Community Supported Agriculture

I love food!! Maybe it is my Italian heritage, I don’t know. But I love everything about meals from searching for the perfect recipe to sitting down and sharing a great meal and great conversation with family and friends. If I had more hours in my day I'd love to spend them searching farmers markets and concocting new dishes in the kitchen.  And I love grocery shopping, which my mom thinks is strange since it is the bane of her week.  But for me walking leisurely down the aisles and looking at all the possibilities stretched out before me is therapeutic.

Up until my son was born I was somewhat of a fair-weather follower of the sustainable, organic, local food movement.  However, once it was time for my son to start eating solid foods I started paying much closer attention to where our food was coming from.   At the same time I had very little time to make it to the local farmers markets.  Luckily for me I found a wonderful local business that delivered fresh, organic produce and eggs to our door weekly and it didn’t cost more than we’d usually spent on produce!!  What more could a new, crazy working mom ask for other than a few more hours of sleep!! 

My weekly baskets had all sorts of interesting items I had never heard of and had no idea what to do with, like kohlrabi.  But that was part of the fun. It allowed us to find fun new ways to cook all of the new goodies in our weekly baskets.  And everything in our weekly basket tasted so much better than produce from the grocery store.  I still have not tasted a Clementine that rivaled the ones in those baskets.   Simplicity found! 

Sadly that little business closed, but not long after a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm popped up in our town. I love that my son knows his local farmer by name and he gets to see where and how his food is grown and harvested.   Then he gets to share in the preparation and cooking of our meals, and the best part is enjoying the fruits of our labor with family and friends. 

For me being connected to our food, where it comes from, how it is prepared, and how it is shared is the essence of simplicity.

Mindfulness Meditation

Last January I joined a meditation group. I had tried meditating a few times before, but it never really stuck as a practice. However, my interest in it always lingered.  So like most things (exercise, learning a new language, etc.) I decided that joining a group with an instructor might help.  It was one of the best gifts I've ever given myself.   I cherish the one hour a week that I spend at my meditation class. It makes me calm, it makes me happy, it gives me a sense of peace, and it most importantly it gives me focus and mindfulness. It allows me to tune out the external voices (media, society, parents, husband, friends, work, etc.) that tell me who I should be and LISTEN to the inner voice that reminds me who I am and the interests, dreams, goals, passions that are mine. Meditation is my vehicle to simplicity and bliss.

It's Time for Simplicity!

I recently attended the 2010 Women’s Conference.  The theme of this year’s conference was “It’s Time”.  For me it's time for simplicity. It’s time to clean house, metaphorically speaking.  It’s time to focus on the things that bring me happiness and simple pleasure and abandon those things that do not. This blog chronicles my journey to that end.  I’m not sure where this journey will take me, but I’m up for the adventure.