Soulfood Friday

Slow stitching with four little girls on a rainy afternoon.

Every Friday I'll be pausing to notice something from the week that has nourished my soul. 
* 
A special, sacred-everyday moment captured on camera, or perhaps a snippet from a book, a recipe still warm from the kitchen or something whimsical that simply made me smile.
 * 
Here are a few simple things that have fed my soul this week. 

What has inspired/fed/nourished your soul this week friends? 
*
 Feel free to link up to your own soulful spaces either at the bottom of this post or in the comments.

 
   

    An InLinkz Link-up

   

Soulfood Friday

I've been savoring October in all it's gold leafed beauty.  Sprigs of dried lavender  make the kitchen smell of pot pouri. As the leaves begin to fall, a few wild geraniums still dapple the garden with daring colour. Our fruit bowl has been filled with the sweetest, crispest hedgerow apples. They taste  of Summer sunlight.

Every Friday I'll be pausing to notice something from the week that has nourished my soul. 
* 
A special, sacred-everyday moment captured on camera, or perhaps a snippet from a book, a recipe still warm from the kitchen or something whimsical that simply made me smile.
 * 
Here are a few simple things that have fed my soul this week. 

What has inspired/fed/nourished your soul this week friends? 
*
 Feel free to link up to your own soulful spaces either at the bottom of this post or in the comments.


   

    An InLinkz Link-up

   

To simply drink your tea

 

I realize I haven't been around much. Going from the full and crazy busy days of seven years homeschooling five children to an almost empty house during the day has left me a little dazed and bemused. I thought I'd be knee deep in all those projects I never had time for but I find myself wanting to just do simple things, wanting to fully take in the little things.
There's the late afternoon sunlight after rain, grooming the cat and actually drinking a cup of tea while it's still hot. Bliss.

"To be mindful is to be fully present with whatever we are doing. If you are drinking tea, just drink your tea. Do not drink your worries, your projects, your regrets. When you hold your cup, you may like to breathe in, to bring your mind back to your body, stop your thinking, and become fully present. In that moment, you become real and the cup of tea becomes real. In this state of true presence and freedom you enjoy simply drinking your tea."

 Thich Nhat Hanh

Last night I dreamt that I was little again. 
One thing you forget about being little is how much your body wants to move and feel the elements. Water, air, earth and even fire have an irresistible appeal. You want to feel the weight of things. You want to move against their resistance and harness their power. 
The first thing I did in my dream of course, was jump into a really big puddle. A feet first, full on splash bomb. I could feel the mud writhing under my boots and it was delicious! 
There was an itch in my legs to run and climb. I stretched out my arms, feeling the width of their span like a sail against the wind as I ran down a hill. My arms felt like wings. If I lifted them up the thermals would carry me, I could feel it.  At one point I began swimming like a fish in strong tidal waters. Water scares me and am not a strong swimmer so this was especially liberating. Then as the itch spread up through my arms and I found myself standing on a boat. A paddle in my hand shovelled the heavy water with satisfying ease. I watched  the ripples ebb away silently. Finally I found myself on the back of a horse galloping fast and free. 

This dream  surprised me. I have always thought of myself as a homebody. Although I enjoy walking in the countryside, I have never been keen on sports. And yet, as I dwelt on the dream I realised how much I actually did love to feel the elements on my skin. It made me remember how, when I was little I loved to move and dance and play in water. I loved to feel the bracing aliveness of testing my limitations by climbing, tumbling and rolling down hills. 
I began to wonder when this love and freedom of my own body ended

 I remember constantly being told to sit still at school. I fidgeted a lot. I'd rock on my chair, tap my fingers on the desk, or kick my legs. Which must have driven my poor teachers to distraction in all truthfulness. 
Thinking on these memories I remember a sense of shame being attached to movement quite early on. Sit still, line up, don't wiggle, stay put! 
At the age of 5 or 6 I didn't question this of course. 
I also remember that it was at school that I first really realised that I was clumsy. I couldn't catch a ball and threw poorly. I was less coordinated as some other kids and me and the other ones labelled not good at sports were always last to be chosen for teams. Slowly but surely I began to mistrust my own body. Instead of enjoying my physicality, I became self conscious and more sedentary. It happened, slowly, incrementally and almost intangibly.  
I wonder, in hindsight, if that the part of me that loved the tactile experiential side of life was channelled into art.
 I loved the feel of clay, think paint and pastels, indeed any medium that I could feel in the fibres of my body as well as I could see it on the fabric of my canvas. 

