I'm grateful to be beginning this journey on a Sunday.  I can embrace the sacredness.  Today started with a ring of the doorbell before I was even dressed or fully awake.  It was our favorite 80-year-old neighbor bringing us a harvest of tomatoes.  I received it like mana from heaven.  His tomatoes are special because they are grown with his own saved seeds.  They are the only tomatoes in the Valley to resist the tomato blight last year.

There seems to be a message in this for me from the Universe:  Find reverence in your food.  Find the sacred.  Find the beauty.  And what could be more beautiful that a red, ripe, home-grown tomato that has been hand delivered with love from a neighbor?

Already our plan has been modified.  After reading through some of the recipes I longed to make, I saw that most of them needed a food dehydrator.  For now, that seems like partial cooking and too much preparation so we're stripping the plan down to make just a simple salad in lieu of an entree each day.  I realize, also, that creating a new recipe every day would be fun for me but a whole other concentration in itself.  So suddenly just eating raw—without all the food prep—seems so much easier.  Most of the work has been taken out of it.

I think this is a key that I am interested in discovering, too.  Ease.  Ease of preparation.  Ease of relationship to our food.  It would make sense that I would come into this adventure carrying expectations of it being a gourmet culinary experience, because I have been hyped up to believe that a perfect tomato isn't enough.  So I will consciously lay down some of my preconceived ideas and open myself to really seeing and tasting and reveling and delighting in a tomato just as it is.  And isn't food really always a gift from God?  Isn't it always communion?