Friday, January 6, 2012

The power of soup and the power of sound.

Lately, I’m addicted to soup and eat it for breakfast and other times. I used to think I needed a lot of stuff to make soup. I used to think I needed a chicken or lamb bones or a leftover ham bone to make soup. With me, necessity was the mother of invention. I invented my quick soup because most of the time, I didn’t have the ingredients and I needed a soup fix immediately. Here’s my first instant soup recipe that takes about 4 minutes to prepare.

a can of whole tomatoes -
8 oz filtered water (omit if you like thicker soup)
1/2 cup of evaporated milk (evaporated milk has all the oomph of cream without the calories.)
two cloves garlic, splash of olive oil.
Puree the tomatoes and garlic in a blender. (I use the Oskar).
Put the puree in a pot. Add the water, milk and olive oil. Heat until it barely boils and you have good cream of tomato soup without any of the stuff they put in canned soup.

Last week I made an even better instant soup. I had a bag of spinach and leftover steamed broccoli and carrots. I put them all into my Oskar and pureed, added filtered water, evaporated milk, salt and pepper and had instant great tasting cream of vegetable soup.

This week I got some kale. Kale is a very sturdy green that looks harsh. I thought, maybe if I puree the kale with some butternut squash, add a little nutmeg and evaporated milk it won’t taste harsh. Guess what? I was right. Again, very good. Progresso now makes chicken stock in a carton (the least doctored of the packaged stocks) that you can substitute for some of the milk. Soup makes me feel that all is right with the world.

Alone is good.
Most people don’t like to be alone. The people who most crave short periods of aloneness are mothers with small children. Next are fathers with small children. Being alone in America implies that you have seriously messed up.

I am alone most of the time. Other voices, other thoughts, other points of view reverberate when I return to solitude. I spend some time reviewing what went on. The review parade goes like this: How they acted, how I acted. What they said, what I said. I evaluate according to my dumb fossilized ideas and it takes place in thought purgatory. Just like in the catholic religion, thought purgatory is a circular holding pattern. You are waiting, waiting, waiting to take off but you can’t because it’s so effortless to keep thinking the same thing over and over.

Nothing ever changes or moves out of thought purgatory until you are alone for enough time to become uncomfortable and start thinking fresh untainted thoughts.
Ah...fresh, untainted thoughts. When you have fresh untainted thoughts you examine how life works and come up with interesting theories.
I have a theory about sound. I think moaning is a healing sound and we make it involuntarily when something hurts. I think the sound starts a process in our subconscious to bring its arsenal to our aid. The arsenal of the subconscious is formidable. There are other sounds that we don’t make automatically that could help us solve problems. If you state a problem as simply as you can without judgment, it also starts a process and that process is not limited to yourself; it is broadcast into the universe and the wheels start turning to bring you what you need. Maybe this is what Jung meant by the universal unconscious.

I’m sure that Stephen Hawking, the brilliant physicist who finds “women to be the biggest mystery” would agree with me. Hawking also said that in order to survive, humans will have to colonize Mars and the universe. Kale looks like it came from Mars.

2 comments:

  1. Now that's a wide-ranging post! From kale to Hawking via Jung, and a recipe thrown in for good measure.

    No chance of getting kale here in West Africa, and a tree branch will be my blender, so bang goes the four minute prep, but this sounds perfect for a charcoal-burning pot. Thanks!

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  2. A tree branch in lieu of a blender - even better.
    Simplify, simplify - that's my mantra for 2012.

    Thanks for reading, Mark.

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