Routines for staying grounded

 

 In the studio

 

Some recent and current reading

 Spinach 

There are no weeds

Routines, be they daily, weekly or monthly, are an anchor in life, especially in these extraordinary times. We need structure. As a natural introvert I haven’t had trouble adapting to the lockdown, and while I share the global anxiety and heartbreak, just as I feel it about global warming, wars, human rights issues, poverty and other crises, and am worried about other people (and in awe of the frontline workers), I am used to dealing with massive uncertainty and am embracing the gifts and lessons in this situation, something I have had plenty of practice in since being diagnosed with cancer.

I am using this period as a retreat of sorts. Luckily I am still working part-time and only losing out on some of my income, and we are financially secure. Being at home has given me the space to expand the routines that have become such vital tools in my healing. It has been an emotional few weeks for various reasons, and some days I could barely do one or two of the things on this list, but I can feel the cumulative benefits from incorporating the below into my days and weeks as much as possible:

Exercise / gardening:

Two activities not everyone is able to do, and I never take them for granted. I dusted off the dumbbells I had bought in preparation for surgery and now rotate Christine Coen’s 22-minute workouts. She focuses on the mental health aspect of weight training and the workouts are varied enough to not feel overwhelming, though I still have to pause at times. I am also running more than ever, but I try not to be too rigid about it. One of my rounds involves stopping at the beach on the way home and wading through the water - we are very lucky to have so much space around us with access to beaches within the 2km radius our movements are currently restricted to. When I don’t feel like a run, I walk instead or spend an hour gardening. It has been sunny and dry lately and I am getting a lot of fresh air into my lungs and appreciating this heightened connection to nature.

Creativity:

Thanks in no small part to this wonderful course, I am in a state of Flow when it comes to painting and drawing. At the moment I am drawing and painting children a lot and working on my botanical illustrations and some personal projects. Last night John and I got our hands into clay, inspired by the Great British Pottery Throw Down (Keith Brymer Jones must be one of the most soulful people on the planet; he is regularly moved to tears by a piece, and those are moments of humanity that are a balm for the spirit!). Food preparation is a creative pursuit in itself and an exercise in mindfulness, and I am trying out recipes I had saved and making large bowls of rainbow salads, healthy desserts and cakes.

Meditation / visualisation / spiritual practice:

These days my practice usually involves one long Joe Dispenza meditation and/or two shorter ones each day. I also still listen to my custom hypnotherapy audio recordings a few times a week. Marisa Peer has been uploading a lot of free resources, including hypnotherapy sessions and visualisations. I read spiritual texts every day and listen to podcasts or Youtube videos, for example talks by Michael A. Singer (I bookmarked this one as I want to listen to it again).

Yoga / breathwork:

These are essentials for getting back into my body. Yoga with Kassandra has created a 30-day morning yoga challenge, so before I sit down to work I do one of those ten-minute sessions and later in the day one of her longer Yin Yoga classes. This one focuses specifically on the immune system.
Wim Hof (aka the Iceman) regularly shares free content, and I have been doing this short sequence of Wim Hof breathing.

Reading:

Reading is probably my number one activity right now; I have been reading so much, across different genres. A couple of standouts: Before lockdown I got Laura Cumming’s new book On Chapel Sands from the library and started reading it last week (as usual, I have several books on the go); I am savouring it at intervals, chapter by chapter, out in the garden. I finally bought Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Instructions on Writing and Life, which I had been wanting to read for years, and, as expected, it is excellent, a book to visit again and again. Elizabeth Hardwick's semi-autobiographical novel-letter Sleepless Nights is also remarkable and certainly in a category of its own.

Writing / correspondence / connection:

I still write my Morning Pages every day and am also working on a journal/memoir (that I might never share publicly either) about the last two years, something I have been doing on and off.

Correspondence is important, too, and I have been making and sending cards, writing letters and putting together parcels, and reaching out to people I had been meaning to contact for a while. Snail mail also offers a balance to all the additional screen time now that so many meetings and appointments have moved online. In a lot of ways this pandemic has brought people closer together. I now talk to my 86-year old friend almost every second day (she lives alone and is cocooning); there are more video calls with family and friends; my ‘Irish’ nephew has playdates with his cousin in Germany via Whatsapp; people are reviving old friendships and forging new ones.

