The View From Here; Water Drainage and Water Saving

Happy full-moontide! For me, as my jury-rigged hormones figure it out, it's that raspberry-leaf and licorice time of the month. (Seriously, it works great - try it!) I'm grateful that we still have viable raspberry leaves on the canes, but their colors are turning and the energy is clearly revortexing groundwards for the winter, so I'm also grateful that I dried so many earlier this year.

One rainy day recently, I climbed up on the roof of our 'bunker' (construction project, eventually to be storage shed and water-tank shed), braving the slick roof for the sweet view of our cabin. This is our dwelling-place:

- a rainy day, so you can't quite see the breathtaking view across the bay -

- and here is the 'bunker,' from the roof of which I took that photo:

Yes, we adore that robin-egg blue too!

Phil worked his tail off yesterday - trying to get all the dirtwork done before the ground freezes.

I took that photo standing on our counter - in that small place between the cabin and the bluff, he was trying to get a waterline to drain, so that we can actually run water down the sink! He dug pretty deep (and it was muddy, wet and rainy, so that was some perilous going yesterday, especially as the outhouse is on the other side of the trench!) and he's also putting down styrofoam as extra insulation, to lessen the risk that water in the pipe would freeze.

However, even though we now theoretically can run water down the sink (hurray!!), I'm only going to do so part of the time, and part of the time do what we've always done and pour the sink water out on the garden.

The reason for this? Our bluff is a major erosion zone - the Pacific Ocean, even mitigated by coming into the bay, is strong and mighty. Especially around equinoxes and solstices, we get enormous tides, and the edge of the bluff is a little closer to our cabin each year. Further up the bay, I've seen houses that have just slid down the cliff. So, the less water we have running down the face of the bluff, the less we'll be contributing to erosion.

Hiking the beach below: considering that rainfall is not high around here, it's astonishing how much water is cascading down the bluff in so many places. I promise pictures in the wintertime, when all these gushing streams have frozen: it's quite beautiful.

Phil has done a ton of work at the toe of the bluff, trying to shore it up, and is planning to do yet more this week...

Can you see his daughter's little dog investigating what we call our 'Sea-bastion?' Buddy the dog turns out to be quite the climber!

My camera wasn't quite up to it, but I always love trying to get photos of the eagles perched on the rocks. They are as patient as the rocks themselves, perching, waiting...

Conserving water is very often a good idea. When I lived in HI, most folks were on catchment and sometimes there'd be a drought, so you really had to watch your consumption. I became adept at the 60-second shower and at showing newcomers how to wash dishes without pouring away gallons of water. Here, we catch water for our garden, and mostly haul our water from town. The less we use, the less we have to heft heavy jugs, but also the less erosion potential.

While I'm ecstatic about having a Vita-Mix now, the difficulty of washing the pitcher was one of the many arguments I used to deny myself getting one for the longest time. Especially with our sink setup...

Sometimes, I heat up water to wash dishes. Almost always, I have herbal tea on the go when I'm using my Vita-Mix. So what I tend to do now is to rinse out the pitcher with some warm herbal tea in it - run the motor (yes, uses a little more power, but definitely saves water) with warm tea. And then I have a much easier-to-clean pitcher, and a warm, watery version of my smoothie or pudding, which I could think of as a chaser, but probably better as an aperitif to be drunk first.

You can see the tea in the pitcher, all foamed up, withe the green smoothie in the pint mason jar and the herbal tea in the quart jar. Oh, and my best friend my pen just off to the right!

A couple more water-saving tips: although I love loose-leaf teas above all, I do use some tea bags. And I save those bags as pan-scrubbers and other cleaners. I use fruit peels in a similar way. In the morning, when I make Phil's sourdough banana pancakes, I save the banana peel and use it to wipe the fork I used to mix up the batter, and then he can use the fork to eat with.

I keep the same mug/mason jar going over and over for tea. I often don't wash the skillet in between cooking food for Phil (seasoning, you know!) Sometimes, especially when it's very cold or we're low on water, I just accept that not everything's going to look immaculate. And then I'll boil some water in the tea-kettle and do a more thorough wash later to make up for it.

