2of32/CARROTS

So I am reading this book The Raw Food Detox Diet by the beautiful Natalia Rose and in it she suggests that you make this green lemonade which is AMAZING by the way.  You take a lemon, 2 apples, 4 stalks of kale, a head of romaine and some ginger and juice it.  I add an orange and on a day like today when I didn't have anymore Romaine so I used cucumber.  Yum differ!  Now here comes my issue.

Waste.  It literally hurts my soul to take all the pulp and throw it away.  So in the middle of the juicing process I separate the kale and lettuce pulp throw it in the pan with some olive oil and sea salt and flash cook it for about a minute....DELICIOUS!!!!!  NOW I am not only juicing kale EVERY DAY I am eating it as well.  Great.  I have minimized my waste and my body is loving it.

Many times people ask me why I look so young and vibrant.  I can't say I am the HEALTHIEST person on the planet but I believe that food as God made it in its purest form is best for our bodies.  I love food, whole UNPROCESSED FOODS.  Many think I am a vegetarian, I AM NOT.  Many think I am a Raw Foodie, I AM NOT.  But I love pure food....simple.  So if you catch me with a rib in my mouth I don't want you to think me a hypocrite.  So I am setting the record straight.  I believe in balance and whole foods, as God intended.  AND I believe in GOOD TASTING foods.  I love cooking, and sharing    the gift of my understanding of flavors with others.  It is much like my love of performance, I see no difference in the two really.  I have a gift and I just love sharing it.  Only with food, I haven't gotten paid for it YET.  My friends, even my mother - who is the greatest benefactor of my food exploits now and the main inspiration- state, "You should open a restaurant!"  Lots of work, maybe when I retire..

So I am talking to my friend Felisha on the phone, trying to convince her to buy a juicer.  She is a vegan and I just want to make sure she gets all of her nutrients in.  Many times, vegans and vegetarians, because they don't eat from the full spectrum of foods, don't get all of the enzymes, vitamins and minerals that all foods provide.  She tells me about this amazing drink she had of carrot, apple and banana.  I am like, "Felisha, you can't juice a banana"  She explains that you you juice the juice then blend the banana.  I have a bag of organic carrots so after juicing my green lemonade I start in on the carrots.  I have a bag of pulp, orange bright, full of Vitamin A and Carotene (sort of the same thing).  "Make carrot bread, I know you can do a good job on that girl"  And there it was.....I don't wanna waste all those vitamins that God placed here for me, I don't wanna throw it in the trash.  oh!

So now I am surfing the web, looking for the best use of my carrot pulp.  Carrot cake, carrot bread, carrot marmalade, carrot soup, carrot bricks???  I am not sure what to do right now one lady suggested flattening it out and freezing it and then breaking off pieces to use in soups, I can dehydrate it in my dehydrator, maybe make carrot chips.  Or I could just throw it away and pray for forgiveness.  I could start a compost pile.  What should I do!!!!!!??????

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New Direction 1 of 32

So I am trying this 32 day process thing where I will blog everyday for 32 days.  Only thing I want to do is to unlink it from my facebook.  I kinda want these to be two separate entities but I am not sure how to do it.  I guess it shouldn't matter, but somehow it does.

Fear started to choke the life out of my blogging.  Fear of offending, fear of being to open and honest, fear of judgement, fear of limiting opportunities for career, love and joy.  The whole point of this blogging was to share and invoke joy.  I am a soul searching for heaven in the now.  Allowing the illusion of suffering to be lifted from my clouded eye is what I am about.  Being in joy.  Allowing the gifts of spirit to be seen.  Being able to see.  That is the direction I steer and even if I only say two words, if I can get to a computer for the next 32 days I will post.

I just saw most of JULIE/JULIA.  Obvious inspiration there.  I loved the joy of Julia Childs spirit.  It spoke to me.  Why are we here?  We come and we go.  I want to really be here, while I am here.  I want to be here so bad it makes me cry.  I am aching to really be here, to share my spirit, my gifts, my heart.  I am here!  I am here!

GratiTUDE

It's late, not gonna say much except that I got an attitude of gratitude. I performed in Witness Uganda again tonight at an off Broadway Theater and I just LOVE that I have an opportunity to be challenged to do more, push farther and share my gifts to others. It is such a blessing to be able to bless others....a perfect union of love amongst humanity. I pray for more opportunities to give in this way with more people. I also learned that my insights are different than others and the way I am is perceived differently by different people. My goal in this is to trust myself more and to have the personal integrity to trust that how I get things are worth sharing, imperative to share and a must.

So excited about the adventure of life and what is to come. So very excited and grateful.

Spoils from the Conquest at Barnes and Nobles

So I am on the Upper East Side of Manhattan reading THE FOUR AGREEMENTS BY DON MIGUEL RUIZ. Now I have read this book before, maybe twice. Once because Oprah said to, and you know Oprah used to have the power of the Wizard of Oz.....'The Color is Green! You don't want to be seen if you ain't in green' Another I think at the University of Santa Monica where I earned a MA in Spiritual Psychology and this time, because my dear friend and I were in the book store late last night and he kept asking me, "Matt what is a book I must read?" The adventure began...man I was like," Malcolm X, Souls of Black Folk, Man Child in the Promised Land, no no have you read The Alchemist!?" We were running through the bookstore like kids in a candy store. All of that information steaming up from those books for us to touch and take in its contents. I pulled Siddhartha, he pulled Uncle Tom's Cabin, I pulled Conversations with God, he pulled Oliver Twist. Roots or Malcolm X, Before the Mayflower or Seat of the Soul? The Four Agreements!! Before you know it I am grabbing books to! The fever has hit me and even though I read this book the soul readies itself to hear deeper and more and my soul leaped with joy and said yes! "This is it this is the one you must read!" He wasn't convinced and I think he was right, this was for me.

