way I normally do. I didn't crave salt and sugar so much. But it was often less than satisfying given the quality of the nondairy cheese and milk replacements I tried then. Veganism felt like a huge set of deprivations, and I quickly reverted to my meat-eating ways.

Even the word vegan suggests that all you get is vegetables – it smacks of asceticism, of martyrdom. Friends draw little “cuckoo” circles in the air up by their temples, asking you, “Isn't vegan about halfway to breatharian?”

Somehow a “plant-based diet” sounds far sweeter and more satisfying. In a recent interview on America's Test Kitchen Radio, veteran chef and cookbook author Mollie Katzen (Moosewood Cookbook, Heart of the Plate) said people often mistake her for being anti-meat. But she does eat a little meat occasionally if it seems like just the right thing, she explained. It's just that Katzen prefers vegetables: by the time she's put all the vegetables she wants on her plate, there's no room for anything else.

When a friend's Facebook discussion flitted onto the book The Engine 2 Diet, I requested it from the library and learned about a fire station in Austin, Texas that went completely vegan, and whose firefighters now rely on barely any seed oils and no animal products in their diets. My questions keep coming: “If a bunch of Texan firefighters can do it, why can't I?”

Before I heard the crying baby rhino, I had already been teetering on the fence, leaning toward giving up meat. One challenge is that my growing child has a surprisingly robust appetite for meat. She craves it. Since I announced to our family that I wouldn't eat meat or prepare it, my daughter and husband sometimes order meat when we go out for the occasional meal, but they don't always.

I've found I haven't been able to quit all meat cold-turkey, though. I became a pescetarian, giving myself permission to eat more protein since I was working out regularly and not trying to lose weight (ok, I admit I wouldn't mind losing just a few pounds). But I have not made peace with this new line I've drawn, this arbitrary one between creatures that live above the water and creatures who live beneath it, and I have continued to question my own wisdom.

Another line in these shifting sands is dairy and eggs. I am an ovo-lacto pescetarian, to get specific. Yet I am less and less comfortable buying the animal products that are available in my local markets. Yes, we buy organic chicken eggs, but this fact doesn't tell me much about the lives of the chickens who pump out all those eggs, day after day. For a while, I was buying eggs from a fellow at work who has chickens. But the supply was erratic, as various weather patterns and other mysteries influenced their egg production. This too has given me pause about buying eggs from large-scale operations.

But I find eggs and dairy harder to quit than anything. I can walk away from alcohol, or order a tonic and lime if I think people will give me a hard time about not having a drink with them. But please don't take away the milk or cream in my morning coffee, or my poached egg for breakfast! My mother says my grandfather – her daddy – saved her life when she was a young girl. Her mother, who was anorexic (or who possibly had intestinal problems she never spoke of aloud) barely ate anything. My mother was failing to thrive. They had been moving around Europe and Mexico. Her father insisted on moving the family to Amsterdam and he saw that she got abundant butter, milk, cream, and cheese. She returned to health and has never forgot her daddy's advocacy, or the role dairy played in her recovery.

“I'm ok with being at the top of the food chain,” I used to say. But I no longer believe this. I am nowhere near the top of the chain, and everything I've learned tells me I'm not all that compared with animals. I may have abilities to conceptualize things animals can't (like past and future – “Here, now” is what my cats seem to say every time I see them), but that doesn't make me better, just differently abled.

Autistic author and speaker and inventor Temple Grandin asserts that as an autistic person, she thinks much the way animals think: in pictures of things and not in words – words are abstractions animals don't understand. We say the same thing to our daughter when we explain to her that the cats understand her tone of voice, but not the words she speaks. Grandin's work has had a huge influence on how people think about animals, and she has used her knowledge to make cows' journeys to the slaughterhouse less frightening. If you follow her logic, either animals fall somewhere on the so-called “autism spectrum,” which for human animals includes Asperger's Syndrome. Or it follows that, like people, some animals have autism, which could mean that others don't, or maybe some animals have lesser degrees of it than others.

In his most recent collection of essays, Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed: The Fascinating Science of Animal Intelligence, Emotions, Friendship, and Conservation, anthropologist Marc Bekoff says some humans feel they are superior to non-human animals and this can indicate that they feel superior or justified in treating other humans as lesser beings. In people, cruelty to animals has come to be an indicator to law-enforcement professionals and psychologists of a likelihood for cruelty to other humans. But, Bekoff continues, like people, it turns out animals have a sense of justice. This immediately rang true to me, having grown up with a violent father. I knew something wasn't right when my father treated my mother as if she was less deserving of the respect and freedoms he insisted on, and when he kicked our dog, who chewed holes in his socks. It felt like a matter of time before it was my turn to be treated badly, too.

In his new book, Bekoff describes a couple of studies that illustrate the notion that animals also have a sense of fairness. In experiments with Capuchin monkeys, known for being a social and cooperative species, "individuals who are shortchanged during a bartering transaction by being offered a less-preferred treat refuse to cooperate with researchers." And an Austrian researcher found that "dogs won't work for food if they see other dogs getting more than they do for performing the same task."