Therapy:
I have regular appointments with my therapists, counsellor, healers and mentors, and these are very much part of my routine. They are expensive (with the exception of the Cancer Care West counselling service; everything they do is free - we are very lucky to have them), but so worth it, and I am thankful that I am in a position to afford them.

Rest:
When I am feeling well, I want to make up for all the time I lost or wasted and go all in. Thanks to energy healing from this man the previously continuous fatigue lifted not soon after my treatment, but in my excitement over that I tend to forget that my body still lets me know very clearly when I have overdone it - which is of course true in general, but now comes with the added sensations of cancer-related fatigue. So while it is tempting to do all the things I've been meaning to do, I remind myself to slow down and take rest days as needed, with no pressure to be productive.

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On the note of productivity, I hope to be back here with possibly shorter but more regular posts - I have a lot of drafts, but haven't had the mental space to edit and post lately. 

 

All the vegetables

Scones made with grated courgette

Daisy last year

I have always eaten healthily, and these days I am 95% vegan, with no refined sugar and very little wheat. I do eat our chickens’ eggs maybe once a week, and I make the odd exception when eating out or invited somewhere, though I draw the line at meat. 

After stage III cancer I feel it is important to do everything in my power. Joe Dispenza says that when he worked as a chiropractor, the clients with most problems were those with 'perfect' diets and lifestyles, and I can see some truth in that as well. Putting pressure on myself and feeling stressed when some sugar or dairy passes my lips is perhaps just as ‘bad’ - or worse - for me as said sugar or dairy.

So instead of becoming too obsessed, I focus on including more of what is definitely beneficial: eight or more portions of vegetables and fruit a day, supergreens in the form of matcha tea and spirulina, and vegetable juices.

We grow some vegetables ourselves and get a box from Green Earth Organics every week, and we base our cooking around what is in the box. I always order extra carrots, as we juice every day (at the moment a mix of carrot, beetroot, ginger, kale and parsley). The day after I got my diagnosis I bought a juicer. There are stories of people curing their cancer with carrot juice, and while I would never have taken the risk of going for a dietary approach at the exclusion of other (including conventional) treatments and doubt those people did only this one thing, I am convinced by the benefits of juicing (and green smoothies). 

I make a lot of curries, chilli, soups and salads and I always throw in some extra vegetables. I have also mastered the vegan moussaka. Anke and I love roasting big trays full of vegetables that can then be eaten with anything and leftovers turned into a salad.

Another way of incorporating more vegetables is to use them in baking. Every summer we grate the abundance of courgettes into chocolatey tray bakes, and that cake always reminds me of home. I adapt a lot of the recipes in this wonderful book (see also photo above) by using other types of sweeteners and halving the amount. Each recipe includes a vegetable and alternatives to wheat such as rice flour or spelt. I have always liked baking, and now more than ever I think why bake any of the traditional white-flour, white-sugar, nutrient-deficient cakes when there are so many ways of baking healthier versions that don’t leave you with that sugar rush and crash. And they taste great, too.

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These are my go-to websites for mostly vegan cooking and baking (they have published books as well):

Minimalist Baker

The Happy Pear

Love & Lemons

Filtered water, no plastic

Years ago a friend gave me a small piece of charcoal for purifying water. She was using this centuries-old Japanese technique and got her charcoal from her Japanese friend. I was excited to try it out with a small bottle and research it, but then I never got around to actually getting started on a bigger scale and buying more.

This summer I visited her and saw that she had taken it to another level by having two 5-litre Kilner dispensers of water with charcoal on the windowsill above her sink, which provide enough water for herself and her two children each day. She had me do a blind taste test comparing purified water with water straight from the tap, and the former tasted so much better. I told John about it, and he promptly bought one of these dispensers, even though he was sceptical, but he likes a project and unlike me, he is a doer.

I then ordered binchotan charcoal from this website, and we said good riddance to our plastic Brita jug with its wasteful and expensive filters - the jug was relocated to the potting table in the shed to use for watering plants. Each night we pour any water we haven't used into a glass jug and refill the dispenser with fresh water, so it is purified by the next morning. After three months you reactivate the charcoal by boiling it in water for ten minutes, and after a further three months you recycle it (there are various uses for old charcoal, from deodorising to gardening), so the sticks last for six months. We use three sticks (each approximately 12 cm and long and 2cm thick) in 4.5 litres of water.

