MAPLE NUT GRANOLA

Here is a simple recipe adapted from America’s Test Kitchen by Nanji Davison that we enjoyed during the 2015 Camp Caravan Summer Seminar

Ingredients:
6 cups thick cut rolled oats
1/3 cup maple syrup
1/3 cup light brown sugar or Florida crystals combined with 1 TB molasses
½ cup vegetable oil of your choice-olive, avocado, sunflower oil
4 tsp vanilla
½ tsp sea salt
2 cups chopped almonds or nuts of your choice
2 cups dried fruit-raisins, fruit juice sweetened dried cranberries (to be added after baking)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Put the rolled oats in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl mix syrup, sugar, oil, vanilla and salt well. Pour over oats. Add nuts and mix well. Cut parchment paper a little larger than the dimensions of a rimmed baking sheet. Press mixture down with a potato masher, being careful to fill in 4 corners. Bake 40-45 minutes, rotating pan half way through baking. Remove from oven and let cool on rack. Pull up edges of parchment paper to help remove granola. Return to large bowl and mix in your choice of dried fruit. Store in tight jars when completely cool.

COOK’S TIPS:
Most recipes have you stir every 10 minutes or so. By pressing the oat mixture flat there are no areas that will cook faster or unevenly. This technique can be used on any recipe. If all you have are whole nuts a quick pulse in a food processor will chop them. You can use all maple syrup but the brown sugar or sugar/molasses mixture adds flavor.

One needs fire. Without fire, there will never be anything. This fire is suffering, voluntary suffering, without which it is impossible to create anything. One must prepare, must know what will make one suffer and when it is there one must make use of it. Only you can prepare, only you know what makes you suffer, make the fire which cooks, cements, crystallizes, does. Suffer by your defects, in your pride, in your egoism. Remind yourself of the aim. Without prepared suffering there is nothing, for by as much as one is conscious, then there is no more suffering, no further process, nothing…Gurdjieff ("Remain Apart").

Inspiration

Enneagram Poem

Out of the dreaming time, a thought flickers into life.
Assuming myself, I stride forward.
Uncertain where to go, I find a breeze that carries me.
Deposited on a mountain slope, I begin to climb and
reach a summit where the view makes me ecstatic.
But, darkness falls and I am left alone.
In the new dawn, I find myself on a verdant plain
The sun shafts through the clouds and guides me to a hill.
Standing there, I see the dream that brought me here.

by A.G.E. Blake

Freshly Laundered & Hanging Out to Dry
Barbara June Applegren has written a new book called "Freshly Laundered & Hanging Out to Dry", about her experiences on the second Sherborne course. It is being serialized on the Bennett Books website. (See links below)

Start Here
Forward and Chap 1, Part 1
Chap 1, Part2
Chap 1, Part 3
Chap 2
Chap 3, Part 1
Chap 3, Part 2
Chap 4
Chap 5
Chap 6, Part 1

At Camp Caravan, we remove our scapes (the flowering tops of the garlic plants) and then make tasty dishes. Group member Penelope Sullivan provides this art work and recipe. Enjoy!

Great Scape Garlic Pesto Recipe

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
And the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
---wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell---on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

~ Diane Ackerman

A crisp clear winter morning at Camp Caravan.
The sun is low in the sky,
At this time of year.
It comes in angled,
Shining on faces at the breakfast table.
Outside the frozen ground lies waiting,
Recuperating.

We too are recuperated.
More than one world is here.
The physical world of sense perceptions
And the invisible behind appearances.

The unseen world brings us here.
It has a life we rarely see or hear,
Inexpressible.
We come to quench a thirst,
Maybe catch a glimpse,
Of what this world can offer,
Meaning, connection, harmony, participation, work.

Martin Brown, MREC

Where is God now?

My father said:
God is in Sari Kamish
Fastening happiness to the tops of trees
Making double ladders
So that people and nations can ascend and descend.
In the evenings
He sat outside and looked at the stars.
Nothing disturbed his inner peace
So long as there was bread
And quiet for meditation.

I wished with all my heart
To be such as I knew him to be
In his old age.

Where is God now?
On Rue des Colonels Renard
I sit in the attitude he taught me
An old man
In my ears the sounds of children's voices
Monsieur Bon Bon
Feeling the sun warm
The ruin of my body
I breathe God
In and out.

Pierce Butler
writer-in-residence
Bentley University