30: Food

I wonder how it's possible to say too much, too little, or just enough about food. For some of us, it never bears thinking about; it's simply what you take at mealtimes to avoid getting hungry and eventually dying. For others, it's an all-consuming passion.

And for still others, it's a dream: elusive, seemingly unobtainable.

See what I mean? So hard to pick just one thing about food to write about. So here's my one thing about food today: the lack of it. Also known as hunger.

I went through a foolish period on the border of my teenage and adult years when hunger was frequent, mainly because of my misguided response to circumstances. But in recent years, there's been only one day when I went hungry because I had no money. I'd started a new job in an upscale neighbourhood where the cost of one meal could literally feed a family well for a day. I had to rush to work that first day, and ended up leaving my packed lunch in my nearly-bare fridge; I'd thrown it together out of the only provisions I had remaining until my first pay.

I still remember how, somewhere around mid-morning, I began to feel the usual rumbling in my midsection. I usually counter that with some low-GI snack to tide me over until lunch. But that day there were no snacks, and there was to be no lunch. The hungry feeling in my stomach went away in the late afternoon as, I imagined, that organ decided it had had enough of being ignored. But for the rest of the workday, I felt my alertness fall, watched the lines in spreadsheets grow blur, willed the words to stop merging into one another and swapping places on documents and getting lost in my brain just as I was going to type them out.

On the one-hour train and bus journey home, all I could think about was that plastic container of food on the second shelf of my fridge. The girl next to me on the train had an open container of trail mix on her lap, from which she would periodically pull a nut, granola cluster or other typical trail-mix component. Every crunch was excruciating, amplified by the juddering across every single rail along the Harbour Bridge that had never bothered me before. Walking through Town Hall station underground to get to the bus stop, I was assailed by the smells of frying chips and seafood, sushi, panini being toasted, dark nutty breads from the German bakery -- all just an arm's reach away, yet they might as well have been half a world away because my wallet was empty.

I had long before that made a habit of saying grace before every meal, and meaning it. So I can't say it was that one day last year that caused me to be thankful for food, because I was already thankful. But maybe it made my thanks into something real, rather than an abstract concept. Now that I had been hungry, I knew now just how privileged I was each time I had food before me.

I resolved that day to go without food every year on that date, as far as health permits, so that I'll constantly be reminded of the many for whom hunger is not a choice. They're not always in some dusty faraway land, and they don't always have the "starvation look". Whenever I'm able, even if in the smallest and seemingly most ineffective of ways, I want to help the hungry to not be hungry. Sometimes I sink deep in ideological questioning, in suspicion over institutional motives and feasibility, or in beating myself up over how little I'm doing to solve a huge worldwide problem, but then I bring myself back to the blank-minded, wobbly-kneed reality of that one day and am reminded of the simple truth: the answer to hunger is food. Will at least a small part of that answer will come from me?

A final note: it's quite rare for me to directly address you, but I'll do it this time. Each of the links in this post is to a different not-for-profit programme addressing the contemporary hunger problem. If you can, please click to learn and give, or search online for other channels if none of these suits you. This post-a-day project has reminded me that there are so many material gifts I could place on a birthday wish list, which I still might do, but right now what would make me happy is knowing that there are just one, two, 13, 58, however many fewer (I know, what an awkward phrase, but the sky is blue and the sun is shining and I am in a hurry to post this so that I can go for a walk) hungry people on earth. For starters.

31: Life

With great relief I can now safely say I'm through the worst of my burnout.

I hope.

In any case, I have been taking small steps daily towards a "normal" life. Normal for me, anyway. One of those steps being that I'm writing again. And I don't know if it seems counterproductive to recover from burnout by setting myself the goal of writing a blog post a day for a month, but even if it is I'm doing it. When I think about it, though, it's probably going to be helpful to have time set aside for writing, so that all other time can be spent not writing. If my burnout could have been attributed to one single cause, it would have been my failure to allocate time and effort to each section of my life that was in proportion to its importance.

So, I decided, in these 31 days before I turn 31, I will write. I made a list of things that are important to me, people and causes and objects and ideas, and I'll try to pick one a day to write about. If I get to October 11 having written all 31 entries, I think I'll have much greater clarity about what I've chosen to make the big things in my life. And if I don't, I'll have stuff to process anyway, through entries with titles like "Why Do I Keep Overcommitting?"

But now, at the beginning of this exercise where the outlook is bright, I'll leave you with this picture, which is what often comes to mind when I think about life.

Not the foot, specifically, but the little person who now walks (also hops, dances, bounces, gallops, chugs and shuffles) on it and its left counterpart. My nephew was three months and a week when this picture was taken, and already so wriggly that the reason my hand is in the shot was for foot-steadying purposes, not because I was trying to replicate some baby lotion commercial.

