Do you eat? Great book to read

Silly question, huh? Do you eat? But not so silly if you ask if this way: Do you eat to live or do you live to eat? The answer should be "both." You should certainly eat to live, i.e., get fuel to keep you alive from your food. But it should also be that you enjoy your food, taste your food, cook your own food, even grow a lot of your own food (or at least make friends with the people that grow it).

The idea behind a very short, simple book that everyone who eats should read is that we should do both: fuel our bodies but on healthy, "real" food, and enjoy that food, in smaller amounts of better quality so that we do not "overfuel" and continue the obesity epidemic that is engulfing the Western world, really due to our overeating and inactivity.

The book? Michael Pollan's Food Rules. It really is short, a couple of years old (2009, I believe), and consists of 64 food rules that will help you appreciate your food and eat better.

I would love it if people joined me, especially people with children, and tried to drive more than a few fast food restaurants out of business. I'm sure we could find better jobs for our unemployed than ruining the health of our overall population.

Can pain result in creativity?

My experience is a negative. I'm not suffering from any chronic pain but the kind of surgical recovery pain that is pretty intense from time to time. And I find I cannot concentrate enough to finish reading chapters in a book, let alone creating a poem or writing even a page or two. It's easier to write short bursts in a blog like this but the pain seems to interfere with the contemplation and imagination necessary to put words, any words, on paper (or virtually).

Interestingly, the pain has made it difficult for me to remember words. I will start speaking and cannot grasp in my mind the word I need. The pain takes over and I just stutter, "uh, um, um, it's...". For someone who lives by words, this is extremely disturbing.

But I'm going to try and keep reading at least and getting my mind to recover as well as my body. Perhaps the blog will help.

Welcome to the post-divorce world

Here it is, the end of a marriage. It actually formally occurred on Feb. 3, 2011 but he just moved out a couple of weeks ago and it seems to have finally sunk in. I don't want to spend any more time thinking about it. It was not a "failure"; we have three gorgeous, intelligent, loving children and I find that I am not unhappy, unlike I was last year when he first told me he wanted a divorce.

Now I want to move on. Not just in the same old groove, but really move on. Join up and become more politically active like I used to be. Do more volunteer work. Do good things for others and be a real role model for my kids. Get back to writing regularly in the evenings, putting in a couple of hours every night on my poetry and fiction. Maybe even getting back to photography to capture something of my dad in my life.

Even though we are in the dead heat of an Arizona desert summer, I feel I am welcoming the burgeoning green growth of spring, the spring of the heart.