Around The Farmhouse: The Chickens Are Busy

Sweet Bay Laurel.  There are a lot of different Bay trees out there and some of them are poisonous to consume so before you use them in cooking, be sure you know which ones you're picking.  Sweet Bay Laurel is said to ward off evil if planted at the entrance to your house, near your front doors being an ideal location.  It is full of historical and mythical symbology but of course I plant it for its culinary uses.  Bay is excellent in stocks, soups, and sauces. 

I know you may roll your eyes at me when I say this, but it is 100% true that growing your own will revolutionize your experience of using it.  I have never seen dried bay leaves in the store that weren't old, dusty, and scentless.  When you dry them yourself they retain much more of their color, their scent, and heavenly flavor.  What's on the grocery shelves is a ghost in comparison and always left me wondering why I bother to use it at all when it imparted so little to my dishes.  The first time I used a fresh bay leaf in soup it was obvious why it has been so popular an herb for so many centuries.  Then I dried all the leaves I trimmed and used those and they retained so much of their flavor it was just amazing!  Then I ran out of my stash of home dried, and then my one bay plant died.  I haven't used any bay leaves in my cooking since and I miss it.

So last summer I bought two new bay plants and they have lived, held their form, all this time without putting off a single fresh leaf of growth.  This is because I failed to repot them.  Just last week Philip and I managed to get out in the garden to clear some beds for spring planting and he asked what else he could do to help and I begged him to repot the bay in two much larger pots we had available and he did.  This week they show signs of fresh growth!

I'm feeling a lot of anxiety right now about keeping Max on track with school, with Kung Fu, with all the little things kids need us to stay on top of.  I'm trying to keep on top of baking so that he gets a little extra nutrition through his sweet tooth.

I'm also feeling anxiety over trying to change my own habits- trying to develop new healthy rituals of behavior in my weekly routine. 

Good things are happening.  I think all the misfortune and the downward funneling we have gone through as a family has brought a lot of necessary things to light.  Through all the misfortune we have learned so much about who we are, accepting who we are, and discovering what we can change that we don't like about ourselves and what we can't change.  And then making those possible changes.  Kung Fu continues to be a guiding light, a centering activity for the three of us. 

What I keep having to remind myself is to be patient and diligent.  Change is a long process.  Change is more arduous than stasis.  To establish change into a new steadfast routine takes time, repetition, determination, and building the strength to hold change in place until it becomes so much a part of you that you no longer have to think about it all the time for it to become as natural as breathing.

I have to recognize the progress I've made in the last few months and give myself some credit for how much I've been working on it all:

• I had gotten very sporadic about taking my meds, I now rarely forget to take them and have added some fish oil and vitamin D supplements to my daily dose of psyche meds. This is very important for my mood stabilization.  I have been doing much better since getting back on anti-depressants and all of the other progress I've been making in my life wouldn't be possible without it.
  

• I am riding my bicycle again to run the majority of my errands.  That means I'm getting somewhere between 12 and 18 miles of bicycle riding in every week that I wasn't getting just a couple of months ago.  When I first started running my long errands on the bike I would dread it but now it isn't really dread anymore, just an awareness that I will be tired when I get home but that I can do this.  I can ask this of my body. 
  

• I routinely go 3 days a week now with no alcohol, sometimes 4 days.  That's huge.  I'm still drinking quite a lot on the days I do drink and there's a long way to improve in this department but for years I wanted to have the discipline to simply not drink every night and couldn't do it.  Since August we have been working on this and it is tremendous to be accomplishing this.
  

• Eating something not too long after I wake up- something with protein- I don't like eating early.  This is so hard to do.  If I eat early I don't really want a big does of nuts or beans or eggs and cheese.  I like to eat a huge breakfast in late morning but this isn't ideal.  I'm supposed to break my fast early and eat 5 or 6 smaller meals through the day rather than the 2 huge ones I've become accustomed to.  I have finally discovered that making almond biscotti is the key.  I can eat biscotti with my coffee and get that little boost of protein.  That may not be big progress, but it is progress.

• Keeping on top of Max's school experience.  Max needs a lot of help remembering to bring homework home, in doing homework (he doesn't actually need help understanding most of it, he needs someone standing over him to keep him on task.  Otherwise he cannot concentrate enough to get the smallest assignment done.  This is ADD and not willfulness.)

Those are just a few of the things I'm working on.  You need to do this too- give yourself credit for the progress you're making in the changes you're trying to bring to your life.  You need to remind yourself to be patient with the process and to just keep at it.  Every single time you "mess up" or veer off the new path you're creating, just get back on.  No self bashing.  Don't give yourself time to let the hopelessness seep back in.  That's perhaps the part I'm working hardest on. 

Holding the deep sense of hopelessness I have felt at bay.  One of the best resources for this aside from the antidepressant medication is my garden.  Seeing plants renew themselves reminds me that I can renew myself too.   Being in the garden, connected to the earth; putting impossibly small seeds in the ground and a week later seeing tiny seedlings emerge from the damp dark ground is life affirming. 

So many of my friends and family are ready for spring.  Ready for the light to increase and burn warmer.  I love spring too, but it's in late winter that I feel the most life stirring.  In this last quarter of winter the sap is rising, leaf bud is emerging, and deeper down roots are building and new shoots, that we won't actually see until spring, are already forming.  So while the landscape is still cold, for some it's still completely buried in ice and snow, the whole northern hemisphere is actually teeming with fresh life.  All the growth we associate with spring starts now, in late winter.  Winter is the mother of new life. 

Winter is the mother of me.

Maybe I still don't believe that things in my life are going to get substantially better than they are now, but winter has delivered hope back to me.  Just a little.

That will have to be enough.