HEALTHY HIGHWAYS by Nikki & David Goldbeck

For those of us who like to travel by car, finding a decent place to eat can be a challenge. Road food is often tasteless, expensive, and often not healthful. But that challenge has been met and conquered by Nikki and David Goldbeck’s Healthy Highways: The Traveler’s Guide to Healthy Eating. With 1900 choices of cafes and restaurants, as well as natural food stores and food co-ops that sell good-for-you snacks, sandwiches, and restaurant fare, the traveler who wants to eat well on the road can sit back and thumb through this handy guide with confidence.

In the introduction the authors state: “Healthy Highways offers real alternatives to the stock fare of supersized, fatty, calorie-laden, repetitious fast food and restaurant meals. Moreover, it provides an opportunity to explore new territory, as you take the healthy highway rather than the fast food lane.”

The book is organized by states, alphabetically, with symbols to indicate, for example, whether the listing is a restaurant and/or store, handicap accessible,
a clock for hours the eatery is open, etc. Accompanying each entry is a list of attributes, describing the type of food, service, and simple driving directions from local highways to keep travelers from getting lost. (See sample entry below.)

Each entry includes the address, phone number, and times of operation, as well as the symbols and descriptive terms mentioned above. Each state map is printed on the first page of that state, with numbered arrows for the different cities. For example, California, the mecca for natural foods in my estimation, has 146 numbered arrows on the map. The arrows point to the city or town and the number on the arrows correspond to the listings below, alphabetically by city.

Peppered throughout the book are what the Goldbecks call “Eat it or Not: Fascinating & Far-Out Facts About Food.” For example, on page 129, interspersed with the entries for Idaho is a box with this question: Which has more nutrition, chunky or creamy peanut butter? The answer (upside down so you have to think about it first): Actually, it’s a tie. But be sure to buy the “natural,” “old-fashioned” or freshly ground kind, since regular peanut butter has sugar and hydrogenated fat added.

Below is a sample entry for an eatery that I worked in when I lived in Seattle. I picked this one, because I can verify that Nikki and David have described it accurately.

LUCKY PALATE (followed by a criss-crossed fork and knife, their symbol for restaurant) 307 McGraw St. (phone symbol) 206-352-2583; (clock symbol for hours of operations) M 9-6, Tues. 9:30-6, and various other times, so call to see if someone is around.
Primarily home-delivered meals, but the storefront sells the healthy vegetarian and vegan “Grab-and-Go Meals,” along with other homemade items. Their website is www.luckypalate.com.
deli vegetarian vegan-friendly organic focus take-out

This is an invaluable resource for all of us who take to the road. (The compact 5” X 8” size should fit in your glove compartment or console.) Borrowing a commercial tagline from another product, I can readily say, “Don’t leave home without it.”

If you are unable to find the book in your local book store or natural food store, you can order it directly from the Goldbecks by sending a check for $18.95 plus $4.75 (and if you are a NY resident, sales tax) to: Ceres Press, PO Box 87, Woodstock, NY 12498 or online at www.HealthyHighways.com. The book comes with free periodic online updates. If you buy it directly through the website or register on the site, you can receive email notices of changes in the listings and new postings.

Be sure to get a copy before your next road trip. It’s the perfect restaurant reference for those of us who want to travel with a happy stomach!

Last fall I profiled Laurie Handlers and mentioned that her book was almost ready for publication. Then, last week, I received a copy with a luscious cover of a man and woman kissing. Below is information on the book that is now available for purchase.

In this book Tantra yoga is explained by a true Tantra goddess. Laurie’s take on Tantra, Tantric sex and how they relate to intimacy will have you laughing and possibly crying – you will definitely look within. You may even find a way to transform your relationships in the process. That’s what Tantra is all about according to Sex & Happiness author Handlers – Tantra = transformation through pleasure!

Endorsements:

“Terrific! A great time. Growth and awareness, kindled by Laurie’s wisdom and sense of humor, await you.” – Dr Judy Kuriansky. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Tantric Sex

“SEX & HAPPINESS puts the innocence an love back into sex and gives Tantra the respect it deserves in the West. Take charge of your life – emotionally, physically and spiritually. A wonderful meditation on the self.” Alan Steinfeld , producer/host New realities TV

“Authentic! Handlers offers you a priceless opportunity to ‘grow your love’ in a playful way. Her down to earth style captures the depth and profundity of Tantra. SEX & HAPPINESS will make you smile inside!”

Cynthia Taylor Lamborne, Nectar Products, Tantric Tools for Sexual Healing

Excerpts from Sex and Happiness: The Tantric Laws of Intimacy

“Even after listing sexual expansion techniques, I would still say, “Come to the bedroom with no expectations, but rather with openness in your heart for whatever happens.” And you would probably say, “Yeah, well, if I could do that I wouldn’t need to read this book, now would I?” And you would be right. This whole book is about regaining the unguarded openness of your heart and bringing it to sex.

