30 Things that Brought Me Joy This Week

Because joy keeps us going.

1. Meeting up with a deer on the main street of town at 7:54am.
2. Stopping in the middle of the little road I live on to shoo a garter snake sunning itself on the warm asphalt off safely into the grass.
3. Realizing, when we finally cut the grass in the meadow despite the still-rollicking-wildflower-population that we had inadvertently farmed hay and my need for browns in the compost was set for a long time.
4. Learning from the nice guy who mows the meadow once a year because we can't bring ourselves to shell out for a riding mower that he'd spotted a nest in time to mow around it.
5. NEW. YORK. CITY. Where I used to live and who is shaking up the flow of power in their politics.
6. Walking into a role-playing practice scenario at Wilderness First Aid Training in which I was one of a group of pretend first aid practitioners arriving at a pretend hot yoga class at a pretend yoga festival in which my fellow students were pretending to be working out hard after fasting on water for several days. They were dropping like flies and we were supposed to figure out whether our patients were just hot and hungry or if they had heat exhaustion/stroke, dehydration, or hyponatremia. Who needed an ice pack, who needed water, who needed CPR? James had been nominated to be the yoga teacher, and he was, on a cool day, stripped down to his tank top and glistening with sweat, which was so thick I could see that it was a glycerine spray. Fortunately, my effort to stop giggling so I could ascertain whether he was just doing a really heavy-handed hippie impression or if I was supposed to deduce that he was high on something was cut short when someone else's patient lost pretend consciousness and it was time to practice a group carry.
7. People showing up to spend two long days learning how to render first aid to strangers and when the benefits of calling for a helicopter rescue outweigh the dangers? That gave me hope.
8. Sugar snap peas after 3 minutes in a hot pan with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Would not have thought you could improve on a raw sugar snap pea.
9. Cooking morel mushrooms for the first time. And the second time. And the third time.
10. Sinners, the movie, finally. WOW. Here's the trailer.
11. Shaking a rattle and ringing a bell at the precise moment that the Earth's axis was tipped most strongly toward the sun for this year during a solstice restorative yoga session.
12. The spectacular collapse of the house full of peonies my beloved neighbor invited me to cut from her garden a couple weeks ago.
13. Waking to the house smelling like peonies every day.
14. The fact that when I covered the dining table with a tray and then two and then and then simply piles of the peony petals to dry them for something-or-other-yet-to-be-determined, we simply shifted to eating at the kitchen table or outside without even discussing that the table was entirely covered with flower petals.
15. The first session of my latest Workshop for Loving. What a joy it is to engage in explicit discussion of how to be human with kind people. (Yes, there's still room! Sorry for the short lead time for advance registration; I'll make it longer next time.)
16. Driving with the top down.
17. Receiving a book of poetry in the mail from a dear new friend.
18. Yoga. Bless the mat, the prayersongs, this aging body; what comfort.
19. The moment when my husband understood that I had gone from shedding a couple of small tears about a hard conversation we were having to heaving sobs about the horrors of the world and wrapped me in his arms.
20. The announcement from my husband that since I don't like making the bed and he doesn't mind it, I can just dump the clean sheets on the bed and he will make it from now on.
21. Falling asleep in that bed reading Japanese Death Poems.
22. Setting up a quilt rack in the temple to hold all the sheepskins so my people can have easy cozy.
23. The joy of a dear friend who just became an auntie.
24. Charging across the deck squirting juvenile squirrels with a squirtgun to chase them off of the back birdfeeder. (They are welcome to the front feeder, which we pretend is a bird feeder but is in effect a squirrel feeder.)
25. Imagining what the baby squirrel thought while digging all those tunnels in my pots of herbs.
26. Switching from my winter cashmere cardigan to my summer cashmere cardigan.
27. Finding the spot where the little half-barrel pond I dream of building can sit.
28. Weeding.
29. Smashing the solstice oystershells with a hammer and adding them to the path in the front grove.
30. The decorations my neighbor hung all over her driveway for her beloved son's high school graduation.

Wow! I sure feel better after writing that. If you don't feel better after reading it, I wonder if writing one yourself could help? If you do, will you send it to me? I'd love to read it.

Last week's newsletter got a lot fewer eyeballs than usual. I'm guessing that's because the title was "Endurance" and folks thought it was going to be a terrible slog about the polycrisis. Actually, the focus of that newsletter is my glee in supporting a beloved student-and-friend in rowing 70 miles from Tacoma to Port Townsend in a tiny boat, which lit my heart so brightly. I tied her endurance to our collective endurance briefly, but if you skipped because you thought it'd be a slog, I'm pretty sure it is not! Here it is again.

