Posted by Elizabeth

When I heard that Elizabeth Gilbert had written a new book, I was nervous.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to read Committed, which picks up where Eat Pray Love leaves off, chronicling her difficult decision to marry Felipe, the man she literally sails off into the sunset with at the end of the story.  There was no way this book could ever live up to EPL, for I am one of those women – and I know there are many of us – for whom EPL changed my life.  Although Maikael and I had already been toying with the idea of taking eight months out of our life to embark on a journey of self-discovery around the world, EPL sealed the deal for me.  Inspired by her tale, we even spent two weeks lapping up life and culture in Ubud, Bali, which she details in such a mesmerizing way.  For me, Gilbert’s prose captured what I was feeling but was unable to put into words at that time in my life, feelings about being caught between a conventional and unconventional life, about being unsure what I wanted from life, about not knowing who I was or what made me happy in the slightest.  As different as our lives were – I was ten years her junior and not considering divorce – I identified with Liz Gilbert.

But I know not everyone felt this way.  When my former bookclub read Eat Pray Love, our group was fiercely divided by equal amounts of adoration and dislike of the book.  Some felt her journey was trite, her head inflated, her love story too tidy and saccharine.  Other just simply didn’t “get it,” which was unfathomable to me, who had found such connection and solace in the book.  As I traveled around the globe, the subject of the book often came up in conversations with fellow explorers (it really was a worldwide phenomenon), and, even amongst the highly self-selecting group of long-term travelers, the division of opinions was just as acute.  Love it or hate it, the book clearly made people feel something.

However, when I learned that Elizabeth Gilbert was coming to town – and that $35 could buy me two tickets and a hardback copy of the book – I was Committed.  So last Wednesday night, me and 500 fellow Liz Gilbert fans, including my former therapist, filed into an expansive ballroom at the University of New Mexico, which was stuffed to the gills with conference seating and estrogen.  The audience was one loud hum, buzzing with the anticipation of a cultural icon about to speak.  But a loud hush fell over the room as soon as Elizabeth Gilbert stepped to the stage, a flowy grey cardigan draped over her thin frame, her tousled blond hair pulled away from her face in a messy twist, a genuine smile etched on her face.

For the next 30 minutes she talked about the process of writing Committed, which represents the fruits of her second attempt to write a follow-up book to EPL. She spent two years writing a 500-page manuscript…and then threw the entire thing away. As she spoke these words, I’m pretty sure I heard myself groan audibly.  I’ve never written anything 500 pages in length, but I’ve written something a tenth of the size, and even throwing that away is vomit-inducing.  Gilbert discussed how difficult it was to ditch the manuscript, one in which she had received a considerable advance from her publisher and who, after two years of work, was soon expecting a publishable book.  “But the book was horrible,” she said.  “It wasn’t ‘me.’  It wasn’t written in my voice.  It was written in the voice of who I thought I should be after the success of Eat Pray Love.”  Her best bet, she reasoned, was to take six months off to figure out the follow-up book she was meant to write.  In the meantime she gardened.  And one day, with her fingers dug hard into the soft earth, a single sentence – the sentence that was to become the opening line to the book – simply came to her.

Late one afternoon in the summer of 2006, I found myself in a small village in northern Vietnam, sitting around a sooty kitchen fire with a number of local women whose language I did not speak, trying to ask them questions about marriage.

From there she “took the sentence for a walk across the page,” and proceeded to pen Committed in a mere two months.

While not all of us have the luxury of time or literary advances, as I sat in that overheated ballroom, surrounded by a sea of like-minded New Mexicans, it dawned me on me what a powerful lesson her process presented for living a life in pencil.   There is nothing more important in this life than learning to be YOU – whoever you are.  In fact, is it even something we should have to learn? If we are skilled and equipped to be anything, it’s to be ourselves.  And yet, how difficult it can be to discover and then speak our voice, whether we are writers or not.  It shouldn’t be easier to be someone else, but that is often the case.  Borrowing someone else’s tastes, pleasures, preferences, and aversions is a simple game of mimicry; to truly face who we are, and not who we think we should be, is a lifelong project.

When we are living a life that isn’t attuned to who we are, it’s been my experience that things take forever to manifest themselves.  Everything feels like a Sisyphean task, making it difficult to differentiate between sheer hard work towards a difficult goal and being engaged in the “wrong” thing.  The difference, I think, is that when we are living a life attuned to who we are, things come more easily, more quickly.  While there are bumps in the road, setbacks, and hard uphill battles, the effort feels purposeful.  We feel a deep sense that, while the path is bumpy, it’s the right path to be traveling down.  No amount of construction can reshape the wrong path.

While we talk often here at Life in Pencil about making changes within the parameters of our existing lives, Gilbert’s story teaches us that sometimes life requires us to start over.  If a plan is born from a place that doesn’t feel true or authentic, no amount of “editing” is going to make it right.  Sometimes, major revisions are required.  Sometimes, we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Sometimes, we have to start from scratch.  When Gilbert threw away that first draft, without another story idea in sight, she was facing a problem that needed to be solved, a puzzle of the highest order.  “A puzzle,” she said, “is just a crisis with the volume knob turned down.”  But rather than panicking, she trusted that time – and a vegetable garden – would eventually bring order to the puzzle.  “Problems are like cheap underwear,” a Buddhist monk friend once told her.  “Eventually they wear themselves out.”

