Every other morning I cut fresh ginger for our coffee.
The ginger is sliced as thin as I can slice it,
a bit of a contest between me and myself.

I used to break the “hand” into pieces, and slice each piece carefully,
methodically, taking a couple of slices off one edge, then flipping it onto
the stabilized bottom and slicing across lengthwise.

Parts of a whole.

Recently I stopped breaking it into pieces, and began working with the whole ginger “hand” intact,  slicing methodically from the outside in, going with the smaller “fingers,” the grain, the shapes, using the whole oddly shaped ginger “hand” to stabilize the whole while I sliced… using the whole body to get he job done more efficiently.

The shift in ritual is also a shift in my elder consciousness,
no need to piece things anymore, I’ll take the whole megillah*.

Only the red is watercolor….

*Megillah (Hebrew: מגילה‎, scroll)
I grew up hearing my mom say, “the whole megillah.”  I never thought about how the idiom came to mean what it means… So I looked it up!  It was taken from Yiddish; the literal Hebrew translation is scroll.  The Megillah is one of five books read on special Jewish feast days, especially referring to The Book of Esther, read on Purim.  An especially long and monotonous story came to be called the gantse Megillah in Yiddish, which translates roughly as the whole Megillah. Jewish nightclub and radio entertainers made this a popular saying in the 1950s.  Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in popularized the phrase anew in 1970s.  When referring to the Hebrew scriptures, Megillah is capitalized. When used in as the slang, the ‘m’ is lowercase.

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