Chinese Herbs to the Rescue

My major accomplishment today was to finish drinking an 8 oz. cup of tea. It took me about an hour, slowly sipping and wishing I didn’t have to. With each sip I held my nose so as not to taste this earthy brew of twigs, barks and spices.

I’d been having a hard time waking in the morning, getting out of bed and enthusiastically taking on the day. And once up I had been dragging my butt, barely able to get through the day without taking naps. So my brother invited me to join him on one of his weekly sojourns to Chinatown, to an herbal shop where he sits on a folding chair in the back of the shop, sticks out his tongue, leans over the table and hands his wrist to the 80 something year old doctor, who then determines what concoction of herbs and barks would make the difference in my brother’s well-being. I took my brother up on his offer, took the subway downtown to Canal Street, the Chinatown of New York City, and after having the most delicious, nurturing bowl of hot noodle soup with vegetables at a local Chinese restaurant, we walked over to the herb shop, avoiding all the luscious looking baked goods in the windows on the way. 15 minutes after sticking out my tongue and extending my wrist across the table, the doctor scribbled out a multi-columned prescription made up of mystifying characters and handed it to the herbalist. I watched as she meticulously laid out, one large piece of white butcher paper for each day of the week, and proceeded to pile up strange, fascinating and beautiful dried pieces of bark, seeds, pods, spices, a witch’s brew, all to be steeped and boiled for an hour and a half on a low flame, and then gobbled down before bedtime. On the first night of preparing this brew, I looked into the pot, barely able to approach it, “Bubble, bubble, broil and trouble,” yes, the trouble had begun as my mother approached the kitchen yelling, “What the hell are you cooking in there? Get that out of my kitchen, you’ll have to find another place to make whatever that crazy doctor told you to do. I can’t take it.” Frankly, neither could I but I had to. And so upstairs my boiling pot and I went, to my brother’s who’d been brewing his own prescribed concoction for a couple of weeks, pleading with him to let me use his stove. He had grown used to the aromas by then, felt so much better himself, and wanting to make sure I’d drink the infusion, offered to be my cook for the next six nights, officially becoming my partner in healing!

Just in case you're in town and not feeling up to par:
EWA Trading Co. Inc.
80 Mulberry Street
New York, NY 10013
www.ewatrading.com
212-964-2017

Mourning begets Gratitude

How can I fall in love with New York City when I have climbed the hills of Switzerland, when I have camped in the Pyrenees Mountains, walked along the Adriatic Coast, hiked Mt. Tamalpais, walked amongst the grapes in Sonoma County, picked oranges in Israel, when I have skied the slopes of Austria, seen the temples of India, got lost and found in Denver’s Rocky Mountains?? I struggle to find peace and pleasure here in this metropolis. My eyes fall upon supermarkets, gourmet food shops, clothing stores, restaurants, fast food shops, coffee shops, hairdressers, manicurists, more restaurants one after the other never ending. And then there is Central Park, thank goodness. Yet my eyes, my nose, long for the beauty of the unaltered, untamppered with physical world, of multi-colored nature. Nothing nurtures me more than looking out into fields of green, visiting with my eyes, hills too steep to climb, forests too thick to visit, while breathing deeply the fresh, wholesome air of dormant Mother Nature.

Japan awakens in me gratitude. I am grateful for New York, its polluted air and all that displeases me.

Mom on Loudspeaker

Mom talks to herself. It started about six years ago when her husband of 50+ years passed away and she found herself living by herself for the first time in her entire life. Born into a family of parents and several sisters, then going from that home to one with her husband, to now living alone, is totally new for her. She feels as though she pretty much has to rely on herself to get things done, despite how often her children are around.

Sitting in the kitchen, her favorite place to be, smoking, watching her favorite cooking shows, I’ll hear my mother say, “I need to…” and then a litany of all the things she needs to get done. Mom doesn’t make requests, she’d rather go without, though it drives her crazy, but she won’t ask, a bane of her generation of women. And so my sister and I have come to interpret “I have to…” to really mean “Will you do x, y, or z for me?” At times I am overwhelmed by the number of “I have to’s…” that come out of her mouth at one time, as I leap up to fulfill her latest hidden requests. This morning I discovered a main source of our mother/daughter upsets during my stay with her. Momma should have had six kids, if not more. She’d have enough tasks, errands, chores, missions, and jobs to keep us all busy! She recently confessed, “I don’t want to do anything (at my age) if I don’t have to.”  Aha!! She should have been a CEO!

Stressed by feeling I’ve got to take care of  all of Mom’s needs, and get right to it, and exhausted when I try, I've just noticed that the barrage of  "I have to's..."  is her internal conversation on loudspeaker. Most of the time she doesn’t even know she’s speaking aloud. Like all of us, throughout the day, we have enumerable things that need to get done and remind ourselves by thinking about them over and over again. Some of us make lists, others simply recite to ourselves on occasion, our list of to do’s, “I have to x, y, z” and then later on, “I’d better get to x, y z” and even later if we haven’t fulfilled on all of our “have to’s”, that inner conversation is there to remind us, “I’d better get to it, it’s getting late.” If only I could find the button to turn Mom’s loud speaker off!

grateful to have a mother

Wild Beests

While waiting on line at the supermarket I noticed a woman ahead of me buying a bag of flour and a rather large bag of sugar. Clearly she was going to be baking, so I asked her. "Not at all. I'm a beekeeper and the sugar is for my bees." I learned then that beekeeping is flourishing in NYC! In March of last year NYC made beekeeping legal! Previously, bees had been classified as a prohibited, "wild animal."  See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/bFakjw

New York Times article: “The number of bees has been falling since the end of World War II, when farmers stopped rotating crops with clover, a good pollen source for bees, and started using fertilizers. Pesticides and herbicides became common as well. In cities, native plants were ripped out in favor of exotic ones that were not good for bees. Then, four years ago, honey bee colonies mysteriously started to die around the country. This drop-off, called colony collapse disorder, added to the mounting health problems, like mites and diseases, that bees are facing…”

“We don’t know the primary cause, but we know the combination of poor nutrition, heavy pesticide use and bee diseases have put bees into a tailspin,” said Marla Spivak, an entomology professor at the Univ. of Minn. and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for her work on honey-bee health.

Whatever the cause of colony collapse disorder, “People want to feel that they are doing something to help,” said Dave Mendes, president of the American Beekeeping Federation in Atlanta. “Having a few beehives in your backyard can make you feel better.” “

A local fellow, here in the city, collected 40 lbs. of honey recently with only two hives!!  Not a bad hobby! So I made a small donation to the beekeepers of New York and wait excitedly for the invitation to come to a nearby rooftop and taste the first honey of the season. 

As per New York City Beekeepers Association NYC has "1,093 Beekeepers and Beelovers" registered.

Hey honey, even the White House maintains hives!

The Flying Non

“For many residents of New York City, our bodies are our cars. So rather than engaging in ‘road rage’ against slow or erratic drivers on a highway, New Yorkers descend into ‘sidewalk rage,’ paroxysms of fury directed at people who exhibit irrational, obstructive walking behavior on Manhattan's crowded concrete.” From Yahoo website, “Time” 2/24/10

Now I understand the erratic behavior of the 6’2” fellow, sauntering with a baby stroller, down a narrow, congested street, while talking on his cell phone, when he turned around, looked me in the eye, and reached for me to throw me across the avenue, when I politely (but slightly irritatedly) asked, “Excuse me, may I get ahead of you?”