And it’s true, isn’t it?  Over time, even the most pernicious problems wear themselves dull and raw, until we genuinely wonder what we were ever worried about in the first place.  Such was the case with Gilbert’s book, and such may be the case with any dilemma, crisis, or life change that you might be facing.  Sometimes, the best thing we can do is take a break and trust that the process will work itself out.  I have always believed that the only way out is through.  Whether we are talking about a failed book project, a career crisis, or a relationship gone awry, there is no easy shortcut or “work around” (as my computer programming husband would say).  We need those seemingly impossible puzzles, those failed attempts, to push us through to the other side.

Just last week I was cleaning out my office, and I discovered a draft of the first essay I had ever written nearly six years ago.  Back then, I was a graduate student in counseling psychology, and a career in writing was the furthest thing from my mind.  And yet, much like Elizabeth Gilbert, I was drying my hair one morning before school when a single line popped into my head.  I immediately scrambled to write it down, and proceeded to skip my morning classes – which I never did – to write an entire essay, which tumbled forth from that one line.  I wasn’t sure where this line had come from, or where it was going, but two years later I submitted that essay to a local writers’ conference.  I remember feeling very proud of my effort, a reflection of the best I could produce at the time.  But reading this essay six years later, while there are lines that are still gems, it struck me that it just wasn’t very good!  The ideas are there, but the execution is sloppy, amateur.  It dawned on me how much I have grown as a writer in that time span, but how necessary it was to write those first stumbling drafts on my way through to becoming a writer.  And when I read this post in another six years, I’m sure I’ll be struck by the same thought.

Gilbert’s friend, an artist, often reminds her, “The creative product is the unidentical twin of the dream you had in your head.”  In other words, what we produce while pursuing the creative process – be it writing a book, baking a pie, or even living life itself – is often a flawed copy of the perfect image we held in our head when we conceived the idea.  It seems to me that the purpose isn’t to create a facsimile but to simply chase after that image to the best of our abilities.  Whatever we produce will never be as perfect as we’d hoped.  But with time and experience, I think our image and the real thing grow closer together.  Just like Gilbert’s book, this blog, as imperfect as it is, couldn’t exist without that first humble essay.  And whatever goal you are working towards in your life couldn’t be accomplished without whatever fumbling efforts you are making right now.

Are you a fan of Eat, Pray, Love (or not)? Have you read Committed?  What lessons do you take away from Gilbert’s process that I have missed?  Do you think that sometimes starting over is the best thing?

Posted by Elizabeth

Yesterday I was flipping through my friend Joann’s online photo album, a chronicle of her recent trip to New Orleans.  There, under a sunny snapshot of sherbet-colored homes, part of the post-Katrina reconstruction effort, were the following words:

Some of the best things in life are friendly to the planet.

I couldn’t help but be drawn to the simplicity of this message.  It is amazing how the act of treading lightly embodies simplicity (remember that old “reduce, reuse, recycle” campaign?).  Not only is it beneficial to our home here on Planet Earth, but it’s good for our soul, our spirit, and our state of mind.  In fact, I can think of nothing simpler than the act of making the old new again.  That’s what I had in mind as Maikael and I constructed our compost bins last weekend, one of countless projects that have been on the proverbial to-do list for years.  We chose the simplest – and cheapest – design possible, twelve feet of chicken wire wrangled into an oval, which now rests in a shady corner of our yard under a tree that sheds lantern-shaped pods.  As a warm fall afternoon warmed my skin, I uprooted the leggy remains of our garden, the lolling heads of blackened tomato plants drooped over their cages, the result of a recent cold snap.  These would form the bottom layer of our compost bin, and if all goes according to plan, will be transformed to loamy mulch and returned to the ground once again come spring.  A simple compost bin contains all the complexities of the circle of life.

But even the simplest things in life require maintenance and upkeep.  I quickly discovered that even the most basic compost pile requires care and attention:  it won’t produce anything fruitful on its own.  The pile must be watered and turned once a week, a delicate balance of moisture and oxygen needed to produce “black gold.”  To neglect the pile would result in a heap of rotting ooze.  Organic matter must be carefully chosen, and my daily routine now requires collecting the detritus of carrot peels and orange rinds in a white porcelain bin stored neatly under the sink.  The lesson is clear:  simplicity must be nurtured.  And yet, we often take the simple things in life at face value:  because, by their very definition, they are simple, we assume there must not be much to them.  But to peek inside a compost pile is to catch a glimpse of life, death, and rebirth in action.  I couldn’t help but be amazed that my own two hands were capable of, if not producing, helping along such a process – a simple pleasure, indeed.  And with a little work and care, the rich byproduct of simple living is ours for the taking.

On our way to the hardware store to buy supplies on Saturday morning, a giant billboard stared me down with two giant words:

DIGGING DEEPER

There were no graphics or subtitles; I’m not even sure what the billboard was advertising.  But it seemed like an apt message for the day’s project.  And more importantly, it summed up everything that my life seems to be pointed towards these days.

