Cooking, for me ... The distance

Cooking, for me, is a form of meditation.  Before all else it requires intentional presence, the act of my being present.  Alert with all my senses.  Cooking is about my being in the moment.  Cooking is about entering into a full and rich relationship with food which I will prepare and eventually consume.  Cooking requires time.  Cooking should not be done in haste.  In cooking there are no real short-cuts.  Eventually I must do everything well.

Like a dancer, when I am preparing food I must be aware of my relationship with the cooking space.  As well I must be aware of those around me such that we compliment each other.



The distance between us rends my peace
shadows my silence
spears my solitude

In your stead I have planted
Iris

soft licking splashes of memory
held hands with craving hearts
singing softly over walks
facing the night
the same moon in different skys

the perfume of yeast rising
kneading your hands
hungry for warm baked
enveloping hugs

bitter sweet tailings of
wine upon your tongue
taking my breath
catching

the last scent

Thoughts on time...

Damned electric analog clocks with their ceaseless ticking. Never any real silence. Just the imposed mesh of sequential marks. I wonder what it would truly be like to be without time. Certainly there would remain the light of day and the darkness of night. But what would it be like to lose all sense of seconds, minutes and hours. No alarm clock impositions of meaning in the day; wake up, be here, go there, remember to take those. No time stamps on emails or Facebook posts. No little synchronized little digital clocks in the lower right hand corner of computer screens. No business hours. Or calls to prayer. No traffic lights or even speed limits, measured in miles per hour. There would be no recipes calling for temperature over time. Time would become the duration of things. Lightness and darkness. The phases of the moon. Ebb and flow of the tide. Seasons of warmth and of cold. Menstruation and lengths of gestation. When certain foods become available. We would ask if there was enough light to travel to the next destination. Or we would acknowledge that it takes Soup amount of time to prepare and cook it. Or how long it took doing something to become tired or sore.

Not so Still Life

While the title of this post is an homage to Richard Brautigan's "Still Life with Woodpecker" here at the Flying Pig Ranch & Thistle Farm life is not so still.  Rummaged around in the shed and finally located that little green cage thing with its hanging chain.  Remembered to get the suet block the last time I was in the bird feeder section.  Rewarded this afternoon with a Downy Woodpecker...

Spent about ten minutes clinging to the cage and hammering the suet block.

Life is good, but not still.  

The Allure of Linux

Once the passion of a faction

Now the dream of the mainstream

Once the allure of the obscure

Now it puts the punk in Steam

Fast forward to today ...  Ubuntu just works.  But the romance is gone.  Now it is just work.

Linux is dead.  Long live Linux.

RSS?

When Google Reader, the best that ever was, closed its digital doors I went looking for an alternative.  But in this day and age of social media do I even need such an archaic system?

A resounding "YES!"

After cycling through a number of off-line and on-line RSS readers I settled on Feedly.  It allows me to manage the large industrial feeds.  It shows me fingernail previews of graphic based sites.  It lets me view complete articles from feeds that honor such requests.  But most important of all it remembers to check those obscure feeds that are not updated on a regular basis.  Frank Paynter''s Listics, Patrick Kurp's Anecdotal Evidence, Betsy Devine's Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar and Olha Pryymak's olechko - blog (who's paintings I have admired for a long time but have become too expensive for my meager means.  Alas.)