Pumpkin cookies with quinoa flakes. Like oatmeal- but better.





Dear Reader (yes, Babycakes, I'm talking to you)- you know how I feel about you, right? I'm crazy about you. I read your kind and thoughtful comments on various social media. I am humbled by your generous, warm and giving e-mails (I save them).





Your feedback and support keeps me going and inspires me.





I started this whole crazy blogging adventure back in a village on Cape Cod famous for quaint. One of those slow paced leafy communities with whitewashed churches and a town grist mill. Salt weathered shingles and white picket fences and roses in June. You know, historic. Beachy. The magical stuff of regional painters and windswept poets prone to melancholy.





Then an empty nest ignited the urge for going and my husband and I moved west to the rural high desert of New Mexico where the cobalt beauty of an oceanic sky met the hot iron of isolation and a certain individual's proclivity toward brittle bones. My broken hip changed my body forever.





Four- er- now thirteen!- years later (relocated to Austin, Texas) I am profoundly grateful. And I am wrestling with new ideas and facing certain limitations post-you-know-what (still waiting for Margaret Mead's promise of post-menopausal zest). Days are often a stew of conflicting realities, losses and gains stirred so close together they emulsify.









Forgive my habitual drift into philosophical territory here, but here's the thing. A growing, deepening awareness of how little we actually control has sparked my need to surrender. And shake loose some assumptions. Including the perception of Other (risking a messy and complicated expansion of the heart, the awareness of Yeah , I am that too ). Which startles you with a sharp clean view of what is valuable and true.





What is bare bones rock bottom important.





Important not in some airy-fairy PC New Agey or even dyed-in-the-wool religious way. I chafe inside any system and its man-made rules. I'm old enough now to look back upon entire decades with an estrogen-free seasoned eye. I see the need behind belief. I see the old paradigm.



I see why people judge and separate, critique and belittle.



I see the reason why unruly concepts are snipped down to size and labeled and tucked safely into rehearsed little packages of fear whisked with a pinch of faith.



The Ego rules. And the Ego loves conflict.





I also see the powerful few at the top doling out platitudes to the millions who struggle with so much less.



And we are not blameless, either, we who are so willing to consume what masquerades as inclusion and progress when it is anything but.





So here's the thing.





Before I share my recipe today, before I conjure words about cookies and yummy flavors and how much vanilla to beat into the dough, allow me some food for thought, if you will.





We are all given moments of grace.



Far too many of these moments are missed, floating by the fuzzy edges of momentum, a stream of invisible assumptions. And needs. Life guarantees change, but really, what else? Opportunity (what are you going to do with what you've got?). Choice. Self explanatory, right? We cut a swath of choices every single day. Trivial choices (would you like whipped cream on that?). And loaded choices (some requiring nothing less than moral courage to execute). Each and every choice spins us off in a direction, a trajectory with consequences.





And what I am coming to realize, even cherish, now more than ever, is this. The choices boil down to a choice between love (connection) or fear (separation).



So what will you choose today?



Think about it.



As for me?





I vote for love.





Karina's Pumpkin Quinoa Cookie Recipe

Originally published December 2009.

These tasty morsels of cookie goodness freeze quite well, so hide a few on baking day and freeze for later. It's always nice to have a surprise treat on hand for unexpected guests. Or breakfast!