While I've been walking my path toward vegetarianism and possibly veganism, my daughter has been learning to ride horses. We have seen a variety of attitudes toward animals at the stables where she's learned. Her first lessons were at a Mustang rescue center. The staff were working with wild and sometimes traumatized horses but gentling them over time so they could work with children, some with special needs. One day when my daughter was in the middle of her first series of lessons, I was helping brush an Appaloosa named called “Shoni Pony,” short for Shoshoni. I felt Shoni flinch when I rubbed the curry comb across one of her flanks and said something about it.

“Oh, you noticed!” The trainer sounded surprised, and explained, “That's where Shoni got bitten by Prince. Prince is new and he's a lot bigger than she is, and they were alone in the corral yesterday for a while before someone noticed she was hurt.”

I thought I was in with Shoni after that, but then another day I was curry-combing and she nipped my arm. That time the trainer was really surprised: “She hardly ever does that! Huh, I wonder what's going on with her.” But I knew I had been up in my head, thinking about other things, and felt Shoni had noticed and given me a nip to bring me back to the here and now.

Another time, I was planning on going on a ride with my daughter and husband as a birthday treat, but when I saw the horses, I balked. My sore knee gave me a good excuse but it was really the horses' rheumy eyes and noses that stopped me – and the way they weren't curious about me like horses usually are when I walk over and try glancing at them and then walking away, a little behavior I picked up in a book by the real-life "horse whisperer" Monty Roberts. After the ride, my daughter protested to me, “Those people are mean to their horses. My horse kept stopping to graze, and the guide told me to kick my horse, hard. I didn't want to, but they kept saying 'The horse doesn't feel anything.'” She wasn't buying that either.

A few years ago, as a member of a selection committee for a film festival, I watched “The Path of the Horse,” an autobiographical documentary by a woman who had been a horse trainer for 20 years and had suddenly come to feel she was doing it all wrong. She quit her training business and sought out people who had different approaches to see if there was an alternative to the “I'll-show-them-who's-the-boss” training demeanor and her habit of bullying the horses into submission, yanking their bridles and jamming the metal bits in their mouths, their eyes rolled back in what looks like desperation at their brutal treatment.

What she found was beautiful, and so much easier. Alexander Nevzorov had done away with bits and bridles and, with only a loose piece of cord around their necks for the most gentle of suggestions, worked with his horses to earn their trust. As with many of the most exquisite interspecies interactions I have ever seen, you can watch these amazing dance routines and behaviors with them on YouTube. The filmmaker found other people who were finding the same communion with animals and building on it in kinder, gentler, and more productive ways.

Last summer, my daughter went to a summer camp at a stable that seemed fine at first, but then the young campers were given crops and encouraged to use them to lash their horses forcefully to tell the horses what to do and not to do. At the Mustang rescue stable, she had learned that horses have sensitive skin and you can only curry them in certain places and not others; now she was once again being asked to inflict pain on them.

It has taken me years to acknowledge the violence I grew up with and to see how I allowed some of it or perpetuated it into my adulthood, even when my father was no longer around. To protect myself and my daughter, I had to walk away from a relationship with my father because I couldn't trust him – not only did he lack any understanding of what he had inflicted on me and my mother and siblings but he also continued to tell stories and jokes that revealed the gaps in his empathy with other human and non-human animals, as Marc Bekoff calls us. As bit by bit I have weeded out these acts of violence in my life, I've felt more and more strongly that I and my fellow human and non-human creatures, and even the planet we all share, deserve better. Somewhere, whether down deep or up here at the surface, we all know we deserve kindness and justice.

And I really, truly hope no studies ever show that plants suffer when we use them as food.

TED talk of the day

I was watching TED talks this morning to help me think about my passions and pursuits. I was going to write about the New York City traffic talk because I was so excited to have found someone who had spent her whole career figuring out what is just starting to take shape in my head, which is that traffic and design can help people make cities more livable, easily. But the talk that hit me where I live is a talk by Eleuthera Lisch on Becoming immune to violence.

That one made me cry, and made me worry, too. I live in a very violence-free environment: the kind of violence I am most likely to be present in the vicinity of is a fight between drunken college students outside a restaurant or more likely a bar (but I so rarely find myself out late late at night anymore), or a car crash. (Not one caused by me, to clarify.) I don't take my daughter to CU football games because neither of us particularly wants to surround ourselves with loud drunk people. If we want to watch a game, there's always TV, which we can control. We don't go where people are likely to be out of control, but every now and then someone gets too drunk and gets belligerent (I wonder: will this guy remember what a dick he was being or will he just think he was having a good time?).

