Tentative Parenting : Shempa, two pokes & a curry undone !

There is a concept in Buddhism known as “Shempa” and next to Anomie is one of my favorite words -  a Shempa is a place where we are “hooked.” It’s something that gets under our skin, that works its way into our mind and we find after a while we can’t stop thinking about it and letting it go is difficult.  ---Meenakshi 

                                                                                                                                          Art Credit : VasuKi M.

I was a hungry grouch today - I was fasting and went over to the hospital for a blood draw...the  serene looking lady poked my left hand searching for the vein...moving the needle around...the vein collapsed and she had to poke me again on my right hand to draw blood...yes! if you saw a tired looking person walking around with two band-aids at the Oracle campus today...that was probably me. I had ten thousand uncharitable thoughts go through my head
#Idiot
#Moron
# she hurt me
#let me give her a dirty look
And then I took a deep breath as she poked me the second time and I let that feeling of disgruntlement and ire course through me, not trying to hide it or smother it with false platitude.  Once I had felt that feeling fully I let it go completely without getting attached to it...the result was I was able to give the lady a smile and have a normal conversation with her around mundane nothings. I was also able to go about the rest of  the day *without* thinking about that unnecessary poke (which is now a large bruise). But as we should allow those negative moments to pass through us, we should also let the good little moments linger – like that energizing Zumba class, the hug from K2, or how good that coconut burfi tasted --- we typically hold on to the negative exchanges and fail to notice the sweet moments. We can minimize the bourgeois suffering (our self-creation in the end) by practicing -negative --pass through, positive--imprint!

I have been pretty full of myself the past 2 weeks...my cooking has been on a roll and I have been dishing out Dals, Curries, Pastas, Soups and even exotic things like Haleem... which all turned out fabulous, however this week I got Guvar from the farmer's market which is my favorite vegetable and which I normally would simply saute with onions and eat by itself...delicious, known and simple. Not this week - I found a reasonably different recipe that I ventured to try and let me tell you the end-result wasn't pretty...it was mostly inedible and I ended up throwing out most of it...it was a humbling experience. To soothe my frugality at the waste of my absolute favorite (and rare to find in the farmer's market) vegetable I made some soul soothing coconut burfis. Here is the recipe I used

I swapped the order of the shredded coconut ( I used Bob Mill's Shredded Organic Coconut - unsweetened) and Condensed Milk (Trader Joe's Organic Condensed Milk)...here's how it looked

And it tasted even better than it looked and I was ok with the curry that came undone. So to K2 I offered these words today as he cried a little bit over complex multiplication tables 
#Don't get attached to the results
#Enjoy the process

Dedicating this post to all those 9/11 mothers who loved and lost....