A Crunchy Life - July 2024 Newsletter
A deeper look into this month's post. I share more thoughts and resources for tapping into a simple, intentional life filled with Earth-based practices.
Hello friends!
This newsletter has taken a little bit longer to get out than I had planned on. I’ve been at the cabin, disconnected from the outer world, severe thunderstorms, power loss. Most of the other cabins near us have been empty. It’s actually been quite wonderful. I’ve been hiking, exploring, resting, playing Bananagrams, working on puzzles, and so the newsletter is about a week later.
The July post is up and it is about how July is the month where any of my routine that has stumbled over the past couple of months recovers and resets itself.
As the weather warmed this spring, my long daily walks continued but I found myself unmotivated for much more than that. As I mentioned last month, I got caught up in the energy of the season. Change was everywhere. In the weather. In the plants. In the more than human beings. In relationships.
Even the daily routines and rituals, the ones that sustain me, became heavy and hard to engage. Morning pages, slow morning strolls in the garden with the dog, cacao lattes, kitchen experimentation, facial massage, electrolyte beverages, writing, swimming - all stumbled.
As July approached I felt another change. I felt those practices quickening. Ready to recover their footing in my daily life. Slowly and surely they are reemerging and I am greeting them, catching my breath, and welcoming their sustenance and teachings once again.
Here’s a deeper look into how I am using my hand, head, and heart this month.
Here’s how I'm using my hand, head, and heart this month to recover and reset my daily practices, and stretch a bit.
Hand: World Chocolate Day - July 7th
In this month’s post I shared that Cacao is one of my daily practices that stumbled over the past couple of months. Its back now, and how I have missed it. I’ve missed the taste, I’ve missed the ritual nature of making it and enjoying it, and I’ve missed how good I feel afterwards.
I also shared the ingredients for my morning cacao. Here is a cacao to bookend the day:
Sweet Dreams
2 cups non-dairy milk 2 teaspoons Chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla), in tea ball 1 tablespoon cacao powder or 1 small cacao chunk, shaved (Theobroma cacao) 1/4 cup water 1 teaspoon orange peel powder raw honey or maple syrup, if desired
Add all ingredients to saucepan and slowly bring to a boil. Take off heat. Let steep for 10-minutes. Take out tea ball. Add raw honey or maple syrup, if desired, to sweeten.
Let’s talk about some of these ingredients.
Warm milk
This is one of those suggestions that many of us grew up with. If you are like me and your mind always seems to be busy, you may have been told, “Have a cup of warm milk, may be add a splash of honey to it, and it will help you fall asleep.” I don’t know if it was the warmth and creaminess of the milk or the tryptophan (an amino acid that promotes relaxation and sleepiness and from which melatonin is synthesized) that helped, but it worked.
Now, that I drink non-dairy milk, I suspect it was both — the warmth and creaminess of the milk and the tryptophan — but I still enjoy the same effect. My mind associates the warm non-dairy milk with early memories of creaminess and warmth, so even if nut milk doesn’t have the tryptophan, I have the same response. Boy, is memory powerful.
Chamomile
Chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) is a common herb that I grow in my herb garden and harvest for teas. It is in fact, an herb which is quite ancient.
In ancient magical practices, chamomile was also known as “blood of Hestia,” the Greek goddess of the hearth and home.
Chamomile is one of the herbs that is said to have grown in Hecate’s (Greek goddess of the dark moon, night, and crossways) legendary garden in Colchis (modern-day Georgia).
Since the ancient times chamomile has been associated with the sun, and was used in rituals to honor the Egyptian Sun God Ra and the Roman Sun God Sol.
The first wood engraving of German chamomile was found in Gart der Gesundheit, also known as the Hortus Sanitatis (1485) written by Johann Wonnecke von Kaub.
In The Complete Herbal, Nicholas Culpeper (1643/1850) states that chamomile flowers “heat and assuage swellings, inflammation of the bowels, dissolve wind, are profitably given in clysters or drink, to such as are troubled with the cholic, or stone.”
