Sunshine

This post has been a work in progress for almost a week.... I almost didn't share it, but I think you're used to emotional ramblings from me by now!


Since opening my heart to a Pagan path my life has instantly become more beautiful. All the thoughts & senses that I have suppressed & hidden inside are now free. It's as though all my life I have contained my soul, my inner being, within a box & I've kept it controlled & done it harm. I have never before had the self confidence to open that box, but now that I have sunshine is pouring into my being! Things have changed in my life. I have a warmth inside me that brings me comfort & strength even at times of stress or sorrow. I understand with humility my place in this Universe & my duty to the Goddess / Mother Earth. I feel more connected than ever to the elements of Earth, Water, Air & Fire, to Nature, to the Moon & the tides & to the turning of the Seasons. I rejoice in all that has been revealed to me & I have a passion to learn & follow this path I have been shown to the full.


I am questioning lots about myself, or more correctly my life choices. After years of on / off vegetarianism I have now committed myself to a vegetarian diet, with the intention of also dropping dairy products & only eating my own free range eggs as an animal product. I am not against eating meat as such, but modern farming methods deeply trouble me & the cruelty many farm animals are subjected to upsets me immensely. I also know that I personally couldn't kill an animal for food, especially as I don't need to to live a healthy life.


In studying my life under a magnifying glass I can see how badly I have fallen into the traps of modern consumerism. I thought I was relatively eco-friendly as I recycle, compost, grow my own veg, monitor & reduce our energy usage, etc., etc. But I look at all the things I have bought from the supermarket recently & the potential harm the products are doing to Mother Nature & the planet scream out at me. When I was younger I was heavily into animal rights - so why now is my bathroom full of shampoos, soaps & chemicals that at best I'm not sure are tested an animals & at worst I know full well are tested in this way. It's not just toiletries & cleaning products either. I do buy Fairtrade when I see the label, organic sometimes if it's not too expensive, but shamefully a look in my food cupboard reveals items that have probably caused damage to the environment either through dirty air or road miles or in the chemicals & pesticides used to produce them. Clearly I have lost my way here! I'm not pretending for one minute that from this moment on I'm going to be a saint, but I'm certainly going to take a closer look at what I put into my shopping basket & try to make sure it's contents reflect more positively my desire to protect & respect the environment, Nature, the animals & plants that share this planet with us & humankind itself.

Other things have happened to me. A greater ability to reach out to others, to find kind words, to chide myself for unkind thoughts, a heightened psychic awareness, a new positivity in my life & a surge of creativity. I want to learn to crochet, get out my pencils & paints again, write, cook - anything to express the whirling, beautiful, passionate joy & exuberance in my heart.




Here's one of my first efforts - lovely homemade marmalade. Pop over to Herne Garden's inspiring blog for the recipe. I used demerera sugar for mine, & reserved all the pith & pips removed by hand juicing the oranges & tied it all up in muslin. I popped this parcel in with the rest of the ingredients during the soaking & simmering stages, then removed it before boiling the marmalade. Making the marmalade was a joyful experience! I gave thanks to the God & Goddess for the fruit & breathed the gorgeous citrus scents right deep down into my lungs. I just beamed when the finished pots sat in a row in my kitchen & I planned who to share them with. I am, of course, completely biased but it is the most delicious marmalade I have ever tasted!

There - I've shared it with you. All my joy, my hopes & my plans. Whatever you have planned or enjoyed I hope you have found sunshine during this cold month of January.

Age is a funny thing

Well yesterday I was 41! How did that happen? I don't feel 41 on the inside, but I am ageing on the outside. One day I decided that dying my hair & smothering myself in various creams really was quite silly. Why exactly was I trying to cheat Nature and for whose benefit? We females in particular have been indoctrinated in to believing we are somehow inferior if we dare to let Father Time give us 'fine lines' & grey roots! So out went the hair dye, out went the fancy creams & lotions! Now I'm strictly a gentle soap & water & simple moisturiser kinda girl - & has my life fallen apart because of it? Of course not, except to say that I feel more comfortable in my own skin now. And I'm polluting the Planet a little less with chemicals. Do the people I care about think any less of me? Is my marriage suddenly in peril? Do people avoid me in the street now? No of course not! My life continues just as happily as it always has. Funny that!