I worry because my daughter is entering a phase in her life where she is more likely to be in places at times when she is more vulnerable to violence, and I hope she stays cautious as she has throughout her childhood. That is, I hope caution is one of her traits, and not just a reflex. And I worry my mom is vulnerable because she is alone so much of the time and she is getting so frail.

What did I do that made me unsafe as a kid? Besides living in a household where violence toward others was commonplace? Trailed after the wrong people for the sake of novelty, for the thrill. Went places with people who weren't sober. Sometimes I chose to; it wasn't always my parents. On the other hand, I had become habituated to it. My daughter would be boggled at the things that were going on around me then, if she were to compare my world with her environment today.

Today, I choose to stay fairly safe but keep alert. Several years back, we were berry-picking with friends in northern California when I suddenly feared for my daughter's life: a set of hunting hawks seemed to be spiraling toward my daughter's shiny dark head. We hid in the car for more than five minutes before the hawks lost interest and flew away. This incident frightened us and told us that anything can happen, anytime. But knowing that helps, in some funny way, not to keep us hypervigilant, but to keep us open-hearted and light on our feet. If we need to fight or flee, we can,  -- but we might also need to take a breath and try compassion first.

The talk culminates with the Alive and Free movement, with four rules for living:
1. Respect comes from within.
2. Change begins with the individual.
3. A true friend will never lead you to danger.
4. There is nothing more valuable than a life.


How will this affect your choices?

Learning from cognitive dissonance

Wait, what? you ask. Cognitive what?

Cognitive dissonance is that phenomenon in which, simply, what's in your head is not matching up with what is going on around you.

I'd say cognitive dissonance has had a presence throughout my life. It has made my life feel out of control and frightening. As a kid, I couldn't trust my thoughts and feelings because the people around me were counting on me to get all the good stuff and skate away past the bad, like Rollergirl in the old Dire Straits song. But really, it was tough to be me in a lot of ways. When they say kids are forced by circumstances to grow up fast, they're talking about kids like me who saw and did a lot of things kids shouldn't have to see and do at tender ages.

Only now becoming clear to me -- so surprising at my advanced age! -- is how much I have contributed to the amount of cognitive dissonance in my life as an adult. Time after time, I have chosen situations that challenged me and confused me at the same time, and I have taken it upon myself to bridge that gap.

To quiet that dissonance, I have had to learn to do some difficult things.

I had to stop riding in cars with anyone I thought might not have my best interests in mind.

I had to call myself a woman instead of a girl. (My blogger name is vanillagrrl for a reason. Grrrr. Tangent: I was so upset when I heard an NPR Science Friday segment last week about women studying STEM -- science, technology, engineering, and math -- and one of the callers talked about her experience in school, adding that she dropped out and had a baby. Then she called herself a girl, as in, "Lots of times I am the only girl in the room." If you've had a baby, surely you have earned the right to call yourself a woman.)

I had to stop doing things that hurt my own feelings, when I stopped and felt my own feelings. I had to stop laughing reflexively about the joke about women being bad drivers. I had to stop getting into an automobile I didn't really want to ride in because it was easier than making some kind of scene about it. Now I am incredulous that my own father told that "joke" with me standing there, not only a woman, but also his daughter! The moment I noticed that I have a father who tells jokes disparaging my half of the population in my presence was a moment I knew I couldn't have a relationship with him because he didn't see me as an equal, as a whole human being.

Now I'd make the scene and refuse the ride, or say something about women being good drivers (thank you, Danica Patrick).

I like to think that I also wouldn't put myself in any of those positions in the first place, but I am not convinced it would be so simple. For I still have things I have to stop doing, because the cognitive dissonance still costs me something very dear every time I experience it. It takes a lot of energy to think one way and act another.

That means I can't say, "I stopped doing those things," because it's an ongoing assignment. I have to keep stopping. When my daughter says, "I don't like riding the bus" and the bus ride is only three minutes long, plus the time they have to interact with the bus driver while the bus is loading, I can hear her cognitive dissonance loud and clear and help her do the right but uncomfortable thing. I can help her stand up for her feelings and figure out how to act on them. But truly, it's not always easy to know when to stand up for my own feelings.

Most recently I stopped eating meat -- well, I'm making an exception for fish, but I am not sure that is defensible given the reasons I stopped eating meat. And still there's more to do. More noise that necessitates adjusting the frequencies to something harmonious instead of the static that consumes my attention and, like kryptonite to Superman, robs me of my strength.

I hope you will wish me strength for this next phase of weeding out the dissonance and finding the sweet harmonies in my world.

Behaving Badly and B'stila

Sorting through my recipe box tonight, I found a recipe for B'stila from a California Moroccan restaurant called Dar Maghreb that plunged me headlong into a series of memories of an amazing food discovery and some wild nights long ago.

John and Lizzie, from exotic England, had blown into town on a crooked wind and livened our little  Boulder hippie scene right up. They told us about their wild adventures in Morocco and Kenya, unpacking from colorful cloth bags and carved boxes hashish and tobacco and clay chillums, which we all smoked, even me now and then. John and Lizzie were fun and cute and tan and had English accents. What was not to love?

