lummi island wine tasting jun 6 ’25
Summer Hours: Fridays and Saturdays, 4-6 pm
Spring Rhodies recall an old poem…
Spring Rhodies recall an old poem…
woody peonies just at the peak of their bloom…
too beautiful to pick…too beautiful not to pick!
Friday Bread This Week
Pan de Cioccolate – A delicious chocolate artisan bread that isn’t an enriched sweet pastry dough with lots of eggs, butter and sugar. Rather this bread is a rich chocolate bread made with a levain, bread flour and fresh milled rye flour, honey for sweetness, vanilla and plenty of dark chocolate. Makes fabulous toast, even better french toast – $5/loaf.
Dried Cherries and Pecans –A nice rustic loaf from a levain that mixed with a sourdough starter the night before final mixing of the final dough from the levain, bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat, and loaded up with dried cherries and toasted pecans . –$5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Chocolate Babka Rolls – A sweet pastry dough full of eggs, butter and sugar, rolled and spread with a chocolate filling, rolled up and cut into individual rolls that are placed in baking forms for baking and then brushed with sugar syrup after baking. I’ve heard some people say they hide these to keep them all to themselves. – 2/$5 – 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Go to Contact us to get on the bread email list.
This week’s wine tasting
Valminor Albarino Rias Baixas ’22 Spain $23
Straw yellow-green color; rich nose of mandarin orange, lime apricot, and peach; floral notes of orange blossom and white flowers with fresh, lively, and full-bodied palate, good structure, well-integrated acidity, decadent, smooth unctuousness.
Monte Tondo Veneto Corvina ’22 Italy $14
Organically farmed; bright nose of fresh cherries and black pepper; fresh, light, and lively palate of cherry, dark chocolate and spice; supple, well-integrated tannins, and a smooth, seductive, slightly spicy finish, definitely our go-to red for summer lunch on the deck!
Seghesio Zinfandel ’21 California $23
Aromas of deep dark fruits lead to a juicy, vibrant palate with notes of black cherry, black raspberry, fig, baking spice and fresh plum, and layered fruit flavors, finishing with supple, textured tannins and a lingering, complex finish.
Economics of the Heart: Jesus, Gnostics, and Politics
credit facebook, origin unknown
My mother’s family were Irish Catholics, and my father’s family were Polish Catholics. My older sister and I attended Catholic schools for the first few grades. Our old stone school was weird, dark, and deeply mythological, with witchy-looking old nuns in dark hallways and constant reminders about the inevitability of sin, death, purgatory, and Hell. The purpose of it all, including threat of the dreaded “Strap,” was to create fear and demand obedience. The takeaway for a 5 yr old was the foregone conclusion that unless you were a Saint (very unlikely!), you would eventually die, and if you were lucky, have to spend a long time agonizing on hot coals in Purgatory for your venial sins before being allowed into some kind of “heaven,”and forever in Hell for any unforgiven mortal sins.
This indoctrination began when I was five and was relentless, bringing frequent nightmares of inescapable torture, because the concept of “sin” seemed to involve pretty much everything humans did, some kind of cosmic Catch-22. I was fortunate enough to have been transferred to public schools beginning in 3rd grade, when in a way real life began. And though I was a practicing Catholic till my early thirties, I could never shake the feeling that the whole structure, the rituals, the costumes, the fascination with sin and guilt and fear were more political than religious, more authoritarian than benign, more dread-inducing than hope-inducing.
Sadly, despite the deep roots of religion in human society, in recent decades religious practices have often been engineered not to save souls, but to establish political control over masses of human beings. This theme has been effectively developed and explored since the inception of Christianity by many spiritual philosophers, beginning shortly after Jesus’ death with the Gnostics.
Though most Gnostic writings were destroyed as part of the Catholic imperative to reinvent the young, enlightened, open-hearted but politically annoying Gnostic mystic Jesus as a virgin-birthed, prophet-predicted Son of God “who rose from the dead and ascended into Heaven, where he sits at the Right Hand of God the Father Almighty, and will come again in Glory to Judge the Living and the Dead.” (from a Catholic prayer).
Gnosticism,[1] taught belief in the attainability of spiritual knowledge or insight into the divine spark of earthly existence– a sort of ‘enlightenment.’ This is very similar to Buddhism and other meditation-centered religious practices, where lengthy “practice” leads to a direct transcendent experience of Reality.
In contrast, many widely practiced and long-established religions are largely socio-political entities defined by a Book of Rules and history, like the Bible or the Koran. These “Religions of the Book” deliberately entangled the dominant religion of a region with the political control of the inhabitants and their institutions. The assertion of Divine Right is a well-worn Authoritarian practice: make the rules you want, make it a crime not to follow them, and punish anyone who crosses the line.
Unique in the world, the US Constitution has been The Book for our nation for 250 years. But since 1987, when Republicans did away with “fair and balanced” public broadcasting, would-be authoritarians of all stripes– blue-collar misogynists, white-collar thieves and sadists, power-hungry egoists, Fox News CINOs (Christians in Name Only), Republican politicians, bankers, CEOs, big $ political donors…you know who they are…all crave to run it all, own it all, and have the unquestioned authority to bump anyone they choose off the planet whenever they want. Like kings.
Real Christians don’t twist their religion into justifications to cause pain to other beings; round up, deport, or imprison innocent people; break up families, fire long-time government employees with no notice, or expose national secrets to our enemies for money or for spite. It is shameful, heartless, cruel, and just plain mean, causing global suffering for their ill-considered actions, the global economy teetering, and hundreds of thousands dying from their idiotic shutdown of USAID.
Since so far competence has not been a hallmark of this administration, we aim to keep fighting till they lose!
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2072 Granger Way