Thought of the Day

Honouring Our Personal Gifts

“Explore daily the will of God”  ~  Carl Jung

As the fourth Simple Abundance principle – Harmony – starts to stir within our souls, Discerning our personal gifts is essential if we are to experience harmony in our lives. “Because our gifts carry us out into the world and make us participants in life, the uncovering of them is one of the most important tasks confronting any one of us” writes Elizabeth O’Connor in her Eighth Day of Creation: Gifts and Creativity.  She goes on to say “When we talk about being true to ourselves – being the persons we are intended to be – we are talking about gifts.  We cannot be ourselves unless we are true to our gifts”

It can be difficult for us to be know, let alone be, who we truly are.  We are often taught by Masters, Mystics, Sages, Philosophers and even Poets, that the authentic path exists and is passed down through the ages.  So why have many of us tuned out from this?  Perhaps it’s partly due to our belief that any such mysterious uncovering may be down to the will of God, rather than relying on ourselves and our own unconscious to guide us along our path of destiny to help us realise and achieve all that we are and are meant to be.

It’s interesting though, as often, even in our own darkest hours of doubt, insecurity and temporary losses of faith, we still want to believe that a Force greater than us really does exist, and is guiding us and working with our own power or understanding.  And it is.  The Force is with your authentic self.  As Obi Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker in Star Wars “The Force is an energy field created by all living things.  It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds galaxies together” It is this Force that binds our dreams and desires with our personal gifts so that they can find a natural outward expression, and we can slowly become who we truly are, and have what we truly want, as well as what we need.  “Follow your feelings, trust your feelings” the Jedi Knight urges us all, because it is within the Force that we can live and move and then truly know our being.

The Force is Love

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Comfort Food & The Good Life

Cooking for Comfort

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so entwined that we cannot think of one without the other” ~  M. F. K. Fisher

Comfort Food: Quirky.  A matter of personal taste. A matter of personal memories taken from specific events, smells or sounds from our past.  All of these things have the ability to transport us back to a part in our lives that sometimes hold fond memories, sometimes from difficult times. No matter what the memory or reason, Comfort Food plays a part in our lives and has a part in our futures

“Comfort food is hearty.  When hearts are heavy, they need gravitational and emotional equilibrium: meat loaf and mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, chicken pot pie, red beans and rice, creamy risotto.  Food that reassures us that we will survive.  With such sustenance we can keep on going, especially when we don’t want to take another step.  Soul food takes us back to our roots, nursery food tucks us into bed, and chocolate alters consciousness.  Different foods for different moods”  ~  Sarah Ban Breathnach – Simple Abundance

The Good Life and Comfort Food are closely linked and go hand in hand together

Scott and Helen Nearing, Inventive visionaries determined to create a completely self-sufficient lifestyle that was solely dependent on their wits, hard work and perseverance, went in search of the good life: “Simplicity, freedom from anxiety . . . an opportunity to be useful and live harmoniously” Two decades later they had succeeded and wrote a homesteading handbook entitled Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World.  First published in 1954, it took until 1970 when it was finally published as a paperback that it became a best-seller

At the age of 91, Helen Nearing shares her moving memoir, Loving and Leaving the Good Life:

• Do the best you can, whatever arises
• Be at peace with yourself
• Find a job you enjoy
• Live in simple conditions: housing, food, clothing; get rid of clutter
• Contact nature every day; feel the earth under your feet
• Take physical exercise through hard work; through gardening or walking
• Don’t worry; live one day at a time
• Share something everyday with someone else; if you live alone, write someone; give something away; help someone else somehow
• Take time to wonder at life and the world; see some humour in life where we can
• Observe the one life in all things
• Be kind to the creatures

I suspect that we often think some of these things and maybe some of them everyday; perhaps if we lived some of these suggestions we would realise, just as Helen Nearing and her Husband did, that the good life is truly here and now

“The one fact that I would cry from every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now”  ~  B. F. Skinner

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Rosemary for Remembrance: Sowing Herbal Hopes and Wishes

Balm brings you sympathy and Marjoram joy

Sage is long life . . . Sweet Woodruff augurs well for health –

A blessing richer far than wealth.

While Lavender means deep devotion,

Herb of sweet omen, Rosemary conveys

Affection and remembrance all your days.

May Heaven and Earth and Man combine

To keep these blessings ever thine.

~ Rachel Page Elliott

“Today, sow some symbolic seeds, even if you don’t have a garden, as a gesture to ritualise the new life you are creating within.  Ask for the blessing of Spirit and the nurturing of the Great Mother and know that in due time there will be an abundant harvest for yourself and those you love.  “In search of my mother’s garden I found my own” Alice Walker tells us.  Today, may this be your discovery as well as mine” ~ An extract from Simple Abundance, Sarah Ban Breathnach, 27 June

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Tarot Guiding You – 25 June 2013

Simple Abundance

For many years now, I’ve been a loyal and interested follower of Sarah Ban Breathnach, the author of Simple Abundance

“Simple Abundance is a book borne out of a deep personal need, written for women who wish to live by their own lights.  Like millions of women, Sarah Ban Breathnach found herself searching for a way to reconcile her spiritual and creative longings with often overwhelming commitments to family, friends and work.  Examining her goal, she found that while there was so much that she wanted, she didn’t know what she truly needed.  As so often happens in life, fulfilment was found not at the end of some make-believe rainbow, but along the journey to self-discovery”

For the month of June, Sarah talks mainly about having a garden that means something to you and delivers a wholeness that not only produces what you would most like it to, i.e., fruit and vegetables or flowers and a quiet relaxing space, but something that becomes meaningful to you and a natural extension of you and your home.  Easy and obviously said you may think; but this is not always the case.  Do you have the most relaxing and comfortable furniture that is available to your purse and size of garden?  Is it the sanctuary that you can lose yourself in when you need to?

It is these questions, along with others, that make us think and perhaps eventually start to view things differently to how we have before:

June 25 – Getting Started

“Plant it with the green side up” ~ Mary Ann and Frederick McGourty

Sarah asks us: “How does your garden grow? Does it grow at all?  If you’re having a hard time realising the garden that lives inside your heart, there’s a way, if there’s a desire.  Perhaps you don’t have a backyard because you live in a city apartment.  That doesn’t have to stop you.  Some of the prettiest gardens I’ve ever seen have been on front stoops.  If you have a balcony or a patio, you can create breathtaking container gardens that bloom with roses, annuals, herbs, tomatoes and vegetables.

If you don’t have a balcony or a patio, interior window boxes can provide you with blooming miniature gardens of seasonal plants all year long.  One of the most charming examples comes to us from the 1930’s: place white lattice in front of an interior window box.  Train the flowers up the lattice to form a delightful and unusual summer curtain” ~ taken from Simple Abundance, 25 June

Investing in some books that speak to you from the shelf, the ones that catch your eye, is a great way to start and gradually open up your eyes to see new things and for your creative side to produce new things.  It’s worth visiting a garden centre every month of the year, and looking to see what’s in colour and season at each time. Buy just one or two plants each time you visit, and in no time at all you will have planted and created a beautiful garden that has interest, colour and flower all year round

And my own favourite rule: ignore the advice that each plant should be planted 12 inches or so away from it’s neighbour!  Some of the most beautiful gardens are the ones that not only look the most established, but the most natural.  By planting individual plants together or side by side, you’re not only encouraging them to compete for the best results, but you’re creating a blanket of garden that is easily tended and has the least amount of encouragement for weeds; namely because there is little room for them to survive in!   Cherida

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