Have you heard the Zen expression, beginner’s mind? It’s a way of being in the world like everything in it is new. There is no expectation, no pain from a history of hurts and humiliations. Everything is experienced from an alert yet unguarded place. It’s a fresh, open, childlike state of mind. Practicing Tantra is one path to this clear, childlike place, but it doesn’t just happen. It takes work and training to come back to the open and loving place that is our natural state, because there’s so much grief and rage to be dealt with between now and then, so much shame and guilt, and so many ideas about how we should be in love, in relationship, and in sex.”

“Intimacy with someone else requires, first and foremost, coming to peace with your own emotional and physical life. This is not a small task, but it is a crucial one. It takes time and courage and forgiveness, coming from you to you. If you want a love affair that is sexually electric and truly intimate, you have to begin by unblocking and unleashing the sex force that is already inside you and learning to feel safe expressing it, in whatever way feels right to you. In order to do that, fear and rage and grief – feelings that you’ve learned to resist – have to be acknowledged and cleared out on a regular basis, and that alone can be one heck of a ride.
What I’m trying to say is that this whole process is going to take time. It’s going to take some time, a lot of tolerance, and a lot of deep breathing. Fasten your seatbelt and settle in for the ride.”

The chapters are based on the Ten Tantric Laws of Intimacy Laurie Handlers has taught in her Ecstasy Advanced Tantra course. They are:
Law 1: Be Your Own Witness
Law 2: Please Yourself
Law 3: Practice Emotional Release
Law 4: Honor Your Anger
Law 5: Speak Your Truth
Law 6: Set Your Boundaries
Law 7: Look in the Mirror of Your Beloved
Law 8: Practice Full Contact Confrontation
Law 9: Surrender
Law 10: Make Love in the Unknown

In her Tantra workshops, Laurie often begins dinner with desert first so in her book Sex & Happiness: The Tantric Laws of Intimacy she begins with Law 10: Make Love in the Unknown and then works you all the way through the rest of the other Intimacy Laws in order 1 – 9 so that you can arrive back at the sweetest part Law 10. The book is a “how to” look into modern intimacy establishing a new paradigm at a time when 50% of marriages fail. It includes tips, real life examples and chapter summaries for you to follow in your own life.

The book sells for $19.99 plus shipping and handling
The eBook sells for $14.99
The audio book will be available soon!
Order at www.sexandhappiness.com

Bio: Laurie Handlers is a Tantra Teacher, an intimacy coach and a Spiritual Leader. She holds a Masters degree in Education and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Sociology. Her career includes over thirty years as a corporate change consultant, individual empowerment coach and international seminar leader. She is a dynamic speaker, facilitator and has taught Butterfly Tantra workshops for women, men, couples and singles since 1999 on ancient Indian, Tibetan and Egyptian Tantric techniques and secrets that are the basis of healing the body, releasing past emotional trauma, stopping the aging process, and reducing stress. Pod casts from her internet radio show Tantra Café can be accessed through www.tribecaradio.com. Laurie is a global citizen and currently divides her time between the US , India and the UK .

Her Vision: “Women and Men Dancing in Eternal Ecstasy on Earth Now!”

Butterfly Workshops, Inc.
“Women & Men Dancing in Eternal Ecstasy on Earth Now!”
(202) 686-7440
http://www.butterflyworkshops.com
http://butterflyworkshops.com/blog/blog.html
http://www.tribecaradio.net/blog/categories/tantraCafe/

Jill Greenberg is a photographer, writer, and artist. While she is young enough to be my daughter, she and I seemed to connect on a peer-to-peer basis. Her work as an artist is what I think is most interesting, although the ways she expresses her art in words is also wonderful to read. She does art installations, which means she creates art on the spot for the place in which it is presented.

I first read about Jill in The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she appeared in a photograph posed in front of her installation of soap slivers, which resembled a paisley mosaic, shown here below. Intrigued, I emailed her and set up the interview for June.

While Jill works in many unusual mediums — dandelion fluff, powder puffs, plastic packaging, and cicada exo-skeletons — I am most interested in Jill’s work as a participant in the Accumulation Project, an endeavor of 19 artists from across the US, in which each artist is committed to accumulating an object of choice for a full year between 9/2005 and 9/2006.

Jill proposed to accumulate those annoying last remnants of used soap that people commonly call soap slivers, and now she receives soap slivers from people all over the country and uses them to create mosaic-like installations. Even though an artist generally works alone, the fact that soap slivers are sent to her with stories attached provides a way of connecting with others. Jill revels in this sharing aspect of her art and considers those who contribute the soap slivers as collaborators, the work of many hands.

Among the contributors to her collection are: a woman who lived through the depression and recalls placing saved soap slivers in a mesh bag to make suds for dishwashing, internationally acclaimed mixed media artist Donald Lipski, and the adult children of deceased parents who departed the world leaving their soap sliver collections behind, as well as slivers from such unexpected sources as the prisoners of the Milwaukee County Jail. In lieu of sending soap, Ruth Mullaney (see below) sent a poem she wrote years before, comparing the virtues of a soap sliver with those of a fresh bar of soap.

