Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1472074
Peggy Pollard, Teacher www.PeggyDance.weebly.com Santa Cruz Waltz & Swing In-Person & Online Dances & Lessons Waltz Tribe membership Grow your mind, body & soul Dance to music you love Sign up Now for upcoming Classes! Aptos Natural food... continued from page 1 is a joint lubricant. It can absorb more than 1,000 times its weight in water. When joints begin to age, they lose their abundant supply and begin to "dry out," in a sense. You can supplement with HA to counter this, helping joints to be lubricated and more pain-free. Look for the Hyalogic brand that offers high-quality HA. To highlight a few addi- tional products, ANF also carries natural makeup and skincare (including diverse items like ones from the Nubian Heri- tage line), bulk lotions including Bonny Doon Farm and Griffin Remedy, Dr. Bronner's soaps and biodegradable cleaner, bulk loose-leaf tea and herbs/spices, bulk Santa Cruz Roasting Coffee Co. coffee beans, probiotics, fermented products like kimchi, and ready-to-heat items like packaged pizzas from Vicolo. Lots of local seniors are big ANF fans. "I love the care that your store puts into making sure that everything you sell is high-quality," says Nancy L. Another customer, Su- san D., says: "I love your store and often find things there that I looked for in vain at other markets. Plus, you did a super job with safety during the COVID pandemic. Keep up the good work!" And Barbara D. refers to shop- ping at ANF as "…always a delightful experience. We regularly come in to fill our larder with organic bulk honey and the be- We Dance To Forget When I open the door to the empty dance hall, I see nothing but the floor. I feel nothing but a lovely emptiness. Like that first scoop of vanilla ice cream, the first words on a blank paper, the first notes of a beauti- ful song, this uncluttered cleanness of the room draws me in like a cool blue pool of water on a sweltering day. The polished wood floor is a blank canvas, ready for our feet to paint a fresh picture. As I step into this empty room I am also stepping into the best cure for BRAMOOLIAP disease. Yes that dreaded, and wayyyyy too common mental disease: "Brain Random Access Memory Overload Of Life Issues And Problems" BRAMOOLIAP! It's the terrible disease that we are all vulnerable to. But good news! We have a cure for BRAMOO- LIAP. The cure is to forget. When our personal computers or phones start glitching, overloaded with too many commands and data, flying across their electrical nodes, they often need to shut down, to reboot and rebuild their complex network connections inside. Human brains are far more complex than com- puters. But we likewise often need to find good ways to shutdown and reboot our minds. This allows our mind and emotions to renew and rebuild. A reboot lets us sort through our experiences, disentangle and refresh our thoughts and feelings, to find peace with the world, and peace in our psyche. A new environment with new people helps us do this. We each need mental sanctuaries. My suede-soled practice ballroom shoes click soft- ly on the varnished wood floor as I walk across the dance floor. As I prepare myself to teach this morn- ing's dance lesson, I work hard to remember -- my form, my rhythms, the proper instructions for the dance patterns, to sharpen my brain to move in new ways. But I also try hard to forget. In this room I shut off the worrying part of my brain to forget all my cares and worries of the week. I turn on the waltz and swing music. Mike walks in with a confident smile on his face. Other dancers arrive and absorb our cheerful vibes, creating a small happy community of har- mony, encouraging and uplifting each other dance by dance, song by song, until the outside world disappears. In this room only happy positivity is allowed to enter. But the outside world's worries are strong. It's gloom hovers always just outside the door. Indeed, we all have so many problems to worry about these days, world- wide and personal, that our brains are constantly, hard at work, day and night, trying to solve them. Like a big ball of many tangled threads, our minds get overwhelmed trying to disentangle them all. For example, stewing in my own mind right now are:this month's Con- gressional hearings on the attempted overthrow of our government, fires, floods, tsunamis, fam- ines, earthquake, global pestilence, wars and the gradual destruction of our entire earth's ecosystem, dooming our entire earth population. All are true and merit everyone worrying about. In addition to that, I'm also mentally calculating whether my powder blue socks coordinate with my purple shorts; what is that strange buzzing noise in the corner of the kitchen, and whether on my last zoom I sounded like a doofus or a cool genius? But those questions are quickly overrided by thoughts on why did my husband snap back at me when I very nicely and reasonably requested he move his annoying clutter of iced tea bottles off the kitchen shelf…which then instantly re-ignited our ongoing territorial tiffs about our limited home space? Tomorrow I'll find a whole new set of worries, I'm sure. Yes, our lives are full of layers and layers of worries big and small. But too much worrying, to the point of overwhelm is bad, definitely bad, for our mental and physical health. Even the healthiest of us are feeling it, including our vibrant university stu- dents. UCSC's Psycho- logical and Counseling service staff, Dr. Richard Enriquez reports that, in the past two years during covid isolation UCSC has seen a big rise in reports of anxiety, depres- sion and many symptoms of mental illness cam- pus-wide. Yes the dreaded (and far too common) disease BRAMOOLIAP is hitting us all. What then is the cure? How do we help our minds let go of the pow- erful worries clouding our thoughts? First finding a happy PLACE, a beautiful place, to put ourselves in, is a good start. A ballroom is great for that. Walking into a clean, safe room devoted to dance powerfully focuses our entire attention. But we can still bring the anxieties in our head with us into the dance hall. So we need some- thing more to override those gnawing, negative thoughts in our brains We need even bigger, stronger thoughts to push them out. An urgent physical task in front of you works great for that. Moving our bodies, especially to music, is powerful to lift us out of our cluttered thinking into a beautiful communion with other people. Doing positive physical actions face to face with another human works great for squeezing out those sticky BRAMOO- LIAP from our minds. Dancing with a partner is just the ticket. The music starts. Mike holds up his left hand in a "V." I place my right hand in his. We con- nect in closed position. Worries begone! For an hour or two, I've forgotten about the outside world. My mind is filled only with the dance we are doing. Yes. The cure for this awful BRAMOOLIAP disease is working. Partner dancing is definitely the strong and refreshing elixir needed to cure that terrible hap- piness-destroying disease of BRAMOO- LIAP. We dance to remem- ber… And, happily, we dance to forget. By Peggy Pollard, Santa Cruz Waltz & Swing www.Peggy- Dance.weebly.com loved tea selection." William and the ANF staff greatly appreciate loyal customers like the ones quoted above, as the store has definitely had its share of challeng- es. For example, owner Gene "Dario" Dickinson is currently on medical leave and in his absence, William is managing the staff and administration remotely from the Pacific Northwest. Also, the pandemic created lots of shortages—not just for ANF but for many businesses. "There are some supply issues that still affect us at some level," says William. "We are doing our best to carry what we can." ANF is doing some restructuring, which in- cludes fun events lined up for the near future. They are ramping up to regu- larly offer various "Spe- cial Demos" at the store; the goal is to eventually host these two to three times each week. These will be divided into two categories: Product Demo Days, where customers get an 'all-day discount' on certain item(s) and a 'deeper discount' during the exact time the demo is happening; and Non-Electrified Busk- ing, with an area where musicians can sell merchandise and music as customers come and go (ANF welcomes musicians to apply for spots). No matter what kind of changes ANF makes, it will remain true to its goal. "Aptos Natural Foods is designed to bring all-natural options to anybody interested in eating and living a healthy lifestyle," says William, who encourages anyone unfamiliar with the store to come and visit soon! Contact information/ website: (831) 685-3334, 7506 Soquel Dr., Aptos, Open 8 a.m.-7 p.m. daily Website: aptosnatural- foods.com Bulk loose leaf tea at ANF-Photo by Tara Fatemi Walker Bigstock Photo