A Salad is a Love Song: My Abeetion

Making a salad

Author showing off bottom of rainbow confetti salad design in a glass floral design cube.

Salads are for sharing

Add more to the salad

Dress it

Keep it complex and interesting

A salad is an entanglement of relations

It starts with getting the best ingredients

Which starts with cultivating the best relations with people who grow food

Make sure they have what they need to thrive

Buy food at the prices they ask

Ask for what you want, tell them what you like

The same advice for intimate relations success: checking in, enthusiastic ongoing affirmative consent, talking about the joy, being expressive of feelings, engage in difficult conversations with confidence that the relation won't be damaged

Being safe and vulnerable at the same time

Being safe and vulnerable at the same time requires TRUST

TRUST

Can you taste trust?

Sometimes I have trusted the wrong people for too long

Sometimes there are forces which cause us to be loyal when we instead should exercise integrity

Forces like having access to work, income, independence of movement, bodily autonomy, due process

Access to air, water, food, shelter, the basic necessities of life

Trust requires repeated interactions which help a person recognize another person's integrity, the way they respond in different situations, what they do consistently

REPEATED INTERACTIONS

Repeated interactions happen in community, when people spontaneously start to expect interactions with neighbors, school families, religious groups, community organizations. Spontaneous interactions sometimes happen in public spaces like Parks and Beaches.

People need to be able to trust each other.  People need to behave trustworthily.  Those who don't, need to be avoided or corrected, but not indulged as if they have integrity, as if they are trustworthy.

A salad is a love song

It tells the story of people who trust each other

It sings the story of passions, lovemaking bees

reproducing life

enthusiastic life-force bursting forth

A salad is about trust

A salad is about the making of love, making food with love, making love with food

There can be blood, in a salad

A beet, a knife, and beet juice on a blue cutting board.

Shredded beet about to be strained through cheese cloth.

Cheese cloth in a strainer, stained with "beet blood".  I strain the shredded beets so the "blood" doesn't bleed into other colors in my design.  I learned early it is important to hide the bloody messes.  Beet juice rinses easily in water.

Whole beet in its bloody cheese cloth.

Beet juice squeezed from shredded beet.  They say you can't squeeze blood from a stone or a turnip.  But it sure looks like you can squeeze blood from a beet.  I used the beet juice to dye my hair and drank the rest.

Containers of shredded veggies, clockwise from top: spinach, beet, cauliflower, carrot.  I use the confetti veggies like colored sands in a mandala to "paint" 3D pictures/scupltures in salad.  My salad is a love song for friends and family.

Assembling a checkerboard design of shredded veggies in a glass floral design cube.

Checkerboard/rubiks cube design and attempted  "heart" design in glass floral design cube.

This is a beet

But it looks like a bloody mess

Is this an organ?

This feels so...birthy

OR is this an abortion?

An abeetion?

Tell this story out loud

The red tent celebration which is so cringe

And also now we say cringe about second wave feminism

Maybe telling these abeetion stories is necessary

Stories about bloody messes

which are so very cringe

and have also been defined to be cringe because they are about women and reproductive labor and caring about others and being the decision makers

They are about women counting, about their lives and experiences mattering

When people want to avoid the cringiness of things, they want to avoid seeing reality

Reality is that women need to be able to control their lives

Reality is that salads are made with love

And love is messy, not a hallmark card

Someone touches all the messes--cleans them, repairs them, makes them whole

Usually that someone is made invisible because it makes others "cringe" to see the process

Some prefer to just take the final product, wrapped up.  Clean.  Fresh.  Sanitized.

Hide the Intimacy, Secrecy, Blood

Face the bloody mess.  Face the cringeworthy.  Face the dream of separation.  Face the dream of connectedness.

A salad is a love song.  An abortion is a love song.

Abortion is healthcare.  Abortion is necessary.  Abortion is loving.