And if you want a little help visualizing the food you eat, several websites are happy to oblige:

Visual Ingredients posts the ingredients of processed food, and well, other food — the ingredient of broccoli is broccoli –  in a visually appealing way.

Sugar Stacks shares pictures of food, with cubes of sugar, representing how much sugar the item contains.

German photographer Oliver Schwarzwald has created a fascinating photo essay illustrating Breakfast around the world (on his link, press editorial, then press breakfast).  His breakfast pictures include a typical American breakfast, French breakfast, Russian breakfast, and more.

And if you really want to think about how our children are being raised on processed food (and it’s not pretty), check out this blog:  Fed Up With Lunch:  The School Lunch Project.  A teacher commits to eating school lunches for a year, and shares her pictures of her daily school meal.

A recent memoir titled The Art of Eating In, chronicles Cathy Erway’s two year commitment to eating in: no fast food, no restaurants, to takeout.

Jamie Oliver is a chef who has taken up the cause for real food.  Take a look at this trailer for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

If this post inspires you to seek out fresh local food, then Local Harvest can help you find organic farms in your area.

Writer Carrie H. lives with her husband and son in sunny California.  Raised in San Antonio, Texas, she has lived in California for 28 years.  In her own words:

Our family of three along with two cats, two rats and a goldfish live in a small Spanish bungalow in Santa Monica, California about a mile from the beach.  According to the original deed it was built in back in 1928 for $1500.  Apparently you got a lot more for $1500 back then.  Our house, although petite, is filled with beautiful details such as oak doors, floors and molding.  It also has high ceilings and unique arches throughout.  We all seem to love and appreciate it’s history and charm.

List three words to describe your home:

Charming, cozy and inviting.

What is your favorite room?

I guess I would have to say the kitchen.  Not only is it where I prepare my family, friends, and pets’ favorite foods, but I also think of it as my control center.  I can work on my lap top while doing a load of laundry and dishes, along with simmering a pot of chili while funneling work calls along with doctors appointments, clarinet lessons etc.  I have such a great feeling of control and accomplishment, well of course until there is one little distraction such as the cat hocking up a fur ball or unexpected delivery from the UPS man and then all the plates that I had spinning so beautifully come crashing down.  The clothes in the washer never make it to the dryer, and the dishwasher never gets unloaded and the chili sticks to the bottom of the pot, and I’m now behind on work and have to leave everything in total disarray as dash off to run carpool.

What is your favorite thing (item) in your house?

I love my hundred plus year old dining room table.  It’s a drop leaf table from a small town in Texas that my mother had shipped to me when I first moved to California.  When I lived alone in a teeny one bedroom apartment, I didn’t have enough room to even open up one leaf.  Then when I got married and we moved into our house that we still live in today,  we opened one leaf and it was very comfortable for the two of us.  Then we had our son Harrison and then we opened up both leaves and as our lives grew we even had a center leaf made so we can now seat eight or so for family holidays and gatherings.  It guess we have grown together throughout the years.

What is your favorite color in your home?

I really like darker shades of green.  It feels warm and seems to go with all the Spanish details of our house.   We have large paned windows throughout and I love the way the green foliage from the outside compliments the greens on the inside.

Describe your evening and/or morning routine.

Hectic and more hectic!  My son has never liked going to bed.  And once he started talking, which was about at 11-12 months he never seemed to stop especially at night.  We refer to him as “The Filibuster.”  He quickly learned that if he just keeps talking he won’t fall asleep.  Now that he’s in middle school it’s even more of a challenge to get him to go to bed and an even bigger challenge to get him up in the morning.  We have resigned ourselves that it will be something that we will struggle with until he goes away to college and then he can talk and stay up all night long!    Because of Harrison’s challenging sleep habits it makes the mornings very rushed and stressful.  Most nights we eat dinner as a family and that is a great time to sit around the “old” table and hear about each other’s day.  It’s then time for homework, a shower, and then of course the struggle to get to bed.  Most of the nights end with Harrison saying, “Let me tell you one more thing…” and David and I responding, “Tomorrow, now no more talking!”

What is in your fridge (three items)?