Now that I have my own children I see with great joy, that they are confident and strong in their bodies. They climb, swim, cartwheel and run with abandon and trust. 
Matilda has always been similar to me in regard to coordination, and clumsiness, yet, she has never noticed a problem with it. She loves to play catch, dance, kick a football and throw a netball just as much as her sisters do.
However, last week she came to me rather sadly, saying she didn't want to do PE anymore because she isn't good at it. This really broke my heart. I don't want her to feel betrayed by her body. I don't want her to feel the social pressure to conform to one, particular, narrow standard. I want her to feel centred and strong in her skin. I wonder if  by overly structuring and measuring movement in the form of formal lessons we undermine some children's natural love of it particularly those children who may not measure up to the standard imposed.

I wonder also, whether this issue effects girls in particular. As women we often feel that we have to control our bodies, natural need for movement and play. We need to be lady like after all, right? From societies repulsion over women's natural body hair to the way female celebrities get in and out of a car, we are constantly judged, shamed, nipped and tucked into stillness and silence.
Through the media we are  pressured to contort our beautiful, strong, flexible feet into high heeled shoes, and make sure we look elegant in clothes that often inhibit our  natural movement, comfort and freedom.

Ultimately I want my girls to question the things that effect them. I want them to feel awake in their minds and strong in their bodies. I want them to be able to simply drink their tea without the pressures, conflicted interests and agendas of our competitive, consumer driven world taint the flavour.


Photos by Matilda

Soulfood Friday

We have been harvesting our garden elderberries and local wild apples and preserving them in a number of ways. Today I made our first home harvested pie. No pictures of that, it was eaten too quickly.
There is something about harvesting and preserving that connects us to our environment. Beautiful plumes of elderberries piled high tempted the girls into the kitchen. I soon had lots of helping hands.

Emmy bought me the movie Far from the Madding Crowd and we watched it together over the weekend. This song from the soundtrack is simply mesmerizing.



Every Friday I'll be pausing to notice something from the week that has nourished my soul. 
* 
A special, sacred-everyday moment captured on camera, or perhaps a snippet from a book, a recipe still warm from the kitchen or something whimsical that simply made me smile.
 * 
Here are a few simple things that have fed my soul this week. 

What has inspired/fed/nourished your soul this week friends? 
*
 Feel free to link up to your own soulful spaces either at the bottom of this post or in the comments.

   

    An InLinkz Link-up

   

{Yarn Along}

 I am still working on Matilda's Pickles Vest. I'm a little less inspired third time around, not because I don't like the pattern, I love it, it's just that novelty motivates me when it comes to knitting and I'm ready to get my hands on some interesting textures and colourways after metres and metres of what is a very pretty but rather monotonous beige/lavender aran.

I have been enjoying "Listening Below the Noise" by Anne D. Le Clare. It was gifted to me by a very kind and thoughtful friend and I have already copied down many a quote from it's pages.

"Just as a blade can pare fruit, sculpt wood or inflict injury, or a key can set free or imprison, in hundreds of tongues around the world, words are being employed both to hurt and to heal. To cause both peace and chaos. To connect and to isolate. To praise and to condemn. Create harmony and discord. Honor and abase. To mask truth and to tell it. To align and to alienate neighbors and nations.
Again I consider, how do I use my allotment? How mindful am I of my intent? How responsible am I to my speech? How long will the effects of my carelessly spoken words linger? In silence, I sit and contemplate."

