Cornelia Aihara's passing

[Leenie]

I received this e-mail from Dawn at the Natural Epicurian


Dear Friends,

I have some sad news to share with you.

Cornellia Aihara, one of the beloved founders of our macrobiotic
community in the U.S., and the most wonderful teacher, author, and
guide, passed away on February 25th at a hospital near Sacramento,
California. Through her tireless and passionate teaching, we learned so
much. Even more important, her dedicated spirit inspired us all as she
led us to discover that we really could be healthier and happier. It is
impossible to sum up the whole of Cornellia's life or the contributions
she has made to this world in just a few words. For those of you who
never had the chance to get to know this extraordinary woman I offer,
below, a brief overview. (For a more personal account of this amazing
woman's life, please scroll down and read the story "Remembering
Cornellia." Written by Morgan Jones who studied extensively with both
Herman and Cornellia Aihara, I think this fond and heartfelt description
of Cornellia will both touch you and give you a sense of who Cornellia
was and why she came to mean so much to us.)

Born in 1926, Cornellia studied macrobiotics in Tokyo with George
Ohsawa, and then came to the United States in 1955 at the invitation of
Herman Aihara, who had corresponded with her. They married a few months
after her arrival in New York City. Later they moved west and
established the George Ohsawa Macrobiotic Foundation and the Vega Study
Center in Oroville, California. Cornellia taught macrobiotic cooking and
home remedies and wrote a number of books including "The Calendar
Cookbook," "The Do of Cooking," "Macrobiotic Child Care," and, with
Herman, the essential and almost encyclopedic volume of home remedies
"Natural Healing From Head to Toe."

It is no overstatement to say that the natural foods and natural health
movements over the last 5 decades -- and thus the modern history of this
country and our very lives -- have been positively and profoundly
influenced by Cornellia and Herman Aihara.

There will be a memorial service and pot luck for Cornellia at the home
of David and Cynthia Briscoe, at 720 Bird Street, Oroville, California
at 12 noon on Saturday, March 4th. Those who live close to Oroville are
asked to bring extra food so that those who are traveling a distance to
attend won't need to feel obligated to bring anything other than
themselves.

In lieu of flowers, the family has asked for donations to help with
cremation and burial costs. If you would like to be of service in memory
of this beautiful woman, please make your check payable to "Cornellia
Aihara Memorial Fund" and bring your contributions to The Natural
Epicurean office at Casa de Luz, or mail them to us at the address
below. We will gather the funds and send them all together to the family.

In health and happiness and in joyful celebration of a life lived as
well as any I know,
-- Dawn Pallavi (formerly Steinborn)

The Natural Epicurean
1701 Toomey Road
Austin, Texas 78704 USA

store: 512/476-2276
cell: 512/658-4975

************************************************** **********************

REMEMBERING CORNELLIA
(or: How Could I Forget?)
By Morgan Jones

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

I have often come across this quote from Margaret Mead, the insightful
and prolific anthropologist. But on just how many of those occasions did
I stop to think deeply about the essential truth distilled in these few
simple words ... and the fact that every moment of every day of my life
is richer as a result of one particular "thoughtful, committed citizen."

On Saturday, February 25th, Cornellia Aihara, beloved teacher,
irrepressible advocate for each individual's right to be in charge of
his or her own life, and the unofficial adopted grandmother of thousands
of students of macrobiotics around the world, spoke her last words of
enthusiastic advice -- this time by telephone to her daughter, Marie,
who was visiting with a dear friend in Mexico. Shortly after the phone
call with Marie, Cornellia slipped peacefully off this relative plane.

Cornellia was born in Fukushima prefecture in Japan on March 31, 1926
with a rare and serious congenital heart defect. The doctors were quite
convinced her heart would fail and she would die. Well, the doctors were
right ... but it took a bit longer then they expected for this
prediction to come true. Cornellia's passing comes exactly 8 years to
the day after the death of her husband, partner, and likewise much loved
teacher, Herman, and just a few weeks shy of her 80th birthday.

(Hmmm. Maybe there something to this "macrobiotic" stuff ...)

Since 1955 when she came to America from her native Japan and met and
married Herman Aihara, Cornellia and Herman worked tirelessly and
selflessly to share with thousands of us lucky students the simple
notion that sickness was not some Universal joke played on an
unsuspecting mankind, but that health -- be it good or bad -- was mostly
the predictable result of choices each of us makes every moment of every
day of our lives. Though it was a strange concept to me, a child of
20th-century America where science was our new religion, I have come to
share Cornellia's unshakable belief that all of us are quite capable of
achieving wellness and happiness by relying primarily on our own
intuition and insight and -- most important of all to Cornellia -- our
own unique lifetime of experience.

