This is a quick, three mentions blog post to share with you the link to a free webinar series on Hope with leading activists, neuroscientists and generally decent, concerned humans. It begins today and involves the option to watch daily, 45 min workshops led by aforementioned decent beings.
I am sending it along rather late and as a very easy way to empower oneself to integrate and move through our collective and immobilizing, climate change despair. I am also sending today as I am finding it is what I need after discussing COP26 with my three children and hearing their frustration (bordering rightly on apathy) at international leaders who have a long history of making promises they don't keep and pandering to polluters.
How can our leaders possibly engender trust in their citizens if they do not prove themselves trustworthy?
And yet, I am an unwavering believer in bright spirit, Emily Dickinson's oft quoted phrase "I dwell in possibility". I believe simply because I so often dwell in Dickinson's realm.
With each new breath we are granted the opportunity to acknowledge our reality and begin again. In the very space between in-breath and out is where hope dwells for me. That gift of yet another chance to exist and apply present moment, non-judging, compassionate awareness to the situation at hand, beautiful, bewildering and terrifyingly complex as it might be.
So here is the link to the event--worthy of enrolling just to hear the indomitable Dr Jane Goodall speak from her wise heart. https://summit.soundstrue.com/activating-hope/register/
And from a household which includes three youth who LOVE to eat and cook and who have A LOT of vegan/vegetarian recipes here are a couple of great recent makes for you to try as meat free options to help our world move to more sustainable food sources in this era of climate change:
Totally delicious Lentil Sloppy Joe's from Forks Over Knives, plant-based living magazine which we made last eve but ate bread free more as a side dish with oven roasted vegetables and hummus. (we subbed out things we didn't have on hand such as fire-roasted canned tomatoes subbed with our own oven- roasted and frozen garden tomatoes)
Speaking of hummus--our three kids are hummus nuts and eat copious amounts of hummus.
Here is a great way to make a frugal hummus. Skip the next three tabbed paragraph's if you already know how to soak and cook dry chickpeas or if you don't like hummus or generally are not interested but please find your way to the end of this post for a final note of literary inspiration!
I purchase a 900g package of dry chickpeas for $2.50 or thereabouts--or plastic free in bulk from the Bulk Barn. From experience and a need to know these things one 900g package of dry chickpeas soaked and cooked yields 8 times 1.5 cups of cooked chickpeas or the rough equivalent of 8 cans of cooked chickpeas and seeing as our favourite hummus recipe in Oh She Glow's Every Day uses 1.5 cups of cooked or canned chickpeas for a single batch and a dbl batch here only lasts two days you can see how this is the most frugal way to eat hummus. For households who aren't as voracious eaters of chickpeas you can still use dry chickpeas perhaps just soaking or cooking 1/4 or 1/2 the 900 gr at a time. Also, chickpeas freeze really well and are the basis of so many wonderfully delicious meat free meals.
Soak rinsed, dry chickpeas a good depth (cover them with 2 or 3 inches of cold water and let sit without a lid overnight. Drain off water and add fresh water for cooking again covering the chickpeas with several inches depth above the chickpeas. Cook until a fork can split them or to desired softness. Drain off water and cool chickpeas in an even layer across your kitchen table on six or seven dinner plates.
Some people (like me) just love the smell of chickpeas steaming away as they cook. Others (like our son) endure the fragrance by dreaming of homemade jalapeno hummus that inevitably follows the boiling process.
As our son comically/encouragingly said to his sisters in response to the COP26 talk and the desperate feeling of being a youth in today's world--"remember what Gandalf said to the despairing Frodo?"
Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times; but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
Thanks for reading!
Dwelling in possibility!
Jill
Comments