Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Milk Moon

May moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have moved into the lunar cycle known as the Milk Moon, when the cows have had their calves and are feeding on the rapidly growing spring grasses in the fields. This year the New Milk Moon fell on Mother's Day -- a coincidence, but a fitting one. Only mothers provide us with that particular and peculiar nourishment that we call milk.

But before I go on to talk about milk, I have a few announcements:

First, the book is almost done. The chapters are all drafted and I am working (a bit frantically) on the recipes. I am desperately in need of people willing to help me out by testing them. If you would like to help, please take a look at the working list (it changes a bit every day!) of recipes and send me a list of which ones you would like to test. I will send them to you as email attachments in Word (sorry, no hard copies). You can test them and then let me know how it goes. I need at least 2 testers per recipe -- first come, first served. . .

Second, I have scheduled three more Full Moon Feasts. These will probably be the only ones for 2005. I would love to have you join me. Take a look.

Third, I am participating in a campaign called Foodshed for Thought. Bay Area participants will be taking the month of August to try only to eat foods that come from within a 100-mile radius of San Francisco. All Bay Area residents are invited to join us -- and those of you in other places can start a similar campaign by eating within 100 miles of where YOU live! Check it out.

And lastly, I encourage you to check out the Fourfold Path to Healing Conference which will take place at the end of July here in Oakland. I will be preparing the meals! It promises to be a wonderful event. There is a discount if you register by May 31.

Now, back to the New Milk Moon. . .

I have written before about the interesting custom among the Tzutujil Maya -- beautifully described by Martín Prechtel -- in which a newborn baby is blessed by the mothers of the community. Any lactating woman who wants to bless the happy family comes on a particular day. These gathered women then pass the baby from woman to woman to suckle the new infant at her breast. I always imagine the women seated in a circle on a swept earthen floor, each beautifully arrayed in the colorful huipil of her clan, laughing and talking as the child is passed. This ritual serves an important social function for the community. As Prechtel writes:

I am particularly interested in this connection between mothers, milk, and peace. In my research, I found that the Tzutujil are not the only culture that uses mother's milk as a peacemaker in social life. When the Masai people of Eastern Africa decide to make peace with an enemy, the emissaries include an elder, a cow with her calf, and a Masai mother and her baby. As one book explains:

The author contrasts this solemn peace -- entered into with an exchange of cows and mother's milk, holding grass in the hand -- to the 'blood brotherhood' that the Masai would sometimes enter into. In that case, two elders would cut their upper arms and would dip meat of a bullock that was killed on the spot into the blood of their 'enemy,' and then eat it. But such a truce was not a lasting one, and the Masai did not honor it as a 'solemn peace.' The fighting would continue.

It makes sense to me that true peace would be sealed with cows, grass, and mother's milk, and not with meat and blood. The energies of the first -- following traditional Eastern thought -- are very Yin. The energies of the second are very Yang. While Yang energy is aggressive, penetrating, and male, Yin energy is receptive, accepting, and female. War is Yang and peace is Yin.

It is absurd and naïve, though, to think that all that is Yin is good and all that is Yang is bad. There is no value judgment here -- these two energies are in a dynamic relationship, and all aspects of life involve both.

The macrobiotic diet has long been followed by people seeking balance, and all foods that are either too Yin or too Yang are proscribed -- adherents eat foods in the middle of the spectrum. Macrobiotics would perhaps be dismayed by the diet of the Masai, which consists almost entirely of milk (that most Yin of foods), and blood (that most Yang of foods) which is drawn from their living Zebu cattle with a long narrow tube. This diet is supplemented by lesser quantities of honey (very Yin) and meat (very Yang). Yet the Masai are famously healthy and unaffected by modern diseases as long as they stick to their traditional diet. Eat your heart out, George Ohsawa. Nevertheless, the diet does, in the end, prove the point of the importance of balance between Yin and Yang foods. It just contradicts the notion that this balance should be achieved by eating a plant-based diet of foods that fall in the middle of the spectrum.

