Gratitude
I am grateful for family, the light that casts beauty across shadows, music that lifts emotions, a little house and garden filled with colour and love, friends and inspirations, the beauty of nature, the ocean’s cold spray, the soft barnacle skin of the grey whale and the possibilities that exist in life.
Category Archives: health and wellness
my first cleanse
It is true. I have never done a foodie cleanse before. I have always wanted to but somehow always resisted the urge. I eat pretty clean. mostly. I was vegetarian for well over a decade, vegan for almost two years and I am not a big sugar junkie though I do have a weakness for really good dark chocolate and those super cheap chocolate cherries. oh. and licorice. I do like me some licorice.
So, when a friend introduced me to Get Fresh – A Spring Cleanse, I was all over it. It didn’t seem overly extreme like ‘eat nothing but lemonade water for a month’ or drink only juice for 10 days. I admire those who can do the extreme cleanse but my body likes to eat and there was that little problem with anorexia in my teens and cough cough early twenties so I don’t like to spin the wheel on starvation. Seems simple, cut out sugar, alcohol, gluten, dairy and meat (seafood is okay, whew). Easy peasy. Oh yeah. Caffiene. Um. What??!! I am not a big coffee drinker but I do have one rather large cup with a dab of cream every single day. I will admit to you that I miss the coffee. Oh how I miss the coffee.
So, my food looked something like this,
Stephanie provided us with some super yummy tasty recipes that were shockingly easy and fast to prepare. I need easy and fast especially during the work week when dinner hour starts off something like this, “what do you want for dinner?” “i don’t know, what do you want?” “i have no clue, so tired. what do you think?” “shrug, no idea”. Well, you get the idea. Hello pizza or chicken potpie’s from the deli counter.
So cooking was a breeze and it was all tasty and delicious and easy. So easy. But outside of the actual meal prep and cooking, was it easy?
Day 1: Started off with a yummy new to me smoothie, hello peach almond bliss. I do green smoothies a lot but I had sort of fallen out of the habit over the past few weeks and am happy to have been kickstarted again. They really do start the day off right. By the end of day 1, I had a pretty kick ass headache going on. I went to bed early, hoping it would go away. I suspected it was the lack of caffiene.
Day 2: I woke up to a raging headache. Not good. Wanted coffee. Didn’t have any. Moved slowly through my day, thankful that it was Sunday. By Sunday afternoon, the headache was gone replaced with a burning ache in my lower back that radiated down my thighs. I have no idea if it was the caffiene withdrawel or the gluten withdrawel but it was nasty. So nasty that I woke in the night in pain and couldn’t sleep for hours.
Day 3: Without being too graphic, I was in the washroom. A LOT. and I do mean A LOT. pass the pooper scooper please.
Day 4: I woke up gingerly assessing my condition and realized that I had no more pain, no headaches and I actually felt pretty good. Clear even. Sort of like when I was vegan. Hmmmmm. and I have been good ever since.
Today is Day 10. The last day of the cleanse and I am feeling good, a little bit on the tired side but it’s Monday and I am always tired on Monday so no surprise there. When I look over the last week, I see that I have been a bit emotional and some tender feelings have surfaced but overall I feel amazing. And I have lost a good inch of bloat in my stomach. Nice.
And now I am faced with some decisions. I have to slowly reintroduce food, no more than one a day I think so I can figure out what feels good and what doesn’t. Did I mention that I miss coffee, the taste and the swirl. But that would be coffee and dairy since I use cream in my coffee. Which means I have to introduce dairy before coffee. I don’t really miss dairy and in fact am wondering if dairy might be a problem for me with regards to the bloated feelings I had been having prior to this cleanse. And then there is the fact that I have been putting maca powder in my smoothie for the past few days and am really feeling energized and I suspect the maca is better for me than the coffee. and then there is the gluten. My husband and I often joke about wheat belly but I do miss toast and gluten free bread is just not the same.
I will take it slow because these days I prefer moderation over extreme. I don’t want to permanently cut anything out of my diet because that would feel extreme to me. but. I want to keep eating as clean as I can and for me that means staying away from processed foods, eating organic, local and preferably out of my backyard. Soon, very soon. This year’s garden is pretty much mapped out and in a couple of weeks it will be safe to plant everything.
My first cleanse feels like a raging success.
*I clearly needed the detox.
*I have a swack of new recipes at my fingertips which is good because the same old same old song and dance in the kitchen gets old.
*I might limit my coffee consumption to the occasional weekend. I might limit my dairy to my occasional coffee consumption.
*I have been drinking coconut water for a while now but it never occured to me to use it in my smoothies. um. hello!! yum!
