Yogis,
The FLOW (Friday Leaning Out the Window) club had its first
meeting on Friday night! There are
currently 20 members, but we have room for….oh I don’t know…..thousands
more. See my previous post if you would
like to join! For me this week the night
sky was clear and the snow packed ground gave the air a crispness with a
somewhat bracing edge to it.
Invigorating! And around 11:00 the
moon rose to shine her light on me and the snow as I drifted off to sleep.
So back to the lemon……..
I was at our local natural market planning to pick up my 3
weekly lemons. Usually they are firm and
bright yellow but this time they all looked slightly sad. Their skin not so smooth with some small
brown spots. A group of limp lemons. I checked the whole basket but they all
looked the same. So I somewhat
begrudgingly picked three and put them in my basket.
As the week progressed and I used these less than perfect
lemons in my morning water, squeezed on my salads and in my lentil soup I noticed
something. They were actually the best
lemons I have had in quite some time!
Juicier with a fuller more complex flavor. I had incorrectly judged them by their
cover. They hadn’t been what I was ‘looking
for’.
I, of all people, should know better. For several years now I have received a
weekly fresh picked farm share as a member of a CSA (community supported
agriculture). The biodynamic food has
not been sprayed, colored or waxed. Often
the produce in the box does not ‘look’ like the works of art you see in Whole
Foods, but once you bite in…..wow! The
gnarly carrots burst with flavor, the smaller mushier looking strawberries take
you back to your childhood, and the lettuce asks for almost no dressing
up. In fact as the host of the CSA site I tell
the new members not to judge the apples and turnips by their appearance, but by
their depth of character.
So why had I judged the lemons?
As humans we are very visual and we are given an image of
what everything, including our own bodies, should look like. And when the outer skin does not live up to the
unrealistic metric, we often pass it by without a glance. But in
the process we might be missing the juiciness.
It has gotten me thinking.
Do I take the time to see things as they are, or do I just ‘look’ at
them. Very little of the story is
revealed by the outer layer. The flavor sits
below the surface. People, no different
than the lemon.
Lately there is a new movement to direct all of the ‘unwanted
vegetables’ with blemishes, bruises and odd shapes away from the trash cans and
into grocery stores in low income neighborhoods. Those shoppers may get the last laugh J
Finally this video came across my path this week. It tells the lemon story a different
way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0qD2K2RWkc
Looking deeper,
SARAH