Nowadays, when I walk into a grocery store -- whether my local co-op, a
Whole Foods superstore, or even an ordinary neighborhood Safeway or
Albertson's or HEB -- I see shelves overflowing with inexpensive natural
foods I can buy to help keep me physically well and mentally clear. I
can easily fill my organic cotton shopping bag with tofu, tempeh, bags
of brown rice and millet and quinoa, 6 or 7 varieties of organic miso,
pickled umeboshi plums, and a dazzling array of multi-colored organic
vegetables from the familiar (carrots and cabbage and cucumbers) to the
exotic (daikon and burdock and Hokkaido pumpkin). OK, so maybe Safeway
and Albertson's don't yet stock the ume plums or the daikon or the
burdock, but just wait ... it won't be long.

Cornellia and Herman Aihara, along with their contemporaries, fellow
Ohsawa disciples, and close friends, Aveline and Michio Kushi, comprise
one very special "small group" of citizens who have changed my world ...
and yours. These 4 individuals are the reason we can easily buy the
foods that will help us heal and maintain our health in the very same
stores that only a few short years ago offered us mostly boxes and bags
and cans of packaged, processed, frozen, freeze-dried, preserved and --
lately -- genetically-modified food-like substances.

While the TV commercials told us how much less time we'd spend cooking
with these modern groceries, Cornellia and Herman knew from long
experience that cooking times wasn't the only thing we we'd be
shortening. And, boy oh boy, am I glad they choose to dedicate their
lives to teaching us what the ads failed to mention.

Cornellia and Herman taught in many venues -- from the living rooms and
kitchens of friends with a handful of students in attendance, to the
unspoiled campground in the Tahoe National Forest where the annual
French Meadows Summer Camp they started in 1970 continues to this day,
to the conference auditoriums filled with those of us hungry for a
better answer than "you only have 3 months to live" or "you'll have to
take this medicine for the rest of your life" gathered again and again.
I met Cornellia and Herman for the first time at the Vega Study Center
they founded in Oroville, California when I became a resident student
and kitchen apprentice there in 1995. I cannot personally chronicle the
whole of her life, as I have only known Cornellia for 11 years. But what
I can tell you is it didn't take anyone very long in the presence of
this diminutive lady with the unimaginable determination to come to
appreciate the twin gifts of her wisdom and her willingness to share
what she had learned from a life of working from sunup to long after
sundown helping folks who were sick find the path to recovery.

During my two years at Vega with Cornellia and Herman I came to
understand that the lectures and lessons could never be as powerfully
instructive as the way our teachers -- and thus, we their captive
students -- lived each and every day. While students at Vega, we were
caught up in the whirlpool that was Cornellia, engulfed in the swirling
waters of her wisdom, day in and day out. We learned to cook by cooking
(and making a lot of mistakes). We learned to use ginger compresses to
relive pain and help restore kidney function by dipping towels in hot
ginger water and applying them to each other over and over again. And we
learned to make miso and takuan pickles and mochi by ... well, by making
miso, and takuan pickles, and mochi.

Cornellia conducted our classes in English, but it took most students a
few weeks (and sometimes months) to come to understand her thick
Japanese accent made even more incomprehensible by a pronounced lisp. As
resident students we would often compare notes while cooking lunch: "I
think I understood at least half of what Cornellia said in Home Remedies
class today," one of us would announce with satisfaction and a sense of
real accomplishment. "Oh yeah, well I think I'm up to 65%," another
would brag. It wasn't a joke that a cooking video Cornellia made in
English required sub-titles to be added so that we could understand what
she was saying. But difficult as it was to understand her words,
Cornellia would not let a one of us misunderstand her methods, her
purpose, or her resolve. She lived her life "full speed ahead" and in
her teaching she employed this same approach.

Imagine your loving, gentle, and soft-spoken grandmother as an almost
5-foot tall Japanese woman with slightly sad, dark eyes, long dark hair
wound up in a tight bun on top of her head, dressed simply in a pale
print cotton blouse and cotton petal pushers, white ankle socks and
rice-straw sandals who was keeping six different dishes cooking
simultaneously on six individual burners while explaining how
fundamentally important it is never to lift the lid on a pot of cooking
grain ... all done with the evangelistic zeal of a television preacher
and the single-mindedness and intensity of a Marine drill sergeant, all
the exuding complete confidence that you, her student, had the brains
and the heart to comprehend and apply each and every detail, every day,
just as she had presented it.

