Heirloom beings

Someone I really respect once asked me, “Are you a human being or a human doing?” Up until I discovered heirloom beans I had the modern ability to make this question a dilemma despite time, experience and the overall aging process.  These days I feel as though I have found the answer. There’s a lot of great questions out there that arrest you and have you consider your life from a loftier perspective or if that’s too much altitude let’s call it a considering perspective. Questions can shed new light and open up doors and windows that had been shut down for the season. Even so, questions just like other life stiffening agents can box you in if you feel there’s only an either or answer. Most of us in this country are fortunate enough to be swirled with a world of responses to how we’d like our coffee; so why not a multiple choice option for our life defining questions?

Given my love of beans in the last few years, understanding that being and beans are probably closely related; that at some significant juncture in the history of humanity and other biota, the bean and being were probably so close that you could not tell one from the other – I would say that I am a human bean every bit as much as a human being.  I might not have been had it not been for the bean.  There is no sure evidence of what I feel to be intuitively true but isn’t it right enough to feel this truth, to own it and live it?  Today I live in a wonderment of heirloom beans. I feel that I have found my roots. At one point I thought my attachment to my roots because of time and circumstances were shrinking, now I feel as if they are growing and extending beyond anything I could have imagined.

Just a few short weeks ago another bean stole my heart. If you don’t understand how beans can do that than surely you are cold to the fact that beans and the history of beans is probably one of the most profound ways we have of understanding our time on this planet. I would not be surprised if the sirens singing to Odysseus on the rocks (That sounds like a drink doesn’t it? I’ll have an Odysseus on the rocks, please.) were Mediterranean beans moving in time with the tide and inking the waters with their messages of love and allure.

I would not have thought I would be a person to sing an ode to beans. But I am that person now.  I often feel a strong urge to sing the praises of the heirloom beans coming on the market and gripping my attention. Maybe I am descended from those very same beans that sang to the twenty-year traveler.  I only wish that I could speak to you of the depth and breath of beans the world over but this discovery is new for me and I am still swooning in a sea of recognition and renewal.  I have found the beans and the beans have found me. They feel as deeply a part of my heritage as my connection to the sea. But knowledge of my bean relatives is not as comprehensive as I would wish.

Only a few weeks ago the Santa Maria Pinquitos took my breath away. They flourished their hold on my palette and even stunned my partner’s ‘beans again’ chorus with an open chord of ‘that is the most delicious bean I ever had.’  It is unquestionably a case of recognizing the core relationship we shared with this bean – a way back feeling of knowing and meeting again after all these travels and trails.

You see, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you accomplished. Life is more profound than that and the gift of this life is not what we do but how we’ve bean.  I wish everyone could know the outright beauty of some beans. For myself and my home, I no longer need museums or visits to galleries or other forms of communion.  I am not trying to convince anyone to stay away from any art that feeds their soul or brings them solace by spending time with their people.  So many of the people in our world do not often get to see their reflection or their glory in the culture that can dominate our lives. In my own small way, I have found that the beauty of beans has brought me the sense of access that only people going to museums or visiting private collections of art or meeting with their people might feel. I have, if you’ll excuse the outright bragging, appaloosa beans, Anazazi beans, calypso or Orca beans, for instance, right on my kitchen counter. I have Christmas beans and I have butterscotch, cranberry and goat’s eye beans as well. I could go on but I would not want to breed jealousy.

I will never forget how the Anazazi beans were nearly hidden under a produce display in  the supermarket where I found them.  Their beauty and uniqueness were immediately apparent. They were in a turquoise package and sold as an expensive, gourmet bean.  Well, that was certainly true. They were rare, they were expensive and they were something someone recovered from the big agricultural machine to save a big piece of history along with a quiet, beautiful bean.  When I got home I let the music of the beans touching each other pour into my hands and thought of the Anazazi, here so long, gone so quickly, leaving so many questions.  It was an honor to hold their beans and they are so lovely.  I could not bring myself to eat them for years because I did not know if I would ever find them again. 

Ever since finding the Anazazi beans I have been keenly aware that there are few places that carry heirloom beans. But when I find them I remember. Remembering pulls something from you and connects that to a deep belonging. I am sure that the people that have been saving seeds and bringing heirloom foods to us are cultural heroes. I know that the story of beans will continue to blossom and bloom because of them.

Since the Anazazi awakened this love of the bean in me I also learned about less elusive beans that I never gave a thought to before. How many kinds of lentils are there in the world?  Quick cooking and each one unique, I am welcoming lentils into the fold.  Beluga lentils are beautiful and because I know they aren’t so rare, I managed to find out how delicious they are. The little traveling I do, I keep an eye out for food stores, even gourmet shops,  because they have become gateways to the beauty of beans. The first time I found Christmas limas I was in Delaware. Now I hear ‘Delaware’ I think Christmas lima. They used to call my mother Leaping Lena.  I wonder about the jumping beans and if some of that spring was in her leaping. I count myself a human in love with being and beans and know that I am every bit as much being as I am bean. That is my heritage and that is why I am an heirloom being.