Have you ever had to think about where your water's coming from and going to?

Our Next Trip, A Freudian Slip, Herb-Talk and Another Shout-out for Weeds!

Happy Friday! A sunny Friday here, and the sun is low in the southern sky now. We've been home just about a week now, and in just over a week, we're taking off again. We're going to England! We're going to see my parents and brothers (and Phil hasn't yet met my dad or one of my brothers), but most especially, we're going to meet this precious little lady.

Bad planning, maybe, to have two trips so close together, but that was just the way it turned out. We'll put on our stoutest traveling shoes...

And, whilst looking at things under magnification of detail,

make sure to stay with the bigger picture! It's been years since I've been to London and I'm excited to see some old friends and have some new experiences. Any recommendations?

Traveling is more stressful for me these days than it used to be, and today I'm going to talk about some of the herbs that help me to stay a little more balanced, as well as some that have an adverse effect. This is, in part, a story of why it's important to be so careful about broad-spectrum recommendations of superherbs to play with: to remember that plants are incredibly potent medicine, even when they come out of a bag or bottle, that we must always be very clear about our intentions in using them, and tune in very carefully to how they're affecting us.

Do you get everything right first time? I don't. Even though I often have blog posts, recipes, poems, etc, largely written up in my head, I'll often wake up in the night - or later that day - and remember that I left something out.  Or sometimes wrote something quite incorrect! In my post on Monday, I mentioned my morning herbal tea blend - rhodiola/fo-ti/reishi. Later in the day, I came back convinced that I'd left out the reishi, and discovered that I'd written 'ginseng' instead! Of course, I fixed it, but that was a Freudian slip, alerting me that it's time to talk about herbs and when they are not appropriate.

Rhodiola has been a wonderful helper to me recently. It is the ground up root of a golden-colored flower that grows in the far north (I am going to investigate growing it here), and it is, amongst other things, an adrenal tonic. Since I started drinking the tea, I've generally been less anxious and my energy has also improved. However, about six weeks ago I started adding ashwagandha and ginseng to the rhodiola. Come to find out, these two are usually considered 'male' tonics, but they are definitely supposed to help support (or perhaps, stimulate) energy. And they are two of the herbs that the superfoodists and others dedicated to doing our best often and strongly recommend.

I was excited about the idea of having more energy without having to eat more, so perhaps my motivations were suspect. I mentioned that I was using these to the Naturopath, and he said fine to the Rhodiola but said be careful with the other two: he said that if I felt like I'd had caffeine, or just generally anxious or overstimulated, I should stop them. I'm so grateful we'd had that conversation, as not long afterwards, just before our Oregon trip, I was crawling out of my skin, just crazed with anxiety, and thought that I was just over-reacting to the upcoming trip.

But then, I quit the ashwagandha and ginseng, and guess what? By the end of that day, I'd scraped myself off the ceiling and was able to feel more objective. To me, that's a real magic with the herbs, though, that they evidently hadn't built up in my system - that it just took a day of not using them to have the overstimulating effect removed. So, ashwagandha and ginseng may be great, but if you're a woman with thyroid/adrenal/other hormonal issues, like myself, it might not make you feel so good. (Note: I wasn't using a large amount by any means: just a little in my morning tea/smoothie).

On the other side, when we went down to Oregon, I packed some rhodiola powder, but didn't manage to put it in my tea for the first three or four days. I started feeling very off-balance and panicky, added the rhodiola back in and felt better almost straight away. I don't like the idea of being 'dependent' on herbs, any more than on pharmaceuticals, but when I see the difference in effect on me of rhodiola versus the other two, I'm able to consider it as a friend and helper to me, a supportive being.

Herbs are strong medicine: this isn't just 'making a cup of tea,' folks! (Although real tea, camellia sinensis, would have me sleepless and climbing walls too, for that matter...)

With that in mind, here is another of my recently arrived goodies from the Raw Food World:

Gynostemma leaves. Another prized and much-touted 'longevity tonic' tea. A small bag is not at all cheap, but it turns out a little goes a long way.

Those leaves unfurl in the cup and become quite large.