Here’s what Jill says about soap:
“Bars of soap are a time-based medium. As they are used, they decompose, shrink, change shape, and crack, accumulating the dirt from our bodies in the resulting crevices, like veins in marble. …In addition to the changing with use, the form of soap we choose provides a record of society’s changes in priorities over time. The increased fear of transmittable pathogens has fostered a reticence to come in close contact with objects used by others, thus, in recent years, the simple, economic bar of soap has faced competition from liquid soap in dispensers that guarantee the product we use on our body is pristine — touched by no skin but our own.”

Of her philosophy as an artist and her motivation for working with such an unusual medium as soap slivers, Jill says: “I privilege the visual aspect of my work, and endeavor to engage conceptual significance through the final form each work takes, as well as through the process of creating it….What primarily attracts me to soap remnants as a medium is the variety of pastel colors I expect to encounter: pearly white, pale or golden yellows, pastel aquas, greens and pinks. Above all, I want the work to have a painterly quality. I view soap as a colorful, malleable, medium that gains significance through our reliance upon it in daily life.”

So much significance about soap slivers! Who would have “thunk” it!

Jill has shown her compositions of soap slivers in three shows to date, and between shows, of course the soap slivers continued to, pardon the pun, shower in. Its first public viewing was at Lunarbase Gallery in Brooklyn, NY during the preliminary show for the Accumulation Project, in which the 19 participating artists presented their collections of proposed objects at an early stage in the process, after about 4 months of accumulation.

She presented larger and more complex displays of the collection in later shows in both May and July of 2006, in Baltimore, MD and Philadelphia, PA., respectively. The Accumulation Project’s final show will be held in Jersey City, NJ starting October 6th, 2007. For more information about the Accumulation Project and its final show, go to www.accumulationproject.org .

At the end of our interview, I asked Jill what kind of artist she considers herself. She told me she is a mixed media and installation artist with an interest in working with ephemeral materials. Often, her works only exist for a short period of time, thus they offer only a fleeting opportunity for viewers to enjoy them. Since the soap fragments are not affixed to the display surface after a showing, they are packed away and sorted in boxes. As Jill notes in her essay, “The Accumulation Project: My Adventures in Ephemeral Art, the boxed soaps are merely “…awaiting their next opportunity to manifest a presence as a changed work of art.” She also has her own twist on the ephemeral quality of her soap project, which is that soap’s very nature is ephemeral, “dissolving in our grip, changing shape and size as it performs its function.”

As you can see, I am very much taken with Jill’s work. I think all of life is ephemeral, and the soap is a metaphor for that life, because like soap, we change in shape and size as we perform our (female) functions. As we go from girlhood and our innocence, we are shaped and changed by careers, marriage, children, divorce, death of loved ones, etc. If we go through childbirth and later we experience menopause, our physical bodies also change shape, like the bars of soap do with increased use. Just as Jill sees each of these shapes as beautiful in their changeability, so I think we can love our bodies as they change their shape. Not to sound too deep, isn’t life like soapsuds in water, bubbly or flat, depending on how much you shake the soap in the water? So start moving your bodies and shaking up your mind and enjoy the fragility and fleeing nature of your life, before it all melts away, like soap.

To view Jill’s artwork, please go to www.artfaceoff.com, click on Gallery, and then type in Jill Greenberg in the box on the left, where it says Customize your Gallery. One of her installations will come up in the center box. Click on that photo and the rest of her work will show up on the left margin view, under her name. The soap mosaic is the second one in the margin, on the right. Click on that and it will appear larger in the main display box.

Below is the poem Ruth Mullaney from Virginia wrote years ago and sent to Jill, after reading about her soap sliver accumulation project in a newspaper article.

On Soap by Ruth C. Mullaney

A new cake of soap is a thing of delight,
Its smoothness and shape, a form just right

Seems better to melt away doing its job
Than be carried along an unsightly blob.

Here is the soap mosaic that Jill created for the Philadelphia show, entitled “The Sweetest Fruit.” It is 54″ X 72″X6″.

Jill explains that the title of her piece comes from a Hindu myth about how the mango got its distinctive paisley-like shape, which you can see in Jill’s photo of her soap slivers mosaic.

“The Monkey god Hanuman was hungry and looked up into the trees for fruit. He ate one, which was a wonderful flavor, much better than all the others. It was a mango. To make sure all of his friends could find the same good fruit he went along and squeezed them all into this distinctive shape.”

For Jill, finding this story was a “eureka” moment, since she explains how our grip transform the soft medium of soap to a distinctly different shape, thus she gave the tile of her mosaic The Sweetest Fruit to both her paisley design versions of soap. (The other design was created for a Baltimore show.) When I first contacted Jill for an interview, she read about mangoes in my blog and sent me the information on mango legend. I love when two strangers connect with something mutually of interest to them.

Feel free to contact Jill about her art via her email address:
JillGreenberg27@hotmail.com.