Apart from all the above benefits, it is aesthetically pleasing - I never liked the look of the plastic jug sitting on the counter.

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Two new-to-me songs I added to my playlist this summer:
"Going home (Mythical Kings and Iguanas)", a strangely haunting song by Dory Previn, which was another late-night-radio-while-driving discovery

"A Rose for Emily" by The Zombies - I found this via the podcast S-Town, which I binge-listened to while painting rooms

Pink

 Three feet

Uncooked

Clouds

1|  Pink shoes you can walk in for miles (because they are Ecco), to the pub and back, for example

2|  Alternating cooking and eating apples from the garden in this apple frangipane tart

3|  I have photographed the view from the kitchen window in this house and in my old place so many times, always with grand plans to paint the particular colour combination of sky-land-sea, and I have done the latter four times in all those years. Sometimes we are in the car on the way to work or home, and the bay is sublime, and I make a mental note to get the morning or evening light down on paper or canvas or snap a hasty photo. One day soon those scribbled lines of 'fuzzy strip of indigo above pale blue water, flat sky' will be translated into paint.

More botanicals

1|  The rose campion a friend gave me a few weeks ago revealed its intense magenta flowers while we were away. Returning from Germany's heatwave and its abundant gardens to grey skies and the worst rain in months, we were in a funk for a day or two, but these pops of colour helped.

 2|  We also came back to a courgette the size of a baby and have incorporated it into every meal (and a cake). And we are eating tons of salad, but so far have only two varieties in our polytunnel. I want to grow chicory - I love bitter leaves, and the above is one of my favourite salads, chicory with orange, walnut, balsamic and apple cider vinegar and honey.

Search for the pioneering photographer and botanist Anna Atkins in Google Images, and you get lost in this sea of cyanotype blue - her work looks so modern.

3|  I was sorting through papers in my studio and accidentally formed this lovely juxtaposition of two of my obsessions - 'Las Meninas' by Velázquez (on a transparency I must have used for a presentation in college; I noticed the image is flipped horizontally here!) and botanical illustrations (this one by Edward Minchen, I believe). I am displaying them temporarily on a shelf in the hope they will spark an idea, or simply to enjoy them for a while.

In the kitchen | Quark bread and coloured walls

 Kitchen work-in-progress

Bread-making work-in-progress.

Illustration by Heather Gatley in this book, which has nothing to do with the bread and which I feel ambivalent about.

One of the things I wanted to get back into this year was making my own bread. Ideally sourdough, but I haven't started the starter yet. I used to make wholemeal spelt bread all the time and have stocked up on spelt flour, but I wanted to try some new recipes as well.

The other day I had to use up some quark that was past its use-by date. I always pick up quark when I see it in the shop, as it is a German staple, but then I never know what to do with it apart from eating it like yogurt or the two ways our family used it - German cheesecake, and potatoes served with quark whipped up with sparkling water and chopped chives and seasoned with pepper and salt.

A quick search online yielded quark oil dough, which apparently is a well-known substitute for yeast dough. In Ireland you cannot buy fresh yeast in the shop, only from bakeries on request, if they are happy to give it to you, and I prefer not to eat too much food containing yeast and haven't bought any dry yeast in years, so I was interested in how the quark oil dough would turn out.

There are various recipes, all very similar, but I didn't follow any particular one - I used around 180g quark, 4 tablespoons milk, 8 tablespoons oil (rapeseed), 1 egg, 350g flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt to make a braided bread (updated to add: I bake it at around 160 degrees celcius for about 20 minutes, though it might take longer, depending on the oven; with our oven, if you followed the recommended time, you would burn everything). You can add some sugar and raisins to make it sweet. It was so quick to make - no waiting, unlike with yeast - and came out well, despite my half-a***d kneading and braiding (hence the rustic look). It took only a few minutes to put together, still tasted fresh the following day, and we loved it, so this is where any leftover quark will end up from now on, and it will be great for making pizza. It is fluffy and moist, and I can imagine substituting kefir for the milk (inspired by my sister).

