Olives, I prefer the ones with pits. Not California, but the real ones, the ones that haven’t been sanitized for an American audience.
Olives, of the twisted-gnarly-tree variety, and I love olive trees, too, they can live to well over a thousand years. I saw the olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, and who knows whose hands have touched that trunk. Trunk upon trunk, so thick, so multilayered, it recalls patterns. Rows of headstones, rings of water from a drop. A cumulus cloud tucked inside another inside another.
Mom is picky, Dad eats anything. Where did they get their sensibilities when it comes to food, and did I get mine from them?
Texture is my main care. Don’t like most shellfish, don’t like the thought of calamari. I like the taste, and I’ve had good calamari, good shrimp, but the thought of what I’m eating, tentacles, and that string of shrimp vein you have to take out before you cook it. That thought lodges in the back of my left lobe, and it’s as if it’s in my throat, that thought.
I used to hate steak, and even now I can’t look at my meat as I cut it. I can’t stare down a chicken wing, veins and corpuscles bother me.
My girls love chile, and I have to think that if you don’t make a big deal out of certain foods, kids won’t either. “Your girls eat chile?!” people tell me, and I don’t mean a spoonful, they love burritos smothered in red.
Olives. I love the color, olive green. I love the texture of an olive, how it’s like a meat, but the kind of meat I wish real meat could be.
Have you ever seen people who mix all their foods on their plates? I once saw a woman who wouldn’t let her mashed potatoes touch her salad greens. She was not into gravy.
Last night I ate a salad to die for, mixed greens tossed in a lemon-anchovy dressing, grated Parmesan and grilled asparagus on top.
Good food, food prepared well, is a blessing, a rainbow, a mist, sunlight after dark clouds, a primrose at evening. Good food, food prepared with a present mind, loving intention, none of it tastes bad, and I can put aside my food eccentricities for a well-cooked meal.
My favorite foods are strong, not bland. Thai anything, spicy tuna rolls, good red chile, pickled-with-vinegar. I wonder what my cravings say about my yin and yang. Surely one of them is out of whack.
-from Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – OLIVES
I’m sitting here marveling at how, in 15 minutes, you put together words so well that I feel as if I’ve just gone on a food adventure, traveling through tastes, other lands, and a little of your mind/soul.
Thai anything is tops on my list, too.
I sometimes think food prepared well is not just a blessing, but HAS been blessed somehow by the person or people preparing it. Blessed with their love and good thoughts. It seems to me that anything prepared that way must absolutely be good for the body as well as the soul.
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Thanks, Robin.
To me my 15-minute writing practices feel too fast and too light, like they don’t really go anywhere. Of course, some manage to drop deeply into first thoughts, and those ones shine to me. Regardless, I’m glad this one took you on a little journey.
Yes, a home-cooked meal made by someone who gives it their all — nothin’ better.
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This olive tale travelled to the garden of Gethsemane. I love what you wrote about the ancient olive tree there, and whose hands may have stroked the bark.
You are so right that texture is hugely important in food – to me also. Also hate bland food and prefer savory salty sour to sweet, love really spicy.
Because food takes so long to grow, it should be handled with reverence and prepared with love. Foodstuffs are such a gift, and preparing and presenting them to others is a ceremonial kind of thing. Fast food has none of that soul-fullness, and eating it is done almost without awareness, just stuffed down on the fly.
Great write, you covered much ground in your brief allotted time. G
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yb food is a magic subject, and you got a lot into a little time.
Excuse a rude question, but if you want to write more in depth and take your time, what’s stopping you? Did you make a deathbed promise to someone to do 15-minute writing practice for the remainder of your days?
(We discussed the danger of the blogospere mentality of ‘your blog is only as good as what’s new on it today’ mentality’ before). Just think, you only found Camelot because it came round for a re-tread.
Am I right in thinking that you once, long ago several months when I was new to blogging chided me for recycling the date on a piece? I thought at the time that you were right, and stopped doing it. But hang on – if one does a really good post, an exceptional one – isn’t it natural to want to expose it to a new audience from time to time? So maybe we should not automatically reject recycling material under all circumstances.
The olive is very special – I take it you know that it has the ability to regenerate itself from its roots, if it is burnt to the ground?
It’s true, food is very special – a form of creativity strikingly different from words, music, pictures… pity it can’t be shared in cyberspace
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P.S. maybe I’m presuming: DO you do slow & long type writing? – And are the results to be found somewhere?
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Not a rude question at all; it’s a good one. (And your delivery is, as always, the best. No deathbed promises, and now that I know how hard it is to publish new material each week, I’m an advocate of recycling posts 8) .)