Posted by Anne

I’m a terrible gardener.  My Mom has always been a fantastic gardener, and awaits the coming of her annual Burpee seed catalog with charming childlike eagerness.  Sorry, Mom.  I can’t relate.  In the plant-world, I might as well be the grim reaper. 

Just one portion of a typical week...

I’m not that worried.  And that’s because I happen to be a member (like Elizabeth), of a local farm’s Community Supported Agriculture program.  Every Wednesday, Ryan dutifully picks up our “farm box”—an enormous Rubbermaid bin of organic goodness.  There are many reasons I’ve loved my CSA program this year—lower grocery bills, amazingly fresh tomatoes, and of course that whole “good for the environment” thing.  But there’s one benefit of the weekly CSA delivery that I’ve enjoyed more than any other:  the opportunity for some seriously Life in Pencil cooking. 

While the weekly box provides a plethora of tomatoes, corn, and mixed greens, there are additional veggies to decipher—rainbow chard, Italian kale, and delicata squash.  It’s a veritable parade of vitamin-rich side items I can’t always find at my local Safeway.  And when faced with a veg I’ve never met, I have to get creative, and I have to improvise. And so each week, I learn something new.  When it comes to dinnertime, change is good. 

This brings me to the final benefit of the CSA season—rediscovering and redefining vegetables I’d long ago crossed off my grocery list.  You see, not every box contains delightful surprises.  As much as I learned to rejoice each time I opened the box to see rainbow chard, my heart sank just as deeply when I glimpsed one of my all-time least favorite members of the vegetable world.  The eggplant.

Sorry, you eggplant lovers out there, but I just don’t get the eggplant.  Sure, it looks pretty, which makes it all the more disappointing.  The skin is tough and waxy.  The inside is flavorless and spongy—and spongy just can’t be a good thing when you’re talking food.  But once again, my CSA challenged me.  It refused to allow me to remain in my eggplant-hating rut.  It gave me THREE Japanese eggplants.  And let me tell you…they were big ones.  At first, I panicked.  I mean, how many times can you make eggplant parmesan?  So one desperate evening, I hit the web, and found a failsafe recipe for eggplant.  It accomplished the unthinkable.  It made me enjoy a meal built entirely around my former purple enemy. 

So thank you, CSA.  Thank you for making me try new things, and throw together meal after meal of spontaneous dishes.  And for the joy of discovering new ingredients, and re-discovering old ones.

I realize this recipe is out of season, but if you need a good eggplant recipe, here you go!

• 1 medium eggplant, cut into 1-inch cubes
• 1 pint cherry tomatoes
• 3 cloves garlic, whole
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 1/4 cup toasted pine nuts
• 1 pound rigatoni pasta
• 1/4 cup torn fresh mint leaves
• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a large bowl combine the eggplant, cherry tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes. Spread the vegetables out in an even layer on the baking sheet. Roast in the oven until the vegetables are tender and the eggplant is golden, about 35 minutes.

While the vegetables are roasting, place the pine nuts in a small baking dish. Place in the oven on the rack below the vegetables. Roast until golden, about 8 minutes. Remove from the oven and reserve.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook until tender but still firm to the bite, stirring occasionally, about 8 to 10 minutes. Drain pasta into a large bowl and reserve 1 1/2 cups of the cooking liquid.

Transfer the roasted vegetables to a food processor. Add the torn mint leaves and extra-virgin olive oil. Puree the vegetables.

Transfer the pureed vegetables to the bowl with the pasta and add the Parmesan. Stir to combine, adding the pasta cooking liquid 1/2 cup at a time until the pasta is saucy. Sprinkle the pine nuts over the top and serve.

Posted by Elizabeth

When I was little, I loved to drag my mother’s senior yearbook from the bookshelf, the 1969 Pine Tree from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, where I would immediately flip to the only photo in which my mother appeared.  Propped on an industrial kitchen counter, smiling through long, glossy locks, my mother appeared next to nine other girls who comprised the Future Homemakers of America.  Because the 1970s were nipping at their heels, the FHA was only a fraction of the size of DECA and the Future Teachers of America (all women), whose photos book-ended my mother’s “career club.”  The home arts were definitely on their way out the door.

Can you guess which one is my mom?

If my mom were alive today, I think she’d be surprised to see the renaissance that’s taking place where the home arts are concerned.  Ball canning supplies hit their highest sales in decades.  Websites such as Etsy and movies like Handmade Nation raise the arts and crafts moments to a higher aesthetic.  The wild success of Julie and Julia has reinvigorated an interest in slow cooking (The Art of French Cooking is back on the best-sellers list).  I even read a review for a children’s book this weekend that revolves around the process of making homemade applesauce, from farmer’s market to canning.  Everywhere I look these days I see throwbacks to an earlier era with a modern twist.  Some attribute it to the economy – when times are tight, we feel a need to produce our own goods – but I think it goes deeper than that.  This movement seems to indicate a nostalgia for a simpler time, a time when our own hands helped to create the things we consumed.

