Daily Prompt Love <3 Reconnecting through Common Ground
10/9/2016
Make art about connections made through food, connections in the present, or to the past.
Posts tagged ‘canning’
Daily Prompt Catch-Up! Heat, and Travel, and the Child You Were
18 August 2016
Gettin that August blast of summer heat!
“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.”~Violette Leduc
Make art about relentless heat.
19 August 2016
So I stood in my yard today and watched a truck hauling a trailer lose control just long enough to smash my mailbox to smithereens.19 August 2016
Make art about witnessing destruction.
20 August 2016
Visiting with family and looking through some newly discovered old family photographs, including some I’d never seen of that wild lil girl I was 🙂
Make art about yourself as a child.
21 August 2016
My sons helped me shuck, cut, and can six dozen ears of corn today. It’s a messy job, but now the house smells like caramel corn, and we have yummy summer in a jar for those cold winter months.
Make art about a task that’s hard, but worth it.
22 August 2016
I’m headed out later this week for a spiritual retreat and a couple of road trip visits with family. Excited, but fretting over getting all my stuff ready.
Make art about preparing to travel.
Daily Prompt Love! <3 Cooking and What Woke You :-)
11 August 2016
Spent all day canning and preserving food. Always takes me back into the company of all those over time who did this before me, especially the women who taught me, as a child, to can and put up food for the winter.
Make art about food as heritage.
12 August 2016
Was abruptly awakened by a crow at the window, informing me—loudly–that the suet cages needed filling 🙂
Make art about being awakened suddenly.
‘Cause I’m Crazy Excited! Daily Prompt :-) Passing on the Old Ways
My mama kept a garden to feed us kids when I was growing up. We were poor, but nowhere near as poor as my mother had been as a child, growing up as she did back in those beautiful North Carolina mountains in the Depression era.
One of the reasons I can is to remind myself to be grateful. I think about how this was the only way my grandmother–we called her Miz Pearl–had to feed my mama and her brothers and sisters, and how she’d work all summer so they would have anything to eat at all in the winter. One hard winter the only thing they had at all were the green beans Miz Pearl had canned the summer before. So as I’m working, I’m thinking how lucky most of us are, to have access to food in ways that the generations before us did not. I’m not rich by any stretch, and I do love my home food, but I have never been hungry, not truly, because of women who put up food this way, who had that wisdom.
So i’m grateful. and really really aware of how I don’t need this food to live, how I don’t have to haul water up from the creek, how I don’t have to build a fire to cook, how hard, how so so so hard, those women before us worked to care for –just to feed–their families.
I’m even more grateful, and excited, because for the first time, my sons, my oldest J, who is 26, and his younger brother Dean–the one I call Manchild 🙂 just months away from his 21st birthday– have asked to learn how to preserve food by the old canning methods. Even Manchild’s best friend Colin wants to learn! So I’m one Happy Hippie Mama right now 🙂
The web of cultures in which I was raised teaches us to honor the wisdom of elders, to honor and appreciate the wisdom born of survival and innovation and ingenuity developed over thousands of years walked by the procession before us. It teaches us to honor what sustains us, the planet, and our community. I am excited to share this with my sons, with these young people. I am honored, and humbled, to have the chance to teach this way of Loving as it was taught to me.
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Daily Prompt
“Oh my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways. And deep ways and steep ways, and high ways, and low.”~Henry Lawson
Make art inspired by old wisdom.
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“When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage, we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society, and we will become whole again. … Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions, and this will benefit everyone.
I always encourage them to practice in a way that will help them go back to their own tradition and get re-rooted. If they succeed at at becoming reintegrated, they will be an important instrument in transforming and renewing their tradition.”― Thích Nhất Hạnh
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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