Food Before Floors

What's in your bowl?

A skill I used to enjoy was a keen ability to prioritize.  No more.  I have lost that ability in the slush-pile of our lives.  I have a minor crisis about this daily.  In fact, right after Mason was born, I saw a counselor about the sudden evaporation of my sense of priorities.  "There is so much to attend to--more than one person could ever take care of. What do I do first?"  She gave me really great advice in the form of a parable:

A professor has a cup in his hand.  Next to him on the desk is a pile of rocks, a pile of sand and a bowl of water.  He fills the cup up with the rocks and asks the class, "is the cup full?" 


They reply, "Yes!" 


"Wrong." He commences to add sand to the cup, fulling in the cracks.  "Now is the cup full?" he asks.  


"Yes!" they reply.  


"Wrong." Next he adds water, filling in more gaps again, until the cup really is full.


"What is the lesson?" asks the professor.  


The student in the front row responds, "No matter how full your cup is, you can always add more!" 


"No," says the professor.  "You better put the rocks in first!"

This is a great parable.  One I think about often in the form of "what are my rocks today?"  Of course they are always my people--my family and friends.  I recently had the revelation that I am a rock that needs to go in, too.  Don't know why it took me three years of motherhood to discover that!!

One clear way I care for all of us is with food.  If we don't have good food in our bellies, it's tough to do much else--maintain energy, health or well-being.   I don't show my love with the latest and greatest toys (because I hate shopping), or with money in the college fund (because it's all going somewhere else right now), or by keeping the house clean (because it's truly impossible.) Instead,  I put up some Colorado tomato sauce and help butcher a local hog.  Needless to say, our pantry and freezer and bellies are full, but not the bank account or vacuum cleaner.