In August it will be two years since we moved into this house, and we still have a lot of work to do. The kitchen is one of two rooms where we left the old floor, and we also kept the kitchen that was there, but painted it (as well as the airing cupboard, on the left in the photo) and took out all the hanging cupboards. It is the only room that has colour on two small areas of wall (everywhere else is some shade of white, pale grey or charcoal, or - half the house - still unpainted). A few weeks ago, with the help of John's brother-in-law, we finally connected a lamp to the cable that was awkwardly sticking out of the corner between the blue wall and ceiling. Usually there is a small armchair in that corner by the stove - currently in the sitting room, as we had visitors and not enough seats -, so it is now a reading corner.

Use the good china

A friend gave us an entire china tea set that she herself had been given as a wedding gift about three decades ago, and we have been using it regularly. The plates are the ideal size for cake and cake-like food.

My sister made these no-bake brownies a few weeks ago, and since then I have made a batch (half the recipe, because I never seem to have enough of one of the ingredients) every Sunday to have on hand for the week. They are packed with dates and ground walnuts and almonds and technically quick to make, but since I don't have a kitchen machine, I use a large knife to chop the dates into smaller and smaller pieces until they resemble a paste. I have an immersion blender with a separate part that has larger blades, but my sister ruined the blades on her blender with sticky dates, so I refrain from trying it. There is a bit of icing sugar in the ganache (I put in less than suggested, and the consistency is fine), but no added sugar in the brownie itself.

An almost sugar-free dessert I make a lot and keep in the freezer is this raspberry ripe, which takes minutes to make. It tastes best when it is semi-frozen.

With both of these you can only eat a small amount, as they are very filling, and you don't get cravings for sugar or stodge. They are delicious, and eating them from beautiful delicate plates (with your fingers, though - my photo lies) adds to the pleasure.

Food | Chutney, chocolate and washing up

John was in Cork a few weeks ago and brought back a lovely spiced apricot chutney from the English Market. When it was gone, I attempted to recreate it. The ingredients were simply apricots and coriander seeds (such a good combination), vinegar and sugar. All the recipes I looked up had quite a few additional ingredients, but I wanted to keep it simple and made it with the above (200g dried apricots, 3/4 teaspoon ground coriander, 200ml apple cider vinegar, 90g brown sugar), adding an onion and 25 grams of raisins (mainly to bulk it up, as I only had a small bag of dried apricots) and a bit of lemon juice. I followed Delia's instructions with regard to the cooking time and loosely based the ratio of the quantities on her recipe, and the result is lovely. We eat it with cheese and bread and add it to stir fries.

Overall we try to keep our sugar intake low, while not excluding it completely (see the chutney!). John is stricter, as he reckons he is an abstainer, not a moderator, whereas I am happy to make exceptions and won't refuse cake. The most important change has been to not eat processed biscuits and cakes. If it is homemade and has recognisable ingredients, it is fine - everything in moderation, of course. I use honey, maple syrup and coconut blossom sugar in my baking.

Yesterday I made these no-sugar bites, and the raspberries are actually sweetener enough. They taste best half frozen or straight from the fridge.

(Also pictured in the food photos: my friend gave me this gorgeous children's book about Frida Kahlo.)

In other sensory news, I love this washing-up liquid (another John find, when the shop didn't have Ecover, which I used for years). It smells of lemon balm and is certified by Ecocert.

Slow

I find myself getting the biggest sense of achievement from small repetitive tasks, and it seems as if I am only learning how to live now - I mean that on a big, philosophical level as well as in the most mundane sense. I have been an adult for long enough to have certain things figured out, but I keep catching myself thinking, if only I had started this ages ago. This evening I made a batch of granola and a tray of banana muffins, and I feel so prepared.

I am only getting the hang of meal planning and grocery shopping now. Having grown up in a household where nothing was wasted, I am always horrified when I read how much food people throw out in the West. I have always endeavoured to continue to live the way we did at home and generally succeeded at the not wasting part (if not the preparation), but during a recent crazy busy time we ate out a lot and ended up throwing out food, including a very black banana (this had never happened before. The one thing I can make in my sleep is banana bread). So now, with two trays emerging from the oven in one evening and an idea of what we are going to cook for the next few days (and nothing dying at the back of the fridge), I feel I have conquered this part of domesticity. 