Chamomile is soothing to both the body and the mind. It supports relaxation, restful sleep, and easing tension and anxiety so it makes a lovely nighttime tea or relaxing bath (Hoffmann 2003). These characteristics place it in a good position to combine with the flavonols in Cacao and the warming effects of milk.
Cacao
Theobroma cacao — Theobroma means “food” (from the Greek broma) “of the gods” (from the Greek theo) (Baharum et al. 2016).
One of the first documents to mention cacao in a Western language was from Hernano Cortés in his 30 October 1520 letter to the Emperor of Spain. However, indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica passed on knowledge of cacao use in every day life and rituals through their oral histories, stonework, pottery, codices for centuries before Cortés letter (Dillinger et al. 2000). Barra, the first pottery using culture of Mesoamerica, knew how to process cacao. Radiocarbon dating from one fragment of a neckless jar proved positive for one of the three alkaloids, unique to Theobroma cacao. This radiocarbon date between 1800 and 1400 BCE (Coe and Coe 2013).
In The True History of Chocolate, the authors explain that cacao was originally pronounced “kakawa” and was a term used by the ancient Olmec as early as 1000 BCE. Cacao-related terms then expanded to adjacent peoples. Table 1 in Dillinger et al. 2000, shows a selected list of Mesoamerican terms for cacao and there are 14 terms for cacao on this selected list.
There’s many reasons to enjoy cacao
many times more antioxidants than berries
highest plant based source of iron
one of the highest sources of magnesium
lots of calcium
helps improve neurotransmitter function
supports creativity, wisdom, abundance
opens the heart chakra and other channels of self-discovery and growth
Table 2 in Dillinger et al. 2000, provides an historical summary of positive claims and uses of cacao, many of these claims with multiple sources supporting them. There are 128 positive claims for the cacao bean, everything from lessening agitation to reducing gout to reducing toothache. It’s a fascinating list. With all of that goodness to support life and well-being, it is no wonder to me that the Olmecs (1500 to 400 BCE) and Mayans (1000 BCE - 900 CE) revered cacao as a sacred plant gifted to the people by the gods.
Cacao has become more complicated since the time of the Olmecs and Mayans. In this modern world there are critical issues in the harvesting of cacao.
Environmental degradation - Massive deforestation. Loss of biodiversity and habitat. Extinction of the more than humans - both flora and fauna. High use of agro-chemicals including highly hazardous pesticides that are a danger to human and more than human and health and the environment’s health (Cocoa Barometer 2022).
Exploitative labor - A large proportion of employees work on a temporary basis, without employment contracts, and earn much less than a living wage, and female workers earn even less than men. There are also issues of human trafficking, insufficient health care facilities and sanitation, and bonded labour (Cocoa Barometer 2022). In 2021 there were 1.56 million children in child labor with 43% engaged in hazardous work on Theobroma cacao farms in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana (which produce nearly 60% of the world’s Theobroma cacao each year). The work these children perform may include agro-chemical exposure, lifting heavy loads, burning fields, using sharp tools. More than half report being injured by their work (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs 2021).
If you do begin to explore cacao, it is important to focus on quality and integrity.
Quality: look for clean test certificates, a full mold and metal report, exceptional quality, and exceptional taste.
Integrity: be able to trace its origins, ethical growing practices, social investments, abuse and exploitation free.
Find a cacao that aligns with you and what’s important to you. It may take a bit of work and research but it will be worth - for you, the environment, and everyone involved in the production of the cacao.
Head: The Journey of Me and My Brain
In this month’s post I shared that as I’ve moved into menopause and retirement, my brain and I have begun a new journey. My brain just doesn’t get the same kind of work out it use to. It doesn’t have the myriad of things bombarding it each day. It doesn’t have to manage as much. Nouns are harder to remember. It no longer works the same. It feels as though it is rewiring itself. There’s a new way of thinking and processing that seems to be emerging.
This month I have returned to one tried and true practice and begun an investigation into a new one.
Tried and True Practice: In my March 2023 post about Retirement, I mentioned that for me "to retire" is less of an ending and more like "retiring to the drawing room.” To retire to the drawing room sounds relaxing, even luxurious. It's barely a transition from one location to another. It signals a downshift in energy. And, yet, it implies that there is more to come. The meal has ended but the festivities continue.