Of course, I, 12 that summer, developed a terrible and obvious crush on John, with his lovely accent, for which he teased me, aping my pouts and such. I loved Lizzie too, so sympathetic and petite and clearly tough as nails but with a weakness for her partner. I still remember her telling me, "You're going to have humongous tits!" (This never came to pass, like a lot of their promises.) Oh, what a complicated package they were, inviting us to fall in love with them and I suspect grabbing anything they could get their hands on.

Fortunately, I was off-limits to John as a kid (my hirsute and tough parent would have pounded him flat) but there was plenty of tension between John and the men in the room over the other women in the room. I felt that same vertigo I felt with my mother with Lizzie, wondering why she went along, and trying to comprehend what this gave them, all the women like my mother and Lizzie, and later my stepmother. Years later I saw my stepmother and she said "I had to leave your father because he couldn't stand to see me be happy." John and Lizzie had come along when things were especially dire; my parents wouldn't be together for many moons after John and Lizzie blew out of town a few weeks later. I suppose my father's controlling fury had something to do with why John and Lizzie were able to come along and get us in their sway, as the Rolling Stones put it in the song. My guess is when they'd wheedled and borrowed and cadged and downright swiped as much as they could get away with, they hit the road again.

Eight or so years later, my mother and stepfather and I had moved out to L.A. We had all been yearning to go to California for various reasons. When I wanted to go to school on the west coast, my parents figured it would be a good time to go too, so we went together. I lived with them for the year, having broken up with my high school sweetheart (and having a fling with our mutual best friend).

Out of the blue, in L.A., we finally got a letter from John and Lizzie. For years after their first disappearance, we wondered where they were. We would think to ourselves, "In prison?" We would say to each other, "Maybe we should print an ad in the Rolling Stone." I think my mother might have even gone ahead and done it once, knowing perfectly well they'd never see it, whether they had landed on the Steppes, the Spanish Steps, or in Stepney. John had shared with us a calling card printed all in blue that read "Expeditions" with their names, John and Elizabeth D____, and bore a printed drawing of a Land Rover loaded with gear on it. Pre-mobile phones, there was no way to keep up with nomads, unless you knew which post office to send mail to their attention in care of General Delivery.

But back to Dar Maghreb, which is what launched this reminiscence. When I was 18 and living with my parents in L.A., guess who should turn up but John and Lizzie, a little older and more careworn, and us a little wiser but no less surprised and happy to see them. We had a blast partying with them. They introduced us to new drug experiences, and told bawdy, titillating stories of getting people to do other things new to them as well. They fascinated me and repelled me, in part because they seemed exactly the same as they had been before, but also like people acting a role. I studied them and wondered if they'd been acting before and I just hadn't noticed, or if their act had grown a little stale to them.

We went to Century City and bought sweatshirts at Heaven after a day lazing in the sun and bodysurfing at Santa Monica Beach. We hot tubbed on the deck in the humid night air, the evening fog permeated with the pyrethrin the landlord had sprayed to control the fleas and keep my mother's Persian cats from being eaten alive.

A couple of years back, when visiting L.A., we had been to this amazing Moroccan restaurant, Dar Maghreb. This had been our first immersive experience with the Moroccan restaurant, a particular form of hospitality with the reclining pillows and the big tray in the middle, the tea poured from astonishing heights without spillage, the sweet mixed with the savory in tender lamb and prunes and in the B'stila, everyone's favorite. B'stila is an appetizer of flaky sheets of filo wrapped around a custardy cinnamony chicken dish that we ate with our hands and wished that's all there was to eat. That and the mint tea, poured by waiters numerous and professional, like soldiers, interchangeable in their fancy trousers all alike.

The first time we went to the Los Angeles Dar Maghreb, we were astonished by the atmosphere and the foods and ate and drank and some people did cocaine in the bathroom and came back for more food and belly dancing. The check was huge but we were with rich people and felt rich ourselves and I wasn't caring who was paying because I was 16 then and still a kid.

When John and Lizzie came to visit us in L.A., a plan hatched to go to Dar Maghreb. We wanted to impress them. Then someone had the brilliant idea: Let's go to Palm Springs for dinner. So we drove out to the Dar Maghreb in Rancho Mirage, where Frank Sinatra used to live, and it dazzled us all over again. And again the B'stila was the best part.

By the end of our epic night, we had eaten and drunk with reckless abandon, people had tucked folded bills into the belly dancers' outfits, and some people had snorted lines of coke from the ornate tray in the center. And we all put in cash for our dinners, even me this time, as I was working 50 hours a week to save money for school in northern California starting in the fall. A minute after we were out the door, John and Lizzie were hustling us toward our cars. A minute later, a waiter emerged, hollering. We had stiffed the waiter. He had found our check with a measly couple of dollars on a check that totaled hundreds. John tried to talk his way around it, but failed. People from our party pulled cash out of pockets to settle the injustice and stop the embarrassment. I didn't have any cash left to add by then.

