Quotes

lemon slice

 nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

-OSCAR WILDE

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Lemon Slice Recipe

ingredients:150g unsalted butter softened,1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1/3 cup caster sugar,1 1/3 cups plain flour,

lemon topping ingredients:4 free range eggs,1 tsp finely grated lemon rind,1/3 cup plain flour,1 1/3 cups caster sugar,2/3 cup lemon juice

method:Preheat oven to 180°C/160°C fan-forced. Grease a slice pan and line with baking paper.

Place softened butter into a kitchen mixer with the sugar and vanilla and beat on low-speed for 2 minutes then add flour and continue mixing until a soft dough forms.  Transfer to pan and press evenly into the base. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until golden. Remove from oven. Set aside to cool.

Make topping Mix eggs, lemon rind, flour and sugar together on low-speed until smooth. Add lemon juice and continue mixing until combined. Pour over base. Bake for 15 minutes or until just set. Cool completely in pan. Dust with icing sugar. Slice into bite size pieces, serve, enjoy with tea.

 

I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die.

By Juan Ramón Jiménez

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She is searching now, although not outside of her self any longer. She has gone within, deep within to the core where she knows all of the answers she so desires to know about herself are. She asks now,in quiet whispers,and out loud for the help and the direction she needs,she understands that she is not alone, that the one she speaks to resides within her, this is something she has always known. She is unafraid now, and with each breath she feels her own strength growing and she is aware of the strength that has no name, or maybe does but feels has her back as she moves forward and away from the familiarities of the way she has been moving through this life and begins working towards a more truthful idea of herself. She is beginning to feel the tips of her own worthiness. She knows the further she travels, the greater the love will be, for herself, for you, for this life. She believes all is as it should be, and understands that it is in the hardest moments that life offers, that are the greatest blessings, it’s what keeps us moving, keep us asking the questions, striving for something else maybe, something more, real, closer to our own truth. She is paying attention now, to herself, to what she is feeling in each and every moment and she finds herself holding back from reacting in ways she always has, and pausing for just a moment, just enough time to create a space, a gap within herself where she can decide what choice to make in that particular moment. She is moving through life purposely and intentionally now, and understands that this is the way it should have always have been.

…she was able to ware proudly her passion for life, instead of her heart on her sleeve. She knew to hold herself back because she valued herself. she knew her price-priceless. She knew that the kind of love she gave was only going to go to somebody worthy of it. When your young your self-worth comes from being loved by other people; but by the time you are a woman with a past, you know your value, and you love yourself. That’s where your self-worth comes from. No man can ever give you your self-worth, but you can let plenty rob you of it. On the surface it would seem she is self-centered, which she is. But self-centered in the best possible way; being centered in the truth of who she is. Her authentic self.  A woman who knows this deserves nothing less than to be loved truly madly deeply. Unconditionally. Devotedly. Exclusively. A woman who will not settle for anything less. Because that is the only way she knows how to love.

-Sarah Ban Breathnach

 

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I have been confused and troubled by love for my life. I know i  have wanted to believe that love is something only another can give to you, like a precious gift  perfectly wrapped, a gift that would always remain the same, unable to be moved by life and harsh circumstances.  I always wanted to believe that it is possible for another to give you the things that you were missing from your own beliefs, that they may just be able to fill the gaps, build you up, see your potential, even if you really couldn’t see or believe these things for yourself.  I wanted to believe it to be this way, because i thought it was easier. There is no need for me to do anything. No need for me to do the hard work of discovering it for myself, within myself, by myself.  It’s easier to accept and embrace the precious gift from another. What i have learnt, is that this rarely works. The very things we are looking for outside of ourselves, for love to provide us with, can never be found out there. It will never really exist there, unless of course, it already exists within you. It’s always nice in the beginning, your love see’s you the way you want to see yourself, you fall in love with the idea they have of you. It’s always a nice idea but it can never be a lasting idea because you don’t for a second believe it to be true for yourself. And that is the only place where love can begin. What i know now is, love doesn’t ask that we change or bend ourselves, it’s doesn’t require us to hide or manipulate truths about who we really are, or ask that we deny any part of ourselves that don’t seem to fit. Love requires nothing, it just is. It doesn’t need to be built up, explained or begged for, it doesn’t even need recognition or admiration, love just simply exists and i understand now, that i must be all that i am seeking, i must journey within and discover that great love for myself, by myself, only then will i truly be able to share it with another.

 

IMG_1137she says, ‘I just keep trying to walk through my karma with as much grace as possible. She believes that before we live our earthly lives, we choose our lessons. For her, our karma is really our decision once we’re here, whether we will or will not honour our souls journey to authenticity.’

