Rebuilding Our Inner Life (after a hard year of pandemic life)
“Want to learn about a different culture?—Go and live there for a year.” That’s the advice I heard as a college student preparing to do a year abroad. It proved true. You need that much time to really settle into a new experience. Part of it undoubtedly comes from experiencing all four seasons; part also surely comes from the subtle inner changes we make to accommodate to new surroundings. That said, we are now nearly a year into our pandemic experience. The idea that we would just need to “batten down the hatches” for a few months and then life would return back to normal, that idea has proven wrong. Life is different now and will continue to be. With fragmented social connections, disrupted rhythms, and so many streams of vastly different information, it is hard to know how to orient yourself.
Plastic Surgery for Food? The GMO Question. Living an Authentic Life, part 4
Is there such a thing as living food? If so, does that mean that there is dead food? Why should it make a difference, if the most important thing about nutrition is the calories, fats, protein and vitamin content of a food? Let's explore this a little: certainly fresh food tastes better, and fruit that has ripened on the tree or vine has a whole different quality than fruit that was picked green and shipped around the world. It also seems increasingly clear, from all kinds of different perspectives, that highly processed food is not good for us. Processed food is not the same. Like formula for babies, which even if it chemically is as close as we can possibly make it to breast milk, it is not an equivalent. That is at least in part due to the fact that the nutritive substance in breast milk has already been enlivened by the mother's body. It can easily be digested and taken up into the body. The substance of the milk is living—it loses some of that when it is frozen or stored for too long, but it is still an amazingly living nutrition. We can think about general food nutrition in the same way—that the closer the food we eat is to its original growing state, the better we can make use of it. We meet it in a different way and can incorporate it into our own living physiology in a better way. Therefore, we can say (though someone who relies solely on laboratory analysis will often argue this) that the Vitamin A, K, and B vitamins in spinach are more living and healthier than if we eat those same vitamins in a concentrated pill form….