Milk, orange juice, and tapenade– Harrison’s favorite snack.  Weird I know!

Do you recognize anything about your aesthetic style that reminds you of your parent’s home or your grandparent’s home? (or other close relative)?  What is your inspiration?

I definitely have been influenced by my mother and grandmother.  My grandparents were in the furniture business back in the early 60’s so there are some very cool furniture and decorative pieces such as dishes, silver, lamps, little boxes etc. that we have all cherished and used to accent our homes.  My grandmother and I really shared the love for miniature things.  Maybe that’s because she was not a very big woman and neither am I.

What do you pack for lunch for your child?  Snacks?

Harrison doesn’t like sandwiches very much so sometimes I just give him slices of turkey, pieces of cheese, and crackers.  He likes fruit snacks and granola bars and when I have time I’ll buy him California rolls from Trader Joes or Whole foods.  And of course he loves tapenade on crackers.  And he looooves bagels and cream cheese for a meal or a snack.

Your child’s favorite activity, craft and or game?

Baseball and more baseball!  Since he’s an only child he wants us to pitch to him and play catch.  He also likes to cook with me.  We also play some board games, such as The Beatles Monopoly.

What has being a parent taught you?

I knew it would be my responsibility to teach my child, but I have been so pleasantly surprised by how much my child has taught me.

For more information about Carrie, click here.

A recent New York Times article, Depression’s Upside, looks at the positive qualities of depression, in particular the activity of ruminating over a particular event or feeling, and how this ruminating can provide an individual with valuable insights.  The relationship between depression and creativity has often been explored.  In this article, the author wonders if this ruminating aspect of depression is what gives some successful writers their tenacious persistence, “like prize fighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. “

Two recently published books, The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch and Manufacturing Depression by Gary Greenberg explore medicating depression and sadness, and the consequences of medicating other emotions or qualities such as shyness, anxiety, fear.  Any emotion can be debilitating at a certain level — how do you figure out what is a natural feeling and what is a real disorder?  How do we find balance?

On a happier note, The Happiness Project is a new book that mines the fields of happiness and how to find it.  The author cheerfully uses charts and studies and her own experience to explore the pursuit of happiness.

A happy life, a life worth living, a good life — we hope for this for ourselves and our children.  Exploring (and experiencing) both sadness and happiness in our lives is one step towards balance, acceptance and joy.

However, truth be told, there’s a lot of good things happening on farms in real life.

There’s Biodynamic farming, for example.  What’s that you ask?   Here’s one answer, given in a video created by Organic Nation TV.

Want to try biodynamic food for yourself?  My local grocery store often carries biodynamic grapes, raisins and wine — look for the Demeter certification seal.   Also check for local biodynamic farmers or CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture).  If you can’t find any, you can purchase biodynamic products online at the Steiner Storehouse.

Maybe you yourself are a farmer, and not just on Facebook (but click here to fan biodynamic farming there), but in Truth.  If so, you may be interested in Crop Mob, an organization which helps to bring regular folk and farmers together, to tend to the farm for the day.  Or maybe you are not a farmer, but a farmer-at-heart, and hankering for some real roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-dirty type of work.  Well Crop Mob can help you find a farm to work on some weekend soon (bring the kids).

And check out April Davila’s blog Without Monsanto.  She is spending the month of March, well, without Monsanto  — trying not to eat, drink, wear, or wash with anything that might be genetically modified.  Turns out, not an easy task.

And there is a new book out titled About a Mountain by John D’Agata about the government plan to store nuclear waste, 77,000 tons of it, in Yucca Mountain in Nevada.  According to calculations, it needs to be stored for a million years at least, but the government, in order to make the number more friendly, has reduced that time to 10,000 years.

There are these big stories of toxic chemicals that wreak havoc to our waterways and mountain ranges, to our health and to the health of the earth, and there are the little stories too.  The bottle of water swigged after school that contains chemical leached from the plastic container.  The dish washing soap which leaves a toxic residue on our plates.  The floor cleaner with warnings on its label that, if read, would cause a grown man to weep, as his baby rolls around on the floor.

