I have a friend who loves to cook and eat. Her talent in life is cooking and she – like Julia Child – brings that joy to her family, friends and community. But my friend indulges herself too much as evident from her weight. She is by all definitions obese and growing larger with age.

The road was circuitous, winding oddly right then straightening in a sharp left turn, the dirt changing at times from asphalt, to cement, and even spurts of cobblestone. As I walked my feet were covered in various fashion of dress – shiny black heels, sensible pumps, Penny Loafers, Earthshoes, flipflops of paisley pink, stocking feet, and the most luxuriously naked barefoot.

The other day I heard a grandmother talking about her teenage grandchildren. It had been a long-time habit of this grandmother to send birthday checks to her children and their children on those special days. After years and years of this gift giving, she decided to stop because no one said Thank You anymore. The birthday card and check had become so routine, so expected, that the obligatory and kind response of thanks had been forgotten.

My son planted a no-dig garden this summer as part of his Senior Thesis for the University of Vermont (posted June 25, 2009). Today we stood in awe at a 6′ tall tomato plant (one of four) that have some 4-6 tomatoes ripening as I write this post.

I am constantly amazed by the depth of training provided by motherhood for seeking “enlightenment.” By that I mean an expansion of consciousness where you transcend your ’self’ as an independent entity and experience yourself as part of an existent whole. By analogy it would be like suddenly realizing you are a cell in the human body that creates the body but only by the dependent relationship to other cells. Only the ‘body’ symbolizes the vast universe or a unified consciousness or what others have called a ‘Oneness’ or ‘universal unity of being’.

I have something in common with Michelle Obama, a brand new vegetable garden in my back yard. Mine was started by my 21 year old son, home from college where he is majoring in Environmental Studies and minoring in Horticulture. For his Senior Thesis, he designed a sustainable vegetable garden in our backyard using a ‘no-dig’ method and is beginning to reap the harvest from his first crop. We have arugula, tomatoes, soybeans, kale, squash, sage, basil, rosemary, and others beginning to show the fruits of his labor.

Whenever I am feeling a little out of sorts or a little frustrated in life, I turn to any book written by Alan Watts and I find that it inevitably cheers me up. He had an eloquent means of bringing to the fore the simplest explanations for the most complicated questions in life. Today I happened to pick up Become What You Areand was reminded of the illusion of self-mastery in the process of self-discovery. By that I mean the idea that we can transcend ourselves by something our self actively does. As Watts points out, “the part of ourself that wants to change ourself is the very one that needs to be changed, but it is as inaccessible as a needle to the prick of its own point” (page 4). That may sounds a little odd but here’s his further elucidation:

I’m embarrassed to say I read Louise Hay’s “You can heal your life” at times when I have a stiff neck, lower back pain, or sinus flare-up. Her book is full of body to emotion relationships with positive affirmations offered as a means to counter what she considers the underlying cause of many illness, negative thoughts and feelings. The feeling of embarrassment stems from my training in science and my respect for the rigors of science, for the power of an accumulation of empiric data to back up hypotheses in life. As far as I know there is no scientific data that can be used to support Hay’s connections. Perhaps Louise Hay is right, perhaps she is wrong. Using science as a means of deciding cannot help at this point in time because there is no scientific research that has yet tested the specific mind-body relationships she puts forth.

The recent arrest of Philip Markoff, the accused Craigslist Killer, shakes us up because it is an example of a facade of normality covering an action of evil. It takes the idiom, ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ to the extreme.