Food Happies

I know I’m sporadic about postings these days.  Trying to do too many things and something languishes.  Which is here and the podcast.  However, something is also fermenting in the background.  That’s right, my thoughts don’t sprout and grow, they putrefy or ferment.  Muwhahahaha.

I go through quiet stages when I’m evolving.  I like to think that’s what we’re all doing, or trying to do.  Not just exist, not just live, but evolve.  Become more.  Expand to the very edges of our skins and revel in our uniqueness and in love.

Universal love, baby.  It is where it’s at.  In all its nasty, decaying, looming, laughing, sparkling, dancing glory.  Because love has never been just Valentine’s love.  It’s always been cleaning dirty diaper love, on babies and on parents because that’s love.  Or should be love, but that’s an entirely different digression I choose not to make today.

Love has always been messy and painful, uplifting and clarifying.  It’s always been the worst torture and the only reason for existence.

Evolve.

To become One with Universe.  To be the Embodiment of Love.  To just get something done freakingly awesomely well.

Because that is all it takes.  Embrace the things that make you feel grand, completed, living a real and connected life in this crazy, fucked up world.  Do what you love and do it again and again and again and watch yourself getting better at that!  Revel in that.  It’s never been about where you get to, though that’s good too, it’s always been about how you get there.  In your time.  On the path that you need to take.  That leads you in a direction that refines you into Love.

So tonight’s meal is brought to you by sliding into the Land of Capable After All, past the City of And You Thought Living Like This Was Too Much Work and settling into the County of Being Really Connected To What I Do Makes Me Feel Great and Damn It’s Tasty Too.  It is a lot of work.  You have to love the results, desire, craze, long for the results.  Otherwise you’re only bothering because someone else told you it was good for you.  And even here Fake It Till You Make it works.  And so does accidentally trying new things until you find yourself in the position you never really considered yourself either capable of or simply not one of those people who did those kind of things.  I feel a bit like I’ve arrived and it’s good.

What I did is really no big deal for most people.  I made soup from scratch, shredded chicken and sprouted rice with quinoa soup (using homemade chicken stock) and desert is lemon blackberry jam swirled cheesecake on cocoa cookie crust.  Yes, I’d made the cookies previously too.

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And that’s what makes this so amazing.  I was a lousy or lazy or just non-existent cook growing up.  My tendencies combined with other cooking siblings and a family that at the time was not overly insistent about food in any extravagant way, made for one insipid avoidant cook.  Food was not inspiring to me growing up.  I had favourites but I felt no call to cook.

This means that I’d never made chicken stock before.  Hel, I roasted my first chicken less than 6 months ago.  And yes, the chicken stock was made from another chicken I roasted (because it really was pretty damn easy and sooooooooo tasty and I could buy a chicken that was free range, organic, etc).  And now I’ve made chicken and rice soup from it.  Even the rice wasn’t just rice!  It’s TruRoots sprouted rice and quinoia blend.  As to how have I never made even chicken noodle soup before?  Well, not big on soups and didn’t grow up with it all the time (sometimes we had homemade, many times we had Lipton) and well, I just didn’t see it on my list of easy capabilities or something.  I don’t know, k, it’s just weird.

This was, however, not my first cheesecake (I’m braver with baking than cooking, but not my all that much).  It was, however, the first one where my cookies became the crust.  They were really good cookies too, with extra cocoa, semi-sweet chocolate chips and white chocolate chips, that were super soft and crumbly.  So I embraced the crumbly.  And the jam?  Well, that I didn’t make, but my friends did.  Lemon Blackberry jam and don’t doubt for a second that they picked every one of those blackberries.

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This was a full wholesome meal, made frame scratch.  With scratches in the scratch!  And I think it’s the scratches in the scratches that are making me feel pretty damn proud.  The realness of it all makes me feel connected and healthy.  And the gift from friends?  That just makes me feel loved.

Love to you All, too.

~The Abysmal Witch

p.s. I only cut my finger once and I’m so much faster at bandaging these days.  😀

p.p.s.  While starting to clean up from dinner I then have this absolutely happy moment and yes, I feel like I’m bragging, I’m just so damn happy about it!  And yeah, kinda proud too.

FB moment:  “That moment when you look at your wall of mead and think “shit, I’m going to have to start drinking some of this, I’m out of space and there’s almost no more storage in the closet”. And then you stop. Realize what you’ve just said to yourself. “Holy Fuck, I have a FULL WALL of MEAD!” That’s a good moment.

(To be fair, though, only 4 rows of shelves are mead, the other 3 are my magical library so it’s not as much mead as it may sound like. Oh, still a lot, just not *that* a lot. Which actually makes it harder, not many bottles left of any individual mead, so I can’t just drink them *casually*. Snort. I’m a hoarder, and in this instance I’m almost okay with it.)”

Wanna see?  Well, for now you get a Samhaine picture of it with poor lighting, an unsteady hand (it was really low light! lol)  and angle to really showcase it because the only other pic of it I have handy would be incriminating for friends of mine.  In appearance, only, mind.  😉  Someday I will have a better picture, but that!  That is NOT THIS DAY!  Happy trials!

