Nourishment - more than just what’s on your plate

I called this blog Nourish because as I’m learning in my Health Coaching program at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, nourishment is more than just the food we eat.  It also includes all the ways in which energy is given and consumed in our lives, i.e., our jobs, our relationships, our hobbies, our emotions and thoughts, and the ways we move our bodies.

Certainly Thanksgiving is a holiday that touches so many of these areas and as we approach the big day next week,, I can’t help but think of celebrations past and the energy of all the bodies crammed in my grandma’s little Cape house. No table long enough, or room big enough to hold her 8 kids, their spouses, and all their children, people filled every room with plates on knees and on card tables.

The house was a riot of sounds, pans clanging, laughter, kids running up and down stairs, and of course football.  There may have been snow on the wide open fields behind her house, where cows grazed in summer sun. The chill in the air in November more likely to produce little puffs of white as the peaceful animals breathed out into the wind.

To my mind, connections and energy exchange are at the center of Thanksgiving and the holiday hits so many of the aspects of life that make our lives full, and complicated. I feel connected to so much at Thanksgiving – history, the earth, family, friends, the past, and present. Time tends to somehow fold in on itself.

 I acknowledge that nostalgia tends to focus its rosy light on all that was good, obscuring some of reality. My own personal truth about nostalgia is that I was desperate to leave my little town and get myself to a big city ASAP when I was a teenager. However, after 25 years of living half a country away from where I grew up, I miss home more than ever and as much as I know that home is where you make it, the kid in me comes more to life when I am in my old neighborhood in the Midwest, with people I grew up with.

I am grateful that my brother also made the move to New England a few years after I did, but he must be feeling nostalgia’s pull too, because this year for Thanksgiving he is reviving an old family recipe, Seven Layer Jello, a true childhood favorite. And even if we’re the only two people who eat it, we will delight in the memories of Thanksgivings at grandma’s house and feel nourished not only by the rainbow of colors, but the connections, the energy, and new memories made from Midwestern roots transplanted in New England soil.

Photo: Seven Layer Jello recipe from my mom’s St. Joseph’s Church cookbook with her handwritten notes below.