*juicing more than once a week is a good thing and I am reminded how easy it is to clean my juicer.
*it really is not THAT much extra work to bring lunch to work every day and it not only saves me from the eating out bloat and afternoon slump but it saves loads of money too.
*chocolate avocado pudding. two of my favourite things together ’nuff said.
*the realization that I haven’t gone this long without coffee since I was pregnant and scarfing down chocolate in an attempt to get my caffiene on. hmmmm. Do I really want to go back to what feels like an addiction? Hells yes and Hell no. Still haven’t reached a decision on this one. I have time.
thankful
The rain falls lightly on my garden. I spent some time there this weekend, pulling out some of the last of the root vegetables and filling more bowls with tomatoes and raspberries. I seriously cannot believe that I am still pulling vine ripened tomatoes out of my garden. Insanity of the best kind. I cleared away much of the debris and turned the dirt over and left some herbs to continue growing for a little while longer. She is such a teacher and a healer and I always walk away from her feeling altered and more at peace with myself than I thought possible. I honour her cycles even as she teaches me to honour mine. When I first started gardening five years ago, I wanted a clean pretty space molded by vision but it never works out that way, the messy happens and things die and wither, flourish and grow wild and I am never in control and neither is she. We have to work together, it is a give and take and along the way we continually surprise each other.
I found out that I am going to be okay. I knew that but I also found out that it was going to be okay. I am relieved and incredibly grateful not only for the gift of good health but also for the reminder. It is odd really that I have watched so many people die, held death in my arms and listened to the whispers and yet most days, I feel that invincibility of youth, the sure footed knowledge that I will be the old crone, white silver hair soft on my head wound in an irritating braid, wrinkles and folds hiding all the experience of my life. For the past week and a half, I have walked around feeling the fragility of being human, the fragility of myself and my mortality. I am fine and feel sure that the vision I have always held of myself will come to fruition but I have realized that the vision of the old crone gets closer and closer seemingly faster every single day. I think that it is a gift to be reminded of my own cycles and that I am aging and while that is okay, it is important that I look after my health, that what I do now will affect how I am later. Time is speeding up, every day is a little bit faster than the last and from what I can gather, it continues to speed up faster and faster. I don’t want to take even one minute of it for granted. Not one.
Something else I realized in the past couple of weeks. I am blessed to have an incredible group of women friends in my life. Five years ago when my world fell apart I didn’t have the supports that I have now and while I can’t go backwards, I can praise the moon for the women that have entered into my life since then. Close friends, tribes and circles of goddesses … women who listen, understand and hold the space. Women who run with wolves, women who love fiercely and women who know that fear and tears are as much a part of us as celebrating, joy and laughter. Passionate women. I am so grateful for all of them and for me for allowing that into my life. It is a risk to allow yourself to be seen, to be held and to be loved but it is a risk worth taking. I may not have a lot of money or any really but I am incredibly rich in my friendships. so thankful for that.
Thanksgiving was quiet this year. There was laughter and good food and we gave thanks for our lives, for the living, for the love. My little family amazes me continually and I am blessed in this love that surrounds me, soaks into my skin and blesses me on a daily basis. At the end of the day, there is a colourful little house in the middle of a street filled with the leaves of life and in that house, there is a home that sits solidly on a foundation of love and that is where I breath my greatest thanks.
******
A bit of housekeeping. I recently, as in this past weekend recently, moved my entire website from squarespace to wordpress. If you follow my feed, you will need to update it, there is a button on the right hand side of this blog. I will be adding a button to my photoblog and my three collaborations (polaroid girls, the four and reel time) to make it easy for anyone who uses a rss reader. I loved squarespace but am on a bit of debt diet and am saving money everywhere that I can so while wordpress upkeep is a little more work for me, it is a lot cheaper in the end and I can host more than one domain so am creating an artistic space for myself outside of hippyurbangirl. I can’t wait to share it with you.
Peace.
Also posted in home and garden
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the waiting
my thoughts are filled, filled with poetry and drunk cherry curses. it is the way. the way we walk around healing and breaking and fumbling in our strong sure step while confidence and fear circle each other warily.
for the longest time i wanted to hide from you. hide from your prying eyes piercing me with perceived expectation. i wanted to hide from ugly and show you pretty files in candy coated colours and then smash that wide open with a long thick gooey scar of garbage strewn down a neglected back alley. and anger and joy circle each other warily, wolves teeth bared as drool hangs and then baptizes me anew.
plain language please.
poetic jargon thank you.
