Winter Health and Motivation

Akasha and I are not fond of winter
(Image by Modern Scribe Photography)

Oh, yes, January, I remember you well.

This is the time of year where I am too cold to think, to move, to do anything good for myself.

I won't drink water, no, water is too cold. Water makes me shiver, and warmed water is boring.  Coffee or tea fills that gap instead, something warm and with flavor.  Or booze. Alas, too much coffee, booze, and not enough water leads to upset kidneys and urinary tract infections and jitteriness and chapped lips.

Chapped lips! Yes, breaking, cracking, owie lips.  I've misplaced my lip balm from Spirit Horse Herbals, and must find something else, and soon.  The past few mornings have me waking with the taste of blood from my dried lips...either it's dry lips, or I'm a day-walking, food-eating vampire with a heartbeat. I'm not ruling that out.

Sore muscles...it's just so hard to convince myself to do yoga and stretch and move in a chilly house, when all I want to do is bundle up in too many layers, much less pull myself out of bed.

I'm such a grumpy winter pixie, y'all.  Pshew!

I think I need to suck it up and get on with things...so tell me.  What do you do to motivate yourself in your dark times and cold nights? 

In a holding pattern...

If you need me, we'll be in a sunbeam.

I've sat down at this blog many times over the past week, intending to write, but no words are forthcoming.  It must be winter, as I am in a holding pattern...

I have cabaret performances and life happening all around me, the holiday rush and the assorted festivities have left me a bit weary and needing restoration.

Fear not, lovies, I shall return again soon to my screen life of Facebook, Twitter, and blogging... but for now, I'm taking a bit of a vacation.

<3 and light, and see you soon!

Amber, Head Pixie

Getting in gear

Things here in the mountains of Carolina are white and serene. The blowing, quiet snow is giving way to the sun, and the wind is in turn changing the frigid rivulets into grandiose icicles. The moon is waxing from a tiny crescent and everyone seems to secretly enjoy their snowdays while complaining about the weather out of the other side of their mouth. I, for one, appreciate a day built for drinking coffee and wearing sweatpants and shuffling from computer to kitchen and back.

Aloe and Kalanchoe waiting for spring

Sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to settle and Be Quiet.  I've been fighting my annual case of winter boo-hoos by keeping myself busy with a ton of projects, and it's working in one way, but it is also straining my focus and making it hard to relax.

My body is calling attention to itself...my skin is asking for Vitamin A, my eyes and dry skin ask me to drink more water and up my healthy oils, and most of all, my muscles are begging for me to stretch and move more!  But gosh, is it hard when it's cold. All I wanna do is curl up with a book and tea and burrow into the covers.

How do you keep yourself motivated through winter? What are you working on?

has jars. making honey. feeling earth rich and cold. 

waxing moon. reading paths. rocking on.

snowing here. keeping warm.

making things. dreaming.

loving you here.

and now.

I've been mostly selling honey to folks locally, and listing the excess on Etsy when I have time.

I wish each and every one of you a safe and happy winter holiday time!

Making Suet

*shiver*

Akasha by Modern Scribe Photography

It's cold, outside. I can feel it leeching through both of the double-paned windows and clinging to my joints...pooling like a fog on the floor and setting my feet to aching.

Just a couple of days ago, I remember quite distinctly, there was a blissful, sweet, early spring warmth! That first taste of the days certain to come once that bugger February gets the hint that you don't want him around no more.

I drove with windows down, grinning like a fool in a thin hoodie jacket.  I danced! I dug up around my gardenia and added some coffee grounds to the soil and watered her...and then had to wrap her back up before this chill settled in again.

Nonetheless, those warm days got the whole household upturned, cleaning and rearranging, our windows opened to the sweet breeze blowing over the hills and up to our ridge. Full of joy and motivation, we decided to finally complete a project we'd planned back in fall - making suet to feed the birds! 

Just in case you aren't sure, suet is those big old waxy blocks you can buy at the store, stuffed full of seeds and colorful bits, for a couple dollars each. You put the suet block in a wire cage and hang it in your tree and watch the birds go to town...

Anyone can make suet! All you need is an overabundance of bacon grease and enthusiasm! And well, a few more ingredients.

