Tag: coffee

new mornings of 4 practices

I developed a fourth new practice for my mornings, before 12noon. It gets added to the bottom of this list:

1. sitting,

2. stepping outdoors in order to walk + spend 30 minutes outside,

3. 20 minutes of cleaning, cleansing, chores and purging,

4. writing the morning pages.

Morning pages, a phrase from writer Julia Cameron, are described on en.wikipedia as:

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. The Artist’s Way says there is no wrong way to do Morning Pages—they are not high art. They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind.

The Artist Date is a once-weekly, festive, solo expedition to explore something that interests the artist.

The first day I did morning pages, on Monday, my forearm fatigued from the length of time and the speed of writing longhand. A lactic FeltSense or the “unclear, pre-verbal sense of  ‘something.'” Yes, unclear and preverbal was that tingling in my right arm. Brought about by the quickness of my right hand moving pen over paper.

Simple french pressin’

I need my frech press back. No need for the plug-me-in cuisinart coffee maker that grinds beans loudly before dripping water over them. It took me 20 minutes this morning to figure out what the damn beep-beep-beep sound was for. By that time, I had foregone coffee while making eggs and quesadillas for breakfast. Midway through my second (mini-) tortilla, i noticed a part of the contraption sitting next to the sink that was causing the electric feedback. Once that was in, coffee making, the electric kind, was back on track.

I look forward to the days of grinding beans by hand, boiling water (either stovetop, or I’m ready for an electric kettle), and the satisfaction of pouring near boiling water over the ground beans.

As wikipedia states, “A French press … is a simple coffee brewing device.”
Yes, bring back the simplicity of this delectable morning routine.

Stumptown, what it is

6pm on a Saturday. Here it feels much later, since I attribute later hours to this level of darkness. Three weeks in, I am 5 weeks past the solstice. Between that and the uncharacteristically warmth of La Nina, I’m acclimating to these environs just fine.

I got my bike today. Two weeks after my first ride, yet only my 3rd day of recreation. Being back in a day job has been an adjustment by giving my daylight hours away to someone else. I’ve chosen to exchange my time and labor for the dynamics of office politics, a desk job, the predictable of payroll, and (ultimately) the travel to the Southeast. Or Deep South, in the office lexicon.

Deep South has been ‘up the coastline from Louisiana to Georgia plus Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee,’ as I’ve been describing it. And Monday at 7am we depart for the hub known as Atlanta’s Hartsfeld-Jackson. To drive west to Montgomery, southwest to NOLA, then north to Jackson.

Out of 8, 3 states I’ve ever been to. Not how I imagined visiting down South when I’ve dreamed of North Carolina since 2008. But, this has been an exercise in not being too fixated on a single plan to not heed the opportunities of misdirection.