Cosmic Rivers, Starting With Pizza And Good Mint Soap

So, go. I have to go to town today to buy things to make pizza and we are having a pizza party tonight for Kathleen's birthday although of course she is not calling it a birthday party, just a pizza party, a girl's night out party.
Here are things I use to make pizza:
Tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, spinach, pineapple, jarred sauce, cheese, onions, olives, deer sausage, maybe some chicken sausage, maybe some banana peppers...I don't know what all.
Flour of course and salt and yeast and a tiny bit of sugar. What am I forgetting? Seems like there is more than that.

Yesterday's fluidity in life seems to have taken leave again, flown and flowed off to visit someone else (lucky soul!) and I am timid again, poor little country mouse. I need to wash my hair.

Last night I took a bath and used a piece of mint soap that Kathleen had given me yesterday from an earlier batch she'd made that her cat had laid on and squished down and it was amazing, that soap and now my whole bathroom smells like heavenly mint. I remember the first time I ever drank mint tea. It was at Hanuman's Conscious Cookery Restaurant in Denver, Colorado about one million years ago- a restaurant far ahead of its time where the ingredients were local and probably grown by white-turbaned monks in a magical garden protected from cold and snow by gods of great beneficence, the vegetables, the beans, the cheese, that mint tea which they brought you a pot of and you could hold the steaming cup in your hand and it warmed you through and through as you waited for your food which was being cooked according to the "cook's consciousness" as stated in the menu and sitars played softly in the background and I will never forget their broccoli hollandaise, their mung bean casserole, their brown bread, their mint tea.

It was right down from the university and sometimes, bored and tired of the vegetarian options at the cafeteria in the dorm (I had chosen to become a vegetarian and I do not quite remember why but it made perfect sense to me) I would go there, sit at a table by myself or sometimes with someone else I knew and that was one of the places I learned to cook by eating.
Sometimes I got fennel seed tea instead of mint.
It was all heavenly.

It was eons before its time.

I just googled the restaurant and found this.

And then this.

From which I just learned that Hanuman's Conscious Cookery had ties to Orlando and Winter Park which were just down the road from Winter Haven where I lived before I moved to Denver. And in one of the pictures from the second link, I see Stephen Gaskin whose wife, Ina May, played such a role in my own personal life and in the lives of thousands and thousands through her work and writing as a midwife.



Wow. Well.

I had no idea. In some of those pictures I saw the faces of the men and women who waited on the tables at Hanuman's. How strange to have just flown back in time and to have discovered more of the mystery of that place.



So. Here I am in Lloyd, Florida, now drinking a cup of mint tea, and I started out talking about pizza and suddenly, I am remembering mung bean casserole and white-turbaned servers who walked in a sort of visible grace- say what you will, I was there- and although I will never in this lifetime be a practitioner of any sort of religion, all of them have touched me at one point or another and yes, probably changed me.

Stephen Gaskin was the one who led his band of hippies back to the land in Tennessee and I suppose his message affected me the most and of course, his wife's message that birth is a sacrament and is best experienced at home if possible. And on the (not always) Evil Facebook, I have discovered that Ina May has a new book out. Birth Matters.


Circles of light and circles of sustenance and circles of wisdom and folly and memory and sometimes Lord, I can barely hold on to the rivers of it all as it swirls and as I so often say, we are flung about through this universe and even if my fluidity has flown has flowed, the rivers are still running, some rivers of chanting, some rivers of dirt-and-soybeans-and-birth, some rivers of prayer, some rivers of music and of words and of all things which are created and I can't even begin to know where they begin, where they will end, where the confluence of them is located or even if there is one, but maybe they all do, somewhere, and that is the location of It All and even if I do not swim in one of them, I can drink from them all and some of them taste of mint and some of them taste of tears and some of them taste of light and some of them taste of blood and all of them are part of It, I think.