We Didn't Go Across the Bay - Self Love and Finding Joy - How To Lose A Pipe - Amazing Grass Giveaway Winner

Here's why we didn't go across the bay after all today - 

- the fog rolled in! It's amazing - we're literally in a blanket of fog, but it's only about 6 degrees cooler than yesterday, when the sun was out. So I will announce the winner of my Amazing Grass giveaway today after all - at the end of this post!

Some pictures from two days ago when it was unabashedly sunny - potatoes that I tickled out of the ground reflecting the sun -

- and a harvest of spuds!

Tina's reflections on self-love post this morning reminds us to look for joy - and to find it - here and now in what we do with our lives. Her post resonated so perfectly for me: just like her, I'd gone back to bed for some extra snuggling with my husband rather than jump on my work as soon as I got up.

And we've been finding joy in the day even postponing our berry adventures. A potentially very frustrating story: Phil can't find the pipe that runs from our sink, that is failing to drain! He ran it out to the edge of the bluff last fall and insulated it. Now, if we spill water in the sink it doesn't run out, so we have to cart out dishwater in the little basin we keep in the sink. He dug where he thought the pipe was, so that he could unblock it - and he can't find it! 

He dug a hole crotch-deep, and that isn't a pipe down there in the hole, it's a retaining rope. He's been looking and digging on and off for two days, and no sign of the pipe! This could be infuriating and frustrating, but I just think it's too funny. And at this point, Phil's thinking he'll just start over with a whole other pipe and give this one up for lost.

I was talking before about wanting my plants to go to seed and the growing season being too short and cool - one thing that's gone to seed in a big way has been arugula! I pulled some out today, and will save some of the seeds, but Phil is concerned that if I leave it all to self-seed, we'll have more than we know what to do with next year - the mustard family likes it up here, that arugula got big!

The smoke behind me is a brush-pile that Phil is burning. My man loves him his chainsaw! He'd taken out a bunch of alder trees, that take over everything otherwise, when we started our building project. We'll use the ashes to amend our soil (potash).

For further joy, we went hiking on the beach despite the fog. The picture at the top of this post shows the view. We always find beautiful things when we hike on the beach - it's hard not to bring the whole beach home, there are so many awesome rocks! Here's Phil with the most darling little feather - 

- and then we put it in a little snail-shell we found -

- precious.

Now for the selection of the two winners of the Amazing Grass Giveaway!

Please bear with me if I do this clunkily - I haven't done it before.

There were 38 entries for the giveaway, many of them multiple by a single person, so with two winners, everyone had a fairly good chance.

Using the random number generator at this website, I was given number 11 and number 30. So…comment #11 was by Bitt! And…comment #30 was by Amber Shea! Congratulations to both of you! Please drop me a line with your contact info so that I can get your goodies sent to you.

Have a great evening, everyone! What joy did you find today?

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.

Reflections on Self-Love: Jealousy

I don't really have time to write a post today, but wanted to check in with today's Reflection on Self-Love.

We're getting the whole summer we didn't have these last few days! We went for a hike on the beach and I even forgot to bring the camera - shame on me! Here's the beach viewed from our yard 300ft higher, the very edge of the bluff barely 30 ft from our house!

Today's topic is Jealousy. Tina asks, "In what ways do you encounter jealousy? How can it hold you back? What could you look to in yourself or your life when wishing for what others have?"

This is something that really repays reflection. I especially appreciate what Tina says earlier in the post about focusing on yourself rather than looking to others for validation or invalidation. She says, "Picture your life through a camera lens. Only you should be in focus. Everything else blurs into the background."

For me, this is extremely powerful. I don't think I'm alone in having grown up thinking that focusing on oneself is selfish. It seems like I need to hear repeatedly that 'your job is you,' or to be reminded that the only way that I can be of service to others is when I'm well-cared for and in good shape - and no one else but me is going to make sure of that!

In my life, jealousy is always either ambivalent or extremely childish. It's ambivalent when I envy someone else's achievements or abilities and then in the next beat realize that I wouldn't want to be them, or that I wouldn't want to have precisely those achievements: I'd rather manage it my own way. If I'm not vigilant, that can lead to feeling bad for not having fulfilled my potential; when I'm doing better, it reminds me to keep on working at it! There are lots of things that Phil can do of which I feel jealous at times, from his athletic prowess to his ease and gregariousness around people. But it feels good when I'm able to remind myself that I'm jealous of these things because I admire them very much, and it's great to admire one's husband! And then, I recognize that being at ease around people is something I can work on, and that there are many other things that I love to do, so that I wouldn't want to spend as many hours of the day in intense physical activity as he does.

