Healthy Seeds

I love my kitchen. If all goes my way, I can become lost for hours. For the past couple of years, I use Christmas as a way to stock up on kitchen essentials: blenders, dehydrators, food processors, cast iron pans, and a bread maker are all gifts from Christmases past. This year I felt no different when my husband asked what I wanted. I really want a new (refurbished, maybe?) Vitamix. Sometimes I daydream about erasing my heart from this blog and just talking about food. I daydream about little cottages with my name out front where I can serve up custom teas, and join the trending dish on essential oils and sauerkraut. I believe in natural remedies, that's true. But, if I may confess, there is also a dirty truth, that I use food to escape from feeling certain things that need to be felt. Fear. Loneliness. Confusion. Anger. Grief. All of it- and you'd never know because I am 95 pounds. Let's just say I store it in my neurons and grow increasingly insane as I lose my grip on it all.

This year, my will wanted something new and shiny on my kitchen counter. I wanted to spend all of my money on new flours and super foods to stuff my pantry with. God, I feel good when my kitchen is full. My emotions promise to behave when there is new food in the house. Not always, but usually when I post to facebook a meal creation, more than hard work and passion went into it, but all of my pain and guilt. I never feel satisfied or revived, just lousy. Or like I want to spend more money on more food. That is all for another time because I decided to do something different, something that would force me to reckon with all that usually stays masked, hidden beneath a frothy paleo coffee drink and pumpkin chai muffin.

I asked for my own laptop. Now, we're not the Waltons (were they wealthy?) so this guy I am typing on is not fancy or big, and can boast of no technical millennial advances- but it does have a keyboard and a screen, which were my basic requirements. Why a laptop? Because every piece of pain that arises from this broken life has a story. I have a story- YOU have a story. More than anything, I want to write mine. Yes, it's fallen and ugly. Yes, I get jammed up in the same places in my life time and time again, and I am frustrated. Especially since my story has already been written, and in the end my soul will be perfected along with my spirit. Somebody say "PROCESS" with me and then bang your first on the table. I'm tired. Aren't you tired? When I am at my end, writing to me is like feeding my story into a recycling bin. I empty out all that used up garbage, and in return I get new vessels to store my feelings in. New ideas and strategies to sort out life.

When my laptop came I first felt a drop of dread. Drop. Drop. Drop. You're a failure. You'll never write. The voice of my arch nemesis, Satan: I am going to laugh at you with the rest of the world.

I turned my eyes to Heaven, "Why did you make me do this?" (I like to blame God when I do brave things....it's usually obedience, not courage on my part), "Don't you know that being healthy is important to me?" I never really hear God speak in coherent sentences, maybe that's strange. I just know what He's saying to me and it was along these lines, "The healthiest thing you can do for yourself is start tying on that laptop." Nobody ever laughs at me in the kitchen, and it's my worst fear.

This, this is true ownership of my dream. When it came time to name this laptop I called it "Summer's Seed" because I don't expect to turn out a novel in a year, or even five years. This is my seed. Careful tending and consistence. That's my goal. Honesty, and commitment. I was thinking about this at church this morning when the Christmas story was told and someone read that the Wise men fell to their knees before baby Jesus, bowing in reverence to a King. He was a baby. He was God's seed, and hardly even resembled who the Savior of the World would become, and yet He was already the fulfillment of everything God has promised He would be. God would always provide for Mary and Joseph to tend to Him, and He would save us all. So many who have gone on to change the world, though not to the scale Jesus has done for us, started with a God-given gift. I wondered if this seed is already the fulfillment of what God is doing in my life: the full favor, all of the Father's pride on my projects, and unending ideas and inspirations from which to draw from. Those things are not in seed form- they are the completed promise. That's enough to make me sit up straight and tall, and tell the truth, well, in fiction form.

Jesus and new laptops, who knows if there be a correlation. All I know is that I want to be healthy, and this here, my little modest seed, is the best place to start.