what the fuck do you want from me I ask myself on a regular basis. you looked at me in my polyester blue smock, pricing gun slung over my left hip and said that i looked like mom’s apple pie, rosy cheeks and milky skin as I stained my fingers with the long inhalation of a choked off breath, still hovering in that middle ground of hope’s optimism and the despair of anger’s pessimism while the punch of your fist still stained blood’s bruise on my rib. and i have no answer because life does not show up on the lines of my face but sit curled up beneath my skin waiting to strike. twenty years later and i still hover.
i was reminded late last week of the fragility of life, the fragility that comes with being human. we push it out of our mind only facing it in moments of grief when death holds tighter than we possibly can to those frail hands. we can be walking along feeling powerful and in control, leaves dancing in cool winds, the cycle of death around us and yet beauty is what we chose to breath in, to hold on to because that is what makes us beautiful. there is a vulnerability that happens in the generic pale green walls of a doctor’s office, our legs pushed open, breasts bared, pushed open with the unnatural clamp of necessity. it is but a moment and then suddenly you find yourself walking frozen through the lightly sound of jazz flutes as the bright colours of book titles float around you.
a lump in your breast.
what does that mean.
and you remember the last time you felt the world tilt hard as blood poured out between your legs, like a faucet left on too long. sometimes you have to hover in the spaces in between the bright smile of optimism and the dark form of despair. sometimes the very possibility of something is enough to stop you. stop you hard.
and so you find yourself in a waiting room. the same but different. a pretty pink smock and the ease of a molten chocolate cake simmering on the tiny television. you remember the last time you were in a room like this. the same but different. your belly not quite showing, the magazine in your hand filled with the words of nicu and what it felt like to pump your milk while your babies hovered between the world of breath and death. you remember running your hand over the soft spot that held your babies not yet knowing there were two of them and yet feeling somehow that this moment was important enough to note. so you filed away the vinyl chairs soft and squishy and the story of the woman who had lost so much and how his hand held yours while you waited to empty your bladder into the cup that held your blood. and now you feel that same sense of importance as a woman in a pink smock laughs nervously and makes conversation about how easy it all looks on the television. meals prepared with a flick of wrist beneath pearls and lightly coiffed hair as a team of jean glad ponytails wander the supermarkets buying just the right ingrediants.
and you realize that yoga has prepared you for this moment, you pose and breath as your breasts are pulled and pushed and it is only vaguely uncomfortable. far less uncomfortable than the prison walled steel you had imagined. they smile and nod and smile reasurringly some more. and you remember that is the way. you were stunned when they handed you the tiny urns, their death now dust. how does that happen when everyone is always smiling, offering up reassurance until they can’t anymore.
you wipe the goo off of your breast, wadding the pretty pink smock and throwing it in the basket even as you remember throwing the blue one in after wiping your belly. ultrasounds see more than babies. you walk away feeling confident again, a little raw and more aware of the way the wind speaks into the leaves but solid. a solid form. until you see the message blinking on your phone.
good thing you learned a thing or two about patience and waiting. you know what it is to wait. and so you wait. even so you have a hard time choking out the words, it will be okay even if that is what everyone wants to hear including yourself. so you sit in that space of not knowing. and you realize that walking through all those thick trees has somehow clouded the knowing, the deep down knowing and you are only left with the peaceful sigh of uncertainty.
i feel the hot breath of the wolves circling and i know, deep down know that regardless, i will be okay. it may or may not be okay but i will be.
Also posted in then and now
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diet
(polaroid sx-70 / px70 impossible film)
When I moved into my house five years ago, the yard was pretty much broken. The front stoop leaned sideways and jiggled in the most alarming ways; there was a rotted tiny platform behind the back door and the only things growing were the plentiful weeds and quack grass along with the forgotten tree stumps around the house.
When I moved into my house five years ago, I was pretty much broken. My boobs hung down to my belly milk still trying to find its way to mouths that no longer breathed; varicose viens and loose muscle from bedrest and a heart that had been fractured so many times, it was hard to see beyond the loosly tied threads keeping it together.
My yard is now a beautiful oasis of herbal remedies, bright flowers, a pretty green stained solid wood stoop, a brick patio nestled in the middle of tomatoes and thyme; yarrow and echniacea and a large cedar deck overlooking lilies and roses and an array of daisies and cucumbers. Raspberries drip red between low slung hops and strawberries peak underneath bright green leaves and white flowers.
My heart thumps in quiet pink freshness and the threads have since fallen away leaving thin silver scars that are more beautiful than painful. Since June I have lost almost 30 pounds. I have 50-60 more to lose to find myself comfortable again in skin that feels familiar, in skin that matches who I have always been. I have tried endlessly to lose this weight that causes joints to ache in winter months and feet crammed into high heels to carry too much around to not scream out in anguish at the end of a long day. But not really. You see I wasn’t really ready and it was safer to hide behind it than to continue moving forward but when I returned from my holiday in June, I started making some real changes in how I live, how I do my job and how I engage in my life.
