My life this month...

I saw him standing there

I decided to take a little stroll through the Botanical Gardens here in Durham the other day on one of the few sunny days we might have this year. A little stroll turned into a long stroll when I realized that the gardens are 60 acres of winding paths through meadows, forests and swamps.

At the end of one quiet, empty path through a forest I came to a sort of clearing. Looking around and listening to the birds and the movement of the leaves I had the strange feeling that someone was watching me. I scanned the treeline. No one. I looked down the path, but no one else was headed my way. Then I saw him, with a look on his face that encouraged me to keep walking.


Move along, sister.

18 weeks without a cell phone and loving it...

Impressions

Recently been having a series of very - colorful - dreams which often include vivid impressions of past events in my life, particularly places I have visited. Here are some of the most memorable experiences.

• Seeing a poisonous sea snake swim right under me while snorkeling in Jamaica when I was 12. I clearly remember thinking that the only reason I didnt get bitten was because it chose not to bite. Thats when I realized that being in the sea is really being out of the human element.
• Waking up pre-dawn on a 19hr. train from Chennai to Delhi, India with four older men staring at me, waiting for me to get up so they could play cribbage.
• My first time using Spanish while on vacation in Mexico during junior high. I was really proud of myself.
• The looks you will get as a single woman standing alone in a movie line in Cairo.
• Winning a booty-shaking contest in a Winnipeg, Canada bar (yes!)
• The pure joy of everything about the town of Dalyan, Turkey. The Kaunos ruins, families that sell honey on the side of the road. Lemons the size of your head.
• Realizing that street vendors in Bangkok are very serious when they say 'last price'. They hold grudges.
• Watching my best friend Nichole chugging mass amounts of root beer in a contest (we were 14) in Laughlin, NV then watching it all come back up. Some through her nose. (Yes, Nichole!!)
• The hurried Londoner that looked at me and shouted, "MOVE" on my first day figuring out the London subway system. Thank you random Londoner, you inspired me to figure it out very quickly.
• Sitting for seven hours in a grungy beach bathroom in Haiti while a woman braided all my hair into tiny plaits.

Intolerance

So, Ive given in.

I am eternally, terribly, horribly lactose intolerant. Cow, goat, sheep - if it makes milk, I cant process it. I am not alone in this, but there are many of you out there who still dont realize how intolerant of dairy products you may be.

I have now gone about six months without dairy products of any kind and it has made a world of difference. A WORLD. Anyone very close to me knows about my long battles with stomach problems (sorry to share) and I have finally realized the culprit (after years of trying to eliminate everything else). Dairy is like poison to my body. This is a lesson I have recently had to learn again when I got weak last week and had some goat bleu cheese. Not pretty.

If you are interested in seeing if you have a dairy intolerance (anything from very mild to strong) there is a ton of information out there. I suggest everyone try at least a month without dairy to see what sort of differences it can make for you. I will warn you that the first week isnt the greatest as your body is busy purging itself of milky toxins, but after that it is smooth sailing. There are lots of great blogs about dairy-free cooking and living, but this is one of my favorites.

Somehow this song, and Sigur Ros music in general, always recharges me. Time to plan a trip to Iceland.

(ive always loved this picture of a Hadza man keeping a lookout on a tree, from National Geographic)

Our culture, well my culture at least, is obsessed with ways to remove fat from the diet. The grocery store shelves are filled with products stating that they are 'lite', 'fat-free', 'skinny', 'skim'. These qualities are promoted as a means to encourage buyers and we fall for it willingly and without fail.

If you were a prehistoric hunter-gatherer you would feel very differently about fat. In contrast to modern diets, you would spend your life searching for fat resources in your diet. More and more it looks like hunter-gatherers based their entire subsistence practice around the acquisition of fat. Hunting intensely in the late autumn when deer, boar and other prey species were at their fattest (after they had gorged in order to survive through the winter), moving to follow herds of caribou or reindeer which provided a main fat source during the Paleolithic period in the North, splitting the bones of hunted animals in times of desperation in order to retrieve the fatty bone marrow.

As we try to avoid fat like the plague, hunter-gatherers would have searched after it relentlessly.

In other news, our weather here has been quite inconsistent, which isnt inconsistent for the UK. We had a long streak of warm, sunny days and then suddenly cloudy, windy, cold rain. Yesterday was particularly interesting as most of the day Durham was filled with just the finest mist of moisture in the air. Things noticed:

• a baby pink tulip covered with the slightest hint of misty dewdrops
• lots of birds loving the escapee earthworms the rain produces
• a layer of Icelandic volcano ash covering my black rain boots
• and increased level of green to the trees and plants that makes it look like someone adjusted the color and brightness modes on a TV
• that smell of fresh rain air
• people on the street in a hurry to get out of the rain have no problem knocking you off the sidewalk
• coffee tastes better when its cold outside
• paying attention in German class is hard when you are concentrating on the rhythm of raindrops on the window
• things always look better the next day after the rain

(vintage Durham Cathedral)

Willow smoke, dogs tails and albino deer

The year I was born Lewis Binford, the so-called 'father' of New or Processual archaeology, wrote a seminal piece of archaeological literature outlining the differences between 'forager' and 'collector' hunter-gatherer groups. It talked about 'affluent societies', logistical strategies and settlement systems.

If you arent an archaeologist you are dying of boredom about now.

Anyway, in his 'Willow Smoke and Dogs' Tails: Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems and Archaeological Site Formation' (1980) he included the following excerpt which always stayed with me:

"An old Eskimo man was asked how he would summarize his life; he thought for a moment and said, "Willow smoke and dogs' tails; when we camp it's all willow smoke, and when we move all you see is dogs' tails wagging in front of you. Eskimo life is half of each."

On a related, but unrelated note:

I came across these pictures on the web today as I was looking for pictures of white-tail deer to include in a Powerpoint (power point! power point!) presentation. I nearly died of cuteness overload. Albino deer (and a baby!). Makes me wonder if this is what people saw that made them think unicorns existed. An antler could easily be mistaken for a horn.

Now all the simple things are simply too complicated for my life.