Recipe re-do

I used to carry recipes tucked into cookbooks that belonged to my mom.  Her familiar handwriting comforted me even though some recipes were no longer foods I ate or prepared, at the time.  Even as I write with my kitty sprawled across my knees, I wish I had the books and wonder whether in my jumble of ukana(stuff) that book might still take up some space? Later in life, my former mother-in-law passed index cards of famous and favorite foods:  Buttermilk pancakes (i made them every Sunday for more than twenty years), Upside-down tuna pie (cornmeal mix and condensed mushroom soup).  The recipe cards from his grandmothers may pass into my son's hands at some point his own facility as cook seems to have fueled those genes, but a recipe box like the one pictured long replaced with the tiny screens with names I admit to know little.

Time and technology mould and fashion our recipes.  I love the crockpot, and chocolate cake, but for the next while I will have to fore-go the cake and savor meals of comfort made in the crockpot.  On most days, that is good:  the affect of rich food and gluten aren't worth the momentary pleasure; but sometimes, I cheat myself and pay the price of anguish.  Healing is a long term process and fixes or cures are often not the recipe that works.  Susun Weed, Herbalist and Wild Woman has crossed my path several times.  Though we have never met, her work as healer, and her story from an astrological point of view continue to offer me options or reinforcement.  The other night I was rereading my favorite astrology book by Elizabeth Rose Campbell.  In it I read a quote from Weed, about the influence of the asteroid Chiron in her life as healer.  In essence Weed said, "It is not my job as healer, to steal the pain of another..."  Her philosophy embraces the belief that imperfection is the place to begin healing, and from that place of acceptance:  "With your cancer, you are perfect " the body-soul will seek out it's perfect recipe.  Somewhere in her story Weed also said of Chiron[the wounded healer] that given time, Chiron will work with your pain and heal the whole rather than to remove the symptom.  At first glance, that sounds homeopathic, and it is.  Nothing wrong with that, and it's an approach or recipe I have used in tandem with others. 

What occurs to me as I fashion the story on re-doing recipes is how allowing I am, or we as humans are, in the adjusting or amending of recipes that work or don't work.  My kitty is mending an infected eye, accepting the juiced wheatgrass we squirt into her tear-duct, licking the juice from her fur that I rub on her back.  We refrain from the antibiotic eyedrops offered, giving her time to heal.  I observe and feel her eye; notice that she is more or less frisky.  Today there is less drainage from the eye.  We are sympatico ... we are common friends.  She attends to herself, notices our vibes.  I try to remember it's not up to me to steal her pain.

Somewhere there is a recipe for two-crust fresh apple banana pie I used to bake when we still lived in Kuliouou Valley.  My friends told me there have a copy of the recipe clipped from the Hawaii Island Journal days.  Ha? I had forgotten I wrote that, and even forgotten how I loved baking and eating Apple Banana Pie.  That pie is as old a food of comfort as it gets beckoning memories of dinners at the old Kaimuki Inn circa 1955.  Not possible to get a hand of Apple Bananas from my Quonset in the woods of Whidbey.  Somehow the recipe slips into space out of reach, at least for a while.  It's painful to know Apple Banana Pie is a recipe lost to me, but it's okay for now because it wouldn't taste quite the same without the gluten of a wheat crust. 

Know what I mean?