Fresh ingredients make healthy meals for body and mind, maybe soul, too

After a week eating hotel food, it's a relief to be back home to my usual fare. Cooking for one has its pros and cons. Sometimes I am too lazy to fix a meal I know will satisfy both my appetites: for maintaining a healthy body and for visual appeal. Thoughtfully prepared food is art. It is easier to eat moderate and healthy meals when they are prepared with a preponderance of fresh ingredients. Canned and other processed foods are lifeless, lacking in that vitality that feeds body and soul. Hot foods warm both heart and stomach. Leftover food come alive again when reheated with fresh ingredients or chilled as a salad.
 
What makes for vitality in our daily routines? Vitality for me is what soul or spirit is to other people. A friend tells me he goes to church on Sundays to feel "refreshed." Going to church starts us with a newly laundered soul for the new week. We stomp our feet and leave yesterday's dust behind. Confession used to serve a similar purpose for Catholics. They unburden themselves of guilt so there is room once again in their hearts to start anew. They will make mistakes again and accumulate flotsam and jetsam in the soul but there is the recourse of cleansing it in the sacrament of renewal.
 
Maybe this is the same impulse in many of us for spring-cleaning. We open the windows, change the bedclothes, put away the heavy winter garments and prepare to live more lightly again, unencumbered with the contemplative penitences of the dark, cold days. Which have their own virtue for allowing us to dig into our souls for what we may have lost from dancing like sprites in spring and summer.
 
Summer for me is fresh vegetables, just as spring is bright flowers. All though the calendar the seasons mark phases our lives mirror. We are infants, then frisky children, ambitious young adults, more easily contented older folks, until we can lay our bodies down gently to go into the night.

Posted via email from Duende Arts