John and Lizzie left shortly after that, our last visit to Dar Maghreb. I have a vague memory of hearing they were no longer together. I haven't seen John and Lizzie since, but I was ecstatic to find this recipe in Great Recipes from Los Angeles. I have made this recipe once, and since have made a simplified version of it that was almost as good and half the work. This is the original recipe. You will need all day to make this version.

B'stila
DAR MAGHREB

The Chicken:
2 chickens (3 pounds each), or 8 pigeons
1 teaspoon salt
Pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
1 cup butter
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 cup chopped onions
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/2 cup chopped coriander leaves (also called cilantro)
1/2 teaspoon safron
2 cups water

The B'stila:
1 pound butter
1/2 cup chopped parsley
1/2 cup chopped coriander leaves
1/2 cup chopped onions
 Pepper
12 eggs
Salt
10 ounces blanched almonds (about 2 cups)
Oil
Confectioners sugar
Cinnamon
1/2 pound clarified butter
1 pound filo (also called phyllo) dough

To make the chicken, put the whole chicken's [sic] breast down, in a Dutch oven, with the giblets, salt and pepper, oil, butter, ginger, onion, garlic, parsley, coriander, saffron, and water (or enough for the liquid to reach 1/3 the depth of the chickens).

Bring the mixture to a boil, and after it boils, turn the chickens breat side up and stir to mix the spices. Bake at 450 F. for approximately 1 hour. Baste the chickens from time to time so they are thoroughly marinated with sauce (if the chickens are still slightly pink, remember they will be cooked again inside the B'stila).

When the chickens are cooked, let the cool, reserving broth. Bone them, leaving the skin on. Separate the chickens into bite-size pieces and put them aside.

To prepare the B'stila, boil the reserved chicken and add the 1 pound of butter, the parsley, the onions, and pepper. Beat the eggs as for an omelet. Pour the eggs into the chicken broth and whip over a moderate fire until the eggs are scrambled to large curds [not certain; my copier omitted some of this]. Add salt to taste.

Heat a film of oil in a skillet and fry the almonds until they reach a deep golden color. Watch them carefully, as they burn quickly. Remove them from the heat and allow the almonds to cool. Grind them coarsely in a food processor. Stir in sugar and cinnamon.

The steps preceding may be done ahead, and the eggs refrigerated until needed.

To construct the B'stila, grease the bottom of a 14-inch skillet with a thick coat of the clarified butter. Place 2 sheets of the filo across the bottom, letting it overhang 6 to 8 inches all around. Spread a ... three-quarters of the eggs. Sprinkle on half of the toasted almonds, then add half of the chicken. Layer on the remaining eggs, then the chicken, then the almonds. Fold over the filo across the top, adding another sheet of filo if the bottom sheets don't cover the top. Brush the filo with clarified butter. Bake at 450 F for 30 to 35 minutes, until the top is golden brown. Remove the B'stila from the oven and flip it onto a large serving plate. Sprinkle more confectioners' sugar over the top and make a crisscross design with 1/4-inch wide bands of cinnamon.

Makes 12 servings.

NOTE: B'stila is eaten with the fingers in Moroccan restaurants. Use only the right hand, and just the thumb and first two fingers, pinching a bite at a time. But be careful, the filling is steaming hot.

Sleepaway, away away

My kid has had first-time jitters about going to sleepaway camp for a while now, and is on her way there, with her dad to drop her off and a best friend to bunk with for a week, which is all happening as I write this post. As coincidence has it, they're riding there with another girl who is adopted and who goes up to Snow Mountain Ranch in the summer for a heritage camp as well, which we have been doing with our daughter each summer for more than half her life. The difference is that we all go to her heritage camp together, but she is doing this on her own.

I feel terrible on one level about letting her go to camp -- nay, encouraging her to go -- given that she's experiencing such mixed feelings about entering the rapids of hormonal flux. I have parental jitters about the worst happening because I am not there. I feel our house and our routines and our adjacent rooms have become a talisman in and of themselves. At home, we can watch over each other constantly, but this is an untethering. I think we share the feeling that we are launching her up into space without a plan by sending her away from us like this.

I have to remember, when I'm feeling anxious that my daughter and knows how to stand up for herself. She was the one who said "No" when Will The Creepy Bus-Driver asked her to say things into his cellphone about another boy on the bus. Thank heavens, and thank me, too, for taking her absolutely seriously when she said she felt nervous around that person. Of course she would feel weird around an adult who was playing unexpected games in the few minutes he had with her every day, and turned and said to my face and hers that he was "just playing along with her and her friend, who had started it." As if he were supposed to be their big bus-driving buddy, their playful pal, not the guardian we expected to escort our tender darlings safely home from school every day. My point is that my daughter does know right from wrong and can take a stand when she needs to.

