midnight word

April Rain Song

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain. 

Langston Hughes

A Ritual to Read to Each Other 

My husband is on a glacier in British Columbia. He also loves Gazpacho.

Those two facts might appear to be completely disconnected, but bear with me here. The truth of the fact is that Gazpacho is exactly what I wanted to eat for dinner tonight, and even though my husband is off on a mountaineering adventure in the Waddington Range of British Columbia, I feel somehow like he is here with me when I make a meal that I know he would absolutely adore.

Sune LOVES mountains. I love mountains too, I may even love them more than the next guy. But I know I don’t love them like Sune loves them. Mountains to Sune are essential. To him, they are the unifying force in the universe. As a multi-national citizen, Sune has made himself truly “at home” in more places in the world than most people have seen the sun set over. But no home on earth compares with the sense of home he feels in any mountain range anywhere in the world. A little game we sometimes play involves me showing him a photograph of a small piece of rock and him identifying from what mountain range in the world that rock originates. 99.9% of the time he is dead accurate.

Sune is a field guide in the Antarctic where once after 10 weeks of sheer bliss mountain climbing and crevasse traversing across that southern landscape he found himself in Capetown, South Africa ordering his first non-Antarctic meal in 15 months and what do you think he ordered? Gazpacho!

So tonight I made gazpacho in honor of Sune’s most recent expedition. Happily, I’ll join him in 3 weeks on that glacier and experience the calm, awesome beauty of those ice locked peaks. Stay tuned for more back country recipes—one of my favorites nuts to crack! And for now, eat some gazpacho why don’t you?

Sune’s Gazpacho:

3 firm, large tomatoes, nicely chopped
1/4 red onion, minced
1/2 yellow bell pepper, nicely chopped
1/2 cup Italian parsley, minced
1 clove of garlic, pressed
1 lime, juiced
1 smoked sardine preserved in olive oil (optional)
2 large slices of sourdough bread, charred and torn into cubes
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar (actually I used pomegranate vinegar because that is all I had)
2 teaspoons Marmite (Worcester or soy sauce could work too)
1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
cracked black pepper and snobby-but-delicious Maldon sea salt, to taste

Chop the tomatoes, onion, bell pepper and parsley and combine in a large bowl.
Mix the olive oil, vinegar, lime juice, garlic, Marmite, and cayenne pepper and sardine (if using) in the blender until smooth.
Pour 2/3 of the tomato mixture into the blender, mix until all ingredients are incorporated.
Tear up your charred pieces of bread into bite size pieces and add them to the blender, you can pour some olive oil on top if you need a bit more liquid. Blend until mostly smooth.

Add plenty of salt and pepper to taste, pour the blender mixture into the bowl with the remaining chopped vegetable mixture, dish up into bowls and serve with plenty of charred, crusty bread for dipping. Serves 4 people.

I have a project in mind about life, villages, happiness and a new rural paradigm. For now, here’s a preview of our winter in rural England. 

The cold view to take of our future is that we are therefore headed for extinction in a universe of impersonal chemical, physical, and biological laws. A more productive, certainly more engaging view, is that we have the intelligence to grasp what is happening, the composure not to be intimidated by its complexity, and the courage to take steps that may bear no fruit in our lifetimes. -Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Photo credit N.Wilder

Just returned from a trip! Traveling with a professional photographer doesn’t inspire me to take too many pictures of my own, but maybe that is a good thing because it forced me to process the journey inwardly and I ended up doing a fair amount of writing along the way.

Something about wilderness forces me to strike that balance between discipline and lightness. There are so many ideas, lessons, life practices that float like clouds above my head in an urban setting. It would be nice to be disciplined, nice to be fearless, nice to smile genuinely in the midst of extreme challenge. For me, the wilderness is a place to be those things—to not just anticipate my best self, but to be her.