Wisdom from the Mat

As we settled into Shavasana at the end of Sunday morning's yoga class (Shavasana being "corpse pose" - you get to lie motionless on the floor after an hour of full-body stretching and movement), our instructor Jeannie offered the following wisdom that really resonated with me. She was encouraging us to tap into the part of ourselves which hasn't changed since we were children:
"There's a part of yourself that has always known ... that, in fact, it's your true essence to be happy."

In entirely unrelated news, one of my housemates got flowers the other day. I spent the first couple of days skeptical that these closely-drawn petals would ever choose to blossom open in late January, then the next few admiring their open-faced beauty. I finally caught them in good light today and couldn't resist taking a few pictures (and subsequently playing around editing said pictures):

Ain't it pretty?

Simple editing software still amazes me some days.

I loved seeing the pollen caught on the petal.

It looks almost playdohlike up close.

There you have the beginning of my week: yoga inspiration and science fun time in the comfort of home. Up next: VISTA training and taxes (both almost as fun).

Life in Yoga-land

I would like to extend a huge thank-you to Yoga Synergy of Fairfield for understanding the financial situation of a VISTA and being flexible in providing membership at a discounted rate. I now have full access to the studio's yoga classes for the next seven months - the rest of my service term - and I love it already.

First, it's just great to be back into stretching and pushing my body in new ways. My last yoga class was nearly a year ago (before my world travels) and I love that I enjoy yoga enough now to appreciate it being back in my life. After a childhood of viewing the practice as silly and superfluous, I now my giant group stretch sessions to start a weekend right.

Second, this is hot/heated yoga, which brings in a whole new dimension. I was a bit nervous when I read various hot-yoga-beginners tips online about what to do if when you feel nauseous, how the mid-class misery will pass and leave you glowing, and all that. Fortunately, our classes were pleasantly heated rather than stifling hot and/or incredibly humid. Compared to the wintry outdoors, the room feels great. It wasn't until we started moving through poses that I began to sweat and appreciated the towel I had brought. (Everyone brings a towel; Douglas Adams would be so pleased.) The heat allows you to get deeper into poses. It allows me to get into some of them at all after so long not seriously stretching.

Third, it's fun social time! I know some yoga is very quiet and introspective, but this isn't that yoga. Well, it is but it isn't. A large portion of our time is spent reflecting on our own poses, but both instructors I've had thus far have known everyone in the class' name (everyone being about 15 people each time) and the second class devolved into a light-hearted conversation on male-female rivalry at one point mid-class. People were laughing and relaxed, which made it a great environment to start the day. That class also had awesome music to add to the fun.

One of the nice things about VISTA is that we're still technically 'on duty' 24/7, but we have much more time to 'have a life' than I did in my first AmeriYear. There's a lot to be said for stability and I've enjoyed getting to settle into this house by the water, sign up for yoga classes, make delicious food in our very own kitchen, and spend time with AmeriFriends and other wonderful people. I even get to sleep in on weekends. It's the little things.

Update: Books

After re-editing to smooth out the adjustment in premise, I'm back down to two pages. Now I know where it's going, though! I feel the characters shaping themselves and getting ready to take over.

Books

A month ago today (I know this because I returned my first set of books yesterday), I went to the Fairfield Public Library to get a library card. I already had a Bridgeport Public Library card from the branch five minutes down the street; it was an easy matter for the friendly woman at the circulation desk to look up my account and grant me borrowing privileges on the same card. She said the magic words - "You can take out as many books as you'd like" (!) - and I was off. Since my days are filled with service at and through the University, I limited myself to nine books and made it through part to all of four of them (I ended up renewing two).

Two of the books were young adult dystopias. After I read the first, I started the second and almost immediately thought, "Wow, this story line seems very familiar." Though I trust that the two authors eventually headed in different directions (I admit that I never made it through the second one to find out, though I do plan, in a far cry from good bookwormishness, to look up a plot summary online), both books started out with the same overarching plot points. When I described the similarities to my dad and offered that I could probably write that, he replied that I really probably could. (To his credit, he has not read either of the books in question.) Thus began my journey to write a book.

Thus far, I have taken the following steps:

1. Decide that even though I thought it would be easiest to write a dystopia, that isn't the genre I'm most drawn to and turn instead to the realistic fantasy sector (yes, I believe that does exist).
2. Come up with a basic setting and my main characters.
3. Reject the setting and decide to relocate the book entirely.
4. Start writing.
5. Consider that I should probably develop a premise for the story before getting much past four pages in the writing process.
6. Talk with my sister on Skype; divulge the first half of the nascent premise.
7. Appreciate how alike she and I think; finish the conversation feeling like I'm on the right track.
8. Reintroduce the setting that I had rejected, in modified form, for one of the main characters; keep the new setting for the other.
9. Taking into account the new premise, delete one of the four pages written thus far; write two more.
10. Think up the rest of the premise; prepare to write.