How to make Bird Suet - as basic as it gets!

On low heat, melt together:
1 cup bacon grease (or any rendered fat)
1 cup peanut butter

Once melted, stir in just about 3 cups of unbleached cornmeal and a couple cups of birdseed. Then stir in whatever else you think those birdies might want to nibble on! Oats and wheat flour are great additions if your suet seems too runny.  Dried fruit like raisins or cranberries are healthy sugars for a bird's diet, and some folks even add a bit of honey to the mix at the start of spring to give the birds a sugar boost.

When it's all mixed together evenly, just line a baking pan with waxed paper and pour the suet mix in. Tamp it down evenly all through the pan and pop it in the refrigerator for a couple of hours to harden. 

Cut the suet into appropriate size and shape for your bird-feeding apparatus and voila! The extra suet stores well in a plastic freezer bag with bits of waxed paper in between each one to make life easier.

Birds of all breeds go NUTS over this when you hang it in a tree! Each block I offer them only lasts for one day when I put it up, so I've only been feeding them suet on the really cold days, like today.

*sigh*

The full moon is almost here and time marches on, bringing eventual spring.  I'll have to keep the birds well fed and make good friends so they won't eat my garden once it's warm!

The Birth of "Mother Love Honey"

The moon gave me a gift last night.

We'd gotten home last night just before dark, the snow blowing and wind howling. We just barely got up the hill that leads to the sharp turn onto our road. Trudging through the yard and up the slope winding up to the warm little house, the large snowflakes clung to our warmth. The sky was starting to turn blue; and so was the snow, and the air itself then became a cornflower blue around us as we made it inside the toasty house.

Later that night I found myself feeling anxious and jittery - it wasn't the now steady-falling snow that was bothering me, nor the movie I couldn't focus on, nor any one specific reason I could conjure. So I just made myself a cup of coffee and wandered aimlessly until I found myself in my quiet little bedroom.

We'd lit "just in case" candles earlier in the evening, having lost power during the last snow, and so my room was bathed in a warm and bronzey glow. The window curtain had been tied back to allow the recumbent cat's baleful glare to bounce off of the swirling white that she so despised. I pulled over a pillow to rest on next to her, gazed outside, and found myself lost in the light.

I couldn't see the moon for all the clouds, but I could feel the moon, full and bright.  The entire world was blue and white and silver, soft and rounded. Beams of glistening light reflected in every crystal prism drifting towards the ground.
 
I lay there for quite some time, staring and breathing silently and deeply. I drowsed, eyes open and blurred, waking to blink and yawn and disturb the warm cat curled at my stomach.

Shapes and spirals filled my mind's eye, sigils and runes written on the white of my vision. Symbols of ice and water and winter, symbols of mother and snow. I felt a steady heat despite the cold eeping through the glass - held in arms bigger than I could ever see and cradled in warmth, I fell asleep at the window.

I woke after an hour or so, dazed from the nap and from waking in the darkness. My thoughts  immediately began to run through the symbols I had drawn in my mind's eye, marking them for a future mosaiced in glass.  While looking for my sketchpad to document these designs, I discovered my favorite books of herblore and a notebook full of potential honey recipes and herbal remedies that I had misplaced months ago.

I poured a glass of wine and sat down to investigate. Wine always helps with divination, you know.  Bibliomancy. I started flipping through the books and my own written words. Page after page, scanning the words, I realized that three herbs were indeed grabbing my attention time and time again:  Motherwort, Lavender, and Oatstraw.

So I thought about what I knew of them, one by one:

Motherwort: sweet mother, loving intentions, good for nerves, calming palpitations, mild sedative, balances severe emotional swings due to stress, shock, and sorrow, directly invigorates uterine tissue, good for trauma recovery, good for pregnancy and post-partum depression

Lavender: good for relaxation, indigestion, nervous stress, antiseptic, good for insomnia, panic, helps with some migraines, helps control muscle spasms

Oatstraw:  tonic for the heart and circulation, highly nutritious, fights panic attacks, soothes nerves, esp. good for illness/trauma recovery, mild sedative


These three create a potent combination of nurturing herbs! This is what you give someone after they've been in shock and the emergency has passed. This is what you feed someone too steeped in grief to open the dams of repressed emotion and allow it to be purged. This is what an anxious stress-ball like me, a chronic fretter, needs to add to a cup of warm milk and water before bed on a cold and snowy night when it seems there is no Spring to be had! 