She really loved the sentiment "Take things in stride," from a framed picture containing "Lessons from a horse." I hope she can internalize more and more of that feeling of taking things in stride, adjusting as she goes, not necessarily stopping but skirting obstacles and continuing on as we all do.

I know too that my daughter has great untapped reserves of strength, and more resilience than she sometimes believes she has. She relies heavily and continuously on us, her parents, for support, which is fine and good, but I think it will be healthy for her to rely on herself, too -- to see and hear up close how other girls in the same situation do and don't rely on themselves.

I love her and worry about her but also trust her and have a huge amount of faith in her that I hope buoys her when she's feeling heavy. So I send her a wish and a prayer: I wish her a great first camp experience! May she make many great memories and friends and always be safe.

Oh, but here's what made me sit down and write about this in the first place. She goes off to camp, I sit down at the computer to start catching up on some writing, and this I find a document my daughter has written. It reads:
"nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo"

I still think she's going to be all right.

Two things:

One: I had been giving myself a hard time about not having made photo albums but finally realized that I have all of my photos online where my daughter can (and often does) browse them. Sure, there are still a zillion notes and charming bits of art or artifice I will want to sift through and preserve in a more organized fashion. But now she can see herself through time, even if time is relative for us: for her, it started at birth. For us, her time started later than her birth, so there are gaps in our chronological records.

"We are awash in images," wrote A.O. Scott in a recent essay responding to his contemporary dilemma -- and Susan Sontag's notion that we should control the flow of images lest we become addicted to them. But I and I see and I know my daughter sees something worth looking for in the pictures of the past.

Two: A fun short film idea: The Band-Aid. A Band-Aid's journey through a dance class. Even the paper wrapping could play a role, so to speak.

A Runway Success!

I just got back from the sweetest event to benefit the Boulder Valley School District's School Food Project: "Recycled to Runway," a fashion show by kids in a class at Common Threads who made their clothes out of trash. Anthropologie hosted the event, delicious food was catered by Whole Foods, and some very nice wines were donated by Frasca Food and Wine and The Kitchen.

Most of the girls were a little keyed-up and rushed up and down the runway. The MC repeatedly had to ask them to stick around at the end of the runway for a second and turn around once more, and it was great when they stayed to chat a little or answer a question about their process. Waylon Lewis, editor of Elephant Magazine, asked one of the designers, “Is your dress comfortable?” and got an honest answer: “No, not at all.”

Watching them zoom up the runway and back in their creations I thought how brave they all were. Even the designers competing on Project Runway didn't have to model their own fashions like these kids were doing!

A couple of the dresses were made with colorful candy wrappers, one was ingeniously decorated with Izze cans cut into interesting shapes, and another girl who said she was “inspired by prom dresses, and really nice dress-up dresses,” wore a gown made of plastic trash bags and dryer sheets, and carried a clutch made of gift cards, the magnetic-stripe kind. “It was hard to use the hot gun just right,” she said. “Too hot and you'd melt a hole in the dress. If it wasn't hot enough, the bags wouldn't stick.”

Another girl, wearing a well constructed dress made of brightly colored plastic shopping bags from Whole Foods said, “I broke three needles making this.” One described her material as “food boxes.” A high school boy used layered newspapers and paint to create an interesting, fashion-forward, graphic tunic shirt with a laced spine and wings painted on either side. One girl made a cocktail dress decorated abundantly with loops of VHS tape for a fabulous spangly effect (her clutch was a VHS cartridge—awesome!). Can you tell a) who I hoped would win (I couldn't help it: girl with the spangly VHS tape dress) and b) that I left early, before the winner was announced?

Wannabe connected

New playlist: Want to be connected

Inspiration: In Lisa Jones' book Broken: A Love Story, Jones tells about making friends on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming with people and animals. At one point in the story, someone teases a young man about being a "wannabe." Her friend Stanford says, "Want to be connected." Don't we all?

"Braided Hair," featuring Speech + Neneh Cherry, from 1 Giant Leap
"Breathe Together," by The Mothers, from The Township Sessions
"Nu" by Timbuktu, from Afrikya Vol. 1: A musical journey through Africa
"Bryn" by Vampire Weekend, from Vampire Weekend
"Loco de Amor" by David Byrne, from Rei Momo
"Tukka Yoots Riddim," by US3 (with samples from "Sookie Sookie" as performed by Grant Green), from Hand on the Torch
"Strange Apparition" by Beck, from The Information
"The Main Thing" by Roxy Music, from Avalon
"Magick Carpet Ride" by The Brooklyn Funk Essentials, from In The Buzz Bag
"The Big Sky" by Kate Bush, from Hounds of Love
"Shanti/Ashtangi" by Madonna, from Ray of Light
"Llegare" by Sidestepper, from 3 am: In Beats We Trust
"Let Love Rule" by Lenny Kravitz, from Let Love Rule
"Until the End of the World" by U2, from the Until The End of the World soundtrack
"Rock On Hanuman" by M.C. Yogi, from Elephant Power

Beautifully different

What is the first thing I think of when I ask what makes me "beautifully different?" Dressing for beauty and fun! I love the way I find interesting combinations of things to wear. Other people say nice things about that, too. I was wearing my shiny-threaded overcoat that has such a great drape over a long sweater and a wacky top and got some really nice compliments. It's so much fun to cheer people up just the way I like to be cheered up by seeing someone dress inspiringly. And it's a continuing positive feedback loop. I'm going to go put on something fun right now!