Youngest son & my mum also have birthdays this week so we all got together at Mum & Dad's last Sunday. Family time is always treasured time! After Mum's yummy dinner, followed by even yummier steamed syrup sponge (heaven!) we got onto the subject of my recent chutney & jam experiments & Dad went & found my gran's copy of Mrs Beeton's cook book. When I opened it a recipe, on yellowing paper & carefully hand written in black ink, fell out. It was for 'A Scripture Christmas Cake Taken from The Bible'. It had no ingredients or method instructions just a list of Bible references. So youngest son & I, both with woefully little Bible knowledge, had a go at unravelling the code. It was good fun so here it is if you have a Bible & fancy a little challenge:

4 1/2 cups .........1st Kings............IV chapter ......22nd verse

1/2 lb....................Judges................V chapter.........25th verse

2 cups....................Jeremiah............VI chapter.........20th verse

2 cups....................Nahum...............III chapter.........12th verse

2 cups..................1st Samuel...........XXX chapter......12th verse

2 cups....................Numbers..............XVII chapter......8th verse

2 teaspoonfuls......1st Samuel..........XIV chapter.......25th verse

To taste..................2nd Chronicles...IX. chapter........9th verse

6...............................Jeremiah.............XVII chapter........11th verse

1 1/2 cups.............Judges..................IV chapter..........19th verse

2 teaspoonfuls.......Amos......................IV chapter..........5th verse

1 pinch....................Leviticus..............II chapter.............13th verse

DIRECTIONS .............PROVERBS............XXIII CHAPTER......14TH VERSE

Bake for 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

(Hint - leaven = Baking Powder)

It all becomes clear - honest! Mum & Dad are going to spend Xmas with us this year, so I'm going to give the recipe a whirl.

Ibbity growing up

To update you on the story of our little rescued Mallard ducklings, Ibbity , the biggest & most developed of the four, had been taking small flights out of our little field but still seemed to be sticking around. However, three days have passed now with no sign of him(?), so it would appear that he has fully embraced his freedom & gone off to live wild just as Nature intended him to. We are lucky in that a good few acres of land across the lane & opposite our little field belongs to a Wildlife Trust & has a reservoir on it, so I am thinking he is possibly over there & not so far away. The Reserve is not open to the public so we cannot go down to see if we can spot him. However, lovely hubby has ordered some good binoculars so we can do a bit of 'twitching' & see if we can see any Mallards down on the water. So although I do miss him I feel happy in my heart that he has had a good start in life after a disastrous beginning. I hope angels will always fly with him & keep him safe.

Ibbity's new home?

His sisters(?) are flourishing & are starting to excercise their wings regularly, so I am making the most of whatever wonderful, precious time we may have left with them.

I have a practical side too!

My recent blogs seem to have been charged with emotion so I thought I'd show my practical side this time around by posting some pictures of my recent experiments in the kitchen. When I lived at home our kitchen was always filled with the most delicious smells at this time of year as Mum & Dad used to make all kinds of chutneys, jams, jellies & syrups. Dad passed on some of his recipes to me & last year I dabbled a bit by making a passable Green Tomato Chutney. Of course, Dad had to go one better & show the young pretender just how it's done by turning one of my home grown pumpkins into scrummy Pumpkin Chutney! This year my lovely neighbour has been sharing her homegrown veg with me, after mine was shredded by the various ducklings & recuperating hens that passed through my garden. However, several HUGE courgette/marrows later we were overflowing with her kind offerings & I was in need a way to make use of our courgette mountain! Luckily, via Twitter, I came across a lovely lady with a new blog Herne Gardens who posted a recipe for Courgette Chutney. Hurrah! It took an awful long time to cook (I finally potted it up at 2am after starting at 4pm!!) but it was worth the wait:

Bolstered by this success I rifled through Dad's recipes & found one for Blackberry Jam. On Sunday youngest son & I gathered blackberries from the lane & after some seriously sticky moments when I was trying to gauge the setting point without the aid of a jam thermometer, several pots of varying sizes were full to the brim with sweet blackberry goodness:

Now the results weren't perfect & I'm certainly no Domestic Goddess, but it really is worth having a go yourself if you haven't already. You'll find the Blackberry Jam recipe down the side of my blog under September's Favourite Recipe of the Month. If you do go hedgerow picking please do remember to leave plenty behind for the birds, mammals & insects that rely on Nature's bounty at this time of year.

Are you impressed with my jars of homemade booty? A jar of jam is a jar of jam - right? Thought so.....

I am absolutely thrilled to say that Ibbity, one of the rescued Mallard ducklings, is now flying very well but has chosen to stay with us for the time being. He flies across & around our little field & delighted me by skimming the top of my head when he landed the other day! It is truly magnificent to see him now in his full flight feathers & incredibly humbling that what is still in essence a wild creature is choosing to remain in our human company. I have a happy feeling that he(?) & his 3 sisters(?) will now stay with us for the Autumn / Winter, but may be fly off come Spring time. Watching them develop has bought the most incredible joy & I will forever treasure this experience.

Ooohhh! Now that feels better :-D

No love....Rough love....Mother love

No love....

