Farmer’s Markets and produce stands are, right now, brimming with nature’s bounty. Vegetables and fruit — blueberries and blackberries now in season — are boasting the ever-changing colours of life.

This is the season for the senses, with an abundance of healthy, natural food packed with nutrients and flavor. This is the time of the year we seem to pay more attention to what we eat. The selection and quality are all right there, fresh and ready for the taking.

The adage “you are what you eat” becomes evermore obvious. But it is more than that. We are everything we ingest: food, drink, information and culture.

Yes, the ingredients of our diet — whether a carnivore, herbivore, or an omnivore — is the easiest to track, because food is considered both a habit and a necessity. We are naturally, and physically, aware of the six to eight hours it takes for a meal to travel through our body from consumption to elimination.

The politics or the poetry we absorb is not as easy to trace, and, generally, remains with us a whole lot longer.

As we are, or should be, conscious of the sugar, salt, and fat in our sources of food, we should also be keenly aware of the loving thoughts, negative attitudes, insults and nuclear threats to our lives.

If all we are is food, our lives would not be as nearly as complete or complicated.

We can, and should, enjoy each meal. It should always be more than simply sustenance, as should the literature we read, the music we listen to, and the conversations we have with families and friends.

We feed our bodies with food, our minds and souls with people and the naturally-occurring daily drama. So as we carefully select our groceries, we should pay the same attention to what we watch, the information we take in, and the knowledge we hold.

It is our choice.

With the number of television channels and streaming services, it should be easier than ever to select a quality documentary or drama. With libraries and electronic access to a greater selection of titles than ever before, summer reading should last straight through to December. There need not be a moral to everything, but it should be more than junk food for the mind.

We can choose to listen to the ramblings and rhetoric of talk radio, or we can tune out and tune into any style of music that will uplift the spirits and wipe out the white noise. The menu is all about choice.

And, just as you scrutinize the display of peaches or packets of berries, you should also look closely at your other choices in life.

Are you sated by what you take in? Are you nourished by your relationships? Are you making healthy choices?

You are what you eat, yes, but you are so much more.

Everywhere, every single day, we are confronted with limitations. What we can do, and where we can (or can’t) do it is spelled out on signs, in court documents and governmental decree.

It gets pretty heavy, and quite negative most of the time. Within minutes of reading this you will surely come across directions that will steer you away from something, or remind you that you just can’t.

I know I’m tired of rules and regulations, boundaries, orders, and 24-hour limitations. There are far too many do nots and thou shalt nots, and the word NO is too direct and just damn bossy.

While I respect and, yes, understand the need for law and order, I feel we, as a society, dwell too much on directive instead of focusing on the opportunities available to us. I’ve taken the liberty of offering some everyday possibilities (please feel free to add to the list).

WE can, and WE should:

• Compliment strangers on tattoos, neckties, and the proper use of manners (and chopsticks).
• Eat more quinoa and spinach, or kale (if you want to be trendy).
• Breathe a little deeper.
• Think more about meditating (which in itself may be meditation enough).
• Wear T-shirts that say something (or nothing at all).
• Visit a place you’ve never seen with a person you don’t see enough.
• Pick up the phone and use it as it was intended. Ignore the texts and data, for even just a day, and communicate.
• Replace well-worn, much-loved records that no longer do the music justice. Install a new needle in the turntable.
• Read a biography once in a while and learn how an actor, artist, or even a politician dealt with their shit.
• Write down your dreams, even the scary ones.
• Look across the table and decide if that person is truthful, respectful, and worthy of your time. Ask yourself if you are as well.
• Drive less, but still go places.
• Cultivate kindness.
• Remember places, people, and things once important to you; that includes your morals and ethics.
• Make eye contact.
• Cook the next recipe you see in a magazine. Get away from the same ‘ol-same ‘ol tastes by trying new ingredients and spices.
• Put away your mobile device when walking down the sidewalk. How much life is passing you by just because your head is down?
• Try out a new fragrance. You were a different person when you selected your last favorite scent. Smell like the present.
• Purchase new bedsheets. Comfort is important 24 hours a day
• Smile more often. Sometimes it’s hard, I know, and you don’t see a lot of shiny happy faces walking down the street. We can all change that just by smiling more, and smiling back.
• Turn off the television, turn up the silence.
• Clean behind the fridge.
• Try to live tomorrow a little better than today. Repeat daily.
• Rid yourself of a bad habit by embracing a new one.
• Keep a list of things you want to do. Stroke items off the list as you progress.
• Expand your mind. Take a class in something; pottery, painting, anthropology, tax peperation.
• Expand your vocabulary. Do a crossword puzzle, play Scrabble, or pick random words out of the dictionary.
• Buy yourself new underwear. Would your mother approve of what you are wearing now?
• Practice yoga, take spin classes, run, climd, or bowl: do something that gets your blood pumping.
• Set the table with your finest china and light a candle, even if you are dining alone.
• Invite a neighbor over for dinner. You’ve already taken the time to set a nice table..
• Do something you’ve never done before, and always be prepared to try new things.
• Know the rules. This is especially important if you intend on breaking them.

