Curses Foiled Again?
We are in a very warm stretch of the Summer season and making a number of attempts to avoid using indoor appliances to heat food. That means cooking things on an outdoor grill.
A couple days ago we decided to prepare a lean cut of seasoned pork - why the entire pork menu isn’t bacon?—who knows? However cooking on an outdoor grill even our infrared electronic device can be tricky since like in life heat and cold are often distributed unevenly no matter what your intentions might be. This being the case we often find it efficient and effective to wrap our intended feast in aluminum foil. When getting the meat ready a sheet of foil was pulled off the roll and some thoughts came into focus. First, the foil was thinner than usual. This prompted the question—would this still be useful? Of course once one question emerges the flood gates opened.
What does being useful foil involve? If you type it wrong all you have is a fool? So thanks to Sr. Gregory my association with foil leaped from something a cartoon villain was “cursed and foiled again” to a method used to multiply algebraic terms. Foil of course stands for First Outers Inners then Lasts. If you fully understand this then add in a useable knowledge of squares between 1 and 50 then multiplying any two digit number by another two digit number becomes as easy as counting to 10 starting at 9. There is of course the sword fighting instrument known as the oil. It’s a long thin sword mostly impactful when you jab or stab with it. However, let’s do away with that and get back to the sheets of aluminum coming from a roll. Now cooking isn’t the only use for this. Rumor has it that it can block the harmful rays beamed down by aliens or perhaps Russian or Chinese satellites? Ok let’s not get into those conspiracies they never helped Jimmy Hoffa.
So lets’s start moving toward the seeking peace and joy connection to foil. So this thin metal which is now being sold in thinner and thinner sheets assort of like the world today. Our protection agains harmful things like rays —oh wait we’re back to the Russians? Seriously our insulation from exterior factors has grown thinner and thinner so what this foil was like in 1910 when it emerged as a product is not what it is toda. Yet if we can imagine our ideas and emotions wrapped in the silver blanket that sells around 30 billion dollars in product, then we can handle random heating from all environments much more effectively. So in seeking peace maybe finding some spiritual foil like meditation, music, prayer, or exercise is a good idea. If we experience joy maybe we can not only take some of it in we can reflect some of it back out into the world? We can turn the shiny side in to hold in heat and produce juices that remain or we can go shiny side out so cooking can take it’s good time and we can relax and smell the goodness we are about to eat. Sometimes it’s good not to hurry through things.
Finally this foil becomes a container for holding in the nourishment it helped to prepare. Maybe something to think about when seeking peace and joy us “what containers do we have that holds in the experiences of peace and joy? Do we share the stories that remind us and others of our peaceful and joyful moments? Do we look for the shiny side in others? Like the foil do we understand that the roll doesn’t go on forever? Do we accept that seeking peace and joy is a process and the result of that doesn’t always go on forever?
Well speaking of going on forever… this entry has gone on quite long enough. Like the pork we are making again soon, it’s time to wrap this up?
