Last fall, after listening to this fantastic TED talk, Tim and I sat down with our kids and brainstormed a list of our family values.  Who are we as a family?  What are we about?  What does it mean to be a Joss-Iudicello?  What things do we want to foster in ourselves, our family, and by extension, our world?  We threw a lot of words up onto a whiteboard and over the next few days, I took the words we had generated and tried to shape them into a few coherent statements.  We posted these statements on our wall for reference and reminder, to enjoin and encourage.

As with many worthwhile things in life, my relationship to these values is not straightforward.  I wish I could say that upon posting them, I magically transformed into their model practitioner.  Not so.  However, having them always before me has helped orient me to what I intend to be about and the ways I mean to live.

Of late, our first value has been much on my mind.  It reads:
As followers of God's Spirit, we are healthy - mindful of what we put in our body, heart, and head and how we use these things.

body
For the past two years our family has been eating things our species genetic code expects: real foods like healthy fats, grass-fed meats, wild-caught fish, vegetables, some fruit.  We work at being omnivorous nutrient-seekers because, as homo sapiens, we are biological beings built this way.  As much as possible, we eat within our species blueprint, paying attention to what is fit and right for us as human animals.  

Because of this practice, we often find ourselves at variance with the standard American diet (you don't eat bread?) and a culture which seems to celebrate every event with feeding our children food-mimicking substances (Easter, Valentine's, Halloween, birthdays, snacks at the park and treats for everyday consumption are all opportunities for gluten, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils & dye).  Though our choices prompt discussions, awkward moments, and some tough choices for our kids, we persist because we feel passionate about being homo sapiens (which means, in part, being thoughtful hosts to the 100 trillion [that's trillion with a T!] microorganisms that live in our gut and thus regulate the health of our whole system).   

heart & head
While eating this way has had its difficulties, being mindful about what we put in our bodies has been the easy part of our value statement.  Food and beverage intake is obvious and concrete.  Far more challenging, is being mindful about what we put in our hearts and heads.  Like building strong physical selves, tender hearts and thoughtful minds need nourishment - they need to be filled with good, real material, the spiritual equivalent of nutrient-dense foods.  And just as our bodies become ill, distended, out of optimal health, from being fed outside our species blueprint, so too these less concrete parts of our makeup. 

In college, I had a philosophy professor who spoke about our species' drive for meaning.  As humans, we are verbivorous - that is, we consume words, we need them for life (the sapiens part of our species profile).  My philosophy professor was not alone in characterizing this human trait; long before him, the Torah proclaimed, "..one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord."  We depend on good language (and art and music) for our spiritual fitness as much as the body depends on good food for physical fitness.  What we fill ourselves with is a matter of consequence.  You are what you eat, body and soul.

Being thoughtful about how we fill ourselves is hard work.  And it becomes harder every day!  The pace at which we receive information has ramped up immeasurably, while our attention spans are dwindling - thank you social media.  My discernment about what is valuable to put in my mind often lapses.  It is so much easier to take in the cheap and the processed and the quick (that facebook post, that youtube clip, that talking-head news report - mental equivalents of candy or pasta or soda) though they seldom provide much nourishment for my heart or mind, rarely giving me the building blocks to extend myself in compassion, love, wisdom, kindness, joy, peace, patience, self-control.

Health is rather a thin word.  To this verbivore, it doesn't nearly approximate all that I want from it.  But I do feel better about the extended definition from our family values, which encompasses the whole person: We are healthy - mindful of what we put in our body, heart, and head and how we use these things.  I do not live by bread alone.  Actually, I don't live by bread at all.  But nor do I live by broth alone (though it has been in the slow cooker for 24 hours and is full of bio-available calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, glycine, proline, collagen...).  My health is also dependent on words I ingest, things I see, what materials I give my heart and mind. This is nutrient-seeking for the verbivore.  The closing lines of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself remind me of this continuous process of feeding ourselves in this way, of feeling our way towards things that are truly good for us:

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I should be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

It is not always obvious why watching that magpie dip through the air, or why reading Winnie the Pooh (Milne's not Disney's!) to Birtie, or why turning off every gadget to sit in silence does a body good (as the milk commercials used to claim, however dubiously).  But nevertheless these things are good health, filtering and fibre-ing our blood, as Whitman writes.  And the great news is, though we may fail to fetch them here and there (as I do - and often), the world is not scant on good things.  They are around, just waiting for our attention to turn their way.

Lastly, fellow verbivore, while I have you, here are some nutrient-dense words for you to chew on:
Wonder.
Imagine.
Think. 
Look.
Listen.
Watch.
Ask.
Search.
Explore.
Ponder.
Treasure.