Tulips Galore!

I can't remember when the tulips in my yard have ever been so stunning. I think it might have something to do with the prolonged cooler weather this spring. I probably didn't do them justice in my photos, but hopefully they will provide you with the extreme cheeriness they're giving me. You would never even know it's a grey day. God truly is good!

A Visit from Me!

Hello, lovely readers. Over the months since I stopped writing here, I have occasionally checked in and discovered that this blog is still being read daily, even without any new posts. I do miss it here. Perhaps the reasons that I felt I had to abandon this beloved project have been sufficiently resolved. Maybe I can rediscover organic mothering and continue to share what inspires me. Most likely I will not be able to re-open the comments function, but there it is. As much as I would like to converse with you all, for personal reasons I still do not feel safe in opening that line of communication.

I continue to be a homeschooling mother. My only girl will be 10 on Sunday--double digits! We are officially finished with this school year, but of course learning never ends, and we have all sorts of plans for summer. Our beloved dog Daisy passed away last month as a result of congenital heart failure. She survived for almost two years on medications after being diagnosed, and she died in her sleep, still a happy dog. For those things we are grateful. We have adopted a new dog, a one-year-old beagle named Milo, from the Humane Society. He is a rascal! Beezy will begin dog training at a local facility with him soon.

Today we're going out to see Farmer Jo Ann for some container flowers to plant, and hanging baskets. It's an annual tradition we enjoy. Beezy especially loves meeting the new kittens that always arrive in spring. Spring. It has come slowly but surely this year, following a long, hard, cold Ohio winter. I am only beginning to unwind and release...

So we'll see how it goes. I'll reach out my branches here and sing to the sun, the moon, and the stars. St. Francis and St. Clare, pray for us, for our beautiful Earth and all of God's creatures living in it. Help us to live and grow in peace and harmony. Teach us to live fully and with awe and wonder. Show us how to be.

Lush.

Summer is still feeling a bit uncertain, it seems. Our public pool opened today, and though it was only 68 degrees and had been raining on and off, Beezy was really excited, so bravely we went! She slid down the tornado water side twice, and that was it. It was just too chilly for her to swim. I knew going in that this was likely to happen, but rather than arguing about the weather, I allowed my child to find out for herself why such days do not make for excellent pool days. I told her afterward that it costs $2 to get in, and that while I didn't want her to feel bad about it, next time we come she needs to be in the water. So if she thinks it might not be warm enough, it would be best to make a different choice. A great lesson learned, and wonderful practice for me of the ideas gleaned from unschooling!

Just as with the slow start to spring this year, my yard tells me what season it is (although summer has not officially begun), regardless of the weather. Summer flowers are blooming and everything is filling in with green. Enjoy these lush, visual delights!!

 coleus, begonias, and geraniums

I plant these urns with some of the soil left over from last year, compost from our pile, and a little topsoil to cover.

iris

Everything's coming up roses...

hollyhock

poppies

Small Town Homesteading

This being the last day of July, it will soon be time to get "back to school" and to a more structured daily routine.  My husband, a college professor off work for the summer, will begin teaching again in a few weeks.  I spent some time ordering books from the library today on rainforests, which will be our first science unit for this homeschooling year.  I also have two Ginn Basic Readers that I ordered from Ebay.  Beezy, now 8 years old, loved the 12-book Dick and Jane series, and I wanted to find something similar with which to continue.  This is especially because other readers had failed to interest Beezy, and I want her to love to read.  The Ginn books have a similar, repetitious style and old-fashioned illustrations, being from the same era as Dick and Jane. 

Fall is also typically designated as a season of new beginnings, even though it's the last season of the year.  It's a time of vibrant, visible change in the natural world, a celebration of the harvest, and a time of turning inward in preparation for the coming days of darkness.  There is a magical whispering of possibility and mystery in the air.  So I am naturally starting to contemplate things I want to do differently.  The end of summer boredom and restlessness is starting to settle in already, maybe because spring came so early this year.  

I changed the look of this blog today and tweaked the topics to reflect my new focus: Charlotte Mason homeschooling, small town homesteading, belly dance, style & beauty, and sacred living.  Not all is completely new.  For instance, I have been using the Charlotte Mason homeschooling method since the beginning, but I also used a lot of Montessori.  This year there will be less emphasis on the Montessori Method and more emphasis on Charlotte Mason's living books, narration, nature notebook, and other elements of her method.  I want to spend way more time exploring the natural world, and I want to incorporate hand crafts.  I loved latch hook kits as a child, and I am going to introduce them to Beezy this year.  I also want to continue her sewing lessons with her great-grandmother.

I desire a deepening of the homesteading way of life for my family as well.  But I find that when we get these wonderful visions in our heads, we want to overhaul everything and make radical, sudden changes, which usually don't pan out.  So I'm simply going to start with baking my own bread and pizza crusts this fall, and I have an aunt that wants to teach me to crochet.  Baby steps on the homestead!  I want to take family bike rides in the evenings, and hopefully we'll have a good tomato crop this year for making my husband's awesome homemade sauce.  

Here's to the joy of beginning fresh plans, dreaming a little dream, and keeping it simple--and then reaping the grand harvest of the organic life!

