Angel Delight and Acceptance

17th May 2012 Thursday

My friend from Sidmouth is held up in the Devon County show traffic. So instead of going to buy curtains for her new home we settle in with cups of tea and the open tin of flapjacks on the table between us, a big jug of lilac blossom scenting the kitchen. We decide talking and crying and laughing are better than shopping. 

After lunch of  left over mushroom risotto I forage in the aisles of Morrisons for the most refined foods I can find like white bread rolls, Rice Krispies, lemon and lime jelly and wine gums. From tomorrow my husband has to have a no fibre diet for two days, then liquids only for two days in preparation for his colonoscopy on Monday. So no vegetables or fruit or wholemeal bread or even jam with pips in it. And no red jelly in case it stains his insides.

I didn’t realise my commitment to fresh and whole and living food was so total .My dedication to organic spinach so religious. I discover, while searching for jelly, that you can still buy Angel Delight - my favourite thing in all the world when I was a teenager, newly arrived on the ship from Africa, and going to school in Bournemouth. I remember the sweet frothy empty texture of it  - but I wouldn’t be able to put it in my mouth now.

When I open the front door tonight after my Mindfulness Meditation class my husband is playing Handel’s Messiah full blast in the kitchen and breaking eggs into the poacher.

One piece of toast or two? he asks with a glass of wine in his hand.

We aren’t supposed to be drinking in the week. In the class tonight we were talking about the practise of acceptance and allowing and letting be. A first step is to stop trying to make things different and just notice how they are - or ‘Don’t argue with reality’ as Byron Katie says.

So I say, ‘Two pieces, please. And thank you for making supper’. And I give him a hug while the steam from the saucepan floats around us  -  a warm, clean mist, dissolving those judging words I nearly said.