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I did a one-week “cleanse” in July and am finishing, this weekend, a one-month version.  Personally I think “cleanse” has become one of those words, like “cultural fit” (in my work life), which is so commonly used, in so many different contexts, as to be almost entirely devoid of meaning.  So let me be more specific.

I worked with Katie Den Ouden of Rooted Wellbeing, who I recommend whole-heartedly and entirely.  For a month I eliminated all dairy, gluten, sugar, soy, meat, alcohol, corn …  I did not, in the end, eliminate caffeine entirely though I reduced it significantly.  Shocking myself, I only cheated once or twice in the whole month period.  I really didn’t want to.  Katie provides detailed recipes – most of which I found delicious – and a lot of support.  I’ve had some complications this month that have nothing to do with the cleanse diet, and Katie was right there to help me think through them, suggest options, and make me feel basically not-alone in this endeavor.

Some changes have been really, really easy for me.  For example, shifting from drinking two venti skim lattes in the morning to one cup of brewed coffee with rice milk and a tiny splash of agave.  So easy.  And a big money saver too!  I don’t miss dairy or gluten anywhere near as much as I thought I would.  I don’t miss meat at all; I have not craved it one single time in a month.  I do miss sugar, and one of my “cheats” was when I had a bunch of M&Ms at Grace’s birthday party.  But you know what?  They didn’t taste that great, and I felt lousy that night.  So, the next morning, back on track.

I start my day with water with lemon in it, take probiotics, and don’t eat breakfast until I’m hungry (another Katie philosophy that I love, after years of having breakfast forced on me by any advice I ever read).  Breakfast is almost always a green smoothie, with flax seed and chia seeds in it.  Delicious.  And I have a whole serving of greens without even noticing it.  You remember, perhaps, how Whit does not eat fruit or vegetables of any kind.  The kid won’t eat raisins, or apple sauce, or buttered corn on the cob, or carrots with ranch.  Not any of the childhood standards.  Yet you know what he simply adores?  Kale chips.  Yes.  He can’t get enough.  All four of us have developed an addiction to them.

For almost a year now Grace has actively wanted to be a vegetarian.  I occasionally press her to have a bite or two of hamburger, worrying about her protein consumption, but in general I haven’t been very heavy-handed on the issue.  She was an enthusiastic supporter of almost everything I cooked all month, and has embraced lentils, beans, and chickpeas as part of her diet.  That has been one aspect of the cleanse I had not thought much about: it makes me cook a lot.  But I like cooking, so it’s not a problem, though occasionally finding the time has been a challenge.

And the results?  Well, I feel really good.  I sleep better (though I’m still having caffeine, I’m having much less, and I suspect the sugar and alcohol elimination has contributed significantly here) and my eczema has entirely cleared up.  Several people have commented that my facial skin looks good.  On the whole I feel much more comfortable digestion-wise than I have in a long time, and a general sense of malaise that had descended over me in recent years lifted.  I didn’t start the cleanse to lose weight, and I never weigh myself, so I don’t know if I have, though there hasn’t been any noticeable change (this is always peoples’ first question).  I haven’t gotten sick yet this fall, and am hopeful that this way of eating will improve my beaten-down and beleaguered immune system.  I know I wrote about being tired, and of feeling quiet and inward, but that was about an injury I sustained and my general state of mind, not about my health from the cleanse.

As I near the end of this experience I feel, more than anything, reminded that what we eat really, really matters.  I have been careless about this before and am grateful for the reminder.  I am committed to incorporating many of these changes on an ongoing basis.  I am deeply thankful to Katie for all of her help, support, and inspiration.  I highly recommend her services to anyone who wants to remember the power of what we eat, and wants to reconnect with the sense of well-being that should be a part of our lives.

Both Grace and Whit recite the standard “now I lay me down to sleep …” prayer before bed.  They usually add on some sentences which always, without exception, are a litany of “thank you”s.  I have not coached them here.  After all, as I’ve shared, Grace and Whit are the people who taught me that praying is saying thank you.

Last week I tucked Whit in and in the nightlight dim I asked him if he wanted to say his prayers.  He looked up at me, clutching Beloved Monkey, and nodded.  I looked at him expectantly.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Prayers, Whit?” I prodded in a whisper.

“Thank you.  Just, thank you.”  I smiled at him and felt my eyes fill with tears.

Meister Eckhart, of course, famously said it best: “If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is “thank you,” that would suffice.”