A perfect application for the tea-straw!

It is a slightly sweet tea, but quite tannic, with a smoky note also. Reminds me just a little bit of oolong tea, without the palpitations. I've been enjoying it with nettles that I gathered and dried this spring. I know that this is a 'female tonic' tea because of the 'gyno' in its name. However, I am still using caution with it, and will re-evaluate whether it is a good medicine for me after about a week. I only added the nettles after three steepings of the same gynostemma leaves, so I'm not going crazy making combinations just yet, until I know how we work together!


What are superherbs? A lot of them are weeds, really - plants that are adept at sucking the minerals out of the most spare, barren soils, in the most adverse climates, and flourishing where few others can. As our garden, and green things in general, dwindle all around here with the onset of winter, I am savoring every meal that I can make of freshly picked greens. And what's interesting is that I find myself picking just as much from outside the raised beds, if not more, as I do from inside!

Chickweed flourished early and late; nettles did the same. Those little baby plants that we nursed so tenderly indoors and then put out in raised beds were outstripped by orders of magnitude of growth by the nettles, dandelions, chickweed, and other, bigger weeds that had had no such mollycoddling. I really loved my garden this year, as has probably been clear from all my writing about it, but when I'm making a meal just for me, I go so often to the weeds - fresh herbs!

I have to confess that the Vita-Mix has greatly facilitated this.

Here she is, churning away my concoction of cooled gynostemma/nettle tea, chickweed, fresh mint, avocado, chlorella, flax, chia and a drop of stevia.

Do you have a special relationship to herbs and weeds, or any adverse stories?

Have a beautiful weekend.

Reflections on Self-Love - Purpose; Two Outings, Two Dinners - Homer Events

We had guests over tonight - a lot of fun - but now it's past 9pm here, which means it's way late everywhere else. I was doing my work and fixing the dinner all day but had my photos uploaded and ready to go, and have been percolating this post in my head, so hopefully I'll keep it brief but have it make sense.

Today's reflection on self-love is about a sense of purpose - recognizing our own uniqueness and connecting with our role in the world. Tina asks, "In what ways does your life have purpose?"

I'll come back to this at the end of the post, but it's been a very perplexing question for me at times. I have struggled with the lack of clarity over whether I'm at liberty to create/recognize my own life purpose, or if my purpose emerges as I'm tugged along by events. Today, I felt like working on my translating job and preparing a dinner for guests were parts of my purpose, but Phil had invited the guests, whom I didn't know very well, and my translating job is translating a dictionary, so parameters are tight!

Be that as it may, while I gave up trying to fix 'compromise' foods that would work for both of us a long time ago, and now fix wholesome but regular omnivore food for Phil and any guests, always with a big salad with  good dressing on it, I know that part of my purpose is to feed myself so that I'm at my most functional.

Here's part of the experiment: I actually went out both Saturday night and Sunday night. Neither time did we get home that late, but two evenings out in a row is a lot for me - I'm not much good come evening. I had two very different dinners those two nights and there were definite results and consequences.

On Saturday night, I went to hear Corrina Delgado, a performance poet from Anchorage. I love going to poetry events and hearing what other people are doing. I loved that she performed everything from memory and used rhyme and rhythm to make it a very oral (and aural) medium. A fascinating meld of hip-hop-type rhythm, intense confessional and mythological comparisons.

I kind of wanted a smoothie beforehand but couldn't be bothered to make it (tired already), so had this instead;

It's soaked wakame, pickled beets, peeled and chopped-up broccoli stalks, broccoli flowers, cilantro, some coconut kefir whey, curry powder, bit of avocado. With some romaine lettuce on the left and some coconut kefir (which I promise I'll explain soon) on the right.

Then, on Sunday night, I had this for dinner

(smoothie with nettles, mint, cilantro, kefir whey, herbal tea, flax, chia gel, slice of avocado, spirulina, chlorella) (oh yeah, and the end of the spoon in my hand when I was taking the photo! No photoshopping here, lol)

before we went out to be part of the basket-burning party.

Above is how it was the day before...