The weight is coming off and it feels easy, it feels like a relief and I realize now that for the past five years, I have been denying myself the joy of wholeness. So long as I didn’t dig down to my roots, so long as I pretended to myself that this was my new normal, I could hold on to the anger because anger and sadness are so entwined. But I am meditating in love, surrendering to the vastness of the universe and am writing and living with all the joy of my being and somewhere in the conversations along the shores of manzanita, the city of portland, the comfort of bellingham and the trampoline fires of vancouver, I realized some things about myself and how far I have come in my journey to myself.
I spent last week hanging out in my garden with my family, marveling at the difference in my garden and realized that while it was a lot of work, a lot of sweat, tears and laughter … it was easy because I wasn’t really starting from scratch. The yard had been neglected for 20 years but prior to that it was well loved and the soil remembered and all it took was a little love for it to spring back to exactly what it remembered. My body has been neglected for only five years and with proper nourishment and love, it is happily and easily remembering who it was.
Disclaimer: Weight and Diet is such an incredibly personal journey and I don’t want to offend anyone with my stories about it as we are all on such differering journeys and are at different points in our own paths. I gave birth to twins after months and months of bedrest. My twins died. This was only a few years after my sister died and that was only shortly after I went through a divorce. I say this because I gained a lot of weight with the birth of my twins and continued to gain weight while I worked through my grief. I am no longer grieving and while sadness can still creep up on me, I no longer feel the dark weight of depression piercing my skin and greying my eyes. I have a beautiful life that I am finally allowing myself to live again. I am no longer running away from it, hiding behind drama or crazy excitement. I am just living fully in my present. I am loved and I love and there is a new calm that swirls around me and I see with clear eyes again.
So, yes. I am dieting. My diet consists of calorie counting because that is what works for me to figure out appropriate portions as that has been skewered over the past five years. I am not eating diet foods but rather am eating healthy whole foods that I cook at home. I am eating mostly organic as I have done for most of my life. I am not denying myself because I sort of feel like sitting down and mindlessly surfing the internet while plowing back a bag of potato chips was denying myself of me and life whereas now I am sitting down with a bowl of freshly picked raspberries or a salad made of all my favourite fruits and veggies and huge hunks of avocada while writing in my leather bound journal or reading a book that has my lips curved up is feeding myself. I am hooping barefeet on the grass or the warm floorboards of my living room and I am walking, biking and swimming in bits and spurts with friends and family.
I am not dieting with any sort of self-loathing to this body that has carried the pain and emotions of my losses. I was beautiful back in June when I weighed 30 pounds more than I do now; I am beautiful now and I will be beautiful when the scale shows me the familiar numbers of my past. This isn’t about hating myself, this is about my outside reflecting who I am on the inside, this is about body, soul, heart alignment and having the freedom to be who I am.
I am more at peace than I have ever been.
namaste.
Also posted in home and garden
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in the quiet
I’ve been quiet. So quiet.
Quietly working, purple manicured fingernails clicking the keys as papers and books highlighted research wander through my eyes. Every night I get home and ease my feet out of my pumps to reveal the happy dance of barefeet as I unwind into new relaxed clothing that allows me to hoop to my heart’s content swaying to the music of my garden thoughts.
If I am not quietly working than I am happily snoozing in the sway of whatever sunlight is gifted to me as salads get made and conversations linger with my little family, with friends that dance in and out of my days. Purple bicycle sways through the sunlight smile of my life.
Over the past year, I have noticed how much I have shifted away from here, this alter ego of a place that soothed my grief and let me linger in distraction so I could work on finding myself whole in small pieces of shattered thought. I have gingerly touched the cracks and realized that they have healed to a point that now requires my full attention. I am giving myself that gift. The gift of full attention.
peace.
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boho love
While on vacation, my husband and I spent a few days with the bohos. I don’t even know how to describe how incredibly healing it was for us to be around them, for us to be with cedar. We had more than one moment where our eyes filled up with soft tears and our hearts filled up with love.
I have been holding on to grief for a long time and I am never quite sure how I will be in the presence of children, especially small children. This trip really showed me how far I have come in my journey and how a beautiful open family and a fairy child can wind their way into my heart and touch those tender bits and kiss them stronger.
