Author: Joyce

By Joyce

I hadn’t made collage art in many moons, but when I saw a stack of LIFE Nature Library encyclopedias and a star chart on my neighbor’s curb, I snatched them up for the quiet weekend ahead.  Sorting through images and delving into non-verbalized waters was just the kind of immersion I needed.

On Sunday morning, I found myself surrounded with books and magazines, flipping through pages, reading here and there, and searching for images; I was casual, comfortable with the mess, until I would see something and then out came the scissors.  The open-ended process would suddenly turn into a narrowed down chase. Cutting pictures out, sometimes requiring the X-Acto knife for precision, became my sole pursuit.

I continued to roam randomly through my materials; savagely tearing whole pages out of books and with four snips of the scissors out came graphic images of words too. My hands were busy, and my piles of pictures grew, but nothing was coming together, not in my mind, or on the page.    I threw my Man and Space encyclopedia down.  Useless! Outdated!  A half hour before, collage making felt so purposeful, so easy and relaxed, but with nothing showing for my efforts, doubts started arising. Was I creating meaning or just wasting my time?

Then it happened. The self-doubt gave me access to stronger feelings. With some force, I tore the star chart off its cardboard background; a layer that I had felt inexplicably bound to.  After having thrown off that constraint, my collage quickly came together:  A muscular old lady in a standing pose, carrying a candle on a backdrop of a seasonal star chart.  It clearly expressed my recent reflections on my own aging, and the necessity to keep working my body through all the seasons of my life, and at the same time, carry my own flame, my spark, to keep me moving.

Making art is always revealing.  And unpredicatable.  It is a reliable remedy, bringing to the surface what we are ready to see.

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By Joyce

Friends and neighbors, Claudia and Jackie, joined me today for stair climbing on this fine, and increasingly rare, sunny morning at the concrete stairs tucked in at intersection of S. Cooper St. and Waters Ave. S. in Upper Rainier Beach. There’s nothing better, in between breaths, than talking about books, gardening and local beautification efforts to take my attention off this demanding, sweaty form of exercise.  All of us carried backpacks with varying poundage (5lbs – 20lbs) of rice or other bulk foods to make it more of a load bearing exercise.  As middle-aged women, we need to keep building lean muscle mass since women tend to lose 5 -7 pounds of muscle a year if not doing weight-bearing exercise.  And besides building strong bones, weight-bearing exercise keeps your metabolism fired up because having more muscle generates more metabolic activity, which burns fat.  At fifty-four years old, I’m all for it.

I would have never imagined that I would voluntarily walk up and down stairs carrying weight, but after my backpacking trip to the Sierra Nevada Mountains this past summer, I can’t think of a better way to stay in shape and partake in my local landscape.  While descending the stairs, one is treated to wide screen views of Lake Washington, a performance stage for precipitation and light.  Mist, rain and fog can seem so miserable when exercising indoors but can actually be the very elements to invigorate the senses when experiencing them outdoors.

Finally, what gets me out of bed so I can climb the stairs, three mornings a week at 8AM, is I feel stronger and better for the effort. If I feel stronger, I feel more self-confident.  If I feel more self-confident then I doubt myself less.  If I doubt myself less, I feel better about my life.  If I accomplish nothing else than climbing stairs in a day then I have indeed done a good amount of cardiovascular work.

All the work, all the sweat, is so worth it, and so much more bearable if I have company.  There’s no denying it – I am a social climber.

Please join me on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8AM at the intersection of S. Cooper St. and Waters Ave. S.  If you want to do load-bearing exercise, use a backpack with a waist belt so the weight is well distributed.  Increase load gradually.

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By Joyce

Months before our epic John Muir Trail hike last summer, I experimented with making homemade energy bars; the goal being to bring along tasty nutrient rich snacks that could fuel us on our calorie burning days. I scoured all the energy bar recipes on the web and closely inspected the ingredients lists on the huge array of protein/power/nutrition/ raw bars sold at my local food coop. I was most interested in what manufacturers were using as binders to hold bars together.  After my research and experiments, I found what worked best for me was using a combination of dried dates or apricots, chia seeds, honey, nut butters, apple sauce and coconut oil.  Because I favor raw foods, I used a dehydrator instead of an oven to retain the most nutrition, and preserve the energy bars.  Be assured that the chewy texture was not compromised from being dehydrated.

As we prepared for our hike, I brought along samples of my energy bars for my hiking partners to try out on our training hikes which helped me refine my recipes. Although I wasn’t scientific about calculating their carbohydrate, protein and fat ratios, they were definitely satisfying.  I can attest that once we were on the John Muir Trail, these energy bars did fuel me up all the mountain passes and kept me going on long mileage days. They traveled well in high heat, held their shape and performed admirably on a caloric level, so much so that we ate far fewer of them than anticipated.  Whether you are hiking or not, it’s handy to have these bars around as snacks or additions to lunches.

The following recipes, although all yummy, are listed in order of popularity. Use my recipes as a guideline for proportions but make substitutions for different protein powders, nuts, seeds or dried fruit if you have a different preference.  Store them in glass sealed containers or, if traveling, you can vaccuum pack or keep them in Ziploc plastic bags.

Sprouted Buckwheat & Carob Energy Bar

The sprouted buckwheat offers a nice crunchy texture and Carob satisfies chocolate lovers.

