Digesting Memories: Of Food and Family

“If we want to create healthy change for ourselves and the planet, we will need to abandon the societal myth of food choice entitlement, stop defining the main course as meat, collectively see animals as sentient beings, drastically overhaul the ways we produce food, and rethink our insistence of assigning economic value to everything under the sun.”

Nine Machetes and an Earring

When I was a boy, one of the things I loved most was a collection of 45-records, passed on to my Grandma Ruth from her dad’s jukebox and pinball machine business Keystone Amusement based in Silverton, a small Oregon town in the Willamette valley an hour’s drive south of Portland.  In the 1950’s and 60’s,Continue reading “Nine Machetes and an Earring”

A Path Into Yoga: Part Three

Western medicine couldn’t heal my body. This realization – and my acceptance of it – slowly sunk into my bones. A couple of months after my last cortisone injection, I tried a “medical yoga” class, a synthesis of restorative yoga and physical therapy intended for injured people, taught by a nurse from the local hospital.Continue reading “A Path Into Yoga: Part Three”

A Path Into Yoga: Part Two

Chefs aren’t known for having an abundance of spare time, but for a few years I devoted most of mine to creating a fantasy world (literally) and writing a young adult story set in that world. I’ve long nursed the dream of publishing a novel, to legitimize my lifelong habit of needing acceptance from othersContinue reading “A Path Into Yoga: Part Two”

A Path Into Yoga: Part One

The ego-mind lives in fear of so much that cannot be avoided or controlled: change, failure, loss, weakness, judgment, shame, pain, and death. My ego-mind, for instance, does not want you to know that I have a son who I was never there for, because my life was a mess, and I was a mess.Continue reading “A Path Into Yoga: Part One”