 

"There is a book called The Hidden Messages of Water by the Japanese scientist Dr. Masuru Emoto. When Dr. Emoto began experimenting with photographing crystals, he found that when the water he used for the experiments was exposed to words like "love" and "gratitude" and "wisdom," it formed stunningly beautiful crystals. But when it was subjected to words like "hate" and "You're ugly," the crystals became dark, malformed and fragmented.
Earlier this morning, as I stared at the photographs Dr. Emoto took - visual evidence of the power of language - I wondered this: If the vibrations of words can affect water so dramatically, what do they do to us? We who are comprised of more than 70% water."



" Our emotions and feelings have an effect on the world moment by moment," Dr. Emoto writes. "If you send out words and images of creativity, then you will be contributing to the creation of a beautiful world. However, emitting messages of destruction, you contribute to the destruction of the universe."

Anne D. LeClare  "Listening Below the Noise - The Transformative Power of Silence"

sharing with Small Things and Frontier Dreams

{52 Project} Hedgerow Gathering

Soulfood Friday

We all came down with stomach flu this past week. One, by one, despite  a friend's so called full proof  immunity building carrot juice smoothies, and my own thick as tar, homemade elderberry syrup, we succumbed.
Today, is the first day we have all been well. I spent the morning, carefully stripping beds, airing rooms, taking down glasses and mugs and clearing away the debris of books, papers and pieces of lego that have banked up in drifts around the bedrooms over past days.
When I went to the kitchen it seemed like a ghost town, chilly and uninhabited.
Rolling up my sleeves I turned the heater on for the first time this year.
I ran a hot bath, filling it with fragrant salts and a peel of aloe soap. Then I sunk down into it's soothing depth, steeping like a brew, and let the week evaporate from my skin with the steam.

Today is meant to be national poetry day. If you've noticed my sidebar, it is quite clear, I dearly love poetry. I wanted to share a poem as any excuse is a good one, and something I had read earlier this week from the travel writer Piers Moore Ede in  his book "All Kinds of Magic" {A Quest for Meaning in a Materiel World} seemed especially pertinent.




Soul drunk, body ruined, these two
Sit helpless in a wrecked wagon
Neither knows how to fix it

And my heart, I'd say it was more
Like a donkey sunk in the mudhole
Struggling and miring deeper

But listen to me: for one moment
Quit being sad. Hear blessings
Dropping their blossoms
Around you. God


In the chapter "Amongst the Sufis"  the writer describes his quest to find the elusive Sufi sects of Rumi's hometown of Konya, Turkey.
The Sufi orders have all been driven underground, their practises criminalised since the redevelopment of Ataturk's hard-line, right wing, government.

By stealth, luck and maybe even the hand of God he finally sets up a meeting with an old, reclusive Sufi teacher (pir) in a backstreet courtyard, (haveli). Over the next couple of paragraphs, he movingly describes how simply being in the presence of this man clarified his mind and gave him a profound sense of peace.

The Sufi's believe this sense of presence and clarity can be transmitted through words, music, dance, art and of course the bodies of those who hold it within themselves such as this gentle, aged, teacher.
An orthodox saying comes close to conveying the same message of transmission: 

"The one who has found the peace of God within himself can heal a thousand around him without knowing."
 
There is much in this world that creates static, white noise within us. Life can be a little like turning the dial through 10 radio stations. To tune our selves into a peaceful, focused frequency takes a discipline, habit and stillness that can be hard to obtain.

Places ( or people) of sanctuary, where there is no ego, pride, trade or judgement are rare and holy but we may recognize them by their quietude.
And although they may be elusive they are as necessary to a human soul as the pause between lines is necessary to a poem.

Every Friday I'll be pausing to notice something from the week that has nourished my soul. 
* 
A special, sacred-everyday moment captured on camera, or perhaps a snippet from a book, a recipe still warm from the kitchen or something whimsical that simply made me smile.
 * 
Here are a few simple things that have fed my soul this week. 

What has inspired/fed/nourished your soul this week friends? 
*
 Feel free to link up to your own soulful spaces either at the bottom of this post or in the comments.

 
   

    An InLinkz Link-up