Today, he is four years and one day old. (It seems I inherited my father's penchant for precision.) He is intelligent and inquisitive and eloquent and all kinds of wonderful. And he is still what comes to mind when I think about life. Because he is so up-to-the-brim-and-over full of life; because his existence reminds me that mine has a purpose. Because after so many years spent surrounded by cultural and institutional assumptions that productivity equalled acceptance equalled worth, in the midst of trying to shake off those assumptions yet feeling defeated by their prevalence, I was reminded through an unabashedly joyful, unashamedly dependent, utterly vulnerable yet unstintingly loved little boy that life wasn't meant to be lived that way. All those words that I've used to describe my nephew, they're just things. And all those things we use to define ourselves as adults? Also just things. I already adored this boy before he even appeared to the world. I didn't know whether he would someday be able to return my verbal volleys (yes) or if he'd ever break our hearts with his behaviour (I hope not). But regardless of what the answers to each of those unknowns was or will be, the love is there simply because he is.

So, to have arrived at a point where I see every human being as valuable intrinsically, regardless of ability, appearance or performance; to know that we are loved far beyond what we deserve or can understand; to want to live every moment as an expression of gratitude and reciprocation of that love... to me, that's life.

Cashew lentil patties

On the whole, they're a lot easier on mind and fingers than chicken. Not as tasty, but I am sure this can be corrected.

In a little gift shop somewhere in Western Australia...

... sit the first minuscule buds of my enterprise.

It's been a slow process, but at last I'm getting somewhere.

While I'm in the final leg (photography, packaging, listing) of opening the Etsy shop, at least I know not all of my handmade hairpins are quietly passing their soft-petalled days in a plastic box in my room.

As of today, a tiny consignment of hairpins is available for sale at the Kent St Gift Shop of the Victoria Park Centre for the Arts.

The petals are made using the Japanese tsumami-kanzashi technique; the centres are ruffled fabric pom-poms using the same fabric. They came to me as discarded sample swatches pleading to be made into something beautiful. I hope I obliged.

If you're in the area and would like to make one of them your own, please drop by the gift shop. If you're not in the area but would also like one, please email me or leave a comment so I can tell you when the online store finally goes live.

I suddenly have all this energy to promote my wares and make more. I think they call this momentum. I like it.

Oh, and one last thing. I'll give away the full proceeds (without knocking off the shop's commission, material costs or any other amount) from every tenth item I sell. For now, the money will go to a children's home in Thailand where a dear friend of mine is involved in helping the little ones to forge joyfully through adverse early lives. I'll tell you more about them soon, once I know how much of the project I'm at liberty to share.

Pub goer

At the Rosemount listening to a new friend's open mic. The beer is a prop; neither donkey nor owner are fond of tipple. (I doubt the donkey is fond of anything. It's a stuffed toy.)

A fun alternative to the tantrum

When days happen like that one last week, when I awoke to find even my personal one-egg frying pan scratched by careless hands that don't know how to look after non-stick surfaces, and a sink spattered with breakfast debris and unknown bits in the sink trap, when it seemed the universe was bent on being ornery with me... when those days happen, some pre-verbal reflex takes over.

Without my having to think too much about it, the flour and eggs come out, and the glass mixing bowl. No butter in this recipe, the one from Orangette that I've made more times than any other thing I've ever cooked or baked. (Yes, family o' mine, even more than mashed potatoes. Believe it.) Instead of store-bought yoghurt, this time I have homemade kefir, a culture as unadorned as can be.

Whipping the batter is a good outlet, and the thing that makes this cake one of my favourites to bake is its adaptability. I swap the flour for wholemeal, sometimes forgetting to add raising agent, and it still rises forgivingly. I hold back, way back, on the sugar and it still tastes like a cake should. And the crumb -- oh, I could write songs about that crumb.

Like some magic cake from Enid Blyton that never goes wrong regardless of what went in -- or didn't -- the lemon yoghurt cake helps me to remember that my life is very much the same, thanks to a grace bigger than I could ever imagine. Scratched frying pans seem so small, so trivial in comparison.

There is one vital difference, though. You can't serve my life hot from the oven with strong, sugarless milky tea.

Always new

It seems I will never tire of gazing upwards. At least, I hope I never do.

If you love breakfast

And also painting. And journalling. And joyfully documenting life, even in the mundane and the not-so-good.

The Art of Breakfast from DannyGregory on Vimeo. (I enjoyed the whole thing, but the end credits were something else!)

Danny blogs here.

For those with chronic sleep problems

I say

if you want

to get better

at doing something,

you learn

from those

who do it

best.

All photographed at Perth Zoo. Not the worst place to spend a rare sunny day. Especially after a fortnight of coughing indoors while outside paints itself in many shades of cold, wet grey. I was possibly coughing more by the end of the day, but there are no regrets. All that fluff (and fangs, and lumbering majesty, and ponderous beauty, and scurrying-about cuteness) was worth it.

Hot water