As you can see, I'm already ten steps (and five pages!) into the book. It really does have potential to be an enjoyable read. We shall see! 

Until it gets to some readable stage, I have a wonderful evening project to occupy my time after the service day. It's fun to have a new goal (write a book) towards which to work after eleven relatively goal-free months since I turned 24 and, simultaneously, completed my time on the Congressional Award. I like goals.

Food Revisited

It's only a week to Halloween, which means it's time to get back to writing! (I'm not sure why it means that, but I hope we can both agree that it does.)

I attended the 7th annual Connecting for Change this weekend, a Bioneers by the Bay conference hosted by the wonderful Marion Institute. Though my biggest highlight of the weekend was seeing all the friendly faces of the fantastic Marion Institute staff and getting to see my lovely former NCCC housemate as her current team helped run the conference (she's now a team leader and spends lots of time making sure they all stay happy and alive), I also loved the conference itself. The keynotes were engaging and compelling; the workshops left me feeling empowered and change-y. (Can we also agree that 'change-y' is a word or would that be too much to ask?) It was a good weekend.

One of the speakers at the conference was Ben Hewitt, a native Vermonter and the author of 'The Town that Food Saved.' Among other topics, he spoke of how Americans on average spend 9.5% of our salaries on food and have the persisting perception that food should be cheap. He proclaimed, "Food should NOT be cheap! It's the most important thing you put in your body. ...It should NOT be cheap." This got me thinking. As part of my AmeriVentures, I've been attempting to stick close to my food stamps. By keeping my food budget close to $200 per month, I've endeavored to get some sense of what it's like to live on food stamps. The venture is falsely constructed, as I miss out on some of the primary emotions of living off food stamps: the fear that comes as that balance nears zero and the days of waiting for the exact moment when money will be added to the card. Instead, I calmly calculate how far over I went in the first two weeks with my plethora of fresh fruits and vegetables and attempt to limit myself with kitchen creativity in the last two weeks of each month.

The experiment is over. I attended the conference with a fellow VISTA (yet another AmeriFriend involved in change-yness) and we talked about the cost of food during our three-hour drive back from southeastern Massachusetts to southwestern Connecticut. She pointed out that we often talk about wanting everyone to have access to fresh produce or wanting everyone to have access to organic foods, but leave ourselves out of the equation. There are positives to spending in solidarity with those who don't have access; there are also positives to using the access I do have, to spending my money on fresh and organic foods and let it speak for my values in a way. Money talks, it seems.

As a result of all this conferencing and thinking, I've decided to readjust my budget to allow me to buy more fresh fruits and vegetables and, going a bit towards the other extreme, to buy more organic foods. I attended a workshop this weekend at which a doctor discussed just how far up the food chain we humans are - environment --> plants --> herbivores --> omnivores/carnivores (incl. humans) --> babies - and what that means for the concentration of toxins in our foods. This got me thinking about those pesticide sprayings any one pepper or zucchini may have had in its life. Wouldn't it be nice to eat a vegetable that hadn't been coated with chemicals 10 times over?

I thought this would indeed be nice, so I went to Stop & Shop (the Fairfield branch; I already adjusted my grocery shopping location when I found early on that a) this one is right on the way home from work rather than past my turn, and b) this one targets a different demographic and that demographic is admittedly much closer to my own, preferring local apples and whole grains to chips and bread for the focal displays). I picked up what organic vegetables I could find beyond leafy greens (an eggplant and a bag of carrots) and some local apples then headed over to Whole Foods, got lots more organic vegetables, and headed home to a delicious dinner of tilapia, kale, mashed butternut squash, and a wheat roll (made locally without sugar). I spent much more money than I would have on this same trip before the weekend, but I ended up with an amazing meal that made me happy. I'll take that.

You, lovely reader, get the next step of my research into this is issue. I found some interesting data as I was looking up the 9.5% statistic online to make sure I was remembering accurately. The statistic was accurate...back in 2004. The USDA puts 2009 US expenditures on food consumed at home just under 7%. By comparison, citizens in Spain, France, and Italy (all of which, I must attest, have fantastic food and a wonderful food culture) spend about 14% of their income on food to be consumed at home. The USDA survey looked at 168 countries and found that people living in the United States commit the smallest percent of our expenditures to our food choices: every other one of the 168 nations commits a greater percentage. It's not surprising that Jordan, Indonesia, and Pakistan all top 40% in spending on food - Azerbaijan is at the extreme with 46.9% of household final income expenditures spent on food that was consumed at home. It does, however, provide a pretty stark image of the shift away from meals eaten in the household and suggests that perhaps there are greater points of concern than food not being cheap enough for the average American. As Ben Hewitt said, "Food should NOT be cheap! It's the most important thing you put in your body. ...It should NOT be cheap."