When my jealousy is childish, it's usually a moment of weakness when I'm questioning my path. Yes, there are times when I envy Phil that he can eat such enormous quantities and very seldom get a stomach ache and never have to worry about body image, and that sometimes he can go long periods without food without his body going into a panic. Sure, I feel jealous of anyone who's naturally slender and doesn't have to worry about what they eat - but this jealousy is all about non-acceptance of myself. When I'm in a more self-accepting mode, I feel grateful for my digestive challenges, because they have enabled me to become a more creative cook, a more compassionate person and have exposed me to all kinds of superfoods I might not otherwise have explored. I haven't yet found a way to feel grateful for having thyroid/adrenal/metabolic problems - but if at some point I'm able to help other people not to go down the road that leads to those things, I might feel grateful for the experience to share.

Not being jealous is all about choosing your own star to aim at and anchor to, rather than taking someone else as an ideal. And as I just suggested, it seems to me that indulging in jealousy is all about not accepting oneself and finding pointers from the outside to beat up on oneself. 

I hope I'll remember this next time I find myself feeling jealousy!

I'm going outside to harvest beets and potatoes now - hope the sun is shining for you too!

Reflections on Self-Love - Control; The Middle East; Giveaways

I managed to upload those pictures to my yesterday's post - here's the clamshells and the shell-shaped rock.

Today, Tina asks, 'what things in life might you try to control?' and invites us to see how we get caught up in controlling behaviors, against our highest good.

My name is Ela and I am a control freak! My goodness, this is an appropriate topic! Just this morning, I almost lost all of my feel-good and hard-won equanimity because I noticed while stretching that my thighs were almost touching! I know that chelating makes me retain water, and that it's getting toward that end of the month as well. I know that eating more carbs tends to make you retain water too, and what with it being berry season I have been doing a bit of that too. But man, I was furious and distraught - and now, ashamed! And, even before I'd turned on the computer and read today's Reflection on self- love, I had identified this perturbation and upset as being entirely due to a feeling of lack of control. I want to choose the amount of space between my thighs and to control it and keep it constant.

Part of me recognizes that this is crazy.

But part of me wants to control everything - I want to make sure that everyone is well and happy and balanced; I fix all kinds of goodies for Phil, hoping that he won't eat as many candy bars with trans fats and HFCS and packaging and expensiveness - that's (verging on) controlling too! 

I guess controlling and perfectionism go closely together. It certainly feels like the same kind of territory that I'm traversing when I'm getting freaked out because dinner's late, or whatever.

It hadn't necessarily occurred to me before that being controlling is opposed to loving oneself. But having a fixed idea of how things should be is surely the opposite of accepting. A good thing to ponder. Thanks again to Tina!

9/11 - a somber day of remembrance for everyone, during Rosh Hashanah, no less! I watched a movie last night called 'Etz Limon' - 'Lemon Tree' - (Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles) about the ways that tensions on the West Bank border intrude into the lives of real people. It was a touching story, sad and apparently insoluble. On a very abstract level, I just enjoyed seeing that familiar territory, hearing Hebrew and Arabic again, feeling my close connection to that part of the world, and yet my removal from its troubles.

Hope everyone's having a great weekend: it's good to remember, but the now continues!

Don't forget my Amazing Grass giveaway - 

and the Almost Vegan Blog is giving away some 'Hail Merry' goodies too!

love to all

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!

Blogging Locations #4, Book Review - Multitasking vs Overstimulation - 30 Days Reflections on Self Love

Here's another spot where I've blogged before we had internet at home - the Best Western motel on the way into town! 

I was there for a Garden Club meeting earlier in the year, had the computer with me, and unexpectedly discovered their wifi. Thereafter, I'd often pull in there on the way home from somewhere and sit in the truck outside the office and get my internetting done. Or once or twice I walked or biked down and sat in the bar to do it, but people smoke in that bar and it was almost unbearable! I felt more creepy, too, in there than sitting in the truck.

It seems like that huge storm just passed us by - it's been clear and sunny here for the second day in a row and no rain in the forecast for the next several! Thankful for an Indian summer. I'm hoping it might enable some of my plants to go to seed - I allowed several of my cilantro and other plants to bolt early, in the hopes that I'd be able to save seed from them. It didn't work last year - got too cold too soon - but this year I started it earlier, and I saw friends' gardens up in Anchorage (where it gets a little warmer) where they were going to seed a month ago. Mine are still obstinately flowering… Bitt had a beautiful post a month or two back about a seed farm she visited on the east coast.

I'm going to do a book review today, for a book that I listened to on tape. This is a medium that I've only recently started exploiting: I love the intimacy and connection of reading, but I'm also a very aurally-oriented person and I love to multitask. Long car journeys or cookathons seemed like a great niche for absorbing more through my ears. I borrowed House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III, for Phil and me to listen to on our last Anchorage trip, but it turned out that Phil had started reading it once before and had put it down, not wanting to get into what it had to offer. But I was intrigued by the style and wanted to hear it, so had been listening in snatches, and then a minor marathon last night and this morning, while I worked on translating. 

