Sorting Lentils

So here's a lesson: when you pick over your lentils, do it slowly! I tend to be careless when I do this, trusting the packagers (and since when do I ever trust businesses to do the right thing?) to have sorted the lentils before sending them to me. And yet I know, through hard-biting teeth-truth, that stones slip through.

 

I resolve to change. I shall bring to lentil-sorting the same single-pointed attention that I bring to making pastry or shelling peas. I shall turn off the radio and just sort with my whole self: lentil, lentil, lentil, stone. And if I find no stones, will I take that as a sign that, from then on, all my boughten lentils are stone-free? Will I relinquish the slow motion of lentil-sorting?

 

I hope not. I hope I would continue to invest myself in the process, not in the outcome. No stones this time might mean half a dozen stones the next time. Keep at it, lentil by lentil. Be slow. Trust your own process to reveal stones, words, faults, beauties. Sort lentils when you are sorting lentils.

 

This brings to mind the twelve quarts of sour cherries that I pitted and froze last summer. Such beautiful cherries—and a new cherry-pitter! Yet, when I baked a cherry pie from my newly frozen cherries, I found two pits that had somehow escaped my eye and my fingers. The lesson: I am not infallible when it comes to cherry-pitting nor, quite likely, when it comes to lentil-sorting.

 

Beware, all you who eat from my table!

 

 

Copyright 2012 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com