Coming Late in Life to Simple Delights

Rhubarb jam made this morning on the woodstove.

I post pictures of foods to FB and to here. Mainly because:

(a) I've lived long enough
(b) I never really had the chance to delight in food preparation for so very many years.

Meals were all need driven. A single mom, two kids, a full-blown career very much in a man's world, long hours. Free time was dedicated to making ends meet: sewing the clothes, making the curtains, knitting the sweaters, freezing the fall vegetables, preserving, rushing through food preparation and lunch making. Catching my breath in between. Juggling mostly. Not really having a good time with it all.

Now?

It's a never ending delight. One of the attractions in my choosing to live here was the distance from restaurants. I ate out a lot in Toronto. It was the lifestyle of many of my friends and I fell into it.

Now I delight in prepping food, creating my own recipe book, feeding friends and feeding myself. Making my own bread, freezing meals for those days. Making jams, preserves from home-grown fruits.

I freeze rhubarb among other fruits in the summer and then take it out in batches and make jam after soaking it overnight with sugar on the woodstove. Like this morning.

And I take an inordinate amount of pleasure in this never having to rush, enjoying the textures, the colours, the scent of something happening in my kitchen.

Bliss. We need more of it in our lives.

Endings and Beginnings

This is my very last tax season. There. I've said it. Right out loud. I just need to make the announcement to clients now and not be persuaded to NOT hang up the calculator. Like last year. I truly, truly am finished with it all. I found this nearly over season (still quite a few boxes and files kicking around my office) extraordinarily taxing. And do pardon the pun. I'm not smiling. It's not funny. To me at least.

A huge negative was in the past years I would add up your 250 medical receipts, for example, and have my mind somewhere in my next book. Or play. But not this year. It required every last bit of my mental energy to add those prednisone scripts and chiropractic chits. I tried meditation to graciously accept the work, I tried gratitude exercises for Gaia's munificence. NONE of it worked. I even burned karmic incense (direct from Tibet!!) to restore my chi to balance with the universe. The smoke fled out my door, leaving me gritting my teeth.

It is over, I am done.

I sent out a song to my lovely young actress to rehearse for my new play tonight.

This brings me joy, excitement and anticipation.

Something that's been hugely lacking in my life through this past trying month 2013.

And what, pray tell, is more important than bliss?

December Blues

I know. I'm a crashing bore. But as a lot of the world drowns in snow and cold weather and ice and other challenges, I can sit on my front deck and look out over this. A few minutes ago.

Blue you can taste. Blue you can smell. Blue you can hear.

Oh, and Nina Simone with her magical "Love me or Leave me" on the Ipod.....can that woman work those jazzy blues with her voice and her piano.....

Bluesy bliss.

Breaking into Bliss

What a lovely sentence I heard on the radio driving home tonight.

"Breaking into Bliss". Freeman Patterson was being interviewed at length on CBC and this is what he said when he described moments of acute observation and feeling joyful with one's world. He has survived many challenges and pain.

And it got me to thinking of when we reach that other side of pain, we earn those stripes of bliss. I truly believe we can only break into bliss if we know what deep dark pain is.

Tonight, I was at Easy Down Easy, a play by Gordon Pinsent when I broke into bliss myself.

Thinking: by gum, I'll be joining Gordon soon in this playwriting thing.