The kinder, gentler approach

I am revisiting a project that is terribly difficult and unpleasant on many levels, and reminds me all too much of where I was and not where I want to be. In working on that project again, I find I have to do more research to find more specifics: my organizational scheme of my book is based on a list of characteristics, for example, which I didn't actually have a copy of in my book yet. I am searching for the characteristics I remembered seeing in my earlier research but one mysteriously is not turning up on the lists in this round of discoveries. It's a puzzle. I love that part of being able to find things you need on the internet. Compared to doing research in school, Google makes it cake-eatingly easy. You just have to be creative and persistent to get the best results. But that's true for everything, isn't it?

One thing I am look for more now is other voices of people like me, people who have survived something threatening and want to set the record straight at last so it doesn't eat them from the inside out (many of us lugging household skeletons into closets suspect this is the true root of cancer, when it's not something obvious like poisoning from chemicals).

Everyone says it when they have an unpopular opinion about something (a corporation, say -- I've just read the book A Civil Action so that is weighing heavily on my mind) or someone (the sociopath in your midst) -- "I thought maybe I was going crazy."

It's a terrible feeling, thinking you are over the edge because you believe something no one around you ever wants to see or admit is that close to them, that threatening. Darkness looks you in the eye, and when you tell others, they draw back from you like you've been bitten by the vampire. And it does make you feel crazy, different, vampiric, creepy, and dark to witness it, tell the tale. But you have to or you'll suffer, like living through an earthquake and needing to talk about it for such a long time after.

I saw a documentary about Lariam, an antimalarial drug, that terrified me, saying it can cause brain lesions -- permanent brain damage! -- that induced psychosis in people. In the film, Taken as Directed, these people were devastated, their optimism gone. One said it was like seeing the devil. And we wonder when we hear about someone going crazy and shooting a bunch of people to bits, but do we ever hear whether they had recently had a course of Lariam administered, or whether they had been exposed to other extreme protocols that fundamentally changed the way their brains worked? I'm feeling that neither my daughter nor I should take it. Too dangerous. And we need less of things in our lives that make us feel like we are going crazy, not more. We can't afford to go toward darkness, even if it is an unintended side-effect of another action.

It's good to keep in mind, as I burrow back into this project again, that it's not a preoccupation with the dark and the past, which is what the quick-judging pragmatist might say. No, instead I am going toward the light, illuminating things, making things easier for the next person who knows someone like this to figure out how to spot the tell-tale traits and avoid the devastating effect someone like that can have on anyone in their vicinity.

So I'm advocating a kinder, gentler approach to things lately. I just wrote to the makers of Off and asked for a case of their clip-on mosquito repellents to give to orphanages to put by windows or anywhere they are needed. Nets are probably a good gift, too. I'll ask around.

I am being kind and gentle with myself about the reverb10 prompts, too. It's a busy time, and I'm working hard, and haven't been up to the daily prompting and blogging rhythm. That's okay, I know. But to get on the path toward catching up, the best community thing I did this year was probably continuing to help with the Garden-to-Table project at my school. Surprised I didn't say speaking at Ignite Boulder 12? Or the Thriller flash mob downtown? Those fall close on the garden's heels, I admit, but so does helping the kids in my daughter's classroom learn more about conflict resolution. It's all good.

Wanna make something of it? Do it!

Today's writing prompt: The last thing I made.

Well, let's see. I made coffee just now. But you meant something lasting, right? I made a cookbook (out of a collection of two women's recipes and nutrition tips) just last week. I think it turned out well. I learned and re-learned a lot in the process. I also made crustless pumpkin pie when I went over to my in-laws' for dinner. I noticed that when I was frustrated with my progress on the cookbook project, my thoughts immediately turned to cooking. I've had a recipe out for a flourless carrot cake that looks amazing, but I refused to let myself do something that would take a lot of time when I was in the middle of my cookbook project. (Which answers the question: Did you have to clear space for the project? Why, yes, I did. It felt like the project took up space. But I let that happen. And it worked! I finished it on time for a deadline but then that fell through -- the folks who wrote it wanted to have the cookbook available at an event last Friday but the event's organizer nixed the idea, so I don't know what's happening with the printing. It is out of my hands. But I do like the way the cookbook turned out. It's a nifty little book with some good stuff in it, and I will let you know when it is available to all.)