This dynamic relationship between Yin and Yang can also be seen in the work of the woman who first campaigned for "Mother's Day" -- Julia Ward Howe. Howe is most famous for an earlier accomplishment, the composition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Talk about Yang. The words are powerful, and full of the righteousness of fighting for a just cause. Howe was a committed abolitionist, and she wrote the Hymn as an encouragement to the Union troops who were fighting the slave-holding Confederacy. The Hymn came out of her passion for social justice. I will quote a few of the famous lines, which never fail to give me goose bumps. The opening stanza goes like this:

And the closing stanza goes like this:

It is an amazing theological testament, as well as a call to arms: 'while Jesus died to make men holy, let us die to make them free.' Howe's passion for freedom (as opposed to slavery) is expressed through the 'terrible swift sword.' It is the Yang side of justice. It is no accident that John Steinbeck used the fabulous phrase 'the grapes of wrath' to title his epic masterpiece of the longing for freedom and equality of working class people. With their red juice and their Eucharistic symbolism, they are a metaphor for blood.

Howe wrote the Hymn in 1861. Almost a decade later, her perspective had shifted. She began to feel that war was not the best response to injustice, and became more of a pacifist. Her original proposal was for a Mother's Day for Peace. This was not meant to be a day to appreciate mothers (as it has become), but as a day for mothers of the world to unite and influence world leaders to build peace. Her Mother's Day Proclamation -- less well known than her hymn -- is worth quoting in its entirety:

That was Howe's great vision for Mother's Day -- not mothers as passive recipients of flowers, brunches, Hallmark cards, and phone calls. But mothers as the great peacemakers, the ones who have given the milk and shed the tears that make them understand that "The sword of murder is not the balance of justice" and that "Blood does not wipe our dishonor." (Some references quote this line as "Blood does not wipe out dishonor." I'm not sure which is correct.)

These two pieces of writing, looked at together, show the dynamic polarity between blood and milk, yang and yin, fighting and peacemaking. The fact that the Hymn is a more powerful piece of writing does not make it representative of the 'right' way, nor does the fact that the Mother's Day Proclamation was written later, when Howe had more experience and wisdom, make it the 'right' way. Questions of when to fight and when to make peace are difficult, deep, and timeless questions that are played out on every stage of our lives. We play them out in our national decisions, obviously. We also play them out in our own relationships.

I have lately been rereading Harriet Lerner's classic book, The Dance of Anger. In it, she describes beautifully the way that even the most knock-down drag-out fights between loved ones can function as ways of maintaining the status quo and keeping the peace. She also describes how 'keeping the peace' and not rocking the boat can be ways of 'de-selfing' and staying stuck in negative patterns. The real transformations she describes always involve both 'blood' and 'milk' -- the blood rushing to our face as we get angry, and pumping loudly in our veins when we decide to make a meaningful change in a relationship. But the moment when we make that change is a peaceful one, and the change is made in a calm and centered way. It is the 'terrible swift sword' wielded by one who has been 'baptized by tears' and has spent many days of 'great and earnest counsel' for the 'amicable settlement' of deep and important questions.

It is the perfect image of the Yin-Yang -- where each contains a kernel of the other, and each honors the importance of the other. It is not a static thing but a flowing thing, a dynamic and ever-shifting balance between universal energies. Without blood, there would be no milk, and without milk, there would be no blood. We are a little bit squeamish about both, but the Masai aren't, and we don't have to be. They are part of life on Earth.

But this is The Milk Moon, and yesterday was Mother's Day. What better time to honor and pray for peace? May it be the solemn peace of grass and cows and mothers nursing each other's young; not the temporary peace of blood brotherhood.

On the Milk Moon, I wish you all the nourishment and rich blessings of the Great Mother we all share, the Earth. May we learn to hear Her voice, and to join Hers with our own, whether it is time to wield our swift sword, or to cry 'Disarm!'

And a heartfelt Mother's Day blessing to all the mothers, especially those whose sons and daughters are in harm's way, no matter what the cause.