-Sarah Ban Breathnach

Pealing back the layers is hard. Its confronting and messy. There comes a time when it becomes necessary, if what we are really wanting is to be more complete within ourselves. It’ s a time when no matter how much you want to blame the other, for all the heartaches that have transpired, you understand that blame really serves no purpose, it keeps you living within the pain, it keeps all that you were wanting to escape from, present. It stops you from healing. And healing is what you need. It takes immense courage to see and understand that all the injustices, betrayals of trust, acts of unworthy behaviour towards you, were really acts of grace. What if the other is always only reinforcing what we honestly believe to be true about ourselves and you realise that the only person that really brought you to this place is yourself? If you truly love and believe in yourself would you honesty accept anything lesser from another for yourself? The truth is, we are only ever receiving what we believe we deserve and it is not until we realise that we deserve better that we are able to make the necessary changes that will bring about better for ourselves. We may even, one day be thankful.

 

the literature of women’s lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.. They resist captivity. They get up and go. They seek better worlds.

-Phyllis Rose

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I have been quiet here lately, away, for quite sometime now, I know. There has really been nothing that has been ready to say. No truth that needed to be revealed, not until now, anyway. I’m in the in-between. Moving slowly and allowing myself to build in strength. I have let go of all that my story entailed and will leave the pages blank for a while.  There are deep hard questions that I need to ask myself now. Ponderings that only arise when all the children are asleep, when the house is still and there’s nowhere to hide, from myself. What was it I believed about myself that would allow another to come in and ever so slowly and carefully dismantle me, my worth? What belief is it I must hold that would say, you are undeserving beside the ones you love, the ones you care for and give your life to? Where did the deep value and love for myself go? I didn’t notice it leave. For so long I didn’t fight for myself. I allowed whatever expectations I had about what I deserved, to slowly fall to such a place that I began to believe and hold on to what was happening as if it was my truth, a devastating portrayal of myself. I would catch myself sending silent whispers off into the world, wondering if this was to continue to be my story. While travelling in the car with my children and my husband, my own reflection caught me in the car window and in that very inconvenient moment I was hit hard with a deafening sadness, where I had to fight with great strength to hold back the tears that were begging to fall but in such  way that I knew if I am to begin now I may never stop crying. I may never be able to escape the depths of this grief,  grief for the loss of myself. This is the moment it became so very clear to me, if I stay in this, I simply would not survive.

 

walking towards truth

 

“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.”
— Simone de Beauvoir

 

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I want to tell my children, don’t mind going against the grain. Don’t be afraid of wanting to make choices  that don’t seem logical, or sensible, or what you believe is expected. I want to tell them, only ever make your decisions from your own truth.  From the place that sits deep within, the place that tells you well ahead that something isn’t right, that something isn’t good for you. The same place can lead you towards living in a way that speaks only your highest truth. I want to tell them, it wont always fit in with everyone, it wont always be what other people want for you or from you, nevertheless follow yourself anyway.  I want to tell them, don’t fall into a sleep walk in your lives, don’t just accept that going through the motions is enough, it rarely is.  Be your own enough, strive for all it is you are wanting and here is the secret, you must believe it. You must hold the deepest faith that all you are wanting will come about if you stay true to yourself. I want to tell them, now that I am older, I know better. I want to save them from some of the heart aches even though I know, really this isn’t possible and more than likely it’s necessary anyway. I want to tell them all of this, in a moment when they can really understand. I want to tell them that it matters, but really I understand that it doesn’t in the end.

she is..

She is the masters finishing touch. Eve is the crown of the creation, Not an after thought. She is Gods final touch, his pièce de résistance. She fills a place in this world nothing and no one else can fill. Look out across the earth and say to yourself.. The whole vast world is incomplete without me.

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.. this is what it is like to be with a woman at rest, a woman comfortable in her feminine beauty. She is enjoyable to be with. She is lovely in her presence. Your heart stops holding its breath. You relax and believe once again that all will be well.

 

-John and Stasi Eldredge, Captivating

 

hitting the ground

 Even though she might.. hit bottom via famine, capture, injured instinct, destructive choices and all of the rest, remember at the bottom is where the living roots of psyche are. It is there that a womans wild underpinnings are. At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sence, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground.

-Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

 

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Instinct is a difficult one to define, for its configurations are invisible and though we sence they have been part of human nature since the begining of time; no one knows quite where they might be housed neurologically or precicly how they act upon us.

 

 