Retirement has felt like a beginning. An emergence. I am learning to say I am retired with the same energy of the drawing room. Relaxed. Less stressed. With anticipation, may be even expectation, that there is more to come.
It is with that renewed beginner’s mind and return to my Morning Pages practice that I found myself drawn to Julia Cameron’s book: It's Never Too Late to Begin Again: Discovering Creativity and Meaning at Midlife and Beyond. In this book, Cameron continues with the foundation of Morning Pages and Artist Dates and adds in a guided process for triggering memories, which she calls the Memoir.
Cameron’s process of working with memories begins by dividing one’s age into twelve sections and then working through questions to spark memories, dreams, wounds, ideas from each time period of one’s life. The first week I worked through the process I was working with ages 0-5 and then the second week was ages 6-10 (I rounded up, its hard enough going back in time that I didn’t want to work with decimal points). I’ve talked in previous posts about the “dark period” and gap in my early memories. Age 0-10 is precisely the dark period.
As frustrating as I found it to try to recall a smell or a sound from those periods of my life, I decided to stop trying to control my memory, to stop trying to force something that has to be there underneath all of the darkness but which is just out of reach. I decided to trust the process and to see where it takes me. I’ve given myself permission to go back and fill in ideas should memories arise. As Cameron says, “As you become open to revisiting your life, your life will become open to revisiting you.” Here’s to hope and transformation.
Investigating a New Practice: I’m beginning a deep dive into the Method of Loci, more commonly called Memory Palaces. Orators in ancient Greece and Rome used the Method of Loci “to translate information to be remembered into easily visualized “things: and imagined placing them at specific places (loci) along familiar paths” (Sandberg, et al. 2020). The orator walked the same imaginary path, recollecting the content, while performing the speech.
A fascinating study comparing using a virtual environment to a personally familiar environment to create a memory palace can be found at: Building a memory palace in minutes: Equivalent memory performance using virtual versus conventional environments with the Method of Loci.
Since episodic memory is age-sensitive and also malleable I thought it would be fun to see if using the Method of Loci could help exercise my brain and thereby increase its performance.
The process I am using:
Choose a place that I know well.
Relax and visualize the place I chose.
Think of a route to take to explore the whole thing.
Follow that route a couple times forwards and backwards.
Choose stops (loci) to store information in. Each station should be visually unique.
Follow the route again. View each stop from the same angle as viewed previously.
Practice round #1:
I started with a grocery list. I already have a visual memory of our local grocery store. I can picture the rows and what is on each shelf. I suppose that’s what happens when I visit a place every other week for years. Frequent interactions breeds visual familiarity.
Instead of taking a grocery list to the store, as a visual of what I needed to pick up, I practiced creating a memory palace for my list. Each row was a loci. For example, #01 on my list, coffee, went into stop number 1, the coffee section; #12 went into stop number 12; etc. I walked each row in my memory and identified what I needed to pick up that week. I practiced it throughout the week and added things as the need arose.
The first time I went to the store I missed two things. The second time I went I remembered them all.
Practice round #2:
Surya Namaskara, Sun Salutation, is a dynamic yoga exercise. It consists of 12 physical postures synchronized with breathing, mantras, awareness, and relaxation. I have practiced it for years. It’s so good for getting everything moving in the morning - digestive system, skeletal-muscular system, nervous system, respiratory system, circulatory system. After completing 3-5 each morning I feel ready for the day.
But, I’ve never been able to remember the Sanskrit name for each posture nor the mantra that corresponds to each. So, I’ve decided to build a memory palace for Surya Namaskara.
Each posture is assigned a loci that corresponds to a 1790 Georgian style house that has significance to me. I spent a lot of time there when I was in high school. I have a visual memory of the layout of the house and even some of the furnishings.
I decided to make each room a loci for each posture so I can add in additional information about the posture over time. Right now, I’m working on adding the Sanskrit names. Next, I’ll work on the mantras, and then the English translations.
Here’s an example.
