Mmmm Mmmmm Good
After decades of renaming January, and celebrating Soup Month, I and my family are no strangers to the many perplexed looks and questions we undoubtedly receive annually in throughout the first month of the year. The most popular question is more of a clarifying statement: “So, you eat soup for a whole month.” The perusal of cookbooks, various websites, and recipe specific searches are all part of this week’s repertoire - the week just prior to what my family has (sometimes unkindly, especially, if close to Jan 31st!) referred to the month of January as “Soup Month”!
Why? Spiritual or religious? Diet or nutrition? Ran out of grocery budget at year end? What would provoke such a rigid idea? Why 31 days of soup?
Originally, the idea stemmed from all of those possibilities and more. However, through the years, the idea has honed a unique evolution of reasoning…to establish peace, grounding, re-balancing, comfort, ease, stillness, and community.
Today, Soup Month provides our family with the amazing opportunity to experience the ability to free space in our hearts, bodies, minds and hourglasses as in a time keeper; not a reference to body image! Making soup requires very little effort for one person or a lot collaboration of many. Some days it may be one of us tossing in a few bags of frozen veggies, beans, stock and seasoning. Voila’! Other days it may include several of us chopping, slicing, and braising beside each other in conversation; catching up in an otherwise fast paced and limited leisure world. Many days our productivity will yield gallons - more than enough to share with our surrounding neighbors and friends. This may take on a look of home delivery to someone who is ill or it may fill our own table with a community dinner for friends and family. For over thirty days, we are able to experience a lightness in our bodies, reminding us of the abundance of nutritional blessings we enjoyed in December, to experience ease in our minds by the elimination of decisions beyond the ones already focused on during a season of gifting, to experience a giving heart through the additional time we get and choose to spend with others and each other in stillness and little elaborate preparation, and of course, to experience comfort in the warmth of every spoonful.
“Soup Month is so much more than a pot, a stock, and a ladle”, I answer. It is a month that clears space in mind, body, and spirit for new ideas, new awareness, and new connections with ourselves and others.