I'm off to do change-y things. Enjoy a crisp apple or other healthy fall treat this week!

They Were Right

People were right when they said that things would pick up once the students arrived. After spending more weeks wishing that something - anything - that a) I could start now and b) would take more than 4 hours to complete would come across my desk, our halls were filled with lost first-years and my desk was filled with tangible, long-term projects. It was a fantastic day.

A highlight was talking with Danielle, my lovely office-mate, about how students assume that we know absolutely everything just because we work there. Example? I had a student ask if I knew a certain professor (I didn't) then follow that up with a query about whether one lab was cancelled or all labs were cancelled because "I don't know if I'm missing class right now." And I'm supposed to know that how exactly? As she was texting and talking to a friend while sitting in the hallway unmoving, I figured she wasn't all too concerned about her potential absence. The hallway I work on is designated for language classes, which makes for fun trips to the water fountain to stay hydrated.

Most of my day's highlights, surprisingly for such a full work day, had little to do with general office happenings. (Speaking of fun office happenings, though, our new Center for Faith and Public Life Assistant Director officially accepted her job today! Now my supervisor can breathe many deep sighs of relief.)

Highlight #1: A phone conversation from one of the disaster coordinators I worked with last summer in Nashville, whom I hadn't talked to in over a year, during which I was able to help re-establish a potential disaster-response partnership with NCCC.

Highlight #2: Tutoring a couple of fellow VISTAs in GRE math - we worked on Pythagorean triples and 'special' right triangles. One brought me dark chocolate as a gift; they told me that what I'll be most tired of by the end of our tutoring sessions is them telling me that I should be a math teacher instead of going into administration. I was happy because they understood more after the two hours than before and some problems had become less scary.

Highlight #3: Putting a trip to NYC with my mom on my calendar for Explorers' Day weekend. My mother, good food, and Broadway? Winning combination.

Highlight #4: A sincere email from a friend.

Highlight #5: Discovering that my rugby team plays at Yale - only 45 minutes from me - in less than a month. I haven't seen them play since graduation! So excited.

Highlight #6: Another phone conversation about disaster, this time in which Melissa set me up to connect students at Fairfield with an NCCC team doing disaster-response volunteer coordination in Connecticut. She got back to me faster than the Red Cross, whom the team will be working for under a FEMA deployment. Friends are awesome.

So today was a day full of connections, reconnections, and math learning fun time. Total win.

As for tomorrow, Danielle and I will be training nine students in the Service-Learning Associates program. The students will each support a faculty member in a service-learning class with logistics, communication, coordination, etc. And I get to meet another Community Partner! Things are indeed picking up : )

In Which I Go Grocery Shopping

I found my blog on only the second try this time. I'm so glad it's not too hard for me to locate. Thanks, Google.

My exciting news update of the evening is that I went grocery shopping. "Wait," you say, "you love food. Of course you went grocery shopping. Why, you probably go twice a week!" Okay, I admit that's true. This, however, was a special grocery trip as it was my first with food stamps. Translation: actual groceries!

My savings would have allowed me to spend lots of money on groceries up until now, but I'd rather attempt some minuscule understanding of what it's like to wait for federal aid to kick in so I had been spending fairly day-to-day up until now. Granted, I got lots of fresh fruit; I tried to limit the fruit and other purchases to things I would consume in the next couple of days in hopes that my EBT card (the debit card on which food stamps are now distributed) would arrive in the mail. Due to my AmeriCorps term showing up in a federal-database search of my social security number, I had to send in an excepted income letter (which VISTA provides to all active members) before I could receive benefits. This states that members' pre-existing benefits cannot be reduced as a result of our AmeriCorps living stipend. Since I applied ten days before I started service, I could use this letter to receive benefits at pre-AmeriCorps levels. The outcome of this letter-requirement was that I was moved from expedited to regular processing for SNAP benefits so ended up receiving my EBT card about 2 1/2 weeks after applying. This is, I will note, much better and nicer than having to wait the full 30 days it could possibly take. I'll now get $200 every month to spend on food. This makes grocery shopping generally more pleasant and enjoyable.

As a side note, I'm enjoying shopping at Stop & Shop much more than I thought I would. I had planned to do most of my shopping at Whole Foods, but I love that the Stop & Shop a mile from my house in Bridgeport helps make Bridgeport not-a-food-desert and I feel obligated to support it in its provision of fresh produce and other healthy options to the community. I also like shopping in the community which I serve rather than across the border in Fairfield. As I generally consider the Fairfield-Bridgeport community my service domain (and hope students will grow to see that as their community too), this may be a bit hypocritical. That said, I'm fully aware that I do service here because Bridgeport is here, not because of Fairfield. Supporting the Bridgeport economy and non-food-desert status works for me.

Happily, I now have delicious salads prepared for all week. Yum.