I know I am in trouble today. I didn’t eat enough solid this morning. I started with soft brown rice soaked in miso soup. It is not a good idea to eat soup or drink smoothies in the morning because they fill you up.
What you need for a day of fasting is complex carbohydrates, preferably whole foods like brown rice, quinoa, or other whole grains; also protein, also fat. I ate some fruit and yogurt but I ought to have had more legumes–what’s in the miso isn’t really enough.
The other thing you need is enough fiber to keep everything moving through because without a lot of food your digestive system doesn’t get the practice it needs.
I did drink water at the end, but once again I drank it too fast, so I haven’t been able to keep much of it in my body.
Well, each day of the fast ought to be different, right? It should be so easy so all you’re doing is skipping lunch?
While it is incorrect to put the body into discomfort during a fast–by exerting yourself, by tempting yourself needlessly–the whole situation is one of practice duress. A controlled situation.
I’ve been careful to supply myself with enough nutrition–the complex carbohydrates, protein and fat, along with vitamins and nutrients from fresh vegetables–but also want to offer myself treats.
Coffee was the hardest–coffee, my dream, my rapture–what else could I do during a long, autumn afternoon, but sit with a notebook, drink coffee, and write sentences.
All my books of prose–two novels and an autobiography–I wrote in sentences, line by line, not know where they were going to lead, not knowing who the characters were, what the plot was, when I would end. Eventually the autobiography organized itself and quite neatly. The second novel took much, much longer, and the threads and plots of it wove together more by instinct than by design.
The sentences of my first novel, Quinn’s Passage, never wove together. The flutter still, in the wind, the sound of the waves crashing on the shore in the background.
During the fast I haven’t much been able to write, though I have two deadlines, one for a book of essays that I am supposed to turn over the publisher as of yesterday. The other for a translation of another novel from another country that also takes place at the seashore, the waves crashing into the characters’ ears.
As in Quinn’s Passage, the characters live is if in dream space. You spend the whole novel submerged in their poetry wondering if they will ever come to.
I drift between my actual physical life and this submerged interior life throughout the day. Does the fast help me focus more on one or the other at any given moment? I want to say not so far, but maybe in small instants it does. For a second or two I get it, then I’m just hungry or want to take a nap or watch a movie or provide myself with some other distraction.
I did teach a class yesterday and teach another one tonight. In between these I taught a yoga class this morning, to a student who had never done yoga before. I thought how wonderful it is to be at the beginning of something.
As at the beginning of the day, before the sun rises, when I run. I used to run in the afternoon–after coffee, after writing, the mental activity still buzzing in brain, I would hit the road.
I do have a little jar of instant decaf coffee. Decaf because at night is when I want to drink coffee now. True coffee feels too harsh on the stomach early in the morning. Instant for two reasons: first because it makes fast.
But second–the real reason, the true reason: I like the way it tastes. When I was growing up we never had ground coffee, only instant. It’s what my parents always drank. It’s comfort food for me, a way of being with them.
These experiences that feel connected: coffee, writing, yoga, running, teaching have all transformed and moved into different relationships with each other this month. In fact my whole life is in more or less tumult because of it, both physically and emotionally.
When you see a person who is fasting you think you are seeing someone who is refraining, restraining, but really you are seeing a whole whirlwind of activity.