My dad worked for C.E.Twombley, a small, paper cup manufacturer, as the production engineer. On spaghetti night he bought meatballs from one of the Italian ladies in the plant.
At forty, my digestion decreased, and I could no longer eat Italian. I weighed a hundred pounds and was living on boiled potatoes, helpless to understand. Specialists found nothing, and a call to the hospital brought the direction to find a naturopath. So I did and improved but with symptoms.
Eventually, I stayed with a friend who cooked Mexican, and my digestion improved. I was eating corn and now saw wheat as the cause. But by my sixties my body ran out of tolerance, and testing revealed gluten sensitivity, dairy intolerance, and more I couldn’t eat.
As I kept growing in spiritual awareness, my focus turned to the effect of emotion on thought and the body. I became a conscious connector among my feelings, my thoughts, and my body’s behavior. Digesting my life and digesting my food were in tandem.
Today, I had fruit sauce with papaya, banana, chiku, purple grapes and fresh figs. I live on brown basmati rice and bhakri I make (sorghum flat bread), carrots and red pumpkin, plain frozen fish and fresh chicken, with raw honey for dessert. I’ve come to accept this. In America there’s baked butternut squash and asparagus, and I, feeling like a Queen, line the tall, steamed, tender, pale green stalks close to my waiting fork.
My realization is, "We can look at people who have more or people who have less. Optimism is gratitude for what we have."