On the evening itself, there were a couple hundred people there, and it was festooned and garlanded. It is an 'impermanent art exhibit' - a monster basket built/woven from local materials. People were invited to add notes saying what they wanted to release.

The sun came out for the only time that day, just in order to set, which was the signal to set the basket on fire! There was lots of drumming and dancing.

And as it got darker, the flames of the basket mounted higher!

It was magical - very social and community-feeling but also intimate. There were folks spinning poi, some of them very good (couldn't get decent pictures in the dark). And then there were these amazing fire-lanterns - like a parachute in reverse, or a miniature hot-air balloon. They were lit and released, and they went up and up and up until you could no longer see them. So cool...

And the verdict on the two dinners? Well, beautiful though the first one was, I was definitely 'aware' of it in an uncomfortable kind of way while listening to the poetry performance. Whereas on Sunday night, I felt lightly but well-nourished. I was wiped out at the end, because we had a hike to get to the gathering and then stood for a long time, but my guts were no problem at all.

So much gratitude for the Vita-Mix! I talked myself out of smoothies with all kinds of rationalizations for ages - blenders are expensive, they pull too much power, have to wash them, etc... And then, when I was trying to make the same food for both Phil and me, he abhors the texture of smoothies and blended food - he'd rather have something to crunch on. Good enough for him, good enough for me, I thought. Well, that was foolish. Phil has an extremely strong digestion, and I have the opposite. There's probably a reason why I'm drawn to smoothies and love them: I tend to feel better afterwards. Now, when I start up inner talk about 'shouldn't use the blender,' I remind myself that making smoothies is being loving to myself.

Is smoothie or salad more self-loving to you?

Back to self-love and a sense of purpose: I mentioned above the dichotomy between the feeling of choosing and connecting to life's purpose and that of having it emerge as you're tugged along by all the different things that bump up against you. For me, I feel that perhaps both are valid. My purpose in any given moment or situation may be somewhat governed by the situation: but I will have a special role and response that won't be just like anyone else's. Furthermore, as I'm bumped around by all these events, I am compelled to write about them. I feel that my poetry writing is my truest life purpose and that part of what I need to do is to fulfill my given role in a situation to the best of my (not anyone else's) ability, and then I need to go do my writing!

How does sense of purpose relate to self-love for you?

The View From Here/Up For This Week; Our Outward Beauty (Reflections on Self Love)

The View From Here

Happy Monday to All! A quick stop-press on my Amazing Grass Giveaway: I had originally said that I would run the giveaway until tomorrow, Tuesday September 14th. However, Phil and I may go across the bay tomorrow to look for some late-fruiting currants. If so, and if we don't get back by the end of the day, I may not be here to do the random selection of a winner! So it may turn out that the giveaway runs through Wednesday 15th. I hope this is ok for everyone!

I've been blogging every day lately in honor of the 30 Days of Reflection on Self Love - I'll re-evaluate that pace at the end of the month (and if I'm gone tomorrow, I may have to miss a day, but will try to cram it in unless we have to camp), but at the moment, it feels like a bit too much, quantity over quality for me a little bit - we've had a lot of guests and chores. So apologize if these aren't great posts - some days, it won't be much more than the day's reflection on self love.

So, today's reflection: Tina points out that "we must not forget that outward appearance does not define our worth as a whole. However, we must also feel free to declare out beauty on the outside. We all desire it…and we all have it! What physical characteristic makes you beautiful?"

Ouch - that's a hard one for me to do. But Phil would say it's only hard for my 'demon' - and he would be right. The part of me that squirms and sighs at that assignment is the part that's always trying to tear me down and never wants to acknowledge that I'm precious in any way. Do we all have a character like that within us? What a good way to quiet it, focusing on these things!

Well, I've always had compliments about my lips - except when I was a little kid and was teased. They're middle-eastern lips - full, the lower slightly fuller than the upper. Good kissing! And even I like my eyes. They're large and not brown, not green, but some of both depending on the light, and often golden.

For 'inner beauty,' or nutritional peace, at least, I've been loving my green smoothies since having changed them up a bit as mentioned before.

