Small Victories

After another week of basically eating seeds and berries because the healthy lunch I packed myself was too bland to bear, I decided that I am gonna have to lean in on this food thing.  Up until the present I have been hovering around Dorito vegetarian status- you know, when “vegetarian” means that you just eat a ton of ho hos?

I have to branch out and learn some new food tricks, or I am going to die of a cashew overdose.

I made this! I am an awesome witch! 

So over the weekend I went all in and made three things that seemed far beyond my grasp.

I made a gluten free, vegan pasta sauce that went on shredded yams instead of pasta. The machine that makes yam-pasta is way too expensive, so instead I just used this hand tool that makes strips of things. Not surprisingly, I accidentally made strips of my left hand, which resulted in this amazing pattern of evenly spaced lines of blood down my palm and wrist. I hate it when I cut myself and there is no one there to see all that immediate red blood. What a waste. The sauce had nut milk and came out of the blender. I love the blender so much I could cry.

I made gluten free french onion dip also out of nut milk, and, like, onion powder.

AND I made fucking almond milk out of fucking almonds. Yeah, that’s right. I turned almonds into almond milk, using the blender and fucking cheesecloth like a fucking pioneer lady. Boom. Need some butter churned, bitches? I am pioneer times. Maybe the railroad will get finished and I’ll get an orange for Christmas. Made my own almond milk. This is West Philly, bitches. Manifest destiny.

This weekend was definitely the peak of my life’s culinary achievement. I think that this kind of on-purpose growth happens in an iamb. There’s the denial that lots of spiritual traditions embrace, but the heart is not in the denial, it’s in the readjustment that you need to do to fill the hole where the thing was that you gave up.

The things that I am gaining in yoga (small gains) come directly from the abandonment of pride or grace or control. I do not have these things in yoga. But little spring flower blades of other things are coming up in there.

And I am also breathing into the gentle daily embarrassment of my relationship. As much as my body has no idea how to do dandasna, my self has no idea how to be someone’s girlfriend in any kind of functioning, healthy way. I don’t know why I am surprised to learn this. It is basically the same thing though. Weird stretching and discomfort with either tears or insight coming out of nowhere occasionally.  To be so lost, so bad at something that I have, in fact, a lot of experience with is weird and kind of overwhelmingly embarrassing. I don’t know if I could do it if I weren’t practicing in yoga.

Man, the real and meaningful gains of life are so hilariously small. This is the real sense of humor of the universe. You are running and running towards some big capital-s success for years and years of striving and misplaced determination and envy and fear until you learn that the really valuable victories are just tiny.

This morning in yoga, I think pitying me, John the yoga guy was telling me that recently he had been getting back to the fundamental poses and trying to learn them really well. He said that when you start yoga, you want to get to all these cool, fancy poses, and go upside down and put your leg over there. But when you get further along, you realize how important the basics are.

This is how I feel about my life. The early part of it was about a crazy game of racking up measurable awesomeness, but when I look back now, I realize the time would have been better spent learning to have a friendship, maybe, or take care of my body, or not make terrible daily choices.

It is crazy the sense of personal satisfaction I feel when I have a decent human interaction, or cook a solid meal. And it’s great in it's own silly, small-scale way, because the opportunities for accomplishment are no longer bounded.

Almond milk, bitches.