What we seem to have forgotten about the emissaries of the home arts movement, who we now consider so “ahead of their time,” was how out-of-synch they were in their respective eras.  Julia Child, for example, had a devil of a time selling her cookbook, as ready-to-make mixes and TV dinners were stepping into fashion, and the feminist movement was solidly underway.  Who wanted to be in the kitchen cooking? Michael Pollan examines this issue thoroughly in his must-read article Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch:  How American Cooking Became a Spectator Sport, and What We Lost Along the Way.  Polland notes that Julia Child “tried to show the sort of women who read ‘The Feminine Mystique’ that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention.”

As I think back to my own mother, who raised me in the 1980s, a time when women were encouraged to pursue high-powered careers and “have it all,” I understand better than ever that she was ahead of her time.  During a decade when the home arts had fallen out of fashion, my mom cooked homemade meals, canned jam in the summer, churned ice cream with a hand-cranked machine, and sewed my Halloween costumes every fall.  She also worked outside the home as a cake decorator, eventually owning her own bakery.  She was never the classic homemaker, nor the average working mom.  I don’t think her goal was to “do it all” in the Martha Stewart sense.  Much like how Julia Child viewed cooking, I think my mom “didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself.”  Regrettably, I never took much interest, nor had much respect, for the home-making that she did.  But now that I’m a grown woman, struggling her way through learning how to can and make her own lattice-top pies and grow her own vegetables, I wish I would have paid more attention to my mom growing up.

While I never aspired to be like my mom, I realize in retrospect that our goals are more similar than different.  I, too, want to be engaged in the home arts in a meaningful way, to be an active participant in the things I produce, without feeling “stuck in the kitchen.”  I want the everyday tasks of my life to matter.  Like Pollan says of Julia Child, I’m “less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than means to a meal.  It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles.”  As I think about how I want my life to be, I want that as much as I want a career.   I think the home arts have something important to offer us if its goal is to connect us to ourselves and provide pleasure, rather than be an obligation, a mechanism to impress, or perhaps worst of all, a fleeting trend.

So tell me, dear readers?  Are my ideas terribly out-of-step, or am I ahead of my time?

Posted by Elizabeth

It’s Labor Day, an occasion to honor hard-working Americans from sea to shining sea.  I haven’t engaged in any paid work this year, but I’ve been a busy bee.  Since today marks the official end of summer, I thought it would be fun to share some images capturing the “fruits of my labors” from a particularly memorable summer.  And since it’s Labor Day, I’m taking a break.  Enjoy the day!

I baked Maikael a Grasshopper Pie, a mint-green confection of chocolate and crème de menthe, for his 32^nd birthday in June.  It’s his favorite.

After hours of digging in packed clay soil, I started a home garden, bearing a bounty of ruby-red tomatoes, amethyst peppers, hooked green chiles, bowling balls of watermelons, and fronds of lettuce.

Anne and I baked a strawberry tart when I visited her in Oregon in June.  It was delicious.

I helped The Jobe’s to make grape juice.

We also canned pears and applesauce.

I was rewarded tenfold with a full belly and a full spirit.

I volunteered at a local organic farm.  I learned more about tending to human dynamics than plants, but  I enjoyed working the land.

I crafted a chocolate cream pie for the angel who was sent to repair my leaky roof.  It wasn’t my labor, but I was eternally grateful.

My Little Sister, having been matched as a volunteer through Big Brothers Big Sisters, and I made patriotic spritz cookies for the 4^th of July.

We also saw Broadway star Patti Cohenour, a New Mexico native, when she have a free concert at the University of New Mexico.

It was a very good summer.

Posted by Elizabeth

Sometimes things don’t turn out like we plan.

It looks so bucolic, doesn't it?

As much as I love trying new things I hate being disappointed, so I sometimes avoid change to steer clear of the frustration that might flow from a plan gone awry.  It was, therefore, a big deal when I took the plunge and committed to an eight-week volunteer assignment at the organic farm; unfortunately, it has not turned out as I had planned.  The job itself is fine — it’s the other volunteers I can’t stand.  Instead of meeting cool, interesting, like-minded 30-somethings, as I had hoped, I pass the time in the company of matronly know-it-alls.  A few weeks ago we found ourselves in the baking Southwest sun, hoeing weeds from a desolate patch of land. P., one of the newest members of our crew, was visibly disappointed by the task at hand.  Every five minutes she made a passive-aggressive comment, expressing her thinly-veiled disgust of the project.  “Boy, these hula hoes sure are dull. I bet this would be easier if the blade was sharpened.”  I didn’t even know that hoes had proper names, but I took an immediate dislike to the “hula hoe,” as it sounded like it belonged not in a garden but at a luau.  When P. is not complaining she’s taking a break, covering for the fact by generously asking us, “Anyone need anything while I’m up?”  Like she’s doing us a favor.

Who knew these guys could be so complicated to harvest?

