More Fun in the Bakery

I've recently discovered a love (and dare I say talent?) for creating "interesting" cakes.

This one (in the shape of the "om" symbol in case you don't recognize it) was for a dual birthday last week:

and a cookie cake for our resident cookie monster

and this one was requested from the grounds/facilities crew for a staff member who was leaving the team. This staff member was often in charge of ploughing the roads and parking lots on Kripalu's property so we made a (somewhat to scale) replica of Kripalu

complete with the main Shadowbrook building and the Annex (built by Carl, the facilities supervisor out of graham crackers and marshmallow fluff) as well as chocolate roads, cream cheese frosting snow, broccoli trees and even a tractor plough and stop signs...

so fun! and it tasted good too.

A Perfect Trip to Florida

While it was short, it gave me all my favorite things:

sunrise over the atlantic, and swimming in the ocean

the smell of orange blossoms carried on hot, wet air after an intense spring thunderstorm

azaleas blooming all over the place

krishna lunch and all my favorite people in gainesville (quite amazing: in 24 hours I saw pretty much everyone I know that still lives in Gainesville - without a phone and without really making any effort, it all just came together)

I sat on the Plaza of the Americas for about 2 hours and people cycled through as classes ended and began... listened to kirtan and lay in the sun. It was great to meet some of the new trip leaders and hang out with old ones, and know that TRiP is in good hands.

a visit to the Lake Jackson Marsh for painting with my mom, some gator sightings (it's mating season)

as well as my aunt's birthday lunch, opera with my grandma, a lecture by Jim Leher, cooking for my mom and grandma, and a good solid dose of love and perspective on the world...

All in all, a very successful trip.

~

and now.... because I heart irony:

I saw this on the way to the marsh

allow me to zoom in on those two signs

well, I suppose they did fail to specify what it was destined for...

Dead Poets Tour

While I procrastinate on the "So You Wanna Be a Kripalu Volunteer" Post, I thought I'd give you a recap of a little adventure I went on with some friends last week.

We decided to do a New England Literary tour, with the highlight being a pilgrimage to the graves of some dead writers.

We paid our respects to Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne & Alcott:

and poked around outside Emerson's old house (which was closed for the season)

Our next destination was the really not very secluded (or pond-like) Walden Pond, which we renamed the Sea of Walden, being as it's quite large.

we even had a picnic at the site of Thoreau's old hut while we discussed becoming born-again transcendentalists...

It being only lunchtime, and all our objectives accomplished, we decided to carry on to Boston.

Upon arriving, we tried to absorb some of the smart that floats around the Harvard campus. We walked around and looked decidedly unfashionable in what came to be known as our "homeless gypsy" outfits. My companion Sara and I further tried to embarrass our urbanite friend Dave by donning fake accents and pretending not to speak English.

I was quite miffed to learn that Harvard does not allow outsiders into its library...libraries being one of my favorite places to explore.

Not to be deterred from a fabulous day by a little exclusive snobbery, we continued into Boston proper and wandered around Boston Common and Beacon Hill, eventually following the Freedom Trail and visiting Paul Revere's house and church...

...some cool graveyards and, (the highlight of the day) discovering our new hero, Mary Dyer. She was a Quaker religious rights activist hanged for refusing to be exiled from the colony.

She inspired the now-flourishing, decidedly tongue-in-cheek underground newsletter-for-the-revolution, "The Mary Dyer Times". The first issue is circulating the Kripalu volunteer community as I write this - but keep it on the down low.

We finished up the day wandering the Italian section of town and visiting Caffé Vittoria, the oldest Italian coffee shop in Boston (est. 1929) - excellent cappuccino and tiramisu.

Puzzling it Out

One of the really beautiful things about yoga for me, is that it makes everything into a metaphor for life:

-Increase your flexibility in a pose... increase the flexibility of your mind and your ability to accept impermanence.

-Focus on alignment of your bones and muscles in class... have an insight about the alignment of your values, thoughts and actions in life.

On January 1st I started a 2,000-piece puzzle of Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night

I also spent time (since it was the beginning of the new year) setting goals and intentions, and generally putting pressure on myself to know what I need to be doing; the next steps in my life.

The irony of that hit me as I was trying to fall asleep one night, and visions of puzzle pieces danced in my head.

So you have a puzzle, and you have a general idea of what it's going to look like, but it only gets revealed one piece at a time. Sections become clear bit by bit, and you simply have to trust that all the pieces will fit together eventually to make a beautiful picture.

So relax Ali :)

"Let go of the life you imagined, to live the life that is waiting for you."

- Joseph Campbell

Bakerista

As I've mentioned, my "new" (January) Seva is in the bakery, and I so so love working there.

Cooking and baking are two of my great creative loves, and I don't think I even realized how much I missed them until I got into the bakery and started creating again.

