My Best Gluten-Free Apple Crisp

The best gluten-free apple crisp I've made. In this lifetime anyway.

The I in my disease.

I've been pondering identity lately. As in, am I the I writing this as Gluten-Free Goddess--- or am I a word-free, less defined kind of I that isn't actually I at all, but merely a spark in the collective energy source that is the Great Mystery? Or Universe. Or Divine. Or whatever conceptual nomenclature you prefer.

Am I my thinking mind- or am I more of an essence, what we call soul, a truth beyond the assumed collection of thought patterns, personality traits, and personal history framed by a set of beliefs and separation known as the ego?

I do know I am not my disease.

One of the reasons I chose not to use the word celiac in my blog title was for just this very reason. I do not define myself as a celiac. In an identity sense. I do not identify with my this disease. That would be identifying with my gastro-functional limitations.

Hello, my name is Karina. And I have screwed up villi.

But I am not my screwed up villi. Just as I am not my post-cataract lens implants. Or my mended broken hip. Or the silvery streaked hair that bristles like a squirrel on this prone-to-migraines head. I am also not this post-menopausal body that has brilliantly succumbed to a gravitational force superior than lunges and squats (in the end gravity wins, I am sorry to tell you).
 
The older I get, I find less and less comfort in defining myself at all- never mind defining myself by my various bodily quirks (not to mention, my southerly migrating butt). I derive no solace in my mental quirks either. My beliefs, or assumptions, or my random monkey thoughts. Even my skills are a poor capture of who I really am. I do not identify with how many paintings I've painted or sold, or how many likes I receive on Instagram. I do not crave recognition as a mirror. The alleged prize of fame and fortune remains less than compelling, my least urgent motivator.

I instead wander the hours of my days seeking answers that lead to more questions. Not answers that close the book. As in, subscribing to a system that has it all "figured out".

As Anne Lamott likes to say, certainty is the opposite of faith.

Certainty is finite.

The end of growth. It clips the wings of possibility- the bigger truth that exists beyond my small understanding. Closing the book on the question of Who am I, exactly? would be foolish. The Big Mystery is far greater and more full of awesome than I can ever attempt to imagine. And whatever micro-teeny part I play in this infinite universal system called Life, I intuitively know one aspect of it, thanks to five-plus decades of living. Whatever It is, It is fluid. Everything changes. Including time. The past, present and future. The Universe (it's expanding, you know, faster than they first calculated). My experiential perception of myself (also expanding). The I that does not exist, because the I is only ego. The nattering, unreliable voice in my head.

So if this I does not exist--- who is craving this apple crisp?

Perhaps the only sensible response is this.

Be one with the apple crisp.

Now that I can do.




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