Farmers Market Meditation

July 15, 2010

Last evening I stopped at the farmers market on the square in Bryan, on my way to teach belly dancing classes. I can't emphasize enough how much I love the farmers market! It makes me inexplicably happy to eat this locally grown food, literally giving my life deeper meaning. I know when I shop there that I am helping the local farmers and leaving a lighter carbon footprint. Sustainable living is a form of spiritual stewardship. Most of the produce is organically grown, though not certified. Fresh, local, in season food is healthier than the conventional counterpart. Period.

    
Before I became a mother, I was not much into cooking. While I was a single person living alone, I did not have much motivation to prepare meals, and I lived in a large city where I had never even heard of a farmers market. As a child I had lived in the country, and my family enjoyed home grown produce from our garden. I grew up with the example of my grandpa, who especially enjoyed making a hearty soup or rivels, and of everyone he seemed to like cooking the most, so to my child's mind it seemed to be more of a man's job! In college I had determined to have a career, and homemaking was never foremost on my mind.
     
Motherhood made me more conscious of proper nutrition than I had been as a single woman, and once we moved to the rural area of my home town and discovered the farmers market, some new neurons seemed to fire in my brain. We also grow some vegetables, fruits and herbs in our home garden.
     
Here's one of the keys to my newly found pleasure:  the chopping meditation. The rhythmic process of the knife slicing through vegetables and hitting a wooden cutting board puts me in a state of "flow", or transcendent consciousness. This preparation takes time, and you have to eat, so something practical is being accomplished, and no one knows you are meditating!
     
Tonight I opened the refrigerator and considered my choices. I felt a bit overwhelmed, and it is my tendency to throw every possible vegetable into the pot or pan for the sake of including all the vitamins and other nutrients. But people, you do not need to cover the entire repertoire in one meal! Restraint is an artistic virtue.
    
The farmers are great for suggesting how to use their produce. The man who sold me three small bags of sugar snap peas said they are wonderful grilled with butter, salt , and pepper, or used in a stir fry. I decided to keep it simple. I very rarely cook with butter, but it sounded like a savory idea. Break out of your cooking rut! Get a little crazy!! Organic butter, mind you. (Note: the growth hormones in conventional meat and dairy are extremely harmful, especially to growing girls, causing premature development and disturbingly early menstruation. You should either personally know the farmer you get these foods from, or buy organic.)
    
I kept the spices basic--sea salt and freshly ground, Trader Joe's lemon pepper. Now, the key to nutrition is color. Seriously people, do we need expert advice, super foods and exotic supplements (ie. coral calcium from Okinawa) to keep us fit and healthy? Three square meals, or 4 to 6 triangular ones, will do it. Do you really need a food pyramid guide (especially one that lists sugar as a food group)?
     
So okay, you have these basic groups: breads and cereals (specifically, whole grains); a variety (think multiple colors) of fruits and vegetables; milk and dairy (organic only); and meat, poultry, fish, eggs, nuts, beans, seeds, legumes, etc... (a.k.a. protein, of which Americans actually eat too much). And yes, the healthy fats--omega 3s, mono- and poly-unsaturated fats. Keep saturated fats to a minimum and eat as many whole foods as possible, rather than processed and packaged foods. Especially check the labels for high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and artificial colors and flavors. If any of these ingredients are listed, put the package back on the shelf! These products do not, I repeat, DO NOT, qualify as food.

Note: The following fruits and vegetables are the most contaminated with pesticides, so buy these organic or a locally grown equivalent--peaches, apples, sweet bell peppers, celery, nectarines, strawberries, cherries, kale, lettuce, grapes (imported), carrots, and pears.
      
Don't eat until you are stuffed. Eat slowly, so that you enjoy and experience your food, and because if you eat too fast, your body won't register that you are full in time, and you'll eat too much. Plus you will suffer from digestive disorders.
     
For fitness, walk as much as you can every day. Walk your dog, pull children in a wagon, walk to visit your grandma, go for a few groceries you can carry in a backpack, pick up your pharmaceuticals, go to the post office, to church, to visit a neighbor. Or ride your bike. Then cross-train with some physical activity you enjoy that is not harmful to your body for 30 minutes, 3 times a week. And sleep--7 to 8 hours a night minimum. That's it!
     
Oh, and cook at home. Avoid fast food like the satanic beast that it is. Even at a real restaurant, you usually don't know where the food came from or what's in it, and the portions are too large. Back to my dinner. Along with sugar snap peas, I added a sweet yellow onion, orange carrots (they also come in purple!), a gorgeous, purple bell pepper, and broccoli to a cast iron skillet (an actual source of dietary iron!). I chopped my vegetables with a wooden-handled paring knife that once belonged to my great-grandmother, Ruth Valley Roush, who died about 38 years ago. Who knows how long she had the knife, but it is still sharp and was made in America, by gosh, by golly! The vegetables went over jasmine rice, and for dessert we had wild blackberries hand-picked by my husband today, in the woods in Michigan. It took him over an hour, so I suspect he got his secret meditation time, too.
     
If you haven't noticed yet, I call a spade a spade, so let me give it to you straight. If you do not cook most of your meals at home, either because you are too tired or you think you don't have enough time, your life may be dangerously out of balance. You are not really living. You were created to love to eat real food, people! So stop dying right now, and get to your local farmers market. Drive out to someone's farm (a real family farm, not the industrial factory kind--also the spawn of you-know-who) and buy eggs and homemade jelly. Try some raw milk or goat cheese! Get your finest paring knife out of the drawer, pick some herbs from your garden, put soothing music on, and meditate away. Bon appetit!!