Resources

We Contain Multitudes
I confess that I came to this YouTube video a little grudgingly, but it was sent by my beloved entirely-grown-man little brother, who rarely makes suggestions and has excellent discernment, so I checked it out. In less than half an hour my entire understanding of the gut microbiome was transformed! Food scientist and dietician Ann Reardon interviews researcher Jens Walters about the microbiome and his research on how dietary choices can affect it. The things that blew my mind:

• It's not necessarily easy to change your microbiome with supplements, because your microbiome is an ecosystem; I can plant as many orange trees as I want in my forest, but they won't grow there. What you feed it is the place where you have more impact.
• How you feed your microbiome changes the substances it produces and the affects that has on your body quite dramatically.
• Our microbiomes are vaster and more unique than I understood; we have dozens of strains in us!
• Changing the diets of the folks in the study for just 3 weeks brought dramatic changes to their health.

Unsurprisingly, what works is eating whole foods like other animals do; the diet in the protocol is based on observations of rural Papua New Guineans. Walters and co-researcher Anissa Armet have written an 88 page book in which "the authors present the scientific rationale for developing the NiMe (Non-Industrialized Microbiome Restore) diet, information on how the diet was clinically validated in a human trial, as well as the recipes used in the trial."And bless the University of Alberta, it's free for download. I'm excited to learn more! Thanks to Jason

If this topic interests you, another cutting-edge, science-focused resource is functional medicine specialist Dr. John Kaiser. I learned of his work from a member of our community who was told for a decade that her occasional bouts of extreme fatigue and other odd symptoms were in her head until Dr. Kaiser finally diagnosed that she was coping with a post-viral syndrome, long mononucleosis. (Long covid is the best-known post-viral syndrome, but any virus can cause them.) Our friend made a full return to robust health with Dr. Kaiser's care, which caught my attention. He's not taking patients now because he's working on a book for Johns Hopkins Press, but his website and YouTube are full of fascinating information about "the gut-mitochondria-brain axis". I hope to recommend his Full Spectrum Health when it comes out; he's aiming at 2027. Thanks to Lizzy

When Life Gives You Lemons
Or in my case, strawberries! My friend Karen had a bumper crop of strawberries and offered me some. When I came by to return to baskets, she gave me more. This cycle continued for a couple of weeks in which James and I ate the most amazing volume of lovely fresh berries with great gratitude. I love to make the most of all foods, so I used the strawberry tops for infusions, working with both white wine vinegar and alcohol. We used strawberry tequila to make a berried version of drunken clams (clams cooked with olive oil, garlic, cilantro, lime, and tequila), drank it straight with ice and in some amazing concoction with shaved ice and bitters that James made, and I'm about to try it in salad dressing for lunch after I send this your way. Infusing couldn't be simpler: put the strawberry tops in a jar with the vinegar or alcohol for a couple of days, shaking it now and then so no one sticks out of the top to go moldy, then strain to store. For more flavor, you can do a second infusion in the same base.

I also vegetable scraps, bones, and cheese rinds in the freezer for making stocks, dry citrus peels for teas and infuse them in vinegar for cleaning, and more; making efforts to minimize food waste feels to me a distinct part of my spiritual practice: honoring the life of the Earth, using as much as possible of what we take so that we can take as little as possible. Yes, there's always compost, and we've got that going out in the grove, but more use before compost is a joyous thing! If you're a fellow lover and user of scraps, I'd be delighted to hear your favorites.

We Are Not Alone
Venus flytraps can count. I know: WHAT?! I saw someone speaking about this on Instagram, which was charming, but was it true? I went hunting: it is true! The study which proved this, published in Nature in 2020, is behind a paywall, but the University of Wurtzburg has a great, detailed article about the study.

One of the backward blessings of this time is how I am newly grateful and amazed by all of the mechanisms here: the collaboration of German and Japanese scientists, the universities which support their work, the entire scientific community in its glorious collaborative processes of creating knowledge about the nature of existence for all of us.

Resistance

Voices of Inspiration
Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a #1 NYT bestseller and a fantastic, accessible resource; all the more so because folks keep making new variations. If you've already seen it in one form, another might re-inspire! Nora Krug's gorgeous graphic edition is on my wishlist, and you can check it out with the LOOK INSIDE button on Bookshop; this could be great for sharing with young people, visual learners, or art lovers. And now you can also watch and listen to John Lithgow reading it for free! Thanks to Jessie and Heatherose

I was introducted to Kentuckian Beth Howard in SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice)'s mass virtual organizing meetings after the pandemic and I was smitten immediately. Beth introduces herself on her Substack as "a community organizer, writer, and proud redneck from Appalachia." She's also working on a book called Rednecks for Black Lives. I find her deeply inspiring. If you have loved ones in the US South who are struggling, Beth might be a great resource to share. You can find her on Instagram as Bethie Jean and Substack as Working Class Love Notes.

Feeding the teacher
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