The worst offender is V., an uber-volunteer who has a “special agreement” where she works twice a week throughout the year (most work-share volunteers only serve once a week during the growing season).  She doesn’t let us forget her special status, which entitles her to boss around her fellow volunteers, as well as any intern she doesn’t particularly like.  She will advise you, in excruciating detail, on the proper technique for pulling a weed or picking a tomato.  The simplest tasks are easily elevated to multi-step processes.  I am very skittish around V., afraid that I will do something wrong (which I invariably do).  But while V. is absolutely Type A, she desperately wants to give the illusion that she’s super laid back, accepting, and easy going (this is a woman whose car has a bumper sticker that simply states, “Coexist.”). We were recently transplanting kale starts from the greenhouse to the field, and the intern in charge of the project, who was obviously on V.’s bad side, had instructed us to dig a hole where a machine had already pre-marked the spot, making sure to place the plant where the soil was wet, indicating a water line.  But she forgot to tell us to loosen the roots a bit before placing them in the soil, which is where our drama begins…

ACT 5, Scene 2
Setting:  8:22 am, in a wide, open field somewhere in the American Southwest

V:  “You guys, it’s really important that you loosen the roots at the bottom of the plant before placing them in the ground.  Because it promotes faster growth.  You see?  Here, I’ll show you how to do it.  Okay, you just need to pinch the roots here at the bottom.  Just shake the roots loose a little bit.  It’s really important that you do this.  You just need to pinch them.  That’s all.

Elizabeth:  Mm-hmm.

V:  And we really need to make sure we’re doing this guys, okay?  It’s really important.  And make sure you’re placing the plants where there’s a water line.  Because sometimes the machine doesn’t get the hole quite right and you need to move the hole a little bit.  Like, I’m finding that the water line is a few inches closer to me than the hole.  So you just need to dig around for it.  But first you need to remember to loosen the roots, okay?  It’s just a reminder.

Elizabeth:

V:  I realize that I’m being kind of bossy this morning, which I’m feeling bad about.

P:  Oh no you’re not.

V:  It’s just that it’s really important that we loosen the roots and make sure that it’s planted on a water line.  Because we could kill a whole row of plants.

Elizabeth:

V:  I mean, I’m not an intern, so I’m not trying to direct things here, but I just know how particular they’re being about planting this year.  I’m not trying to seek approval or anything.  It’s just that I’ve always been a teacher and I like to get things right, you know?  I don’t know that much about gardening, but I do know how important it is to loosen the roots.

Elizabeth walks over to the palette to gather more starts to place in the ground.

V:  DON’T do those yet.  They’re a different variety.

Feeling like a chastised four year-old, Elizabeth silently walks the other way, rolling her eyes in giant circles, praying for the morning to end.

<<END OF SCENE>>

I realized that it’s hard for me to be around V. because I see a glimmer of myself in her; the really awful part that I try to deny is there.  I’ve worked hard to be someone who doesn’t act from a place of seeking approval, to squash the know-it-all tendencies that I suspect are lurking just below the surface.  I’ve diligently erased the person who micromanages her environment.  I secretly fear that the hypocritical quality that irritates me most in V. – the control freak who is trying desperately to appear so go-with-the-flow – is the very thing I dislike most about myself.  My time at the farm has been an exercise in fighting the urge to one-up V., something I’m really good at if given the chance.  Although it hasn’t turned out as I had hoped, I’m digging in and making the most of my final two weeks.  Last week I avoided P. and V., gravitating towards the interns who, as it turns out, are the cool thirty-somethings I thought I’d find in my fellow volunteers.

As for those kale plants?  They sprouted just fine.

Posted by Elizabeth

The elusive ABF

My friend, Marc, better known to you LiP Readers as ABF, invited me to his grandfather’s farm to help him harvest grapes last Friday.  A psychic that Heidi and I visited in Sedona last May predicted that I’d be “getting back to the earth,” to which I promptly rolled my eyes and declared myself “not an outdoorsy person.”  Until last March I had never pierced a shovel into the ground, but lately life keeps presenting opportunities to work the land.  It looks like Phoenix Rising Star is having the last laugh.

This turkey was WAY heavier than it looked

I had been to Mr. Jobe’s property once before, earlier in the spring, when we went to select the tomato and chile pepper starts that were just crowning through the sandy soil.  (He wouldn’t accept payment for the plants, simply the promise that I’d bring a juicy melon by when the harvest was ready.)  We ended up spending hours on his little homestead, which I can best describe as a Midwestern farm satellite, a piece of Iowa (where Mr. Jobe is, in fact, from) plunked down in Albuquerque’s South Valley.  Stands of fruit trees lined the front yard, and a giant bell from Mr. Jobe’s childhood schoolhouse stood proudly in the backyard.  A sweet red barn crouched in a shady corner at the back of the property, where wild turkeys, shaking and fanning their tail feathers at us, roamed the yard.  The house felt like stepping into the Midwest of a bygone era, with its fading photographs, simple pine furniture, antique farm tools, and an old telephone propped on the wall.  I was enchanted by this place, and jumped at the opportunity to go again.

