This month has been a good one. I feel as if my equilibrium is slowly being restored after a summer of being blindsided both by mind and body. I will not invite any deities to punish me for hubris by saying that I am cured because I am very much aware that I am not. Yet I am finding small ways in which to make my life a little better each day and reworking both how I think and what I do in positive ways.
One way that my little changes are having an impact is that I am catching up with my blog schedule so this is quite a substantial list of posts that were not up the last time I shared a list with you:
The Orchard (a Flashes of Feathers tale)
Singing an Autumn Tune (the latest Flashes of Feathers tale)
Crochet-wise I am still working on my ‘this is the largest thing I have ever made’ project and I am so close to finishing I can taste it. The body of The Item is now done, the ends (so many ends) have been woven in and I am now adding the edging. I am half way through the edging process and if I’m lucky I will finish it tomorrow. Which will mean pictures in my Wrangling the Yarn blog post next month plus full details of size and yarnage and all that good stuff.
And now, having discussed the word herding and the yarn wrangling, I shall move to the life living part of the newsletter (why yes, I do actually remember what I said these monthly missives would be about back when I started it last year) and talk about the three things in the subheading.
Prayers. I’m no longer a Christian but I was brought up as an active member of the Church of England and from the ages of about three until my mid twenties pretty much every single day of my life was book-ended by prayer. When I woke up in the morning I (silently, in my head, I was never a demonstrative pray-er) gave thanks for the fact I had woken up and the last thing I did at night was say the Lord’s Prayer.
When I stopped doing that, during a particularly awful time in my life when prayer and indeed belief of any sort seemed futile, it didn’t occur to me that I would be in anyway worse off for not doing it. And for many years I don’t think I was, or rather I had something else which replaced it so swiftly and completely that I didn’t realise it had. That something was greeting the dog every morning and wishing her a good night when I went up to bed. Not quite the same thing, granted, but similar enough that my brain did not feel that the shape of my day had changed in any meaningful way.
And then five years ago the dog died and I no longer had morning and evening conversations with something that did not talk back and who I believed loved me unconditionally. It’s also taken me all of those five years to realise that I was, in fact, missing a foundational ritual in my life. Mainly because it hadn’t occured to me that it was a ritual at all. But it was. And when I suddenly felt so unmoored I didn’t know what to do with myself I suddenly found that I was reciting the Lord’s Prayer each time I woke in a blind panic in the middle of the night. And it soothed me in the way familiar things sooth. Yet it also troubled me because I did not believe the words I was saying. So why was I saying them?
The answer, which was obvious once I thought about it, was that I hadn’t given myself anything to replace them with. So I sat down and spent some time working out what I actually wanted to wrap my days with and it came down to gratitude and awe and acknowledging the good. So I wrote myself two tiny little pagan prayers (barely three lines each) and spent the last three weeks building a small morning and evening ritual around them. Again, nothing big. I say my morning prayer before I do my ten minute morning mediation before I’ve even got out of bed. I say my evening prayer last thing, once my evening wind down routine (crochet with audiobook, journal, read at least two pages of a physical book) is complete, I’ve put the light out and snuggled down. It’s grounding and rewarding and gives each day a pleasing nostalgic shape without using things that don’t serve me any more.
Pomegranate seeds. Sadly this is not an announcement that I have a retelling of Persephone’s story being published but rather a psa that they’re very tasty sprinkled on many things, including salads and icecream, and they have been brightening up my food for the past few weeks. Along with many colours of peppers, and bean mixes, and homemade coleslaw. And yes, this is another of my “small changes for big differences” things, this one for the benefit of my body.
A friend showed me an app she began using to try and get more variety of fruit and veg in to her diet. It’s called the Rainbow Diet Food Journal1 * and allows you to log the fruit and vegetables you eat each day; not every food, not how much of each, just the fruit and vegetables. Since I do not like anything that looks remotely like calorie counting (I have no intention of precipiating a relapse into either of my eating disorders) this is practically a perfect way to me to monitor beneficial food without turing it into a stick to beat myself with. I only have to eat one berry, or slice of apple, or leaf of lettuce for it to count and that makes getting to your 10 a day and completing the rainbow feel very doable!
Generally what happens is that you tell yourself you only need to eat a small amount of each thing and then before you know it every day you’re making delicious salads or hearty vegetable soups stuffed with every colour of fruit and veg you can lay your hands on and you find you are no longer getting hungry between meals so your snacking habits have practically disappeared and then you do your monthly weigh in and realise you’ve lost a couple of pounds in weight without even thinking about it. Or that might just be me but I suspect it might be true for quiet a few people.
Anyway, pomegranate seeds are like tiny sparkly jewels on your food and I am honestly surprised Persephone only ate six out of the proffered 12. I’d have scoffed the lot and still be stuck in the underworld!
Ruins. Well there are many ruins across the British Isles but the ones I visited were those of Haughmond Abbey, just outside Shrewsbury. They are cared for by English Heritage but are free to enter and on a sunny day (which yesterday was) they’re glorious. I dug out my proper camera and spent a happy few hours wandering around the space where monks once spent the entirety of their lives, talking to the birds and insects who now live there and attempting to take artistic photographs of what was left of the buildings.
I think these four are the best of what I took and I’m sharing them not because I think they’re brilliant (I don’t spend enough time with this camera to get the best depth and focus when I do use it) but because I had fun taking them and then even more fun this morning, going through and picking out which ones to share. And that, I feel, is absolutely the point of such outings.
I’ve also included this, which is less than clear, because I managing to photograph two crows mobbing a bird of prey is I feel quite a triumph given that they were two fields away rather than directly over the abbey:
It was a fascinating chase to watch and am going to have a go at enhancing some of the other photos I attempted to take of it. But that will take me longer than I have before I want to post this, so keep an eye on my social media if you want to see more. I do not know what type of bird of prey it was, only that this photo makes it look a lot smaller than the crow next to it, when in fact they both had similar wingspans. Still, the top crow is pleasingly crow-shaped and identifiable in the picture so I’m happy!
And we end, as always, with a tarot card drawn from my Wildwood tarot deck to offer us some insight into the month ahead:
What is coming back into our lives in October? Is it a person, a group of people, a situation, or is it something a little less tangible? Reunions don’t have to be replays. What you felt before, how you acted before, what decisions you made before, none of that has to be repeated. You can, obviously, if that’s what you think is the right thing, but you do not have to. You are allowed to change, you are allowed to grow, and you are allowed to say “this is me now, meet me as I am or do not meet me at all”.
Take care of yourselves, my lovelies, and until next time
As we in the northern hemisphere are past both equinox and equilux and our nights are longer than our days, may we find light and joy and rest in the simple things of hearth and home.
This is not a paid promotion, it’s just something that helps me so I’m sharing in case it helps you too. I believe there are both apple and android versions of the app.