I had no idea the exhilarating, energizing feeling reading gave me. I was like, "ooooooo you gotta have some James Baldwin in your life! Oh wait, Zora......oooooooo no Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fannon!!! He discovered God in the dagon concentration camps!!! He found peace among the ruins of hate and mayhem........yeah you need that in your life" So many books so much information and God gifted insights and perspectives and journeys and adventures........whew! This was fun! A bookstore.....this much fun....really? Two friends sharing information/light.....an utter joy and gift.

Finally, we stood at the checkout line, perusing our remains of the day (not a bad movie), with a sober more practical knowing; we weren't going to impulse buy the 10 or so books we collectively held. Moving the books back and forth like they were playing cards and we making choices for the draft, we made our final selections as if this was it. And for this moment this was it. There will be more books and more times to read books just like there is a new draft each year but this was the selection for this moment, this season and it felt VERY important.

He settled for Malcolm X, Siddhartha, and The Art of War.....CLASSICS....MUST READS. I on Siddhartha (again), Seat of the Soul (again) and The Four Agreements (again).

Ahhhh let the insights begin...again....

MASARU OZAKI.02

Season's Greetings 2009 - 2010

dRATS!

Okay not cool, not cool at all. I took the train, AGAIN. This time from 42nd street to 34th and caught the express Q to Brooklyn. Walked amid cat calls from cars to my friend Monique DeBose's farewell party. After an amazing a capella singing circle which included some impromptu spoken word from a NY school teacher, I was off to a party of someone that works at the United Nations. So instead of paying 25 in a cab from Brooklyn to gentrified Spanish Harlem, Rita a medical resident at the Brooklyn Hospital walked me to the 4, 5 train so I could take that to Harlem. No problem, right? RATS! I was the only one on the platform and I thought I was in the subway scene from the WIZ, where the walls start coming to life with that do do dooo do doo do music in the background. The rat was sizable, not the cat size that I heard about but sizable. He scurried towards me and was not afraid. I almost started running but I stomped my feet and he paused but not in the way I would have liked. Has somebody been feeding these guys? He was like a little dog wanting to nibble. He reluctantly went away but again, not fast enough.

After going to 86th street and switching to the 6 to 110th and Lexington I sat again to a woman and her cart and her man staring at me.

"You are beautiful!"

"Thank you"

"I love the pink in those shoes and I have the perfect nail polish for them, that color is all wrong"

She was right, the red I had did not match the shade of pink in my shoes but it did match the red in my dress and nothing I had on really matched. And besides, I don't match fingernail polish to shoes!

"I wish I had that nail polish I would give it to you. It would look good! You look good girl, look at you all dressed up" she sized me up as I did her. Definitely recovering or on drugs, definitely a hard life. I wasn't afraid but I was cautious. This is why I don't ride the train was the thought I had but at the same time she wanted to engage, I just wanted to make sure she didn't get off at my stop.

She went on to tell me that she had been in prison, been stabbed several times-which she showed me both on her neck and abdomen, once weighed over 300 pounds, had lost her kids and was trying to get them back, back in recovery after a drug relapse, was a punching bag for her boxer husband, was qualified for her first apartment that she got a 500 stipend to furnish it, that she to knew how to sit like me but didn't like to anymore and that kids used to beat her up when she was young because she was too prim and proper.

"You should write a book! I wish I had some money because I wanna do something with you!"

I said, really knowing that this is another reason I will be a star but then if I am a millionaire would I ride trains and have these random amazing encounters? Maybe I would do it once a month for good measure.

"I was working on a book! I am gonna write one but my computer got a virus because I was turning it on and off the wrong way and I lost everything, but there was an editor and I gotta get to a computer so I can find him again because I sent him all my stuff and I hope he has a copy" she languished with her New York/Spanish accent.

She then went on to recite poetry that bought tears to my eyes.

"I wrote that one in prison"she blankly proclaimed.

"How could you remember it so well?" I was curious.

"These are the ones that come from me, from my soul, they have meaning, that's how I remember, It's from my heart"

She went on to recite another one about the hold that drugs had on her and her pleads to God to free her from that grasp that kept her from everything she held dear. I have had the same pleas the same concerns the same questions as her and I felt her humanity in this moment. Though not drugs, the demon that she named crack has many forms and functions, be it food, drugs, cigarettes, men, bad luck...you get it. We all come here to move beyond something and this was her SOMETHING.

"You not from the city are you?" She already knew the answer.

"No Georgia" I don't know why I said this but I wanted to be from the place she thought I was from. New Jersey just didn't seem to fit. Why would I be so different if I was from New Jersey and to her I was different.

"Yeah, I can tell you haven't been through it like, me but we all have what we have that's why I don't make no excuses, we all go through stuff"

And indeed we do, I had a lot in common with the recovering crack head. My time came to get off the train and before I could say goodbye she said, "Maybe we will see each other again but remember you are a beautiful woman! I hope the best for you."

I wanted to hug her but thought to myself, 'Mattilyn lets not loose it!' So I just replied, "You are an amazing person, who are you?"

"I am nobody"

"No you are definitely somebody"

"I came up out of the cracks"

I thought of the rat coming up from the tracks onto the platform, making its presence known.

"You are definitely somebody" I repeated to her

"Nobody is better than anybody else"

"You are so right"

"God bless you"

"And God bless you"

"Take care"

"I will" and I was off in Spanish Harlem, being followed by a guy in red who I am sure I could have mothered and through the danky streets to an amazing Oasis in the hood, a rooftop party. Amid the chaos we all reside.