It’s winter for real, now. The light may be returning after Solstice, but for most of us the air is cold and it’s more comfortable indoors. Or maybe under the covers.

Sunday marked the twelfth day of the Twelve Holy Days. I’m not particularly Christian, I find value in many symbols from many different spiritual traditions. And this year, the Twelve Holy Days felt very significant to me.

Solstice, December 21st, marks the moment in the northern hemisphere when the day is shortest, the longest night. The tightest contraction, if you will. There’s a span of time where things stop. The days aren’t immediately longer. There’s a resting. When early Christians chose the 25th of December as the birth day of the Christ, they did so for a reason. This is when we begin to experience movement again, just the inkling of expansion. The Sun appears again.

Those first 12 days of expansion are a time when we can experience the coming energy of the year. What will come into our lives? What intentions will we set? The 12 Holy Days are a time when God or the Universe or the Holy Spirit or your Higher Power, whatever words resonate for you, can be heard in the quiet. Some traditions say the 12th day, January 6th, is when the Magi visited the baby Jesus. When the Sun became known to the conscious mind.

Whether you know it as such or not, this is where your authentic New Year’s Intentions come from – your Highest Self speaking to you about your next steps in life.
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Okay, it’s not free of berries or seeds. Or coconut. But, it will work for a LOT of us.

The berries were in the freezer from summer, a welcome burst of sunshine flavor. I used the same crust I made for the Pumpkin Pie I posted the recipe for on Thanksgiving. I’ve taken out the baking soda that was in it originally – I don’t think it adds any real leavening, and I think it interacts with the berries in this recipe to make a little fizz on your tongue. It’s not unpleasant, but my son commented, “Mom, it tastes fermented!”

Only my son would identify a fizzy flavor as fermented. Heh.
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Self care is a dance. I wish it were straightforward, a prescription the doctor could write and we could fill at the pharmacy, take once a day, and be done with. That would be simple, wouldn’t it?

But, especially when you have chronic health challenges, it’s often a dance whose steps seem to be changing every day. Sometimes because the way an ailment expresses itself goes through a transition, sometimes because you start a new treatment or supplement regimen, sometimes because the season has changed, or perhaps your hormones are changing due to aging. You may decide to remove a food from your diet to see if it makes a difference in your digestion or energy level and an entirely different set of symptoms you weren’t even consciously aware of disappears.

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I’ve been feeling done lately. Just done. I don’t want to cook, I don’t even really want to eat much.

Some of it’s the heat (which is thankfully starting to abate). It’s definitely the humidity, which is continuing even as the temperature is dropping. It’s the busyness of getting in the last events of the summer while preparing for the school year’s beginning. Then there’s trying to keep up with a hyper fertile, crazy huge pear tree that came with the house we bought three years ago. I’m starting to wonder if maybe we could just sell the tree.

But, I just can’t let the pears rot, so I’ve been chopping, cooking, drying, leathering, juicing and reducing batch after batch of windfall pears. And I don’t even eat the things. Can you tell I’m a little over it?

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Haven’t written much in the past year. Not much at all.

Sometimes things have to die so that they can come back to life in a true way.

Starting from a young age I wanted to be an actress. I loved being on stage. My first real acting classes, I realized later, were my first formal spiritual training. The reality that I could take on different states of mind and emotions at will showed me I was not the personality that I knew as “me”. If that wasn’t “me”, what was?

I explored more as I became an adult. I became fascinated with creativity of many types – writing and film making, primarily. I was cooking for a living, until I could become “an artist”.

In my early thirties I shared the idea that I was waiting to “become an artist” with a group of teachers on a meditation retreat. One of the teachers said, “But, Durga, you ARE an artist. There’s no becoming. It doesn’t matter if you’re not making money at it. Being an artist is a way of being in the world. It’s a view.”
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I wrote this article a few years back, and posted it on the old blog. It’s timely! So many of us are traveling sometime over the summer. Here it is, edited and updated. Enjoy.

Some helpful hints on traveling with diets outside the cultural norm. A little planning can go a LONG way.

Here are some things that work for my family when we’re on the go.
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