In the early hours I awoke from a dream wherein I was browsing in a market place.
I approached a trader to ask how business was but instead instantly and without second thought bought one of her spinach and feta pies. Having consumed it there and then I turned to buy a second - one would never be enough! - as I opened my humble purse I felt the remorse of spending my precious fruit money on a compulsive addiction. I ate the second pie sitting on some steps. It went in a flash. A young man with curly blonde hair and a guitar came and sat next to me, could have been an angel but I was in too drunken a torpor to adequately communicate.
Then I attempted to cross somewhere and found myself in an almost empty reservoir, at the bottom and on the far side. I couldn't see how I had got to where I was or how to return without entering foreboding green water, and besides there was no longer a ladder in the place where I had descended.
Suddenly next to me another ladder appeared, with rungs so narrow I could barely grip them with the tips of my fingers. Somehow I ascended, as if being lifted. At the top I found myself in a new land of green rolling hills - and a church, I think.
I had no way to go back the way I had come, had left the place I was in before.
I am on the other side.
No more temptation, no more old life, not even any more transitions, salads or mixes. Certainly this is the power of having access to the uplifting company of someone who has held the faith... and this book that has come to me now, Raw Eating, written in the sixties by Iranian author and true philanthropist, Arshavir Ter Hovannessian.
Since I found this book a few days ago I have devoured it twice and with the same appetite as did I the pies in my dream, starting immediately again at the first page as soon as I turned the last. Assuredly will power is nothing next to love, and loving the words of this masterpiece and the presence of octogenarian Essie Honiball is the magic which has brought me into a new land where I would never have had the will power to enter.
Raw Eating by Arshavir Ter Hovannessian
Free online here