And “thank you” were my grandfather’s last words to my grandmother, as she died, in 1997.  My family, those who came before and those who come after, two men who will never know each other yet are bound by shared bloodlines, both coming to the same conclusion.  I left Whit’s room and sat at my desk and cried and cried.  How can you be sorrowful and grateful at the same time?  I was.  In fact, I often am.

Thank you.

(the streak of an airplane in the gloaming, observed by Grace on our new tradition, the Noticing Things Evening Walk)

Yesterday morning I attended a talk by Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn at Grace and Whit’s school.  Having read and enjoyed Jon and Myla’s book, Everyday Blessings, I was eager to hear them in person.

Jon and Myla spoke for about an hour about mindful parenting and led the group through some very short meditation exercises.  Much of what they talk about – engaging in this moment right now, the primacy of living in the life we already have, and honoring the everyday – is familiar to me.  Despite how intimately I know the importance of these practices and the value of this way of being in the world, I still find it very difficult.

At one point Jon asked us to close our eyes and turn our awareness to our bodies, to the feel of our physical selves in space, on our chairs, in this room.  I closed my eyes and felt my right hip aching, felt the slight tightness in my chest because my breath was not deep enough, felt the hairs on my arm as imperceptible currents moved through the room.

Jon went on, asking us to hear the silence, and Philip Larkin’s lines leapt to my mind: “And sense the solving emptiness/ that lies just under all we do.”  Couldn’t that emptiness also be read as the silence Jon urged us to listen to?  The silence that is there all the time, underneath, supporting all of the rest of our life’s chaos.  Beneath all of the frantic attempts to avoid the awareness, beneath the noisy thinking that distracts, beneath the shuttling between past and future to avoid staring into the sun of the present: silence.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that awareness is not my problem – if anything I’m too aware, too porous, too open to all of the world’s input and stimulus.  What I’ve been wondering all day is if I developed my distracting monkey brain as a way of escaping the intensity of this awareness.  Is thinking, for me, a way of avoiding feeling?  I am instinctively, naturally aware – hyper, incredibly, viscerally aware.  Maybe my life has been a series of exercises to try to circumvent the sharpness that this awareness can bring.  Of course this awareness carries tremendous gifts, soaring joy and feelings so strong I am on the edge of bursting.  But it also trails with it sadness, and loneliness, and the brutal, inescapable truth of impermanence.

I’m so fortunate to have thoughtful, engaged readers, and one of my favorite things is hearing from you.  At least ten times, and probably more, individual people have sent me (in comments and in personal emails) the same passage by T. S. Eliot.  The frequency with which I receive it cannot be dismissed as random coincidence.  It’s more like a chorus from the universe, and thank you to all of you who have participated in its chant.

The passage has long been one I’ve loved, too, but today I heard it a new way.  Once again, you all knew something before I did: my journey, chronicled here in such exhausting detail, is just back to where I started.  What I am doing is chronicling my slow, halting, back-and-forth circling back to the very place I came from.  It’s to learning to live with – even embrace – the grandeur and terror that comes of the sensitivity and awareness that is an essential part of who I have always been.

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring.
Will be to arrive where we started.
And know the place for the first time.

(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets)

A repost from almost exactly a year ago.  Still very much on my mind.  I guess you could say I am still engaged in the slow, halting, back-and-forth circling.

I am one of two girls.  My sister and I grew up in a world where we knew – what absolute certainty – that we could grow up to do or be whatever we wanted.  Careers I wanted to pursue at various times in my childhood: doctor, Marine, writer, Supreme Court justice, marathoner.  The only thing that limited us was our ability to work towards something.  We had access to great schools, dedicated teachers, and, probably most of all, parents who believed in us unconditionally.

In fact, the truth is I’ve never experienced my gender as something that held me back.  I’ve never really experienced it as a factor at all.  Different pros and cons, a particulate set of challenges to juggle?  Sure.  A problem, a liability, a burden?  Never.

This isn’t so for many, many girls in the developing world.  There is a host of sobering data at the The Girl Effect.  All the complex issues are connected, in a tangled knot: education, healthcare, family planning, the global economy.

For example:

1/4 of girls in the developing world aren’t in school.

Yet when a girl in the developing world receives 7 or more years of education, she marries 4 years later and has 2.2 children.

A direct link has been shown between higher levels of education among mothers and better infant and child health.

75% of 15-to-24 year olds living with HIV in Africa are girls.

When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 per- cent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man.

I wish I had a solution.  I don’t.  But I hope you will take the time to watch this video, think further about how immensely privileged we are in this country, and commit to helping however you can those who are less fortunate.  Let’s also work as hard as we can to raise our daughters to know they can do and be anything they want.  And to help their sisters in other countries who may need it.