If I’m writing an essay or other writing project, I don’t limit myself to 15-minute sprints. But days go by where I’m not working on anything substantial; the 15-minute practices are a way to keep “in shape.” Just like practicing a guitar 15 minutes a day. Also, the timer automatically puts me in keep-your-hand-moving mode, where I don’t ponder what the next word might be.
When I’m working on something meaty, I will write in longer stretches. One hour is about my limit, though, for writing without pause. And I do mean, zero pause.
Reason we publish our 15-minute practices, in spite of the fact that they’re not meant for publishing, is because this is, in part, a demo blog; i.e., here’s what a 15-minute writing practice might net. Even more useful would be a demo of how a raw writing practice can be polished into a final piece. We did that once with a guest writer (LINK).
Glad to see you’re questioning my advice and considering to republish the good stuff. Oh, and yes, I write by hand and type both. All the writing practices that I publish here were written in long-hand then entered into the computer. I much prefer writing by hand, but it’s not practical some times.
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How ’bout you, stranger, do you have a preference: long-hand or type it in?
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Not a 15 minute comment maybe, but a meaty one nevertheless – thank you yb.
I went from longhand to manual then electric typewriter, and finally word processor. Now I doubt if I any longer have the muscles needed to hold a pen for more than a few minutes.
One puzzle left by your comment: I understand how writing practice allows, even obliges you to let stuff flow out without exerting all kinds of controls on it. I don’t know if you’ve been following the conversation between Colleen Anderson and myself on muse-driven versus ego-driven writing – in it, we’ve been discussing the merits and demerits of both, and certainly both seem to feel that each is important. But muse-driven in our definition has really been about those things that ‘write themselves’ – I’m not sure what the relation is between this and your writing practice. I guess you’ve had the experience of those moments when you feel an imperative need to write, and stuff just pours out – how do you evaluate writing practice relative to this? Is writing practice about liberating the muse, or about technical fluency, or both… enlightenment please?!.
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I hadn’t been following the conversation, stranger, but I did check out the two links.
Is writing practice about liberating the muse? For me, yes and no. I don’t experience a muse in the sense of having something outside of myself inspire me. So, in that respect, no. However, for me writing practice is a way to ensure that regardless if I feel moved or inspired, I still produce. I still fall into a mode where it’s not my mind or ego that is squeezing the words out of me but rather a more natural flowing of what it is I have to say.
Not sure if that makes sense, but I almost see writing practice as getting to the same outcome as “being touched by the muse.” Except, instead of the muse being outside of me, it is all within me.
p.s., that’s not to say that external things don’t inspire, because actually they do. Someone else’s writing, a piece of art, a beautiful day, the rain. These all can inspire. But they are not, per my understanding of “the muse,” muses. Or are they?
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Hi yb,
I can’t do a short reply, which is why it hasn’t arrived yet!
catch you later
94S
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Ybonesy
Well, the break only served to convince me of this: what connects us to the muse is not the mind – so one cannot discuss one’s way there.
yb, in my book nothing is more dangerous than to give advice to people – also, I could use the cards, but I don’t ‘spy’ like that, so what follows really is flying by the seat of my pants:
first, the nearest words can come is poetry – see below; second, I think if you want that experience, the best thing to do would be to stop writing – until the day comes when something starts dictating inside you. I said ‘if you want’ and that’s a very large ‘if’. Also, I may be TOTALLY wrong. The best person I know to ask a second opinion from is Kalliope Amorphous – and also, being a woman, I’m sure her perspective would be much closer to you than mine.
But what about your visual stuff: surely there must be many moments when you suddenly do something out of the blue, completely surprising yourself, not even knowing what’s going on?
You know, I like you very much, yb, and I hope always that you have a good trip on this Earthwalk.
But I don’t know if any of this will help!
MUSE
Who is this thief in the night,
breaching all my defences?
Wanton! Wilt thou have thy way
with me again?
When I would resist
thou playest me like a harp –
that air of sweet surrender.
Only be merciful I ask thee;
use me not more than I can stand.
Have thou some care
for my immortal soul,
Lest the power of thy light
be my darkness in the end.
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[…] https://redravine.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/practice-olives-15min-2/ […]
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P.S. If only we could edit comments! I’ve re-read what you wrote, and I end up wondering if this is about differences in experience or merely in semantics: muse, inspiration, inner, outer…
Sometimes I feel as if the more I dig at this issue – conscious versus Unconscious in writing and art – the less I understand. And my suggestion about stopping writing may well be a million miles off target. But about asking Kalliope, that I do believe in – though she too may be at a loss for words!
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Yeah, it’s probably semantics. I certainly don’t feel at a loss for inspiration. But I do appreciate your noodling on it.
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stranger, the Muse poem pulled me in. This idea that the light might be the darkness in the end…yes.
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