I'll review it in a moment below, but first I want to review that methodology! In brief, it wasn't the best idea. As I said, I'm a multitasker, but I think that working on my translating job and listening to a book was using overly similar parts of my brain. This evening, I am fried! After running some errands and going for a walk this afternoon, I just don't feel like doing anything - and there's still quite a bit on my list. Big tides here this week - at lower tides you can hike where the water is here.

My first thought about car journeys or long kitchen spells, or cleaning/organizing-type stuff, seems like a much better idea: I think that what I did was an abuse of my capacities.

What about you? Are you a multitasker or do you get overstimulated/zapped?

Having just talked about overtaxing my brain, I'll turn to today's Reflection on Self Love. Tina asked us once again to highlight and appreciate three areas of our physical body, and led with a very courageous and moving appreciation of three of her own. Oh dear, I thought I'd gotten away with this part last week! I definitely found some resistance to having to do this again. However, I love the spirit of her goal to change how we view our physical bodies: "We need to shift the qualities with which we define them from aesthetic ones to purposeful ones." When you think about what your body does for you, rather than how it happens to be looking today, it's certainly easier to feel grateful.

OK - deep breath! - and apologies - I'm not much good at self portraits, so this is going to be sans visuals.

I thank my hands for all the work they allow me to do, both communicating by means of writing and typing, and gardening, harvesting, handling and preparing food, and a whole host of other things. They even allow me to clean the rest of my body, to give the gift of loving touch, to put food in my mouth. They go into all sorts of places, both delicious and noxious, and have scars and calluses from all sorts of hard work. My index fingers have the huge knuckles of my dad and his mom, whom I otherwise don't much resemble. My pinkie fingers are ludicrously short and don't even reach to the top knuckle of my ring fingers. 

I thank my nose for how it constantly informs and protects me. It tells me when a dish of food that I can't taste (because it contains ingredients to which I'm allergic) is well-balanced and when it needs adjusting. It tells me when there are gases around that I may not want to be inhaling! It keeps me attuned to the changes of season and the proximity of animals. I happen to somewhat like my nose aesthetically too - it is a nice shape and size, even if it does have a little mole right on the tip!

I thank my lips for all the amazing work they do in producing intelligible sounds and words. (If you've ever had anesthesia at the dentist's and tried to talk afterwards, you'll know that lips aren't just for the p's, b's and m's!) I also thank them for their fullness and the pleasure that that can let in. 

Ok - cooling my blushes as the sky blushes pink in the west here…

Back to House of Sand and Fog. It is an inexorably unfolding tragedy, on a par with the ancient Greek tragedies in terms of the universal horror depicted and damningly painful denouement, but it is on the physical scale of an epic. Despite the fact that it is set in the '80's SF Bay Area and that the protagonists are an Iranian immigrant family (particularly the paterfamilias), an ex-drug addict whose husband has left her, also new to the west coast, and the cop who falls for her, I felt that it was redolent of the Classics and their themes and devices. 

Although the narrative is mostly present tense, the story never proceeds linearly: the reader/listener is dropped into the midst of a scene and many of the events preceding it are revealed through the reflections of the current narrator. One of the most virtuosic elements is the intimacy of the characters - the story unfolds through the interwoven perspectives of the three main characters and all of them are made to feel believable and sympathetic. All of them are warped and at times despicable, but you can always understand why they get into the binds that they do. 

Since the book is so character-driven, it is also extremely discursive - we are held in suspense in the main plot whilst one or other character is made to reminisce about earlier days, tell back-stories, make connections. I could see how some people might not prefer such a discursive journey, but it's extremely effective at what it's doing.

The prose and many of the images are enduringly beautiful or evocative, the kind that will remain with you. 

Some of the plot's credibility is sacrificed to that of the characters. For me, the only way to reconcile this was to suspend disbelief and remind myself that this is a tragedy. Just like in Greek tragedy, everyone ends up either dead or bereft, in what seems a hideously unfair way. 

And so, I had to end by asking myself whether Phil was right to avoid even getting entangled with it - is this the kind of uplifting message/view of the universe/society to which I wish to expose myself? And I end ambivalent. I feel like I learned a lot from listening to the book, particularly as a writer, but I can't say that it's the sort of message that I want to be putting into my cells.

Just a word more about the experience of listening to it on tape rather than reading it: this was an unabridged reading, by the author and his wife. I enjoyed it a lot - there were very few distracting moments when something was read with inappropriate inflection, as can happen when people read aloud. He does quite an impressive Persian accent too. 

What are you looking for when you choose a book to read? 

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!