Return
Last published notes and recipes, parenting, regenerating creativity.
Last published notes —
Quiet time to yourself, whether that be early in the morning or during movement or before bed with a book, these good habits, without corruption of telephone or video or news, is the only reprieve we are to have as adults that bring us back to a childlike state. Before input. Before infiltration. Before awareness of opinions. Where creation is born in us. When we were protected by our own imagination, with the confidence to believe in our own ideas.
There are two options for raising children: you can either carve out the mental capacity to let go of all momentary control while those very attributes are shaping someone else’s childhood, or look up later to wish you had.
Even our shared yearning for a simpler, quieter time, is noisy. We label everything now. From style to activity to hobby. What was once visually simulating and left for self exploration found between glossy pages of a magazine… is spelled out for us, and pops up wherever we turn. The most heartbreaking thing about the digital world and access to elsewhere at all hours, is that our children will never experience the feeling of living without it.
Latest recipes -
Chop desired amount of strawberries into bite size pieces and combine in a bowl with 2 tablesp coconut sugar and juice from 1/2 small lemon. Mix and set in fridge.
In a bowl, whisk together 3 eggs, 1/2 c coconut sugar, two pinches kosher salt, and 1/2 c milk. Add 1 teasp almond extract and 1/2 teasp vanilla bean paste. Add 2 cups almond flour packed and 1 teasp baking soda and combine. Add 1/2 c slivered almonds. Pour batter into a parchment lined 9 inch cake pan and cover entirely with more slivered almonds. Sprinkle with coconut sugar evenly and bake in a 350 degree oven for 25-30 minutes.
Remove and let cool before cutting. To plate, top with your strawberries and powdered sugar.
Wash and halve or quarter 1 bunch radishes. Toss in olive oil, salt, pepper, and bake in a 425 degree oven for 20 minutes until tender or browned slightly. In a bowl, combine 1 can nice tuna via Box Hill, 1 tablesp plain yogurt, 1 tablesp coarse mustard, pinch salt, freshly cracked pepper. Top tuna with roasted radishes and lots of freshly torn basil, another pinch of salt, and pepper.
Toss 2 c raw pecans in 1/4 c maple syrup, transfer to a parchment lined baking pan. Bake in a 325 degree oven for 8-10 minutes until fragrant and browned. Remove and sprinkle / toss in salt and let cool. Heat 2 oz dark or semi-sweet chocolate in a small saucepan until melted (I love this one). Combine nuts in melted chocolate and dust with 2 tablesp cacao powder. Toss. Store in a glass mason jar in the fridge.
Lately —
“I suck”, Maddox said from the backseat on our way to St. Louis playing a video game, I assume, losing at a level in Donkey Kong. I said to him… “Hey… do you know what happens when you get older? You become all the things you tell yourself, even the whispers.”
“I should try something different,” I repeated. You can say that.
This quote —
"What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
The forest is forever because it
dies
and dies
and
so lives."
- Ursula K Le Guin
For the moms —
For the moms knee deep in their instruments for childrearing, corralled by diaper changing, nap times, and eating you cannot conveniently feed from the snack bar, awaiting the day they can read a book by the pool — in one short breath of a decade I have arrived here — nobody needs a floaty, and circled by friends, nobody needs me either. I look up every minute or so and count, watch, listen. The seconds feel indulgent as if I am not allowed to have them… but they are here, and those going by quickly, too. After this we will drive to football camp for the hour and fifteen minute long activity where I have the option of watching my boys, or returning to housework odds and ends: a laundry switch, animal check, or a few errands, which isn’t a ton of time but without a baby on your hip or miniature shadow, it is equally productive as it is abandoned. Some of the best years of my life are already gone: comically so, they were the most frantic, completely uncentered around me.
We are always wondering when the break will come, and when it does, we ache from watching in the rear view mirror: what “was”. In the end, it’s not as fun.
On our death beds, we will not entertain for one second the happiness we formerly imagined would come after the marathon, or one we had prior to because one never arrives and the other dies. Did you take the time to mourn?
It is only those beautiful, sweaty, smiley, teary miles, that felt so good we woke up the next day to run again.
Return days —
Every month just after my cycle there are a few days of nothing. I call them to myself, “return” days. No inspiration, no hope, no spark, no new thoughts. Nothing to pull from. In these days I dive deeper into tending to the children… simultaneously this is the sequence for them too through challenging bouts of emotion — they peck, play, and sleep harder, longer, eating like wild hogs — manners like wolves or chickens.
I used to let this crumble me and three plus years ago, with any contribution of even a lick of alcohol before ditching the poison, this doubtful serpent coiled itself so tight I gasped for air with no understanding of relief. Unable to separate ourselves from patterns that do not define our true potential, the wallowing is wasteful. There is an art to our allowances, this goes for acceptance of the unsettlement of passions too.
On the morning I wake with direction and vision again, everything is in its right placement. The dog is losing his thick winter coat before the hot months arrive, an early morning summer storm illuminates the back field as if on a movie set in perfect spotlight — the sky dances with pink and fire and the ground gets its much needed drink — nature is running its course. I watch the horses rotate their toilet, preferring an opposite corner of the pen, which is remarkable and happens nearly overnight. I let some of the piles decompose and scatter it, but the rest I scoop daily with a manure fork tossing it over my shoulder and into the woods. Just like that, they regenerate growth in dignity.
Your words are a balm to my soul.