Cornellia and Herman were as different as night and day ... yin and
yang, I guess.

Herman loved to answer important questions with expansive explanations
to help us see ourselves in the largest possible context. If I asked
where cancer comes from, Herman would explain the role of the body's
acid / alkaline balance in creating the damaged DNA of mutant cells, how
a lack of sufficient oxygen intake could slow the body's natural ability
to eliminate the damaged cells, how animal protein serves as the
building blocks of cancer cells, and how excess simple sugar supplies
the fuel for rapid cell division. And he was just warming up as he spoke
of the physical part of the puzzle ...

Cornellia's answer was simpler: "Bad-da diet-ta," she would say in her
unique usage of the English tongue ... and then she would put us all to
work, confident that if we cooked for ourselves long enough and paid
attention to the changes we saw in our bodies and our minds, eventually
each of us would come to understand how what we put in our mouths turned
into ... us.

Cornellia was a woman of few words -- perhaps because she was, by
nature, a straightforward soul who thought doing was more important than
talking, and maybe partly because she just got tired of working so hard
to be understood. But she was determined that each of her students learn
the right way -- the very best way -- to do each and every thing, down
to the smallest detail, from the very first day, the very first hour we
were in her charge. Often one of us would fail to understand Cornellia's
barked orders as we worked to roast some sesame seeds so each individual
tiny seed was equally well browned or we carefully cut a carrot into
what should have been pieces of EXACTLY the same size. After resolutely
repeating her unintelligible directions for the 3rd time, Cornellia
might lose her patience and raise her voice in exasperation ... as if
increasing the volume might somehow make up for the speech impediment.

At first such outbursts could be scary for the new recruits in the
group, as one or more of us took her exclamations as personal criticism
and a sure sign that we would never get it, never measure up to her
lofty standards. But soon enough we would each come to see that
Cornellia's insistence and persistence were just the outward
manifestations of the very deep love she was offering us, her newly
rescued waifs. Cornellia didn't want anyone to suffer for another minute
if that suffering wasn't necessary, and she certainly didn't want to
waste any time ... hers or ours. After a few more years of studying and
trying my best as a teacher to pass along some of what I had learned
from Cornellia, I came to see just how many people in my community deal
daily with aches and pains and acid reflux and tumors and insulin shots
and weakened immune systems and constant fatigue and blocked arteries
and failing nervous systems and deep emotional traumas ... well, the
list goes on and on. And it soon dawned on me exactly why Cornellia
never rested, why she must have felt there were far too many souls to
support. She just didn't have time for long-winded discussions of how
every precious detail of cooking my rice each day could contribute quite
a bit over my lifetime of eating it

And I came to understand that Cornellia had faith in us ... she was
confident that, eventually, we would each come to understand -- from our
own individual experiences and in our bones and in our guts -- exactly
why the little things mattered so much over the long haul.

Thanks, Cornellia. Thanks for the 50+ years you worked so hard to gather
your experiences of cooking and eating and healing and playing and
chanting and exercising and playing and praying and ... well, of just
living with awareness that each moment of each day we each create our
health and our happiness, or sometimes, sadly, our disease and our
misery. Thanks for trying so desperately to teach me what you had
learned after I showed up at your front door with my cholesterol-clogged
arteries and a mind equally closed from a lifetime of cheese burgers and
vanilla milkshakes and Egg McMuffins and chocolate eclairs and 45-ounce
Coca Colas and my Western scientific and agnostic upbringing. Thanks for
the long days and long nights. Thanks for sweating the details.

Oh, and thanks for never giving up on me. Now I know what it feels like
to be loved AND trusted at the very same time ... and I don't think
there is a sweeter feeling. I promise never to forget what you've shared
with me. And every day while I gently warm my rice over the lowest
possible flame for exactly twenty minutes, every time I turn the flame
to high to bring the cooker up to full pressure, each time I place my
flame tamer under the pot so all my grain will cook evenly, I'll think
of you. Next time I put the sweet white miso in my shopping cart at
Whole Foods, next time I forego the air conditioning and open the
windows wide to let in the fresh air while planning a seasonal menu to
naturally cool my body and my mind, next time I slowly brown the tempeh
in my cast iron skillet with no trace of poisonous Teflon, next time I
lay my head down on my organic cotton futon and pull the organic cotton
sheets over me ... and for as long as I can hold the focus I'll try to
forget my trials and tribulations and the challenges that are just a
part of everyday life, and I'll recall instead the many, many gifts you
and Herman have given me.

Cornellia had a defective heart -- at least that's what the doctors said
again and again and again. I say maybe they just weren't using the right
instruments.