The Daily G.I.F.T. from The GratiDude

Recycle! Ideas, recipes, memories, let’s leverage the good from the past!

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Moving this to the TOP, as this is the Foundation.

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The G.I.F.T. Today

Grateful: for knowing, deeply, that I am always perfect right where I am, and that I am more than enough.

Intention-ease and flow always as the school year rhythm steadies.

First-finish form filling and doc scan

Things-follow up HOP/Steve

Morning Meditation from The GratiDude

An Italian buddy of mine, whose grandparents were from Sicily recently found an old notebook that included some recipes of his grandmothers.  The paper was yellow and tattered and worn in some cases, and all of it was handwritten in Italian so for multiple reasons, he brought it to get the paper restored a bit, so it would not fall apart and then afterwards had it all digitally scanned and translated.

Once he had the notebook restored,  he went ahead and used the Bolognese recipe which included specifically sautéed a piece of beef fat in the sauce with garlic and onions at the very beginning of the process.  The ‘chunk of fat” was something he had never heard of, and he had to ask the Butcher at Publix for a chunk of fat that he needed to execute this portion of the recipe.

Obviously, this sauce turned out to be the best saucy ever put in his mouth or any kind of pasta ever and he marveled at some of the nuances of this old recipe that had been lost overtime, either due to everyone’s rushing around and need to make things faster, the reliance on processed food, and just how little people actually cook here in the United States and in the modern world in many cases.

Something old broken discarded, and it turned out to be better than anything that he could muster with all his modern technology, AI, the cooking channel AND a Gordon Ramsay app.  

There are reasons why clichés and other sayings and colloquialisms stand the test of time over many years.

Yesterday was the political debate which I did not tune into, and I have not heard about it yet this morning, but I’m sure I will hear more than I can stand before lunchtime.  

In Jamaica, there’s a saying that describes such a Political Spectacle and the Candidates that participate by saying that, “the higher the monkey climbs the more that they reveal”.

Try to close your eyes and picture yourself standing under a tree and watching a monkey climb up a tree and then looking up and tell me what do you see?

You see monkey’s ass.

The monkey only climbed a foot up the tree. Well, you wouldn’t have that view, would you?

I think you see why these saying stick around because they tell a great story that stands the test of time like a great Bolognese recipe.

I love finding out where cliches and sayings came from, it is a fun way to learn history. 

Here are a few examples:

Forever and a Day
This exaggerated way of saying “a really long time” would have been considered poetic in the sixteenth century. William Shakespeare popularized the saying in his play The Taming of the Shrew (written in the early 1590s and first printed in 1623).

Though Shakespeare is often credited with coining the phrase, he wasn’t the first writer to use it. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Thomas Paynell’s translation of Ulrich von Hutten’s De Morbo Gallico put the words in a much less romantic context. The treatise on the French disease, or syphilis, includes the sentence: “Let them bid farewell forever and a day to these, that go about to restore us from diseases with their disputations.” And it’s very possible it’s a folk alteration of a much earlier phrase: Forever and aye (or ay—usually rhymes with day) is attested as early as the 1400s, with the OED defining aye as “ever, always, continually”—meaning forever and aye can be taken to mean “for all future as well as present time.”

He may not have invented it, but Shakespeare did help make the saying a cliché; the phrase has been used so much that it now elicits groans instead of swoons. Even he couldn’t resist reusing it: Forever and a day also appears in his comedy As You Like It, written around 1600.

Happily Ever After
This cliché ending line to countless fairy tales originated with The Decameron, penned by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century. A translation of the work from the 1700s gave us the line, “so they lived very lovingly, and happily, ever after” regarding marriage. In its earlier usage, the phrase wasn’t referring to the remainder of a couple’s time on Earth. The ever after once referred to heaven, and living happily ever after meant “enjoying eternal bliss in the afterlife.”

However, for you, there is no need to rummage through the attic or go turning over stones, looking for a relic to resurrect when you could look at your own life experience and find the moments in time during which you were feeling extremely content and satisfied and without anxiety.  What were the variables in your life that allowed you to think healthy thoughts and stay connected to your breath that gave you that good feeling?