I made sopa de lima with limas! Sopa de lima is a soup from the Yucatan and perhaps my favorite Mexican soup. But limas are hard to come by. I forgot to mention that last week, in the Matlatzinca village, I found and bought a bag for $1. When I googled “Lima”, of course I first got results for the capital of Peru. However in the AI overview, I still couldn’t find my citrus. I did learn that LIMA can stand for “Least Intrustive, Minimally Aversive” which may need to be added to my lexicon, and that a lima lima is a species of bivalve, also known as the spiny fileclam which sounds like a malcontented office assistant. The lima fruit is a cross between citron and bitter orange. They’re around the size of a tangerine, smooth skinned like a meyer lemon, but look a bit unripe, with a greenish tinge. You can eat them raw easily, there’s not a ton o flavor, but the smell!!!! Sopa de lima can be made 2 ways, one with a clear broth and the other with a rich sofrito. While I like the latter, I prefer the simplicity of the former.
I’ve been reading a lot about mindfunlness and have been trying, in my own small way, to practice it. To be cognizant of every change in every sensation in every moment for a least a few moments. The idea being to recognize movement in the smallest of things and accept the temporary nature of the world and our lives within it. So you start with the breath drawing attention to the feeling of air entering your nose, drawing further, the expansion of your chest and belly, the way it lifts your spine. You simply experience. You don’t name you don’t judge. This is freakin’ impossible with emotional pain. Ok, more likely it’s beyond my current skill set, but trying to allow it to happen and not name it or it’s components, not work to understand it’s cause. And honestly, it’s too complex and moving to name in real time. When you cry you feel a constriction in your throat, crumpling of your face, tightness across your chest, contractions in your bell, tears filling your eyes and then it immediately changes to the release of a sob and then back again. And I simply cannot put words on all the things before they change again. The goal of mindfulness is to be able to do this wordlessly, to experience and observe without trying to drawa conclusions. Quite simply, you broke my heart and it’s my daily challenge to allow that to just be, the weight and sadness of it and to trust that my heart knows how to heal itself and just be patient. To work to not assign blame, not overanalyze, not obsess with small details here and there as though they are clues I’m putting together that somehow change something. So yeah, there’s that.
Leo is starting at a new school that’s closer to my house and just generally seems better and has exciting events like Balls, Ropes & Cones Mondays, Massage Fridays and Bubble Saturdays, which to be perfectly honest, I’m a little jealous of. He already got a bath there and does not smell like lavendar, so now it’s just me. And we get to walk past this restaurant that leaves cilantro out to dry and this amazing jaguar mural.
My parents showed up, safe and sound, tonight, and that aside it’s been a pretty uneventul week overall. I apologize to anyone who might wanting photographic evidence of their safe arrival, I utterly failed in this regard. But there is a promising week ahead photowise.
Tacos from Los Gonzalitos. A chile relleno and sirloin northern style (with beans). One of my favs.
Year One Project 
Leave a comment