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Springtime Nettle Pesto!

rsz_nettle_pestoNettles are here!
These deep green stinging nettles are deeply nutritive and in abundance right now. Harvest them (using gloves!) while you can and experiment in the kitchen. I love to use nettles for pesto. I put it on steamed veggies, toast, raw vegetables, eggs or over pasta!
Here’s an easy recipe to try. I hope you enjoy it.
—Lizz

Recipe: Nettle Pesto

  • Prep time: 10 min
  • Total time: 10 min
  • Serves: 2 cups

Ingredients:

  • 4 garlic cloves
  • 3/4 C pine nuts ( I often use almonds or walnuts)
  • 1/4 C olive oil
  • 1/2 tsp sea salt
  • 1 Tbs lemon juice
  • 3/4 C parmesan or asiago cheese, shredded (for a vegan version I add nutritional yeast)

Instructions:

  1. Put a pot of water on and when its boiling dump the fresh nettles in for just one minute.
  2. Strain well and get as much water out as possible. Add nettles to blender or food processor.
  3. Add garlic, pine nuts, olive oil, sea salt, lemon juice and cheese if you’re using it.
  4. Pulse until smooth and creamy and salt to taste. Enjoy!

Source: http://www.nakedcuisine.com/?s=nettle+pesto

How about you? What do you feel quickening in your body? What are you hoping to bud?

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Equinox Meditation

seedling
As spoken to the Tantra SM equinox celebrants.
Lay on the floor or the ground.   Relax your body.  Notice your breath.  Let your breath move your body. With the inhalation and exhalation, your tissues will respond with the expansion.   With each breath, sink into the ground.   Gravity is the earth’s embrace.
Continue to notice your breath, follow the in/out breath through your nostrils into your nasal passages.   Breath into the area between your eye brows.  Once firmly aware of the place between the eyes, with your breath move your attention back into the middle of your mind, into the inner eye located behind your eyeballs.    From your inner eye, scan down your body. Allow the zenith of the sun to illuminate the seeds to be planted, or the germinating seeds already there.  Notice the potential.  Scan your whole body, noticing the ripeness, the quickening, and the seeds swelling.  Planted to express through the coming months.   Fertilized by yearning and desire.  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
Focus on your breath, following your breath back toward the place between your eyebrows, and then your nasal septum.  Breathing into the place between your nostrils.   Next, follow your breath as it goes from your nostrils all the way into your lungs.  Breathe deeply into the region of your heart.
Become aware of your limbs, feeling the periphery of your body.  Gently wiggle your fingers and toes.  Take some time to bask in the relaxation and illumination.
Thank you
Alex

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A quiet voice is whispering . . .

Something is coming
 clock train
I’m starting to feel it: the flickering flame catching, the spark jumping, more and more on either side of the dim flame catching light and spreading, the heat spreading upward and out. Since our spring-forward daylight savings time change, the days feel longer, with more sunlight and daytime, suntime and daylight.
I’m noticing myself growing. Sometimes, just noticing the growing and naming it is the radical, revolutionary act. Change happens while we’re making other plans, while we’re going along seeking stability or transformation or pleasure or relief or whatever we path on which we might particularly be seeking right now. I’m noticing my path changing: New opportunities forking me into new directions, paths which used to be wide open and that I expected to go on for many more tanks of gas are now tiny walking trails that I’m carefully scrambling through. I’m attempting to reevaluate, reevaluate, reevaluate—from the place of now, rather than being attached to the decision my former self made when I started along this road. I’m not them anymore, I know different things.
This week, I can really feel that. In my morning meditations, some quiet voice is whispering, *change is coming, change is here, change is coming, change has already happened.* Everything is green green green and today the sun is shining, the leaves are bursting out of their branches which were just a week ago bare.
Something is coming. I can feel the heat, the green, the forks in the paths. I’m watching, following my deep pleasure, following my inner quiet, to take me somewhere new.
—Zed

How about you? What do you feel quickening in your body? What are you hoping to bud?
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Podcast

Pleasure Lab Podcast – Episode 16

PleasureLabEpisode16Show Notes:

Length: 1:08:00

  • Alex and Amy on quickening and online embodiment (00:40)
  • Amy and Zed’s Book Club (44:22)
  • TT@H: Alex on quickening into pleasure (39:37)

Several books were mentioned in this episode:

Music: Grateful to Little Dog Big Ears for their Creative Commons licensed music She Sees Mice (intro and outro) and New Ages I (try this at home section). Also to Orquesta Arrecife for their snippet LA MORDAZA (whimsey section).
Oh, and Val McDermid: we want to buy you a drink!
Don’t want to miss another episode? Subscribe in iTunes or Sticher! And while you’re there, please rate us so others can find the Pleasure Lab too.

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Spring is, well, springing
The spring is coiling . . .
During this month of March, we here at Body Trust are pondering the theme of “quickening.” What is that impulse that forms the cherry buds that become the blossoms? What makes a crocus push its way up through the snow into the lengthening daylight? What is the impulse that comes before the flowering? And how does it manifest in our bodies?
Alex and I were discussing this very thing for the upcoming episode of the Pleasure Lab podcast. We felt the impulse in our bodies, a wriggling up, a potency that gathered speed until it stuck in our throats, just before the point of words. It kept repeating itself, silently gathering, until we laughed . . . because silent gestures make for lousy podcasts.
Medically, “quickening” is the first perceptible movement of the fetus in utero. Linguistically, the verb form means “to make more rapid, accelerate” or “to become more alive.” But magically, I have to wonder if—when the croci emerge and those cherry blossoms weigh heavy overhead—how do they sense the quickening in us? Do they smile their compassionate flowery smiles and say, “Oh, those humans, look at them doing their springtime thing again . . .”
In my body I feel the quickening as a frustration. What will I let come to fruition? Have I gathered the resources necessary to bring things into form? Can I suffer this place of readiness before outcome is known? We shall see. 🙂
—Amy

How about you? What do you feel quickening in your body? What are you hoping to bud?