Chemicals in food, in water, and in our household products have real consequences for each of us.  A recent piece in the  New York Times talks about the effects of toxic chemicals on our health.

Each decision we make on a household level has an effect on our well being, and the earth’s too.

A few simple tips for avoiding toxic chemicals in your home:

• Buy (or grow) organic or biodynamic food;
• Avoid processed food and all the chemicals it contains;
• Filter your water;
• Choose non toxic household products for cleaning or make your own –water,  vinegar, baking soda and essential oils are pretty much all you need;
• Choose non toxic personal products – shampoo, toothpaste, makeup, and so on.

I loved reading this recipe for biscotti using Weleda’s Pomegranate Body Oil (I haven’t tried cooking with it yet, but the oil is wonderful for the skin, with a lovely light scent; plus, sign up here to win a Weleda Spa Trip).  This is how it should be, products so pure that you can eat them.

HealthyChild.org has created this video, to help spread the word about creating toxic free homes for our children.

How do you avoid exposing your family to toxic chemicals?

It’s the same way with boredom.  You start to think about it, and then it’s everywhere.

British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner (1950) Bertrand Russell wrote:

“A certain amount of boredom is…essential to a happy life.“

And he also wrote, giving a push for slow living:

“A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”

Leo Tolstoy wrote “Boredom: the desire for desires,”  which partly explains why we cover up those slow moments with shopping, eating, drinking, rushing to and fro.  But it might be nice to embrace a slow moment sometimes, to stop for a sunset, instead of twittering and tweeting it away.

Johannes Kepler wrote about them in 1611, and Rene Descartes described a snowflake in 1635:  “These were little plates of ice, very flat, very polished, very transparent, about the thickness of a sheet of rather thick paper…but so perfectly formed in hexagons, and of which the six sides were so straight, and the six angles so equal, that it is impossible for men to make anything so exact.”

Wilson A. Bentley, who died in 1931, was considered the snowflake man:  “Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”

Dennis Klocek, artist, author and weather researcher, offers these old farmer’s weather rhymes about snow:

“When snow falls dry, it means to lie.”  “The larger the flake the shorter the fall.” “Three heavy frosts then a storm.”

These three sayings are true with our Austin snowfall.  First, it was a wet snow, not dry, and it melted quickly.  Second, the flakes were large and did seem to have a short fall.  Third, we have had a chilly winter here, with about three frosts, so we were due a storm.

Kenneth Libbrecht is one scientist who has taken up a serious study of snowflakes.  These are his beautiful pictures of snowflakes.

And on the topic of weather, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac (‘useful, with a pleasant degree of humor’),  February 24th, 2010 is a good day to to graft, pollinate and plant aboveground crops.

Click on this little snowflake to see a movie of a snowflake forming (courtesy of SnowCrystals.com)

I’ve read some interesting memoirs about marriage recently, including the recent Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert and Cleaved by Julia Powell.

Robert Louis Stevenson said: “Marriage is a friendship recognized by the police.”  That quote makes me laugh, but also makes me think a bit too.  Gilbert thinks about it too.

Committed explores Gilbert’s struggle with the concept of marriage, of becoming legally bound to another person.    And though initially she rails against the constraints of  marriage as an institution, she comes to see it as a liberating and subversive act, a revolutionary movement that undercuts the powers that be in a way that she finds very appealing. Exploring The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage by Ferdinand Mount, she writes that because non-arranged marriage is a private, individual decision between two people, it represents a “liberty of heart” that governments ultimately have no control over.  Governments can’t control the secret, private lives of couples.

Cleaved explores the author’s infidelity.  I found this book painful to read in the way that TMZ can be painful to watch or gawker.com can be painful to scroll through– it is an almost too intimate portrait of a woman on her worse behavior.