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Discombobulation…and closet re-orgs.

Do you ever feel that way?  Just discombobulated in everything.  Things not fitting together in quite the right way.

Oh, the majority of my pieces of things have been really great.  No, seriously, aside from when I want to kill him, having my partner move in with me has been a fabulous thing (if you had asked me last year if I would be living with someone the following year I would have snorted my kahlua and chocolate milk all over you); my job has changed which has brought challenges both interesting and painful; my coven has changed which has been unadulterated goodness.  Despite my partner being a foodie, I’ve kept my body in the shape that makes me happy.  There are two new (1 as of yesterday!) slithery bodies in the house (we now have a ball python, a desert king and a corn snake).  I’ve started dancing again in small doses.  I can feel the magic around me, swirling, pulling, daring.

So many different pieces, trying to get them to align in the best way possible, to find my way in my severely changing world order has been interesting.  And a challenge.  And while that is mostly under control, it has left me with a sense of not really knowing where from here.

I mean, sure, you’d think that I’d just settle in, that I would savour getting everything resolved and organized (we got the last of the boxes unpacked yesterday).

Apparently not quite.

Oh, I’m savouring.  Hell yeah!  But how will this all work going forward?  The most wonderful option would be if it would all just work out with no effort and no planning.

Ha!

That’s what the universe says to that.  Or I say to the universe.  Depends on the day.

Today I feel somewhat combobulated.  It makes a nice change but I don’t trust it.  It could easily just slip away into the dis and I get left once more floating in a sea of not-necessarily-articulated options and pulls.  Pulls being our interests, desires, wants and needs.

Hmmm, I wonder if this is what a closet or drawer feels like when you pull or dump everything out of it, sort through it all and then start working on getting it all back in, minus a few pieces, perhaps with space for a few (planned?) new items, and everything hopefully making more sense as you put it back into a probably re-configured space.  I think I’m at the contemplating parts going back in and where the best places are for things and what will get left out and what kind of space will be left over for the other important things that I’ve wanted to put into it but never had the room for.

It’s an interesting time.  I really want my “closet” re-org finished.  I’d like to move on to other things, thank you very much, Universe.  Just saying.

Deep and wild blessings to one, to all, and to you in particular.

~Saturn

~The Abysmal Witch

The Meaning of Life

Apparently I had me a smarty sounding moment back in 2004.  My boss was having a bad day and I guess he’d been muttering about what was the meaning of life, anyway.  Apparently I decided to answer that in a note I left him at the end of the day.  While sorting out some papers today I found that explanation and can’t resist sharing it:

The question “what is the meaning of life” is inherently misleading.  It asks for a quantifiable and descriptive quality to be applied to something that is by its very nature existing in realms that exist beyond the scope covered by our limited concepts of verbal communication.  It is a question of the same ilk as the mind/body problem or the nature of deity – these are questions that we want to answer the way we have been taught is proper through our western education, with formulae and charts and explanations that can be graded.

Yet life extends into dimensions we have barely started to be aware of and possibly beyond that thereby confounding any such attempt.  We have not yet been able to fully define life and so long as that definition eludes us, so will a definition of its meaning.

However, should we attempt to contemplate the mystery of life, we start to see spiralling and cycling possibilities of interconnectedness that hint at an inherent goodness (i.e. positiveness) that exists within the act of living.  At a most basic level, it can be said that there is meant to be life because life exists, on a par with saying that there is a universe because the universe exists.

But it is likely that the scope of the question being posed is of a far more narrow view:  what is the meaning of life for me living s a human being in this world at this time?  A ‘why do I exist’ style of question rather than why do any of us exist.  This type of question is often interpreted as the seeking of purpose, a questing on the part of our human spirit that needs to feel useful in order to be satisfied in its current situation.  Typically this type of seeker is not satisfied by the type of answer that is a fall out from the previous category of question:  that s/he is alive because the universe is a living, changing organism composed of a multitude of living creatures, being and experiencing, of which s/he is a part, that her/his life is simply (though necessarily) another strand in the wonderfully complex weaving of what is.

So what answer would satisfy?

Would only a quantifiable answer, one that can be described and labelled and fulfilled be acceptable?

Because when a purpose can be fulfilled, there is a meaning in that, something that only that person can do.  To say the purpose is to live, continue life through the creation of offspring and die, often seems hollow, lacking in a fullness of answer that was hoped for.  Truly, any interchangeable answer seems to be lacking for this seeker and that leads to the possible conclusion that s/he is in actuality looking for validation for their own existence, a comforting pat on the shoulder confirming that they are special, unique and that without their existence in the here and now the universe would not exist (either as a statement full stop, in the way it is ‘meant’ to exist, or simply not as it does now).

And for those seekers, my answer is that they are entitled to that pat on the shoulder for if they were not living their unique life as they are now in this moment and in this place, this universe (even though in which of the three aspects I cannot say) would not exist.  🙂