A Change in the Wind

Shepherd's Pie: Two variations for the trail

The all-time best cookbook for backpackers, sez me, is a long out of print paperback called The Hungry Hiker's Book of Good Cooking, by Gretchen McHugh. Though it dates from l982, it's really from the l970's, complete with vaguely "Joy of Sex" illustrations, on brown paper. But my copy is dog-eared, written up, torn -- these recipes cannot be beat.

Here's one of Grechen's best, w/a variation for our times, for Shepherd's Pie:

First,make her basic ground beef, which takes one lb lead ground beef; two cloves garlic, 1/2 cup finely chopped onion, some bouillon. Cook the beef w/garlic and onions until its browned. Pour or skim off the fat. Add 2 tablespoons flour, salt to taste, and a small amount of fresh rosemary. When it's cooked, dehydrate, which can be managed by spreading it out on a baking sheet and leaving it in an oven set at low, for about six hours, with the door ajar. Leave a little moisture.

On the trail cover with water, bring to a boil, simmer ten minutes. In a second pot, boil water and make instant potatoes. Put the potatoes atop the shepherd's pie, then add grated parmesan on top. No one will be hungry after, guaranteed.

All this to reveal that yes, I'm back on the PCT, on a stretch from the desert (Anza-Borrego) to the mountains (the San Jacinto, high over Palm Springs) and back to the desert. 100 miles.

Must add my variation. For a friend who after all too many antibiotics can't handle onion, garlic, or other strong flavors, began by cooking three sweet peppers in a light oil until softened. Brown the beef, add a couple of tablespoons tomato paste, then some Italian herbs -- parsley, basil, thyme. Then as before. 

Came out better than Heather's! Flavorful, delicate, charming. Live and learn. 

You do not have to be good: Mary Oliver

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. 

Good to remember: Our pain is not the world's. Quite the contrary.

[image via Panhala]

The loneliness of the long-distance floater

From the National Geographic's annual photo contest, by Eric Guth:

Is it possible to sense loneliness and loss in a chunk of glacial ice? 

Related articles

The winning images from Nat Geo's 2012 Photography Competition will blow you away

Writers, Artists, Musicians: Where Would We Be If Our Loneliness Left Us Alone?

The little girl and the Beasts of the Southern Wild

National Geographic contest winners

The sound of 2012: Anthemic, but with banjo or violin

Although Frank Ocean captured the headlines and topped the critics' lists, for yours truly what stands out in pop music this year is the discovery of a consensus acoustic sound that is not rock, for better or worse, and yet is shared by the likes of relatively new bands Mumford & Sons, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, the Avett Brothers, The Lumineers, and Lord Huron, among countless, countless others.

Anthemic folk-rock, as Jon Pareles said. With a dash of sarcasm, he voiced the thoughts of a young fan newly converted to this "roots" music: “Wow, I’m cool. I heard a banjo. I’m different. And I’m going to tell all my friends how much hearing an actual banjo as opposed to a synthesizer moved me.”

Yes, but...stand-out tracks include I Will Wait, Stubborn Love, and the instant classic Winter in My Heart (though it's a yearning ballad, not an anthem). My fav band is everyone else's too, Mumford & Sons, the most exciting, although Fleet Foxes still have the best harmonies, and the Avett Brothers make me ache the most.

Most visual is surely Lord Huron:

...who seems to offer in their visual work a destination, a virtual home in the lonesome wilderness.  

Cheryl Strayed: To turn our suffering into beauty

From an unusually rich interview in The Millions, the friendliest of literary sites, with Cheryl Strayed, the author of the great and influential Wild: 

Cheryl Strayed: I’ve always thought that the important thing is to turn our suffering into beauty. And the image of the phoenix rising from the ashes has always been super-cool to me, that idea of our greatest beauty and strength rising out of the things that have been destroyed and have been lost. In Wild I talk about this book that I carried all the way with me, this collection of poems by Adrienne Rich called The Dream of A Common Language. And on the trail in Wild, I read that first poem, it’s called “Power.”

The poem is about Marie Curie, who discovered radiation. And she ended up dying of basically radiation exposure, this disease that had been essentially her greatest achievement. Marie Curie could never admit that’s what was killing her. And Adrienne Rich writes, she died a famous woman denying that the greatest source of her power was her wound. I’m paraphrasing it, but essentially it’s that. The thing about Adrienne Rich and what I was trying to do also in my writing career is to do the opposite, to not deny that our power comes from our wounds, that those deep wounds are the place of our power, and to really write from that place in my own life. That goes back to this earlier question about authority. That’s what authority is. When you’re actually writing from that deepest place within you, if you tell the truth, you’re using your greatest power and your greatest authority. That’s a key piece, not just doing that as a writer but when we talk about healing. Whatever the loss may be, not avoiding that wound, not trying to have it covered up and pretend it’s not there but rather to look into it.

Edward Abbey: A place to make a grown man weep

Even a curmudgeon on the subject of Internet video must admit it's a good thing that a filmmaker had Edward Abbey show him around the Arches National Park, where Abbey was a park ranger...back in l956. 

 

Essay by Edward Abbey "I Loved it...I Loved it All" from Ned Judge on Vimeo.

