Longing for Brown Cow Yogurt: Mindfulness in the Morning After COVID-19
Robin B. Zeiger, Ph.D.
It is more than a decade since I savored Maple Brown Cow Yogurt. I think my tastebuds still remember. I remember the anticipation of opening the yogurt to find the layer of whole fat resting atop. With care, I mixed the top slowly into the maple flavoring.
What was the real challenge? It was to eat the yogurt slowly enough to savor its very existence.
In those days of my meetings with Brown Cow, I was a busy professional and mother of younger children. Too often I wolfed down my food in-between the demands of young children. Too often I ate on the run, barely attending to the sensual experience of the cuisine.
My Brown Cow yogurt was a special treat. It was more expensive than the usual supermarket brands. I had to travel to the health food store to find my treasure. And with all of its fat, it somehow felt too indulgent. Those were the days when the wisdom of the time was to eat low-fat foods. Our current wisdom now recognizes the benefit of a healthy amount of fat in our goods.
It is strange. I haven’t thought of this special indulgence for the longest time. I now live in a country where it does not exist. My yogurts are much more boring and/or less healthy. Thus, I often create my own morning ritual with plain yogurt, fruit, granola and chia seeds.
How did Brown Cow arrive again in my life? I am a prolific dreamer. I am intensely curious about the meaning of the scenes of the night that enrich my life. Like the fat of the yogurt, they add taste and aroma to my daily musings. Each dream is a gift in symbolic language.
A few days ago, I had a strange but very simple dream.
Dreamscape
I find myself in a small specialty grocery store that appears to be new. The shelves are not yet fully stocked. What I am searching for does not appear to be within my reach. A grocer offers his help. I ask for yogurt. It seems clear to me that I want some very special yogurt. Although I typically dream in English, my mother tongue, I find myself asking him for “cherry” in Hebrew, the language of my new country. The word is “duvduvan” and somehow it sounds a bit melodic and exotic. He goes into the back and takes a long time. I become impatient and leave the store a bit disgusted, without any purchases.. I even decide to forgo the money I am to receive for my returned bottles.
When I wake up, I am so puzzled. I am all but ready to cast aside this dream as unimportant. Yet, I have learned from master dream interpreters to meet each dream with fresh eyes and simple curiosity. I have learned to always ask, “Why has this dream arrived in my life at the moment?”
First and foremost, we must meet our dreams, like so many precious moments in life, with our emotions and feelings. Here is the clue. Suddenly the name “Brown Cow” pops into my mind. As I am musing with a colleague about the dream, tears well up in my eyes. I travel in my mind’s eye to a small outdoor shopping area, I frequented in my previous home in Richmond, Virginia.
I suddenly return to the moments of raising four young children. As a professional, wife and mother, I ran from here to there and anywhere, with not enough mindfulness.
My Brown Cow symbolizes for me the moments of peace and introspection that I stole from my busy schedule. I ran away to the coffee shop or the health food store to steal some precious moments for myself. Sometimes I sat alone and ate yogurt or sipped my vanilla latte. Sometimes my late mother accompanied me. And even farther back in time, I remembered the moments I savored when a small baby fell asleep in the stroller and I could write or read or introspect sitting outside in front of Starbucks.
Life was not simple, but the yogurt was calming and nurturing. The cow on the cover looked peaceful. I licked the cover of the yogurt and tried so hard to appreciate the maple syrup. My dream reminds me that Brown Cow cherry was a close second favorite.
Perhaps in my grocery store of the night, I am trying to “reorder” the moment.
“Why now?” I think it has something to do with COVID-19 and the morning after. This pandemic has been horrific, killing many and terrorizing our globus. So many have been confined to their small spaces with little children. There were no simple moments at the coffee shop. Too many elderly people have suffered and sometimes died alone and in silence.
Like much of life, the bad and horrific also sometimes brings other blessings. Many of us have learned to appreciate the simple. Here is the blessing of introverted time and space to think and regroup.
I am without young children. I could continue to work via Zoom and some in-person meetings. I live in an agricultural village with lots of open space. For the first time, I began a wonderful meditation practice on Zoom with a skilled group leader. I could suddenly carve out time to write and to engage in my own form of “art therapy for the soul.” I connected to friends on a deeper level via weekly coffee zoom meetings.
Thankfully our country has engaged in a powerful push to vaccinate all adults. As I look around the still bleeding and wounded world, I am grateful every day for the two vaccines that me and my family each received. My “green pass” allows me once again to enter the public spaces of stores and groceries and coffee shops. I wish and pray for the time when most of the world can be vaccinated.
Yet, I reflect on something else. There is also a bit of a curse to reentering the public spaces of our world. Each morning when I wake up, I find myself once again with too many choices and too many tasks. The roads are crowded. We all begin again the rat race of rushing from place to place without enough thought.
Enter the world of dreams. Many dreams bring problems, conflicts, nightmares, and warnings from our inner self. Some herald deep longing for newness and change.
I am blessed with the memory of the Brown Cow yogurt. Yet, I rush out of the store before I can receive it. Perhaps the shopkeeper would have found it it to or maybe offered me another brand of cherry that is even more special. I am rushed and impatient.
My waking ego suggests another way. The Hebrew word is seemingly out of left field. When something appears out of place in a dream, it begs our attentiion. The Hebrew word sugggests I need to recapture my sensory experience of the Brown Cow I must “reorder” it in my new birthplace. And it is crucial that I am patient enough to receive it.
If there is one lesson, I have learned most of all from the past year, It is to find the beauty in the moments with nature. When we were confined to the space that were 100 meters from our house, with new eyes and ears, I discovered the treasures of nature. With my four-legged friend, I meandered the paths behind my house and listened for the birds. I stopped to smell the flowers and wonder at the beauty of the spider webs. I noticed the miracle of the tree stumps that sprouted new life. And I remembered to be thankful to our Creator for the breath of fresh air.
May we all return to “normalcy” with renewal- with our five senses attuned to the simple everyday miracles of our world.
Robin B. Zeiger is a practicing Jungian psychoanalyst and a free-lance writer.
She is a member of the:
International Association of Analytical Psychology and the Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology. She can be reached at rbzeiger@yahoo.com.
