Raw for One

My self-taught culinary skills, however novice and incomplete, have come in handy for my first ever 100% Raw and all-organic meal at home! (Up to this point, I've only had what amounts to partially Raw meals and totally Raw snacks.) From top left to bottom: Mango-strawberry-kale smoothie, vegetable juice, garlic dill cashew-cheese dip (purchased from a very talented woman who's name I don't yet know; I didn't eat the whole tub in this one sitting, of course),  whole avocado, small piece of raw sun butter bread (a dense, cracker-like snack composed largely of seeds, herbs and fruit - by Two Moms in the Raw - who make an array of yummy snacks), celery, raw grass-fed hormone-free ground beef, drizzled in cold-pressed olive oil, seasoned with herbs, raw red onion and covered in raw Amish asiago cheese.... YUM!

Body Language

I am in awe of my body.

I don't mean that in an unreasonably narcissistic way. I mean simply that I have never been as appropriately thankful as I am now for all the impressive, microcosmic miracles my body performs on a daily basis, no thinking required. Having to monitor just one of those functions 'manually', as I do now with my diabetes, is quite enough to bring home a very deep appreciation.

My wonder and gratitude stem from a very personal and profound spiritual awakening I experienced in the year or so leading up to my introduction to Raw foods. Without getting too specific, let it suffice to say that, until recently, I had been so engrossed in my spiritual insights and adventures as to be less than attentive to the physical world, except where tethered to it by my insulin pump.

Diagnosis 1600.1: Fish Out of Water

Exactly three years ago today, I had an experience I can only call life-changing. Though, at times, it's led me down a dark and difficult path, it has finally brought me to where I am now - a place of overwhelming gratitude, healing, community and love.

Following is my description of the events, from an online letter I originally composed on Monday, January 28, 2008.

Suddenly Diabetic.

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I'm still picking away the medical tape. 

I keep finding remnants of it in deliberately spaced vital intervals all over my body, and at times, in intimate places, which makes me tearfully shudder, "Where was I?"

But it's my arms that really tell the story of my visit to the ER a week ago Friday. The bruises on my wrists and inner elbows where ER and ICU nurses pumped countless fluids and IVs and drew blood - sometimes with so little success they had to stick me several times or go almost an inch deep - have now turned shades of rancid brown and green. Apparently, I am a Type 1 Diabetic... and I nearly died finding out about it.