Buddhism tells us that tasks such as weeding or mowing the lawn teach you the point of pointlessness, and I am really enjoying that. I remember as a child when it dawned on me that the joy of having just washed my hair would not last very long before I would have to do it again, and again, and again, and the panic (some sort of existential angst) that I felt. I cannot quite claim that I have mastered a zen-like immersion in everyday tasks, but I do derive genuine pleasure from them most of the time. It's as though I have finally pushed aside that daunting mountain of 'shoulds' and 'to-dos' and am living in the moment more, for now at least.

MITs and simple pleasures

 lemon-blueberry-cake

soaps

gardening

It is rather difficult to work from home when the weather is as good as it has been for the past week. In fact, I cannot remember the last time it rained, and this is the west of Ireland. I keep making excuses to get up and do something that involves fresh air and sunshine (such as finally peeling off the foil on the new door frames, which clearly states "Remove immediately after installation"... oops.).

In an attempt to tick off at least some of the items on my to-do list, I have dug out one of those productivity tips I had stored away in a corner of my brain, which is to set the three most important tasks (MITs) of the day first thing in the morning. While I always have a million things I ought to do swirling around in my head, determining and writing these three down - and, crucially, thinking of them as 'most important' - helps me to focus. I have two sets of threes, one for work (both the Uni work and my freelance work) and one for everything else (these days, at least two of that second set are house- or garden-related, and the other one tends to be something to do with correspondence or organising, for example meal planning or scheduling things). It is so simple and works so much better than my overfilled and overwhelming diary (which I still keep, but I now try not to stuff sheets of paper covered with more scribbles into it).

I know I always go on about aromatherapy, but there is such a strong link between smells and wellbeing, and, perhaps accentuated by the sun, I am noticing them much more, and 'stop to smell the roses' throughout the day. The soaps pictured above were housewarming gifts, including a cinnamon soap from Germany, and they smell and look amazing.

We had friends over for lunch on Friday and Sunday, and I ended up making the same cake twice. I used to make this lemon-blueberry cake a lot a few years ago, but this time I made it with coconut sugar, which gives it a darker, more wholesome appearance (even if the health benefits over white sugar may not be that considerable). I love using citrus peel in baking and cooking (grating lime peel onto stir fries is a favourite).

 The garden is bursting with activity. You can watch things grow; the neighbours' dogs and cats visit; and we have added a bird bath (another gift) to the bird feeder - a safe distance from the cats' reach. I spent a good chunk of my work-from-home Friday weeding, which has got to be one of the most therapeutic tasks there are. The specks of orange in the photo above are calendula, which is not a weed, but we have tons of it (I need to ask my mom for her recipe for calendula balm), and a couple fell victim to John's polytunnel tidy-up.

Apple bread

Usually I wouldn't go near anything Christmassy until December 1st, but this week is the last week of the current term of my classes, so I wanted to bake something to go with our early Christmas coffee. One thing I made was Apfelbrot, a staple in our family in the lead-up to Christmas. It is a rustic cake/bread, moister than stollen, lighter than fruit cake and beautifully fragrant.

There are a lot of variations of this, and I have experimented with different nuts - chopped roasted hazelnuts instead of whole ones; almonds; mixed nuts minus the peanuts, as I felt they wouldn't work that well - but here is my aunt's recipe (which I just realised happens to be dairy- and eggfree):


   Apfelbrot 

• 750g apples (peeled and grated)

• 250g sugar [I use less, around 200g]

• 250g raisins

• 250g whole hazelnuts

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

• 1 teaspoon ground cloves

• 1 heaped teaspoon cocoa powder

• 1 dessert spoon dark rum

• 500g flour

• 5 teaspoons baking powder

1. Mix the grated apples and the sugar and let stand for at least six hours or overnight.
2. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius (160 for fan-assisted ovens).
3. Put the raisins in a sieve or colander, rinse vigorously under a fully opened hot tap and drain. 
4. Add the raisins, nuts, spices, cocoa and rum to the apples and sugar and mix to combine.
5. Mix the flour and baking powder and sift onto the apple mixture. Mix to combine.
6. Pour into two medium-sized loaf tins. Bake for 45-60 minutes.