A couple nights ago I gathered these wild greens for it:

I was experimenting to see if raspberry leaves as well as the berries would be good in a smoothie. Raspberry leaf tea is a godsend for menstrual cramps, especially mixed with licorice. I wanted a test run for that time of the month, to see if I could just blend and drink them. The raspberry leaves are on the left of the photo. On the right are some stinging nettles. Behind the raspberry leaves are some plantain leaves - it's a ubiquitous weed with loads of good herbal properties; the seeds are almost the same thing as psyllium. And behind the plantain is chickweed. They're all sitting on the solar shower that we warm water in to wash with when it's warm enough here. It's very seldom warm enough for me to stand outside naked on the stoop and wash myself, but Phil does it even in midwinter! I stand inside in a rubbermaid tub! Oh, and the smoothie was great - raspberry leaves and all!

Up for this Week

Like I said, I'll try to keep up the pace with daily reflections on self-love. 

Gorgeous weather again here, although the fog has rolled in from the ocean this afternoon. Such a blessing, this sudden summery weather, more summer than we had all summer!

I found this weevil in our raspberries - I pick really carefully, and it's still astonishing to me how many bugs end up in the berries!

Under magnification, you can see that it has a veritable drill bit on the end of its nose! Evidently, it can bore into anything!

Those are delectable raspberries… I'm so grateful that I can enjoy them.

Green Smoothie Learning Curve; Reflections on Self Love

Happy Friday, loves!

I want to talk about the sudden jump today in my green smoothie learning curve, and about today's reflection on self love.

First - thanks so much to all who are entering my Amazing Grass giveaway - please spread the word, and I'd love to connect with more likeminded folks through this blog.

I stumbled into making green smoothies back in California, and had started doing it shortly before Victoria Boutenko began recommending them: in fact, I spoke with her in person at an event just at that outset. I was selling produce and coming home with lots of squashed peaches and bunches of chard that I found hard to eat straight. At the time, I ate mostly fruit and no fat, so blending them together seemed a good way of making the chard etc palatable. And that was the major goal of my green smoothies until now - to make it palatable, no more (and sometimes, just barely)! I start to realize that a lot of my 'safe' food has been like that. 

Well, what with avoiding fruit now (except for my daily Naturopath-ordered apple and enjoying these raspberries growing outside), the green smoothies were very sludgy and bitter, with nothing but a carrot or beet to carry the green taste.

Isn't this the funniest little carrot I pulled out of the ground today?

 I'd also been adding very little liquid, and cramming in the greens, and often would feel stuffed without being satiated afterwards. I noticed that maybe I didn't most love that super-sludgy bitterness. Until the Vita-Mix arrived, I'd barely been making them - that little hand-blender not quite up to the task. Even with the Vita, thick, bitter, green sludge didn't taste great and I actually didn't feel that great from it either! Time to see what I could learn. (Self love, anyone?)

So today at lunch, my green smoothie had me humming and yumming - what a change! It was nut milk and herbal spicy tea, a little piece of avocado, some chia gel and flax seeds, a little pea protein powder, a teaspoon of carob, peppermint leaves and stinging nettles from the garden - just a few - and some peppermint oil, three drops of dark chocolate flavor extract and a touch of stevia! Oh my goodness, this was delightful! I'd been craving chocolate and thought I should probably not use cacao, as I'm chelating again and my adrenals have plenty to do already. This hit my chocolate spot really well.

And for dinner - a super-powerful smoothie: herbal spicy tea, stinging nettles and clover and some raspberries - all freshly picked, a few walnuts, some hemp protein/fiber powder, some chia gel, chlorella, spirulina  and a whole red jalapeno! Somehow the intensity of the nettles and hot pepper go so well together, and are toned down by the light raspberry and hemp tastes. This more liquid, drinkable texture is so much more to my liking - and it's easier to clean out the pitcher afterwards too! What rocket fuel! I love the dark, dark blue-green too. (And yes, those are kombucha scobys in the background!)

OK - Today's Reflection on self love is about exercise. Tina asks: "Has exercise ever controlled your life or defined you in a negative way? What ways can/do you pursue fitness for health and a stronger sense of self?"