Wolfgang Gadeke wrote a thoughtful book on marriage in question and answer format titled Sexuality, Partnership and Marriage, from a spiritual perspective.  I’ll paraphrase his four tips taking care of a marriage:

1. Continual work on inner questions — exploring the meaning of marriage, the human being, human existence, the meaning of life on an intellectual and spiritual level.
2. Shared experience, especially having to do with art and nature — participating in each others experiences, cultivating shared experiences on an artistic and soulful level.
3. Caring for and cultivating daily life together — caring for the home together, eating and sleeping together, and also building community together and sharing a spiritual life together, on a practical and doing/willing level.
4. Treating the “physical partnership not as an end in itself, but as a possibility to make real a communion of life, soul and spirit.”   This last tip is about sex, and about bringing together, in one sense, the spiritual, soulful and physical aspects of the marriage.  It is also about respect.

Sound advice, and as always, easier said than done.

Cokie and Steve Roberts wrote From This Day Forward, an engaging book about marriage.  I couldn’t find the exact quote, but I seem to remember that on of their tips for a long and happy marriage was something like:  “Be deaf and mute.”  Knowing the things we say to the people we love, and the things we think we hear them say to us, it seems like good advice too.

Ann Stahl, a wise woman and a former teacher of mine, once advised to “hold it lightly, like a feather.”  I take that to mean that in marriage and in life, in the things that happen, the experiences that we have,the triumphs and the sorrows — it is best to consider each moment lightly, carefully, gently, freely.  It is best to hold an experience lightly,  like a feather.  It makes sense to me.

Losing

We lose on purpose.  We lose by accident.   We lose by surprise and it takes our breath away.

Losing was on my mind over the weekend, having seen Arthur Miller’s play “A View from the Bridge.”  Liev Schreiber plays the title role.  His performance is wonderful.  He loses a lot in this play.  And others lose too.  One of the themes of the play is illegal immigration.  The two young Italians in the play lose their homes and their homelands, one loses his wife and children.  They live in a sort of limbo.  Lots of people around the world live that way.  It’s heartbreaking really, all the loss that takes place.  And how intimate that loss is — the wrenching pain, for example, of leaving and losing a child, left behind in a country far away.

Especially living here in Texas, I have come to know that the Texan/Mexican border is a geographical point which witnesses a huge amount of loss. That maybe the case for many borders.    Some interesting books on this particular type of loss are  Ted Conover’s Coyotes (I can’t wait to read his new book on roads), and The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea and Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario.

Loss itself is a kind of border, it’s an edge.

Most memoirs focus on loss.  There’s the loss of a spouse:  The Year of Magical Thinking;  the loss of a marriage:  Happens Every Day;  the loss of a pregnancy:  An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination; the loss of years:  The Night of the Gun.

In the The Other Side of Sadness we learn that grief over a loss is interspersed with happiness and levity.  That’s good news.  We all have lost or will lose things of great significance.  But even in the sorrow of loss, we will find laughter.

Poet Elizabeth Bishop has an especially exquisite take on loss in her poem, One Art:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

What did you lose?

The question is always, of course, ‘what makes us happy?’  The literature of happiness is huge, including three recent books that are interesting and fun to read:  The Geography of Bliss, The How of Happiness, and 59 Seconds.

So, happily getting right to the point, I have come up with this list of seven ways to get happier:

• Nature – Spend time in nature; connect with nature.  Water a plant, grow a garden or climb Mount Kilimanjaro.  E. O. Wilson talked about Biophilia, the deep connection between man and nature.  Nature nurtures us.
• Gratitude – Count your blessings.  Write them down if you want to.
• Self Reflection — Be mindful of your thoughts, feelings, actions.  Keep a journal or meditate.
• Relationships — Nurture your relationships with your loved ones and with your community.  Build trust.  Touch somebody, literally.
• Share — Do something for someone else.  Share your time, your knowledge, your resources.  Find people in your own community that need your help, or explore further afield.
• Choose experiences, not things — Time and again it is shown that owning lots of things and having a materialistic viewpoint, does not actually make us happier.  Instead, redirect your resources to make things happen instead of towards acquiring things.  And more often than not we regret what we didn’t do, not what we did.  So do it — go to that wedding, attend the birthday party, take that trip, play with a child.
• Slow Down — Take it easy, take a moment to breathe.  Don’t rush through the good times in search of the next best thing.  Savor what is happening now.

If you have any to add to the list, please comment or send and email!