Other things I've made recently: Matching winter scarves for my in-laws, and dinners. I've been wanting to make up songs but don't quite know how to go about it. I made soup for a soup swap recently, and want to do that again. But it is true that lately, cooking is my go-to activity when I want to create something -- and my novel is calling me to work on it more and more, too, which I am doing.

I am casting about for something to make for my writers' group. I was trying to think of something everyone might like (little carrot cakes?) and then thought: our web site. If I could have a site ready by the time we meet next week, the group would be thrilled. I just don't know if I can pull that off. But it's a good goal.

Reflections: We may never have this knowledge again

That's another reason I write, to continue to respond to the prompt of my most recent post. I know I will never see things this way again. I am groping my way forward in the tule fog, the dark, the blurry view of naivete. And I'd better call it like I see it now because I will never see it this way again. I know things will change, times will change, perspectives will change with experience and exposure to new ideas and people.

So does that leave me with nothing? We have a trope: When my husband and I ask one another, "Can I bring you anything?" the other occasionally responds, "I have nothing left to hope for." Which is from a sign in Asia's failed attempt at saying: "We leave you nothing else to be desired. All your needs will be fulfilled here." But truly, I am so filled with love and gratitude for this fragile state of joy and peace at those moments that I feel I lack nothing, I have nothing to hope for beyond this. So love is the wonder and the light in my life, which happens to be the response to the reverb10 prompt and a nice seed for thought.

And while we're on the topic of wonders, I have to give a big shout-out to music! I still think the lyric is a little cheesy but I agree with Michael Franti that everyone deserves music. And with Johnny Cash, when he sang, "Get rhythm when you get the blues. A jumpy rhythm makes you feel so fine, It'll shake all the trouble from your worried mind. Get rhythm when you get the blues." For me there is truth in that. A few years ago I wondered whether I was depressed, and I am wondering that lately. But I decided to exercise. I started going to the gym three times a week. I thought I would want to swim, but I have never bonded with swimming here in this pool. Maybe it was too cold for the first five years since our rec center was remodeled and I got turned off and I should try it again, but in the meantime I stumbled back into my dance class and discovered, in a room full of people who share my love and interest in movement and dance and joy and energy, what quickly became my primary source of balance.

Now I go four times a week to dance for 45-50 minutes and cool down for another few, and I find as long as I can dance every week I feel good. I stay sane and healthy. And my goodness, there's so much to learn about committing to a gesture or a movement or a pattern, to being ready to change direction on a dime, to moving together with a group and doing your own thing all at once, to learning to move within my own levels (my lesson for this week was anything at any time can take you back to level 1, and that is just fine).

As for things I've let go of this year, the final prompt for the moment: Being an editor for other people. I just keep getting rebuffed at a certain level. It works against human nature: People don't like to be told what to do. And I love editing but I suppose I'll just have to do it for myself for now. It's like painting my house: I care almost too much to do it for anyone but me, perhaps. But I think if I commit to myself, I can go far with it! So I know what is really at the top of my wish list: A package of 10 ISBN numbers. Woohoo!

Prompt of the day: What keeps me from writing?

I listen to Talk of the Nation on NPR a lot and today's, if you didn't already hear it, was about bullying. Lots of different people reported different things, one that someone had found him on facebook and apologized for long ago bullying, another who was on facebook and a bully got in touch and started bullying her all over again (horrors). One woman said she realized that she was so angry and scared all the time about being bullied that she had become a bully toward other people, always ready to go off if they didn't do what she expected. That resonated with me. And then the host read from someone's email, I think, and it described a person's path to better living after having survived the hell of bullying and the author was very apologetic for having taken all that anger and fear out on others for so long. I really felt a jolt of recognition then about things I've both struggled with and their costs, the tolls those misplaced emotions have taken in my life, on my friendships.

Another thought: I had a conversation with my mother not so very long ago, that set off such a series of ripples for her. It seemed like a trivial thing. I said, "Not everyone likes creamy food," when my mom was making something or talking about some kind of food my daughter was less than enthused about. My mother could hardly believe it! Someone who doesn't like creamy food? What? The very idea was unthinkable at first. We talked about it for days! And that conversation went on to reverberate for a while and later morphed into one about mind-reading. I said to my mother at one point, "I can't read your mind. You have to tell me what you want." And she just looked at me. Really? As if she'd never quite realized we were that different from one another, different enough to have separate perspectives on the same thing. I feel like there's something in having been habitually underestimated or underprotected as kids that makes us all so defensive and sometimes angry about not being understood, as if we feel it is part of a grand conspiracy and this present communication breakdown is further proof of our being at the ground zero of misunderstanding.

So I hope it makes sense when I say that fear of being misunderstood is a cause of procrastination for me, and yet is also one of my biggest motivators for writing down what I am thinking.

Shipbuilding

Today's #reverb10 prompt is to reflect on the past year, picking a single word to encapsulate it. I came up with shipbuilding, because it feels like I'm gearing up for the next phase.

Woohoo!