The Orangery is loci #1 for Standing Prayer Pose. I decided to start in the Orangery, even though it is outside of the house, because it is a good preparation space before entering into the postures. When I look at the Orangery I see the figure of posture #1. I enter the Orangery through the north door way. The west wall contains the Sanskrit name: Pranamasana. The south wall contains the mantra: Om mitraya namah. The east wall contains the translation: Prostration to Him who is affectionate to all.
From the Orangery I walk up a stairway loci #2, then to the music room loci #3, then the drawing room loci #4, etc. until I have 12 loci that correspond to the 12 postures of Surya Namaskara.
This is going to take a while to build and integrate. So far, it’s useful, practical, and fun. I can always add to it later if I want to remember more things about each posture.
I find myself working through the route and the image of each posture when I am sitting idly, like when I’m picking up one of our children from a friend’s house and am sitting in the car waiting for them to come out.
Heart: Swim Across America Baltimore Open Water Swim.
In this month’s post I shared that I am returning to my pool practice this month to prepare for the Baltimore Open Water Swim. I’m rediscovering the quiet I find when in the water and my body is finding the familiarity of the movement. I’m focusing on recovering my technique, speed, distance, and overall fitness. Each day in the pool involves a warm up, focus, and cool down. Anchoring all of my pool time is strength training, walking, and stretching.
Swimming this July is all about recovering my practice; lengthening out my limbs and my core, at the same time tightening my core. Aiming for a tight streamlined position. Re-engaging all of that into a more limber, lengthier movement. Trying to bring my breathing and heart rate to a quicker recovery so that when I start back up with the next set it is easier.
I’m not swimming as far as I have in the past when preparing for an event. Right now, its 1250 yards, just under 3/4 mile, broken into a warm up, sets of 100 yards, and a cool down. In August my focus will be preparation so the number of yards will rise to about 2050 with sets between 200-600 yards and then in September my focus will be readiness so I will be tapering back, down to between 1650-1800 with sets between 600-1000 yards.
Back in 2009 I read Dara Torres book, Age is Just a Number. In this book she discussed how at the age 41, after she had retired from competitive swimming and eight years after her last Olympics, she became the oldest swimmer to ever make the Olympic team. She took three silver medals at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing —including a .01-second finish behind the gold medalist in the women’s 50-meter freestyle.
At the time Dara went to Beijing, she was age 41 with a two year old daughter and I was age 40 with a 3 year old daughter. I found her book truly remarkable in terms of her honesty and frankness about motherhood, swimming, and chasing a dream. She left me believing anything is possible.
Now, as I swim this July, I am reminded of the lessons I gleaned from this book:
“The water doesn’t know how old you are.” “You don’t have to put an age limit on your dreams.” “Lifestyle, not genetics, is the primary reason older athletes tend to slow down.” “Life is never as simple and straightforward as you think it’s going to be.” “Everyone feels scared inside sometimes. The secret is knowing how to deal with your hard feelings so they don’t undermine your work.” “Age is just a number.”
So, here I am; not trying to do what I did when I was 18, 20, 25 or even 35. I’m finding my own way, based on who I am now.
Resources for open water swimming:
US Masters Swimming Open Water Central
Both of these resources have provided a wealth of information about training, food choices leading up to the event, gear, pretty much anything anything I’ve wanted to know.
Final thought for this month:
“Chocolate is more than a beverage or confection; chocolate is more than the sum of interesting phytochemicals. Chocolate is a part of history; chocolate tells the story of people and events from antiquity to present…To taste chocolate, therefore is to share in a common connection through history, from the time of the Olmec over 3000 years to the present, from the frothy cacao beverages prepared at the court of King Moctezuma, to the era of the modern chocolate bar” (Dillinger et al. 2000).
I love how at the end of this scientific paper, at the very end, right before the acknowledgements, these researchers bring it all together, right down to the most precise nugget: Everything is connected. Everything deserves reverence and intention, including cacao. 3000+ years is a lot of connectedness to tap into each morning with my cup of cacao. I love it!
This month my hand, head, and heart practices provide an opportunity to recover and reset my daily practices, and to stretch a bit. Any of my routine that stumbled over the past couple of months gets to recover and reset so that I am ready for a season of preparation and harvest that begins in August.
Love,
Karen