Be grateful for what we have and appreciate all we have been through. It’s taken a while to get here, and you’ve survived your fair share of bad days and emotional traffic. Thinking of what you’ve done is far more productive than being told what you can’t.

Please feel free to add to the list by clicking on comment (up above). What should you be doing?

 

         The night
accepts the silence,
      appreciates
     the soft, steady breath
         of lovers
        and dogs.

        New Moon
shows as no moon can.
      High resolution
     darkness softening
          hard edges
        and difficult lives,

         Here we are,
part of the silence,
      immune to
     time and temperature,
         and words
      once spoken.
©2017 j.g. lewis

Walls surround me; people tell me, even ask me
where I’ve been. I can’t find the answers, or
the reason from within. If home is the place
where you lay your head, I’ve got no room left
for what goes on when the walls are closing in.

No longer seeking safety or salvation, but simply
common ground. There were never second chances the
first time around. It’s been years since I have come home,
though I’m not without my blame, I’m not without
my judgment and not without my shame.

No reminders. No residue.
No solutions, nor the pain.

More a feeling than a destination, home is not
about geography. Even less the physical location.
The whisper of home gets hard to understand,
even mundane decisions become more difficult
when you take life in your own hands.

Driving forward, moving slowly, the place between
here and this. Listen to music you chose, the next
track on the disc. Melancholy melody, even lyrically
it stokes a chord. We all remember taking chances,
but too often forget about the risk.

Nothing there, nothing lost.
Nothing left. Nothing gained

Of course I’m still dreaming of home, it helps me
pass the time. Past mistakes and memories,
I own them; they are all mine. My mind often loaded
with gentle thoughts of you, yet it still provides
no direction of where I’m going to.

©2017 j.g. lewis

No matter how quickly our technologies evolve, or how fast our processors process, we still rely on ancient methods to make our way through each day.

Just yesterday I wrote in my journal, printed out a card to a loved one, and tapped a text message to my daughter. I started a letter to a friend, composed a forceful email to a pharmaceutical company, and contributed to ongoing dialogue with a curious collection of sensitive souls.

I scribbled out a couple of lines to a poem, added onto the grocery list, jotted down an upcoming appointment in my agenda, and recorded a client concern warranting further investigation.

I wrote with a pencil in a notebook and used a pen on a preprinted form. I also employed a laptop, then a desktop computer, and made use of a few apps on my mobile device.

Through it all, my daily communication — regardless of the format, font or function — was done using the same standard 26 letters and 10 digits that have been used for centuries, along with a handful of punctuation marks for proper order.

In a society that wants to do everything differently than we have on the past, we are stuck on such a simple practice. My country is bilingual; both languages (English and French) use the same characters.

In my life as a writer I have used all the traditional hand-held writing instruments from crayon to fountain pen, and mechanical devices including typewriter, mainframe computer, tablets and my phone.

But the alphabet has not changed in my lifetime, nor that of my father’s, or my father’s father.

The alphabet is old, its roots dating back to 2700 BC. Since the early days of hieroglyphics, we have used similar symbols to show love and anger, and to emphasize sadness or fear. Our wants, our struggles, and our fantasies are illustrated as they always have been.

The letters remain the same. A combination of curves and lines, an R is always an r, the S is the same, again and again, like an A is an a: upper case or lower. We have barely even altered how the letters are used. Today’s Apple keyboards are essentially laid out the same as the keys on yesteryear’s Underwood.

Even the meanings of words can change, but not how they are produced. Words keep the world moving, and learning; they maintain order or spell out anarchy. And we understand. At the turn of the millennium, the printing press was named the greatest invention of all time because of its ability to help spread the written word.

We use the written word more than we ever have. Yes, the format has changed (again) but it is still both our primary form of communication and the essential instrument in recording history.

Years ago, just as this whole digital thing was really catching on, as personal computer sales began to dramatically increase, there was talk about a paperless society. Oh how wrong they were. Newspaper and magazine sales (and production) have declined, but we still shuffle an awful lot of paper at the office.

While we don’t mail letters like we used to, yet our email inboxes continue to fill up.

It’s only words.

We can boast about how society has changed or evolved (even improved), but the foundation of communication are the letters that grew from symbols once scratched out on the walls of caves.

How simple; how profound; how enduring.

©2017 j.g. lewis