Janet Eats

I am back at one of my favorite retreats. Well, I guess at this point, it is my Favorite, back East anyway. Forget the “one of” part. Kripalu. It is a yoga retreat in the Berkshires, a short drive from Lenox, Mass. It is a former monastery that has been turned into a school for Yogis and Aruyrvedic practitioners. It is also a place for visitors looking for wellness programs, or just a little R&R. You can practice yoga here three times a day, and do this wonderful moving form they call Yoga Dance. The yoga dance is very tribal, very primal, sweat-inducing, and LOTS of fun.

I arrived after a four-hour bus drive, sat next to a cool woman who commuted back and forth between her apartment outside of Boston and the Vermont woods where she lived with the boyfriend she met on You-Tube. When you leave the highly caffeinated world of Manhattan and land anywhere bucolic, it takes awhile to adapt to the deafening din of silence. Crickets in NYC mean no one has come to your nightclub. The smells, the views, the sounds of silence can be intimidating. I walked around, made myself at home in my spartan room (happy to see that the unknown roommate with whom I was to share the room had not arrived yet). A gentle yoga class, a delicious vegetarian dinner, some quiet time in the sun room until three 20-somethings came in to gab. Even then, I wasn’t in the mindset to be the librarian and “shhhhhush” them. I just went to my little room and fell asleep.
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Have you ever been in a restaurant with a group of friends, wondering what to order when someone suggests: let’s just order a bunch of different dishes and — SHARE.

Share. Even more than the conundrum of “no, you can’t order that, that’s what I am ordering!”. As if there is some rule against that. I mean, what’s the point of eating out if you can’t taste what your dining partner ordered. You know how it works, you’re digging into your plate when you ask your friend “you want to taste?” That’s code for “can *I* taste what you’re having?”
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My very sage friend, Amy, nudged me today to get back into writing my blog. We both agree that it just takes that first entry to get revved up again.

So, I make no promises that this will be coherent, but it will reflect my day and my thoughts nonetheless.

I went to the Greenmarket at Union Square in Manhattan on this beautiful, slightly overcast Spring day. It is a regular thing I do on Saturdays. I take my market bag — bought many years ago at a farmers market in Provence. It’s a lovely bag, sold by a French woman who had taken the classic market bag– and we’re talking hearty straw bag made in Morocco. With sturdy leather handles. And she handpainted it for sale at that market in Nyons.
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