As we pulled up to the farm, Mr. Jobe sat sorting tart green apples and pears blushing rosy pink, the victims of a nasty storm that blew through last week.  We immediately set to work, clutching five gallon pails as we made our way out to the grape vines that swooped like leafy bunting from the fence.  Mr. Jobe pointed out the different grape varieties, showing us how to identify the unfortunately-named Hemrods that we would be picking that day, the small clusters of champagne-colored fruit glowing translucent in the early morning light like marbles.  “Squeeze ‘em, and if they’re hard, they ain’t ready,” said Mr. Jobe, which sounded like as good of advice as any.  I plucked a small handful and popped them in my mouth, their velvety skins slipping easily away to reveal a soft center.  They were like candy, the sweetest grapes I’d ever tasted.

Like a kid in a candy store

I snapped off clusters with my fingers, stopping from time to time to gorge myself, the sticky-sweet juice coating my hands.  I quickly filled three buckets, totally oblivious to the bees swarming around my head, caught in a fruit-picking trance where time seemed to melt away.  Mr. Jobe puttered by on his scooter on his way to get more buckets.  “Hop on, Liz!” he called, and we took a very short, very slow ride back to the homestead.  When the picking was done, we wheeled the grapes to a cleaning station in an ancient wheelbarrow, the grapes splayed out on a series of mesh wire grates.  After gently hosing down the fruit we transferred them in great handfuls to a contraption that looked like a medieval vice, which was actually a press to squeeze juice from the grapes, and Mr. Jobe indulged me by letting me turn the lever on the press.  (I assume that Marc wasn’t jealous, having had the good fortune of working on the farm from the time he was a little boy.)

The system didn’t work very well, so the grapes were ferried to the house for the (apparently) tried-and-true steaming method of juicing grapes, a process that was completely foreign to me.  Two massive steamers were assembled, a series of interlocking metal trays towering over the stovetop with a tube protruding from the bottom where the juice was siphoned off, affecting a complicated mousetrap.  After 45 minutes the trays were emptied, more grapes were added, and Mrs. Jobe began ladling the beautiful blush liquid into thick glass canning jars; my favorite was a giant circus tent rendered in glass.  I was impressed by how deftly they moved through what seemed to be a complex series of steps, as if it lived in their bones, and this process was repeated many times as we worked in the steamy kitchen.

Needless to say, this was a slow and tedious process.  It was nearly one o’clock and we hadn’t even started canning yet.  Putting up the fruits of your labor is a task from another time, when the world spun at a slower pace.  Perhaps this is why the activity was so satisfying:  it could not be rushed.  Shortcuts and multitasking would have spelled disaster.  While we waited for the juice to finish expressing, we sat down to a proper lunch.  Fresh-baked lasagna bellied up next to sourdough bread (“Normally I make my own”, apologized Mrs. Jobe, later showing me her antique grain mill), which we slathered with great spoonfuls of amber-colored peach preserves.  Crisp rings of farm-grown cucumbers floated in an icy bowl alongside ribbons of alabaster onions.  A rustic jar of grape juice from last year’s harvest was served in tall cobalt glasses, a tangy-sweet concoction that I’d never tasted the likes of.  “I’ve got homemade chocolate cake and pound cake for dessert,” announced Mrs. Jobe.  I helped myself to a slice of each, and thought Marc was completely insane when he declined, patting his stomach and declaring that he was stuffed.

A treasure trove

Bloated but happy, we made our way out to Mr. Jobe’s prolific garden, where we picked gigantic tomatoes, long fingers of green beans, lavender-tinged turnips shouldering themselves out of the soil, saffron zucchini, fat cylinders of bristly cucumbers, waxy yellow peppers, and those fallen apples and pears.  “Take more, hon, take more,” urged Mr. Jobe, pushing more bags into my hands.  Little did I know that this was my payment for a morning of hard work.  After loading me down with a pint of fresh grape juice, a jar of pear sauce, and, of course, a heaping bag of grapes, I could barely lift the box.

Upon arriving home, I all but panicked as I surveyed the massive haul of produce.  But I slowly began picking my way through cookbooks, unearthing clever ways to make use of this bounty.  I reworked my dinner menu, settling on a small cut of filet mignon and a roasted green bean and tomato salad, since Marc urged me to use the beans as soon as possible after harvesting.  The deep, earthy flavor of grill-roasted beans, topped with the bright, clean taste of balsamic-laced chunks of sun-warmed tomatoes, was a revelation.  Alongside a bottle of solid merlot, it was one of the most sublime meals I’ve eaten in a long time.  I suddenly felt exhausted, the kind of tired you feel when your labor has been physical and honest.  I don’t feel this way very often, but it feels good.

We talk a great deal about “living simply,” a phrase that’s been become fraught with cliché and often equates to adopting complicated practices in the search for simplicity.  I fear that living simply has become segregated from the rest of our lives, the destination we arrive at after moving quickly through the rest of our day.  But true simple living requires us to move slow, and by moving slow there simply isn’t enough time to do as much.  Being a part of the Jobe’s world, if only for a day, provided some clues as to what living simply really means.  It is about connecting with others; having a sense of season and place; knowing your purpose; making use of what you have; actively engaging your mind, body, and spirit in equal measure; and looking to ritual and tradition.  It is about being deeply attuned to life around you.  As I sat and reflected upon the day, I couldn’t remember the last time my spirit had felt so light, my soul so full.  I hope I can feel this way more often.