It's great to be invited to consider exercise as a way to take good care of ourselves; and I love that Tina notes that running errands, walking from one place to another, etc, can all be included as exercise. 

I have to say, I have an inferiority complex around exercise! Always have. My experience of my body has been that it tires easily and does not build muscle easily. When I got quite strong a couple years ago, eating raw eggs in addition to raw plant foods, I wondered if this difficulty was nutritional and tried more animal products. But the end seemed to be that those foods just made me sick and my fitness levels crashed even before I quit eating them. It seems like I've gone through this cycle a few times, of building up to being fairly strong and then majorly crashing and being barely able to do anything. Chronic Fatigue, and adrenal and digestive problems, if we want to label. 

This time around, I'm so determined not to crash and burn again: to resist my natural tendency to push myself as hard as I can. So lately, I haven't always parked as far away from the store as possible - I've only done that if I've had the energy. I haven't always taken stairs instead of an elevator if I'm in that situation (I used to refuse to get in an elevator unless I was very heavily-laden!)

Yesterday, during my walk, I hiked out on this tongue of land surrounded by high tide water - it was a very high tide; much of the time, all of the surrounding land can be hiked on too.

I stopped to sit on this log for a little, and appreciated the treasure someone else had left - a small rock that's shaped just like a clam, with some clamshells beside it to make the point! 

That said, I was pretty sore and tired this morning, and today have kept my walks to errand-running and stretching.  

Speaking of exercise - I'll leave you with word of another great giveaway from Averie - for a $50 shopping spree at America's Nutrition, with all kinds of exercise equipment as well as nutritional products and foods. Go here to enter!

30 Days of Self Love - Perfectionism - and Green Smoothie

Having seen some great green smoothies around lately, I decided to share mine today, as well as today's reflections on self love.

First, a reminder of my Amazing Grass giveaway - go here to enter!

One of the last farmer's markets of the year here in Homer…

In today's reflection, Tina asks us to remember that anything that is perfect is dead: that the imperfections make things beautiful and unique, and allows us to have goals.

"In what things do you try to seek perfection? Why do you even want it? How does desiring perfection actually hurt that area of your life? What would letting go of the hope of perfection do for you?"

This is one of the most crucial thought-habits that pop up and sabotage self love - and to me at least, it's not even always clear where it comes from! I had tended to think that I wasn't really perfectionist, because I tend to be 'sparky' rather than 'meticulous,' and beyond a certain point in your progress, you can't get things perfect on 'spark' alone - you have to do some of the perspiration stuff. I certainly do not keep a tidy house! However, that's been a way to beat myself too - to hold up a goal of perfection to myself and feel despondent when I always came short. Telling yourself that everything you accomplish is no good, that nothing will ever be good enough, doesn't allow for any kind of self esteem.

I also see that perfectionism inscribes itself on our life habits. My current need to eat and sleep at very regular/set times seems like an expression of a certain kind of perfectionism - there's a lot of anxiety that comes up if anything knocks the pattern. Sure, that's mostly because of the physiological component, that my blood sugar goes whacko if I don't take care of it regularly, that I turn into a pumpkin if I don't go to bed early… But probably I should consider this spiritual imprint upon it.

So, a perfectly imperfect, messy lunch today! Almost all of it greens from the garden, and lots of them weeds - wild greens that aren't 'supposed' to be in the beds! I harvested some raspberries, and you can also see lots of chickweed, parsley, mint, chives, dandelion leaves, arugula…

Here it is proudly in the Vita-Mix, with herbal tea, fenugreek sprouts, flax seeds, a little piece of avocado…

Fenugreek sprouts - so yummy...

Of course, raspberries plus greens makes it slightly at the brownish end rather than a vivid green, but it was good! It was definitely bitter and sour, and I stirred in a tiny bit of white stevia powder. Should have blended it in - it didn't mix quite thoroughly. 

It looks so nice in my mug, I think! I love how foamy it gets in the Vita-Mix, and how I blend up some tea to wash out the pitcher and that thin, green-tinted tea, is also foamy.

Love and greenness!