It makes me so happy; I have a new energy, a spring in my step, and feel like I'm in a beautiful flow of creativity. People have actually told me I look different!

I work 8-4, five days a week, but it doesn't even really feel like work. I leave with more energy than I went in with. We have a really nice space to work in with a gorgeous wooden table to work bread on, a giant oven, and a giant mixer...

My supervisor Hedley is awesome and lets me and River (the other volunteer baker - see above with handfuls of icing) experiment when our regular work is done. I've been having a lot of fun making vegan, raw and gluten-free stuff, and generally being creative.

The only thing that's hard about the bakery is the list. We have a list of things to do each day, and you'd think that would be nice for my brain, but Hedley likes to mess with me by crossing things off the list while I'm doing them! UNacceptable! We have an ongoing competition to sneakily cross off the other's work before they get a chance.

Overall, I'm learning a lot about bread and pastry and even find it easy not to eat too much sugar or gluten while I'm working. Sunday marked the end of my sugar- & gluten-free month and it went really well (lost another 10 lbs! geez) I noticed a distinct evenness in the quality and quantity of my energy throughout the month and feel really healthy and happy here at Kripalu.

Next: Why Life is a Puzzle

And then: So You Want to be a Kripalu Volunteer?

Why I love(d) Veggie Prep

Even though I'm now in the bakery, I still have a very soft spot in my heart for my old job of Veggie Prep, and here's why:

Veggie Prep is a listmaker's dream job:

I'm a fairly obsessive listmaker and cross-er off-er (to the point where, if I've done something that wasn't on my list, I'll write it on just so I can cross it off).

Working in veggie prep is like working on giant list. You start out the day with a board full of labels, and every time you finish a job, you get the satisfaction of sticking a label on your container, and by the end of the day, you're left with a clean board. My brain LOVES this.

Another thing my brain likes to do (almost as much as making lists and crossing stuff off), is to learn a job really throughly and then try to think of ways to do it better and more efficiently. Not only were there lots of opportunities for this in VP, but it was highly praised as well (double hurray!). So basically I was really good at my job, which always feels nice.

Also, I love working with food, and having the opportunity to put my love into the food that goes out to everyone at Kripalu has been really rewarding.

So my brain was happy in all sorts of ways.

But the other big reason I loved it is that we just had lots of fun:

Giant Daikon

Squash!

Turnipman

Be still, my beeting heart...

We also liked to add punctuation to the labels:

potatoes? Sweet!

Spinach, baby!

...but of course, what makes or breaks any job is the group of people you work with, and veggie prep has some of the best.

On my last day in there before I went to the bakery, they gave me a going away card and we all toasted with leftover sparkling cider from New Year's.

A few messages from the card:

"Ali, I want cookies all the time so I can eat my feeling of betrayal and loss. I'll miss you"

"Ali! You're leaving! Your loyalty's a fakery! I can't believe you're going to the bakery!"

the funny thing is, the bakery is about 10 feet away from the prep kitchen, so I still see them all the time :)

Next time, I'll tell you about my new job in the Bakery

A Day in the Life of a Kripalu Volunteer

Just like in the "real world", your day is very different depending whether you're working, or you have off.

We'll start with a workday.

There are several different "sevas" or "jobs of selfless service to the community" or "karma yoga" (which is traditionally doing service without the expectation of anything in return, whereas we get room and board and programs, but we'll let that slide for now).

The sevas that volunteers do include: housekeeping, dishwashing, veggie prepping, grounds keeping, maintenace, production support for events, and a few office jobs.

Let me tell you about Veggie Prep, the seva with which I am best acquainted:

We go in at 8 am, and there is a magnet board filled with labels for the day that need to be fulfilled.

These labels are spit out by a computer and are for the recipes the chefs will be cooking the next day (we prep one day ahead). They're based on some (I'm sure fabulously complicated) math taking into account projected guest & staff headcount.

The labels tell us what to prep, how to cut it, how much, and what it's for.

When you're done a job, you stick the label on the container and put it on a cart that goes upstairs to the hot kitchen.

We work in a large room with tables that are giant cutting boards, chopping and slicing not just veggies, but cheese, tofu, tempeh, and some meats. We also measure out and soak the beans, and crack the eggs. So basically, we see just about everything before it goes upstairs to the hot kitchen.

There is a gigantic walk-in fridge where thousands of dollars of produce are kept, as well as a walk-in freezer and "39 degree room" where we keep proteins (meat, fake meat, cheese, eggs, milk and nuts).

There are all sorts of cool machines that help us do our work. We have a giant carrot/beet/potato peeler/scrubber:

as well as a few chopping/dicing/slicing/crumbling machines.

It's actually a really fun job, and I loved doing it.

Next time: Why I love VP