Roasted Green Bean and Tomato Salad
Adapted from The New Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas
Serves 2-3 as a side dish

1 pound green beans, trimmed
1 large or 2 small very ripe tomatoes
2 Tablespoons olive oil, divided
Generous splash of balsamic vinegar
Pinch of salt
A sprinkling of fresh-ground pepper
5 garlic cloves, peeled and divided

Preheat grill to medium-high heat.  Toss green beans with four garlic cloves, 1 Tablespoon of olive oil, salt, and pepper.  Place in a grill basket over grate, grilling for 6-7 minutes or until blacked spots appear on the beans (this is to taste – grill less time if you like less char, more time if you like them more blackened).  Meanwhile, dice the tomatoes in generous chunks, retaining their juices.  Place in a bowl with the remaining Tablespoon of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and remaining garlic clove, minced.  Crush gently with the backside of a fork or potato masher.  When beans are done, transfer to large platter and top with tomato mixture.  Bon appétit!

Posted by Elizabeth

The tools of my trade

On Wednesday morning I arrived at the farm, a little less bleary-eyed and nervous about what week two would bring.  I was immediately greeted by S., the girl with the chic cowboy hat, who waved and told me that V. was already in the field weeding soybeans.  As I grabbed a hoe and made my way through the neat rows I contemplated which was worse:  weeding or uprooting diseased plants, last week’s unenviable duty.  My own lawn is riddled with giant fists of clover, spreading through the crisp green blades like a clubbed hand.  If I couldn’t manage to take care of my own minuscule lawn, how was I going to tend to an entire field?  I asked V. how to decipher the plants from the weeds, which seemed to be one tangled mess.  She pointed at a delicate lime-colored shoot, poking its head through a wild jungle of foliage.  “That’s the plant, everything else are weeds.”

I started at one end of a row, happy to work on my own for awhile.  Here the plants were small, barely established, and the weeds had so overtaken the patch that it was easy to miss the starts.  As I raked the hoe down the row, I noticed that the weeds liked to congregate at the base of the plant, choking off the life source.  I worked gingerly around the baby shoots, carefully extracting the enmeshed weeds that held the plant in a choke hold.  As I set about this oddly satisfying work, it got me thinking about humans, and how much we have in common with plants.  How many “weedy” relationships have I been in, which threatened to suck the life out of me?  The “weeds of life” often masquerade as bad habits, sidling up next to us, small and innocent at first, and then taking over our lives before we know what happened.  Sometimes weeds look prettier than the plants themselves; jaded by their pleasing visage we mistake them for something beneficial, and don’t realize their detrimental effect on our life until it’s too late.  The shoots most riddled with weeds looked haggard and withered, barely recognizable as a plant.  But I knew that once I freed them they would snap back to life, their bases growing stronger, sprouting tender leaves that stretched toward the sun.  I’ve learned from my own postage stamp of a garden not to count a plant out prematurely.  Like humans, they are resilient.

Cursed clover!

As I made my way down the row the plants grew taller and lusher, fanning their broad leaves in the soft morning breeze.  Fuzzy bean pods, dangling from the underbelly like delicate earrings, marked the more mature plants.  Here the weeds were sparser, but more pervasive.  At first glance the plants seemed fine, but upon closer inspection the tendrils of creeper vines had spiraled their way up the base, wrapping their spindly arms around the succulent leaves.  Weeds can be sneaky this way, hiding in the dark corners of the garden, slowly advancing unseen.  How much easier it is to uproot the unwanted elements of our lives before they’ve had a chance to take hold!  I worked diligently to unfurl the tiny vines from the plants, which took much longer to uproot than the larger, more obvious sprays of clover. Although they didn’t appear so, the vines were clearly the more dangerous weeds, the unassuming ones.

I have a feeling that I have a great deal to learn from weeding.  I tend to stay in bad relationships longer than I should.  I often neglect the everyday details of my life in favor of more glamorous affairs, deeming them unimportant.  While not a procrastinator by nature, I do a poor job of taking care of pedestrian details as they arise, letting them languish and snowball into a mess of tasks that is so overwhelming that they remain largely undone.  I wonder how much less chaotic my world would feel if I simply plucked the weeds of my life, one by one, as they entered my garden?  By ignoring the ordinary and constantly searching for novelty, by refusing to muck about in the dregs of the everyday, I know I am missing something important.

I learned this week that, until the harvest is in full swing, Wednesday are largely maintenance days around the farm.  The universe obviously thinks I have a lot of learn from weeding, too.

What are the weeds in your life?

Posted by Elizabeth

I’ve always hated the phrase, “Grow where you’re planted.”  It sounds like a trite platitude for people who are too lazy to change their situation.  That, and it’s just sort of a dopey phrase.  But there is something apropos about using gardening lingo to describe personal transformation.  When I was in graduate school, a client presented to the counseling center because “she had outgrown her pot.”  We were all pretty sure she was on pot, but the metaphor was apt, elegantly describing her state of mind.  Regardless of my personal thoughts on the phraseology, I’ve recently made a decision to grow where I’m planted; or, as I prefer, “dig deeper” (more gardening terminology, I know).  This plan involves doing all the things I’ve always wanted to do, but have never felt invested enough in my life here to do.  The first item on my list?  Volunteering for a local organic farm.  By working the fields two and a half hours one morning a week for the next eight weeks, I’ll receive 50% off my weekly boxes, which provide a king’s ransom of fresh produce.   I figured this would be a good opportunity to enjoy fresh air and exercise, while learning a thing or two about food production.  Oh, and I’m going to make a bunch of new best friends.