With the oven in our new house we have noticed that everything is cooked much sooner than expected. After years of having an oven where you had to add at least 20 minutes to the given time, this still surprises me every time. So I would advise checking after 45 minutes.

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Speaking of preparation, this year I even managed to buy a diary (Moleskine; the price seems to go up every year, but it is the best weekly planner I know of) before January. I am one of those sad people who get antsy and panic when they enter the new year without a diary (and yet I almost always end up leaving it until mid-January). So between the baking and planning ahead to such an extent that I have a planner for planning ahead I feel a bit more ready for the winter months.

Four senses - October 2015

Sound  |  "All We Want is Love" by Ane Brun. I wish there were a word (because I am about to use a range of clichés) for that feeling when you hear a new song and it is so beautiful your heart hurts and you are reminded of the other times this has happened in the past with a song (for me, for example, with "Rising" by Lhasa de Sela), and there is that sense of coming home and recognition and enchantment. [Photo: the Burren under its duvet]

Smell  |  Smelling roses in the Botanic Gardens. The variety and the subtle differences and the imaginative names! One reason I use a rose moisturiser is for the scent.

Sight  |  Progress in the garden. Still a lot to do before the cold weather comes, but the doors of the shed  (some of the frame hanging loose) and various other things are painted and the grass is cut, and we are getting on top of the weeds and briars.

Taste  |  This non-dairy (bó is cow in Irish) ice cream. We are not off anything at the moment, though we attempted a sugar-free house (everything in moderation these days) and I do try to limit my intake of sugar and dairy in particular. We may have eaten this sandwiched between a meringue and whipped cream on one occasion.


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As always, I link to products, etc., so it is easier to find them and because I like them. No affiliate links or any such thing.

Looking at green

A gift of rosemary and homemade rosemary pesto

The cygnets are growing so fast

Doing new versions of older paintings

While I try to move my 'office' outside as often as possible, there have been too many days spent working indoors for too long. My eyes get tired quickly in front of the computer, and even though I love the smell of my studio (and I mostly use water-mixable oils now, so rarely need turpentine - and when I do I use low-odour solvent), after a few hours my lungs are crying out for fresh air and I need to look into the distance, at green growing things, or at the sea.

A while ago I made daily walks a non-negotiable, because it can be too easy to not do the things you know are good for you and you enjoy. I no longer count walks into town from work (lovely as they are, past the swan nest and other delights); there has to be a proper walk just for the sake of walking. At the moment it tends to be evening time; the morning mirror-a-commute walk when I work from home has fallen away, but I might reinstate it and go running in the evening. There are no rigid rules.

Even though full-on summer has been sporadic here, at this time of the year  I crave being in nature all the time. Sometimes when taking out the compost - a few steps across the garden to the wall - it hits me how wrong it feels to be indoors on such a glorious day, and I look forward to doing laundry, because I get a few minutes at the clothes line.

This year I want to get into gardening more (and it looks like it will happen). In the meantime I tend to the few plants I have here and enjoy the abundance from other people's gardens.

Breakfast table book*

 

 

"Over the years Lucian's breakfast varied from pains au raisin to porridge to scrambled egg and toast, Sally and David always wanting to make sure he ate sufficiently and healthily, as he had a very sweet tooth. Lucian would often take a bar of home-made nougat from the shop's shelves as he walked in, sometimes jokingly slipping it into his pocket like a shoplifter. With a murderously sharp black-handled kitchen knife, he would slice it bit by bit, offering up slivers." 

(Greig, Geordie: Breakfast with Lucian, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, p.4)

While Breakfast with Lucian (a birthday present and perfect companion to this) is, of course, about so much more than what Lucian Freud used to have for breakfast, I admit that I am almost obsessively interested in these glimpses into people's habits and choices and the minutiae of everyday life. The internet may be awash with look-at-what-I-had-for-lunch-type photos and blog posts and facebook updates, and a certain cynicism has evolved in response to this, but both in fiction and non-fiction I am always pleased to see references to food or other domestic routines.

P.S.: My own breakfast varies, but my breakfast table tends to include multiple beverages, blueberries and coconut oil (the latter on toast and in coffee), and occasionally there is cava and roses - keeping the tradition of the Sektfrühstück going!

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*I did not actually read the book while having breakfast - mindfulness and all...