1 cup dried dates (soaked)

1 cup almond meal

1 cup whey protein powder

1 cup walnuts

2 cups sprouted buckwheat groats

½ cup Chia seeds  (soak ½ cup chia seeds in 1 cup water)

¼ cup carob powder

½ cup cacao nibs

¼-1/2 cup honey

pinch salt

Instructions

Sprout  your buckwheat groats.  I place my grouts in a colander to sprout so it is easy to rinse.

Soak ½ cup chia seeds in 1 cup water.  Wait ½ hr.

In Cuisine art, pulse walnuts into small chunks.  Put aside

In Cuisine art, pulse soaked dates into a paste.

In mixing bowl, mix together all of the above ingredients until they all stick together. Transfer and flatten mixture to ½”-5/8” on dehydrator trays covered with either parchment or non-stick dehydrator sheets on them.  Use a pizza cutter to cut energy bars into a grid of whatever dimensions you prefer, but don’t cut all the way through so you can easily flip it later.  Set temperature on dehydrator to 115
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By Joyce

Chop. Chop.  Time to harvest and preserve the kohlrabi.  I had a hunch kohlrabi would make a good ferment because as a brassica it is sweet, similar in color, and crunchy like cabbage, but this outer-worldly looking vegetable is even more versatile.  In this ferment, I added Hungarian hot wax peppers to give subtle spice, and indeed, the combo created a delicate balance of flavors.

Below is my recipe, such as it is.  The fermentation process lends itself to experimentation and variation.  I change it up based on what is available from my garden or on sale in the grocery store, usually making just quart size containers at a time.  Having a few different ferments bubbling away on the kitchen counter or in the refrigerator allows me to serve several small side dishes (Korean-style) alongside main dishes at dinner.  The variation at the table not only stimulates interest but the digestion as well.

In Vegetable Fermentation Further Simplified, Sandor Katz gives the lowdown on how to ferment any vegetable.  If you are looking to get into fermentation, follow his guidelines and you’ll be making very original side dishes and manufacturing your own tasty probiotics in your kitchen in no time.  I’d love to hear about what you are fermenting.

Fermented Kohlrabi

3 – 4  kohlrabi

2 Hungarian hot wax peppers

2 teaspoons salt

Peel skin off kohlrabi and shred in cuisine art or mandolin.

Place shredded kohlrabi in bowl and sprinkle 2 teaspoons of salt over kohlrabi.

Wash hands and massage kohlrabi until you’ve squeezed out as much liquid as possible.

Mix in diced hot wax peppers

Pack vegetables into a canning jar.

Pour liquid over the top of vegetables.

Fill plastic baggie with enough water to weigh down kohlrabi so it is submerged under liquid (usually just 1/2 cup of water).

Place on kitchen counter in a bowl.  As it ferments it will bubble up and excess will spill into bowl.

Wait 3 – 7 days, or more.  Taste often until flavor appeals to you.

Cover with a lid and place in refrigerator.

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By Joyce

Strong as a boulder, small as a pebble, that’s how I feel after returning from a twenty-day backpacking expedition on the John Muir Trail (JMT) in California.  My three trail companions and I hiked over 200 miles from Tuolumne meadows to Mt. Whitney, crossed seven mountain passes over 11,000 feet, and earned a total elevation gain of 46,000 feet during the course of this magnificent, everything-worked-according-to-our-plan trip.

Even though there are enormous health benefits to daily load-bearing exercise, drinking 2-3 liters of water and massive bowel elimination, it was being in the mountains that felt most therapeutic. Most of our days were spent in dry sunny high alpine zones where we walked by pristine lakes and rivers, through boulder fields, talus slopes and scattered granite outcroppings while mountains, dramatic rock cathedrals, either surrounded or beckoned us forward on our southward route.

Of course, it was physically rigorous, and consumed all my attention, to climb and then descend the switchbacks on every mountain pass.  Each step up the mountain, the rarified air, brought me closer to the dizzying cerulean blue sky and dazzling panoramic views.  It’s the kind of high one can’t get from smoking or imbibing; elevation elation comes from hard-core effort.  However, the subjective significance of all my efforts shrunk to pebble size compared to the import of the geologic forces that both built and eroded the Sierra Nevada mountain range.  It was obvious: me, my time on earth is puny; I too will erode. My insignificance in the scheme of things wasn’t a negation of my existence, just a perfectly calibrated dose of reality, and that is exactly the kind of medicine the mountains delivers.

Being in this vast sparse rocky land, I found the spaciousness and silence in myself to safely make my way without much self-commentary given how the wilderness wholly absorbed me. I spent entire days observing the shifts in light, the pecular and wonderful rock formations, the coursing of water through streams, the emerald and turquoise lakes populated by trout, and the ever changing vantage points which convinced me that I was beholding the most beautiful sight in my entire life, only to cancel that thought ten switchbacks later when I would again be forced by sheer awe to make that proclamation all over again.

Now as I re-enter my life in Seattle, I am not just noticing natural beauty in my surroundings, I am stopping more regularly, and opening up space and time in myself to really experience it. This morning as I stood in my kitchen washing dishes, I looked out to the backyard and observed water evaporating and swirling into an ethereal mist off our canvas chairs from the previous night’s rain; pausing, I engaged in this very quiet transitory moment. Allowing myself more time to concentrate on each moment as it arises requires an internal stillness. My mentors, the mountains, modeled how to hold steady and poised while in the flow of
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