Last month we had a Recording and Listening practice intensive focusing on our relationship with food. The three principles we practiced with were simplicity, care, and gratitude. As soon as I read the assignment, it dropped in the program in Kantolomba is a model for us in each of these areas.
Simplicity: The weekly menu in Kantolomba does not vary. Every Tuesday is eggs and rice. Every Wednesday is beans and nchima. Every Friday rice with peanut sauce...
Care: There is a clockwork routine that repeats every week. Every Tuesday, a team sits for hours sorting tens of thousands of individual beans, taking out any rotten ones. The beans are then pre-cooked that afternoon, and cooked the following day (several hours over an outdoor brazier). Every Wednesday, they shell thousands of peanuts. Every Thursday, the peanuts are roasted, and every Friday, they are ground down to make a paste for the peanut sauce for the rice. Five giant pots of nchima are cooked for three hours each, twice each week.
From conditioning’s perspective this is a grim relationship with food. Where is the spice (literally and metaphorically)? How monotonous, how boring!
But anyone who has spent any time at the property knows that it’s quite the contrary—the whole process is infused with great joy and gratitude. There is often singing accompanying the work. The gratitude for having good, simple, nutritious, plentiful food seems fresh every day.
Rather than being a source of entertainment or distraction, food is nourishment and celebration. The team considers it a great honor to spend their days in the service of providing this nourishment to 1,000 children and 37 adults!
May we follow their model and find this simplicity the joyous and practical guide.
To hear details of how the team pulls off this great feat, listen to the Good News Update with Theresa during the last trip: February 17 edition of Open Air.
In gassho,
Jen