A great recipe, thirty-five years later: Gypsy Soup

They say a classic is revealed through its ability to stand the test of time. Well, this recipe came out in the original Moosewood cookbook/restaurant in l977, some thirty-five years ago. Yet to me it's new, because I "discovered" it this year, while looking for inexpensive but hearty vegetarian dishes. 

Better late than never. And, after all, it may far older than Moosewood. No matter. It's still great:

Recipe By: Mollie Katzen, "Moosewood Cookbook"
Serving Size: 4 Preparation Time: 1:30

• 3 tablespoons olive oil -- up to 4T
• 2 cups chopped onion
• 2 cloves chopped garlic
• 2 cups sweet potatoes -- chopped & peeled (Or winter squash)
• 1/2 cup chopped celery
• 1 cup chopped fresh tomatoes
• 3/4 cup chopped sweet peppers
• 1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas
• 3 cups stock or water
• 2 teaspoons paprika
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 teaspoon basil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• dash cinnamon
• dash cayenne
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tablespoon tamari soy sauce

In a soup kettle or large saucepan, saute onions, garlic, celery and sweet potatoes in olive oil for about five minutes. Add seasonings, except tamari, and the stock or water.
Simmer, covered, fifteen minutes.
Add remaining vegetables and chickpeas.

Simmer another 10 minutes or so - until all the vegetables are as tender as you like them.

NOTES : The vegetables used in this soup are flexible. Any orange vegetable can be combined with green...for example, peas or green beans could replace the peppers. Carrots can be used instead of, or in addition to the squash or sweet potatoes, etc. Note that if you want to use uncooked garbanzo beans/chickpeas, you should think about boiling them the night before (sez forgetful me). 

All wholesome food is caught without a net or trap. -- William Blake

(from the frontispiece of the original Moosewood cookbook)

Milky Way over the Sierras: Jeffrey Sullivan

At last Google+ provides a reason to believe:

From July 2010, via Jeffrey Sullivan. 

Around the world with Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg

Today was Walt Whitman's birthday.

"Good day for DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act] to be ruled unconstitutional," remarked poet friend Robert Peake from London.

A look at how Walt became a poet at all shows the truth of what Robert said:

[Whitman] was working as a carpenter, his father's trade, and living with his mother in Brooklyn, when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "The Poet," which claimed the new United States needed a poet to properly capture its spirit. Whitman decided he was that poet. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman later said. "Emerson brought me to a boil."

Whitman began work on his collection Leaves of Grass, crafting an American epic that celebrated the common man. He did most of the typesetting for the book himself, and he made sure the edition was small enough to fit in a pocket, later explaining, "I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air." He was 37 years old when he paid for the publication of 795 copies out of his own pocket.

Many of Whitman's poems were criticized for being openly erotic. One of Whitman's earliest reviews had called the book "a mass of stupid filth," accusing Whitman of "that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians." But rather than censoring himself, Whitman added 146 poems to his third edition.

Of course, many of Whitman's poems were openly erotic, but Whitman's most famous line ever, arguably, is his tribute to his mentor, which is also the simplest and best encapsulation of Emerson's philosophy:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" 

Which to me is about the most useful line of poetry ever. In speeches, in therapy, and sometimes, in remonstrating discussions with one's own self, it's true and consoling, and a reminder of our possibilities.

So let me celebrate this discoverer, this Whitman, with a personal fav from amongst his poems, called Facing West from California's Shores: 

Facing west from California's shores,

Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,

I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,

Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;

For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,

From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,

From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,

Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,

Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,

(But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)  

A century or so later his foremost follower, Allen Ginsberg, wrote an equally searching (if much longer) poem, also worth celebrating. The 92nd Y has a spectacular 1973 recording of Ginsberg reading Mind Breaths, and explaining how he had been inspired by his meditation practice.

It's fascinating, and quite inspiring in its own right. It's as if Ginsberg has evolved Whtiman to a new level, taken his spirit, and put it into practice.

Let me quote a few lines from the Californian part of the journey: 

...out towards Reno's neon, dollar bills skittering downstreet along the curb
up into Sierras oak leaves blown down by fall cold chills
over peaktops snowy gales beginning,
a breath of prayer down on Kitkitdizze's horngreen leaves close to ground,
over Gary's roof, over temple pillar, tens and manazanita arbors in Sierra
    pine foothills
a breath falls over Sacramento Valley, roar of wind down the sixland freeway
    across Bay Bridge
uproar of papers floating over Montgomery Street, pigons flutter down
    before sunset from Washington Park's white churchsteeple --
Golden Gate waters whitecapped scoudding out to Pacific spreads... 

If memory serves, Rolling Stone published this poem, back in the 70's. Wouldn't do anything like that now.             

The richness of the light of these days: John Muir

Warm and bright, the valley was spanned by fibrous bows of white cloud, heated masses of air from currentless ovens of chambered and bushy rocks lifted by newborn winds and bourne whole or in fragments about the open gulf of the valley...the richness of the light of these days recalls our best mellow autumns and springs. 

John Muir, January 24-26, 1869    

(via my new Twitter stream, Muirtweets)

(image from an astounding HD video posted today on YosemiteBlog)