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Without warning, sometimes life just calls for us to hit the ground. To do nothing except be with whatever it is that has called us there. Most of the time for women this fall is unexpected and abruptly interferes with the routines we have created and the taking care of the children.  We are, all at once forced to pay attention to ourselves and see what it is that has sent us suddenly plummeting.  I have always thought myself to be in-touch with this inner knowing, wisdom of my own truth, I know now, that this too can get entangled and in a way lost within our all too busy and full lives. If we allow ourselves to wander too far astray from this unique and mysterious magic within ourselves by being too compliant, too good, too accommodating, too obliging, trying to bend and shape ourselves into something that clearly doesn’t fit, we are in danger of losing touch with our deepest intuition. “Instead of living freely, she begins to live falsely.’  Our intuitive nature  gives us the ability to know our own truth, to see the unseen, to feel the truth of something before it is presented to us. ‘…to strip away her intuitive nature, her natural curiosity..  (which) leads her to discover “what lies underneath” and beyond the obvious,’ is devastating to the soul of the woman. Women have a way of losing themselves so to speak, in the raising of the children, in the taking care of others, the house, their husbands, their jobs, always serving themselves last. She drinks the cold cup of tea, allows all she loves and sometimes doesn’t to walk before her, that’s just what we do, we save ourselves for later.  We do this because we love and care deeply. We see the ones around us so clearly that we make way, allow them to step first in their lives. If women do this without balance, without coming from a place of their soul truth, they are in danger of finding themselves lost within a world that isn’t entirely theirs, one where the windows of life that have a way of opening as we move forward on our paths, suddenly are closed. By not being completely true with ourselves we are out of alignment with this Life force. The Life force that resides within us. As women it is vital that every spoon we feed into the mouths of our babies, we first spoon into ourselves. At times throughout our lives it becomes necessary to dispose of the old clothes, the ones ‘which have become slackened from the wearing. The clothes are like us, worn and worn until our ideas and values are slackened by the passing of time.’ in the doing for others and not paying attention to our own inner desires closely enough. This is when we hit the ground, this is where the renewal, the revivifying, takes place.. in the re-discovering of what we really hold to be true, what we really hold sacred.

For many women, this task requires that they clear a time each day for contemplation, for a space to live in that is clearly their own with paper, pens, paints,tools, conversations, time, freedoms that are for this work only. Each woman has her own preferences, her own way.

 

the woman within

I had two watershed experiences when I was in my early twenties, experiences that went against everything I had been taught about my body up to then. While at a women’s weeklong gathering and at night at the fire near the hot springs, I saw a naked woman of about thirty-five; her breasts were emptied out by childbearing her belly strained from birthing children. I was very young and I remember feeling sorry for the assaults on her fair and thin skin.

Some one was playing.. and she began to dance, her hair, her breasts, her skin, her limbs all moving in different directions. How beautiful she was, how vital. Her grace was heartbreaking. … that night I saw it. I saw what I had been taught to ignore, the power of a womans body when it is animated from the inside.

-Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

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begin here, with your daughters and sons, mothers fight the ever-growing war against this illusion of sculpting our bodies as though we were not born perfectly into this world. Teach your daughters to love themselves from the inside out. Teach your sons that we are perfect in all our flaws,  that really the flaws are an illusion in its self.  That our bodies are going to grow and change as we do, that never throughout our lives will we stay the same nor should we feel we have to. It is in our child baring years that we feel this most. It is in these years that loving ourselves and the body we wear needs our greatest admiration, for how perfectly they are able to stretch and define themselves around new life, sometimes leaving us with deep blue and purple scars that remain as reminders of how we once carried another within ourselves. Let us rid ourselves of this belief that we are meant to conceptually fit  some unattainable idea of ourselves, before and after we carry our children. Let us change the minds of our teenage daughters and ease them  of the heavy burdens they believe their bodies to be. Let us teach our sons to look deeper, that the real beauty of a woman lies deep within her layers, that they will never find what they are looking for if they are only ever to look at her from the outside.

young body. old soul.

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Her feet bare more of that of ninety years,

They are more weathered than any explanation can offer

They are feet that have walked this earth many many times,

I know this to be true.

She is remembering rather than learning,

Her purpose is strong like a ferocious wind,

She is going to move through this life at tremendous speed, I’m not sure we will be able to keep up, that is alright.

She will touch people, move them, to pay attention like she has done since the day she was born, this is her gift.

She was born with old feet,  and blessed with an old soul.

 

women who run with the wolves

Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, the-river- beneath-the-river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting…or any activity which requires intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between- worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude… much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them.’

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 I’ll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the Wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door; if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much that you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.

The Self must have freedom to move, to speak, to be angry and to create. This self is durable, resilient, and possesses high intuition. It is a self which is knowledgable in the spiritual dealings of death and birth.

…there is in many women a ‘hungry’ one inside. But rather than hungry to be a certain size, shape, or height, rather than hungry to fit the stereotype; women are hungry for basic regard from the culture surrounding them. The ‘hungry’ one inside is longing to be treated respectfully, to be accepted and in the very least, to be met without stereotyping.

-Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

There is a fire that burns within us, no woman is excluded from this.  At times it lies dormant, waiting for long drawn out periods, with great patience, for right timing to ignite it to its full force. Women know this to be true. Some are closer to it than others. For some it burns as a quiet tinder,others a ravishing burn or a ferocious flame.  The closer we come to ourselves, often after long treks down broken roads and undesired outcomes, we become tired of the search and finally surrender to all that we are in our mysterious ways, we decide to return home. With surrender, comes tremendous acceptance of ourselves despite what the world is saying.  We let go of everything and in doing so find everything. We discover that we are essentially all that we ever needed, and it isn’t necessary to better, or move or change ourselves, all that is ever really necessary is to unfold from the inside out. And as Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, in Women Who Run With the Wolves,’Entering the terrain of wisdom occurs at any age. We sometimes step, sometimes stumble, and other times we are pulled into the territory of the Crone when the need for a deeper, larger understanding of our most meaningful path can no longer be denied—when the gifts hidden in our challenges must be brought forth.’