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An Ode to Compost
Who knew Walt was a composter too?
Spring IS in the air…I feel so much composting both within myself and around me. Here’s a poem that captures compost. It’s kind of long but well worth the patience to read it.
With love,
—Lizz
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Gratitude for Soil Composters
Gratitude for Soil Composters
Today, I acknowledge and celebrate the soil composters, which are microbes such as Bacteria, Fungi, Actinomycetes, Algae, Protozoa, and Nematodes. These characters breakdown the dying and dead, and work together to create nourishing environments.
I am grateful for these forces that I cannot see continue their steadfast focus of alchemical change. The living experience of composters consuming, transforming and offering, an ongoing cycle. This sustains the soils, and the foundation for food production.
On this late winter day, let’s take a moment of awareness and contribute in some way to our net of earth microbes, offering our dead to the compost bin or pile, turning over the compost heap or noticing the new green shoots peaking out.
—Alex

How about you? What are you composting this month? What are your tools of alchemy?
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There is magic in decay
There is magic in decay
February is compost month.
I’m spending a lot of time sloughing off 2015 and fully entering 2016. I’m making fertile ground from last year’s waste. I’m still letting go, but things are starting to emerge, too: new ideas, new production, new energy.
I love talking about compost, as in my conversation with Amy on this month’s Pleasure Lab podcast, because it illuminates so much of the necessary but often disgust-inducing processes that bodies (and lives) go through. Remember that bumper sticker—"Throw it ‘away’? There is no ‘away.’" Now, I notice that waste bins in many places are labeled "recycling" and "landfill." I find something beautiful in the grotesque, in the unspeakable, in the unconscious. Don’t you?
—Zed

Compost

By Dan Chelotti
There is magic in decay.
A dance to be done
For the rotting, the maggot strewn
Piles of flesh which pile
Upon the dung-ridden earth
And the damp that gathers
And rusts and defiles.
There is a bit of this
In even the most zoetic soul — 
The dancing child’s arms
Flailing to an old ska song
Conduct the day-old flies
Away to whatever rank
Native is closest. Just today
I was walking along the river
With my daughter in my backpack
And I opened my email
On my phone and Duffie
Had sent me a poem
Called “Compost.” I read it
To my little girl and started
To explain before I was three
Words in Selma started
Yelling, Daddy, Daddy, snake!
In the path was a snake,
Belly up and still nerve-twitching
The ghost of some passing
Bicycle or horse. Pretty, Selma said.
Yes, I said. And underneath my yes
Another yes, the yes to my body,
Just beginning to show signs
Of slack, and another, my grasping
In the dark for affirming flesh
That in turn says yes, yes
Let’s rot together but not until
We’ve drained what sap
Is left in these trees.
And I wake in the morning
And think of the coroner
Calling to ask what color
My father’s eyes were,
And I asked, Why? Why can’t
You just look — and the coroner,
Matter-of-factly says, Decay.
Do you want some eggs, my love?
I have a new way of preparing them.
And look, look outside, I think this weather
Has the chance of holding.
From poetryfoundation.org

How about you? What are you composting this month? What are your tools of alchemy?

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Podcast

Pleasure Lab Podcast – Episode 15

PleasureLabEpisode15Show Notes:

Length: 57:36
Amy and Zed ponder composting and disgusting (00:40)
Amy reads an excerpt from her short story “Waiting to Pee” (44:22)
TT@H: Zed on mindfulness (39:37)
Several books were mentioned in this episode:

Music: Grateful to Little Dog Big Ears for their Creative Commons licensed music She Sees Mice (intro and outro) and New Ages I (try this at home section). Also to Orquesta Arrecife for their snippet LA MORDAZA (whimsey section).

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How to Scratch an Itch
How to Scratch an Itch or The Composting of Ideas
When I’m working on a visual design project, one of my favorite parts of the process is the "not doing" phase.
When I’m designing a book, business card, or illustrating an idea I first get clear on the intention of the project. What is the hope or aspiration? What meaning and feeling will it convey? What is the design intention? I then spend hours looking at other types of design (the joke in graphic design is that there are no original ideas, just borrowed ones) seeing what styles have resonance, even if I’m not sure exactly why. Once I’m visually satiated, it is then time for the "not doing." That means forget all about the project, go for a walk or the gym, and completely surrender the idea to my unconscious. It’s like heading out while a big pot simmers on the back of the stove: I know when I return that something delicious will be waiting. All those ideas and other images will have been digested, transmuted into something new and exactly what I need for the project. It’s a kind of composting. It requires a trust in my capacities of creative digestion. And it’s deeply pleasurable.
Sometimes the composting, this "not doing" can happen in the present moment. For example, I have a concept like "itch" that I want to illustrate. I’m curious about the sensory experience of itch and perhaps I read a bit about it, discerning the differences between itch and scratch and pain, discovering the role of natriuretic polypeptide b (Nppb) and the pathways between skin and brain, etc.. And then I just let my pencil wander across the page, letting images emerge that are not a conscious depiction of "itch" but more an embodied sourcing of what my eyes and drawing hands ‘hear’ from the intelligence of my body that knows "itch." The result is not something my mind would ever have designed, but the image has resonance for all the rest of me.

How about you? How do you compost ideas? What are your tools of alchemy?

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