Remarkably Jess fully recovered from the very nasty neck wound inflicted on her by some of her fellow ex battery hens. She just willed herself to get better I think because she so loved her new free life! So it was time to introduce her & mild mannered Lottie to the rest of the flock. As usual we used the trusted stealth technique of popping them into the hen house under cover of dark. This has never failed for me so I was expecting all to go well. However, when I let the hens out the following morning after just a couple of minutes ex-batt Norah flew at Jess. I left them to it for a moment, thinking it may be just a bit of harmless bickering, but the attack grew in ferocity & it was clear that Jess was in serious trouble. I had to quickly wade in & rescue her. Not a moment too soon either as Norah had partially reopened her neck wound! Poor Jess! I don't understand it! She is a very sweet hen & not the least bit aggressive herself. She's not the obvious bottom of the pecking order of the 6 ex-battery hens either, being larger & more feathered than some of the others. I hugged Jess to me & she quickly calmed & looked up at me with that oh so trusting look. I must admit to shedding a tear for my little girl.

So it was a case of more antiseptic spray & a return to the back garden for Jess. There were no such problems for Lottie so I have left her with the rest of the hens. I've been given a couple of ideas by fellow seasoned poultry keepers - one is to coat Jess in a special tar & the other to spray her with a foul smelling liquid called Ukadex to deter further pecking. So I'll let her heal again & persevere. If not it looks as though she is destined to be the garden hen that none of the others loved. Good job she's got big soft me!

Rough love....

My ducks are all confused! Apologies for this rather indelicate subject, but although each of the drakes has a mate of his own kind it would appear that none of them aside for Harold the Crested duck fancies his own mate. Donald the Khaki Campbell is besotted with Daisy the Aylesbury & regularly 'services' her without a single protest from her mate Seymour. Donald also has a thing for Little Wing the Indian Runner, however she is far too fast for him to catch!. Big Chief the Indian Runner drake keeps going after Jemima the Khaki Campbell. Donald rigorously defends Jemima though, so her honour is intact. The biggest problem in every sense is Seymour the Aylesbury drake. He is a handsome but cumbersome duck & he only has eyes for Puddles, our other Khaki Campbell. When I was in our little field at the weekend I noticed that Puddles was looking a bit sorry for herself & closer inspection revealed the damage that Seymour's advances had done to her.

The feathers on her back were raggedy & slightly blood stained. She also seemed to be limping. So I gently caught her & checked her over more thoroughly. Under her wings her back was red raw. Her legs both seemed OK though, definitely no serious damage. So it was down to the garden for Puddles! Our back garden seems to be becoming the sick ward for our rescued & injured birds. I sprayed Puddle's raw skin with antiseptic spray & put her in the penned off area with the little rescued Mallard ducklings. They are funny when faced with anything they are not sure about. The all run for cover under the old hutch. Then because they are ducks & ducks are naturally inquisitive, their curiosity gets the better of them so they choose a 'volunteer' among them & unceremoniously push this fellow out into the danger zone! If no horrors become this duckling the others will cautiously venture out.

After going through this funny routine they decided that Puddles was friend rather than foe & carried on with their dabbling & preening.

I'm very happy to report that Puddles is looking much better & that because she & the growing ducklings needed rather more space than the enclosure would allow, today they were given the freedom of the garden.

Injured Jess seemed happy to be joined by her ducky friends & they all enjoyed foraging in the wet grass together. It was such a heart warming sight.

Unless any readers of my blog can suggest a solution to this muddle, Hubby is going to pen a section of the field off for Daisy & Seymour with their own house & pond to prevent any further rough love!

Mother love....

I received my own dose of Mother love when we dropped Mum & Dad's dog back to them on Sunday. It's something I need on a regular basis! Today & tomorrow I have days off work so I can shower my lovely lads with big doses of my Motherly love. Even though they are teenagers now I can still get away with hugging them & loving them & squeezing them, so long as I don't do it in public & definitely not in front of their friends!! Unfortunately the rain was back so our plans for a picnic went out of the window. Instead we had a bake in. Youngest made Chocolate Mousse with Honeycomb Topping, middle son made Victoria Sponge, eldest son made Chocolate Chip Cookies & I made Fruit & Nut Flapjacks. The kitchen was filled with the most delicious smells!

If we get to go on our picnic tomorrow at least we'll have plenty of goodies to take with us. I was reading one of my favourite blogs A Life Full of Blessings & how amazed the author is at the way her love for her young daughters just keeps growing & thought how true that is. I can remember at each birthday & milestone wishing I could freeze that perfect moment in time because I could not possibly love them more. But there have been many precious moments since. More reasons to feel proud. More times when they have amazed me. More times when my heart has been so full it could burst.

Sometimes Mother loves pops up in unexpected places. This evening I was kind of dreading trying to round up the rescued Mallard ducklings for bed time now that they have the whole garden to hide in, but my sons & I found them with Puddles & as we quietly guided her into the garden shed to join Jess the injured hen they followed along behind her & popped into the shed with no problems at all. I recognised the look in Puddles bright eyes - it was Mother love towards those little ducklings! What a sweet duck she is.