Lately I feel like I am turning into a tomato. I am living, breathing and dreaming tomatoes. We have made tomato-everything at our house and still our tomato plants keep producing ripened fruit that requires fairly immediate attention. Yesterday, I had to get rid of some pretty gross tomatoes before I promptly started to make more tomato sauce with the good ones. I was thrown into action.
This ripening-abundance of early fall will also seemly come to a screeching halt after a good frost if we don’t pick the partially ripe and unripened fruit left on the plants. It’s all a choice.
Our minds are just like this.
Experiences can be like the fruits piling up in the bowl. If the ripened fruits are left unobserved we will fail to respond and they will be missed opportunities; they will rot.
Any experience…a brand new one or something so familiar to you that you could do it in your sleep, can be experienced in a fresh way if you are willing to observe and respond: pick the single fruit as it’s ready and eat it off the vine, or pick a bunch of tomatoes at once and make salsa, tomato sauce, gazpacho. You can choose to watch things as they are and then respond this way today and that way tomorrow, dependent upon the depth of your observation. You can choose to live the life that’s at your door.
Likewise, when the frost comes, you can choose to forget you have a garden altogether or you can harvest what’s left and figure out where to go from there…Why not ripen tomatoes indoors? Or try recipes that call for green tomatoes?
Practices like yoga and meditation cultivate moment-to-moment awareness which in-turn cultivates an embodied life; one that you live as it happens no matter the circumstances of the season or the well-worn paths of cravings and aversions in your mind.
And that…is just a little food for thought 🙂
Ingredients:
About 2 pounds of ripe, roughly cut, mixed variety of tomatoes
sea salt and fresh pepper
red wine vinegar with a bit of balsamic
extra virgin olive oil
1 clove of garlic, pressed or grated
1 fresh red chilli pepper, deseeded and chopped finely
fresh oregano and basil leaves
1. Put tomatoes in a colander and sprinkle with sea salt and let excess moisture drip away from the fruit into the sink or bowl beneath for about 15 minutes or so. Discard liquid. The tomatoes won’t taste salty but will be really flavourful. Transfer tomatoes to a serving dish.
2. Make the dressing with one part vinegar to three parts oil and then add salt and pepper to taste, the garlic and chilli. Pour over the tomatoes and garnish with fresh oregano and basil leaves and serve with a rustic bread. Yum.
Another beautiful read, always inspiring Katherine. Lot of love xx
Thank you for reading these posts. Love you.