I learn so much about myself when I travel. In the weeks that I have been home, I have started really noticing the shifts and how they are playing out in my life, in my living. The changes that are manifesting in my body, in the way that I am eating and playing and in the way that I am spending my time. I laugh easier and I smile more often. I can feel myself shedding the final softness of grief, the final bits of anger.
I am still processing it all. but i know this. I love that family with every ounce of my being and they really do live in paradise, it envelops them even as their light touches every thing around them.
peace.
Also posted in love and friendship, photography and documentation, video and vlog
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playing outside
(polaroid sx-70 / px 100 silver shade impossible film)
what can i say? it’s summer so i’m outside hooping, shooting polaroid film and generally enjoying life.
i spend most of my work days sitting at a computer
sucking up the air conditioning
so when i get home, the last thing i need is more computer time
speaking of …
in a whish whirl woot
she has gone … back outside.
sisters
(polaroid colorpack iii / polaroid 664 film / kristen)
there are those moments
that we can’t escape from in life, those moments
where we hover in that place, where we wait and we do what we can
knowing there is really nothing we can do
even as we crack and lose ourselves in the pain of it all.
i spent 4 months watching my sister die, holding a space inside of myself that was sometimes like a cold wind blowing in the open spaces and was sometimes like a brick wall of knuckle scraped comfort that no one could penetrate. sometimes i laughed until my sides hurt and sometimes i cried until the salt swollen skin felt unnatural and burned into the broken spaces. i ate badly and my skin took on a loose pallor that seemed tinged with green. i drank like a fish and i forgot i needed water. i hated my family. i loved my family. no one understood and everyone understood. it was such a space of immediate contradictions filled with more pain and more love than i thought i had the capacity to hold inside of me. i was numb even as the slightest breeze caused me to slink from the needle like pain of my emotions.
what can i say. death sucks.
no matter how many times i watch someone i love die, i never get used to it and i never understand it. i remember people looking to me to guide them through what i needed but what the hell does anyone really need when they are the ones living, when they are the ones in the middle of it, bearing witness to it all. i didn’t know what i needed and there wasn’t really anything anyone could do for me but i remember hating being alone and even when people were irritating me, i liked that better than the dark spaces of empty.
during the long months of watching my sister weaken, watching my family collapse, tubes and blood and sunken flesh, i had a lover who sat beside me as i watched every single episode of buffy the vampire slayer over and over and over again. it didn’t prevent my sister from dying and it didn’t take away the pain but sometimes a distraction is like a warm blanket.
i am grateful that it worked out that i was able to be a bit of a distraction for a short time during my recent travels and hopefully somewhat of a warm blanket. i know there is nothing i can really do but give my love to a friend who is living in those filled and hollow spaces of love and pain.
Also posted in love and friendship, then and now, travel and stories
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bah humbug
This is a really hard time of the year for a lot of people and its not helped by all the expectations that we pile on top of ourselves. It will be fun dammit whether we like it or not and we should be grateful for the endless party invitations and the family dinners and the chocolate in great abundance pretty much everywhere. And isn’t it pretty outside, all that cold fluffy snow to be shoveled and the cozy endless darkness that requires more candles and twinkle lights than any one person should own. All those dinners out and lunches with friends as the bills pile up and the bank account dollars dwindle quicker than you can shout sale!!
As everyone rushes to go on vacation, the work stress mounts and as everyone rushes from here to there and everywhere, bumpers crumble under the collective weight of our endless need to consume. And I find myself in the bah humbug wanting to avoid the entire production only its impossible to avoid and so the tears are quick to prick eyes and frowns seem to be everywhere.
We have let go of big expectations for the season as we forego putting up a big bountiful tree in favour of pretty redwood sticks and we forego buying presents choosing instead red velvet stockings filled with little bits of love and me, well … I am in search of the quiet and the soft. Understanding and love wrapped up in soft flannel as the crunch of snow sparkles beneath my snowshoes. Last week was a difficult week that started with a car accident and ended in too many tears. I don’t want to dwell on it all prefering to hold onto the hope that as we enter the winter solstice, we also enter that place where hope’s quiet words whisper beauty into our hearts.
peace and light and a little bit of bah humbug.
Also posted in december views
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in the moment
Moment.
Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).
(Author: Ali Edwards)
… sweat trickled down the burning scald of the hot sun as flowers bloomed open and i wrapped myself in layers of warmth to speed down the cold frozen hill of the white rabbit only to land in the cool waters of chlorine bubbles as i discovered myself in the underworld of your soft skin, beard tickling lips soothing the laughter of friendship strolling through photos captured in the light of all of us …
This was a year where I really learned to live in the moment. The thing is when you are really living in the moment, every single moment is a moment of feeling incredibly alive.
instagram addiction