This is where the magic's gonna happen!

Perhaps it’s the change-a-holic in me, having started and ended more endeavors than I’d care to count, but I’ve never had difficulty meeting new people.  I was the kid who wandered off once at a picnic, only to be found minutes later munching on a sandwich and chatting amiably with a nearby family.  My parents were always afraid that I would be kidnapped, convinced that I’d see it as an opportunity to make a new friend.  Not surprisingly, my overly-trusting attitude, a strong desire to have others like me, and a chameleon-like ability to fit into any group dynamic has caused me problems in the past.  And sometimes I  have a tendency to set my expectations a tad high.  But this would be different!

6:50 am:  I roll out of bed, bleary-eyed.  This is the earliest I have been up in months, and I slept terribly the night before.  “You’re nervous,” says Maikael.  “No I’m not,” I snap.  “I’m excited.”

7:35 am: I scramble out the door five minutes late, without time for coffee.  That’s okay!, I assure myself.  Working in the fields is a natural pick-me-up!

7:50 am: I arrive at the farm and spot a field of heads bobbing in the distance.  These are the people I am going to spend the morning discussing the meaning of life with.  I am suddenly very nervous, but plaster a smile on my face as I approach the Farm Manager for my first assignment.  Will I be picking peppers?  Pruning basil?  He tells me to begin uprooting a row of tomato plants that have been plagued with disease, scavenging for any extant fruit.  Today I am harvesting death.

7:55 am: I settle in next to the only two women already working the fields.  I smile and wait for them to say “hello,” but they just keep talking to one another, seemingly oblivious to my presence, as I fill my box with tart green tomatoes.  Are these ones too small?  Too firm?  Too mushy?  Am I really supposed to pull this plant out of the ground?

8:10 am: More people show up, all of who seem to know one another.  The group quickly moves towards the middle of the row, leaving me by myself, kneeling in a muddy field.  I begin making my way back towards the group, convinced that I will win them over with my charm and wit.  As I pick over the uprooted plants, gathering a few missed tomatoes, a woman approaches.  “Honey, we’ve already gone over those plants.”  I suddenly feel like a four year-old.  “When we work as a group, we use a system call leapfrogging.”  Her voice is one big air quote.

8:16 am: I look at my watch, convinced it must be at least 9 am by now.

8:40 am: We finish the first row and move onto the second.  The Farm Manager directs me and another woman to start at one end, while the rest of the group migrates to the opposite side.

8:50 am: In the last 10 minutes I have discovered that my partner is “on walkabout” in New Mexico, recently attended The Rainbow Gathering, lived in the Bay Area, is going through a nasty divorce, loves her therapist, would rather have no sex than bad sex, knows everything there is to know about Costa Rica, doesn’t believe that gardening is mindless work, talks to insects and plants in Spanish, and uses the phrase “right on” to punctuate every sentence.

9:00 am: My Partner goes to get a new box, and I quickly move to the end of the row where everyone else has congregated.

9:10 am: A girl, wearing tight jeans, a skinny black T-shirt that says “Velvet Teen,” and the kind of cowboy hat Matthew McConnaughey wears to a movie premiere, begins talking with another girl about the new Harry Potter film.  Just as I am about to give the movie my enthusiastic endorsement, the girls start giggling and making fun of Rupert Grint’s acting abilities.

9:15 am: Velvet Teen mentions that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are splitting, so I feign mock surprise.  This wins Velvet Teen over.  My Partner catches up to me, and begins talking about “vegetable pornography.”  Everyone else moves further up the row.

9:30 am: Progress!  Someone asks me my name!  In a desperate move, I mention, totally unsolicited, that I just returned from a trip around the world, a sure-fire conversation starter.  I am such a whore.

9:45 am: We finish pulling the tomatoes and heap them in a large pile at the end of the field.  An iridescent salamander slithers across the rows, causing multiple people to screech, “Watch out for the little guy!” Everyone must stop and admire the beautiful creature.

10:00 am: We begin pulling tomatillo plants, which have succumbed to the same fate as the tomatoes.  A few people purr, “Poor plants!”  When someone mentions an ah-mazing grilled pizza they ate recently, I offer a recipe, to which I am assured that you don’t need a recipe for grilled pizza.  This is the same person who can’t figure out what to do with a tomatillo other than whip it into salsa verde.

10:15 am: Having largely given up, I offhandedly mention an article I recently read that discussed the repercussions of giving kids weird names.

10:30 am: Everyone is still talking about weird names, and although it’s time to leave, people suddenly start asking me questions.  Although I’m not yet sure of my place amongst these people, I can’t help but feel just a little bit victorious.

10:40 am: As I make my way to the car, My Partner calls to me, “Well, are you coming back?”  I’m not going anywhere for the next seven weeks.  I’m digging deep.