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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I wrote this post a few weeks ago, and am just now getting around to posting it. Things have changed rapidly here, and hospice is with us now, caring for my mom is what is looking like her last days. I’ll wrote more soon. Blessings.

I’m chronically self-sufficient. A bit of a control freak.

I talk a good talk, I know the drill—it takes a village. We can’t do it alone. I know it’s okay to ask for help, in fact, it’s important to! I practice it in small ways with my husband. (Sometimes.)

I’m getting better at saying no when I’m asked to do something that I know will push me over the edge into abject Stressville.

But, I haven’t really learned how to ask for help. It’s even hard for me to recognize when help is offered. I tend to give a reflexive, “No, thanks, I’m fine! I can handle it.”

In my last post I wrote about my mother moving here. She finally has a diagnosis of gastritis, duodenitis and esophageal constrictions (which were stretched successfully). That’s basically a lot of inflammation in her upper digestive tract. So, eating and drinking is not much fun for her. The good news is it’s not cancer. Although what’s going on at the other end of her digestion is still an unknown, she opted not to let anyone take a look. Which is her right.
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