So armed with that knowledge, inspired with a sort of meandering moon gift, I made my first ever jar of Mother Love Honey today.

Mother Love Honey Photograph by Modern Scribe Photography, Sarah Thomas

Snow, part 2

Well, we just got power back after 26 hours of blissful yet tense silence...it is really amazing what the brain does without an electrical grid humming around it constantly!

The heat is on, the coffee is brewed and kept warm magically. This morning involved our propane camping stove, a kettle of boiling water, a french press pot, and my old-fashioned hand-grinder for our coffee beans.

We nuked our bag of microwave popcorn...talk about another magic spell! Our stove now works, our oven, too. We have hot water. All these little easy conveniences that we take for granted every day become such a big deal when they are first removed.

Overall, we got around 15 inches of snow, with drifts even higher. The sharp hill outside of our driveway is not something we've wanted to venture down yet, so we are eying our last two rolls of toilet paper and smoking down our cigarettes carefully. We didn't take the snow warnings seriously. Everyone told us when we moved down here that "Asheville just doesn't get any snow" or "we're in a valley, we're safe from blizzards!"

Liars! Heh...the weather just wanted to screw with the poor kids from the coast who've never dealt with snow in this quantity. Even the Arkansan in the house hasn't seen this much come down so fast.

Tomorrow we are going to try to get down to the store and such for some of the basics. Until then, I'm making more candles...just in case...

Snow!

It sure don't do this in the swamp....whoo! What a way to have a first winter in the mountains. There is already three or four inches, and there is a potential for there to be ten inches by this time tomorrow!

(It's now much whiter than when this picture was taken at 9am this morning)

The silent, spinning white blur of outdoors lured us out to play for a bit - I made a snow gnome with a big beard and a pointy hat, and Eric made a snow hottie, and I practiced throwing snowballs through the center of our tire swing.

Akasha doesn't care for the snow, though...can't blame her, even with her fur coat, she's too snooty to have snow between her toes!

Recipe Box: Big, Fluffy Pancakes

Do you know what the best part about winter is, in my humble opinion?

It's the license, the freedom, the unhinged ability to eat massive amounts of food in the quest to keep warm...especially this, my first mountain winter! This is COLD! The swamp does NOT get this cold, no sir, no ma'am...*shiver*

Anyhoo, here's my household's favorite breakfast these days:

Big Fluffy Pancakes
(serves 3-4, if you stretch it)

1 ½ cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
3 ½ tsp baking powder
1 tbsp white sugar
1 egg
1 ¼ cup milk
3 tbsp melted butter
splash of vanilla or other extract, if you wish

In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar.
Make a well in the center and pour in the milk, egg, and melted butter; mix until smooth.
Heat griddle over medium high, pour or scoop about ¼ cup batter for each pancake.
Brown and serve.

That's it...simple and SO FLUFFY and dense without being undercooked....ah, sweet wonderful hot bread covered in Cocoa Honey, how I love thee....

Cranky, Creaky and Cold

We've been infested with imps, lately...long-fingered, big nosed, kite-eared giggling troublemakers who press their faces to the cold glass and leave ugly prints! Sometimes they aren't so bad, and they sure do know how to party...but when you least expect it, BAM! The butter's spoiled, or the wine has turned to vinegar, or a joyous mood is deflated in milliseconds for no real reason. Cranky, Creaky, and Cold - triplets of minor annoyances and mediocre malevolence.

I blame winter. Winter drives all sorts of things indoors, out of the cold, out of the wet. This rocky ground radiates the chill like a slow, nauseous vibration up through your shoes and up your legbones.

So, too much coffee and copious amounts of hot tea have made it good thus far. I also made a new honey that seemed to help a bit - Ginger and Ashwaganda! I'll talk more about that one later, since I'm all out at the moment.

I'm pulling up a blanket and pouring some more warm coffee into my cup, and snuggling with my dear one. I hope Cranky, Creaky, and Cold keep themselves out of your home!