The Secret Garden

The price of happiness?

A friend of mine has recently gone on sabbatical. She’s taken five months off to reflect on her life and to decide whether high-powered career woman, single at 40 is really the way she wants to go. She’s done this by booking five months off work, flying to the other side of the globe and… enrolling in ski instructor school. At a cost of *cough* thousand pounds, she has managed to book up every waking moment from the day she lands to the day she leaves and she doesn’t even intend to teach skiing when she graduates! It’s the best bit of procrastination I have ever seen. 

She wrote to me today to tell me that she is enjoying the “chilled” feeling she is experiencing out there, and hopes to bring it back home. But bring it back home to what exactly? To the same lifestyle she had before she left? Same job, different company? The “chilled” feeling she is experiencing now, a few days into the trip, is just denial. All she has done is put off making any decisions about her life for another five months. It’s like a 0% finance deal on a credit card. The debts are still there at the end of the promotion.

This may sound harsh, and I am only writing this secure in the knowledge that she will never, ever read this blog (since she is so self-absorbed that she still gets my partner’s name wrong and doesn’t seem to care). But I think it illustrates an important point.

You see, I have always envied her her job. She earns a lot of money, and she lives a very comfortable lifestyle. At the age of 30 she has bought a house in central London and goes skiing for almost the whole of January and February each year. I used to think that is what I wanted. That with the extra cash in my pocket I would be happy. I even thought that it was a huge self-indulgence for her to be complaining about her lifestyle, and to be considering taking a career break for no other reason than inertia.

But is it really?

While it is abundantly clear that I disagree with how she is going about “finding herself”, I think it is important to be looking for oneself in the first place. So many people seem to be aware that there is something missing from their lives – that there is a depth that is lacking – but so few people seem to be willing to look for it.

I would like to think that I am willing to look, but where on earth do I start? Does the answer lie in voluntary simplicity? Can giving up on the idea of money, of possessions, of purchasing power really make one happy?

There is an idea in NLP that money is energy, and you only ever have as much as you can deal with. If that is the case, then having less money means you need less energy expenditure to maintain it; you have excess energy to devote to creativity, to spirituality, to actually living.

But is that actually true? Less money means fewer holidays abroad, limiting entertainment opportunities (from missed Hen Parties at one end of the spectrum to living without a TV at the other), limiting the amount of stuff you can have (including clothes, haircuts, time and labour-saving devices and crafting bits). Less money means using more brain power in creatively dealing with life, and doing things the hard way.

So is that really desirable? I think what is becoming clear as I write is that it is not simplicity for simplicty’s sake that appeals. Rather, it is a process of working out exactly what you need to live, adding a safety margin, and then having only that. On the face of it that’s quite a frightening concept – of limiting life to the bare minimum. But what if you were really honest about what you need to live a happy life? Then the picture changes.

If you were truly honest with yourself about what you needed to be happy, then rather than limiting yourself to a life of austerity, you choose to provide yourself with only what you need. It becomes an ecological as well as a philosophical concept. It means taking only what you need to be happy (whatever that may reasonably be) and nothing more.

I quite like that concept. The hard part is deciding what I really need to be happy, and what I only think I need. There is going to be some honesty and personal soul-searching involved in that.

Hmmm… is that the washing machine for a life laundry I can hear, filling up?

Clawing back some dignity

So I have spent the evening clawing back some dignity after the lemonade debacle. I added citric acid in the end, which gave the stuff some bite, but it hasn't dissolved properly and so one bottle is going to be far more tangy than the other! Oh well. It was a lesson. It was my choice to continue with the post, even though it showed me in a bad light, because I think it is important not to take yourself too seriously. I'm no domestic goddess. I'm a human being in training. As someone very dear to me once said: "in this life we all die beginners".

It has been a trying evening (no, not the lemonade! I mean personal stuff, like being hounded out of every room by a manic flatmate) so I got the spinning wheel out. The wheel (should it have a name?) has been languishing in disuse for the last nine months, and I really don't know why. As soon as I got my foot on the treadle and some fleece in my hands, I relaxed. It's as if I were transported somewhere else, and my focus on the task was complete.

I've started spinning some lovely fleece. It's 17.9 micron Merino, which is as fine as Cashmere, and a monkey to get it to stay on the bobbin. It needs a lot of twist, and if I don't have my next rolag lined up and ready to go, I end up pulling off the entire length I have just spun as it comes apart in my hands as I thread it back through the orifice to attach the next bit. It's highly absorbing. I'm ending up with about a third of the fleece on the bobbin, a third as waste (claggy, twiggy, matted mess) and a third as noil. It's tempting to combine this last third of fluff with the carded fleece and roll it all up into a rolag, but when I do it comes back to bite me on the bum. The rolag disintegrates and I have to unreel the whole of the previous section piece by piece trying to get a strong join.

I hope this means I am learning a lot!

I'm learning that carding fleece isn't just about combing out the tangles, it is about separating the vegetable matter and the nubbly matted bits from the loose strands, and then further separating the short strands from the longer ones. I'm learning that a scrap of suede wrapped round my thigh saves wrecking yet another pair of jeans with the metal teeth of the carders!

I'm learning that the darker patches of fleece are the softest and the shortest staple, that the oatmeal bits are the nubbliest, and the white patches are the coarsest and the longest staple and spin beautifully into long, smooth singles. All of this is fun, and absorbing (it is worth saying that again and again) but what I am also learning - which is the most invaluable lesson to me - is how to relax. How to clear my mind, and to make the crap that is flying my way not stick.

It is going to take me a month of Sundays to fill the bobbin with this stuff, and with the tiny dog-comb carders I am using it takes an age to prepare enough fibre to spin for more than five minutes at a time, but I am oddly attracted to the task. I don't even have a project in mind for the yarn, but that doesn't matter. What matters to me right now is the process. Just like the lemonade, when life hands you a tangled, knotted mass of a problem the best thing to do is to grasp a handful and, little by little, straighten it out into something of value.

When life hands you lemons...

Make lemonade.

A little trite I know, but literal in my case. Here's the recipe:

Lemonade
2 1/2 small lemons
350g cane sugar
1/2 pint boiling water
12g tartaric acid

Oh bugger. I used Cream of Tartar. There goes my nice little blog post about how when life is difficult you can overcome the difficulty by transcending it (accepting it will be so). Arse. Don't I look a fool! Ha ha - I wonder what it will taste like now...?

Ho hum.

There's a life lesson in that too I guess!

Sharing the love

Just a quickie while I'm still in a good mood...

Lovely nature pics from a freebie site. Wish I could say I took them but I didn't. This is pure, gratuitous nature porn. Mmmmmmmm... yummy!

If a thing is worth doing...

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well, so the saying goes.

I have been reading my favourite book Sloe Gin and Beeswax again. I'm feeling more inspired. The problem I identified in my ranty post from last week is the sense of a lack of time. There is no pleasure to be had from rushing through a job with your mind on other things; rather the joy of making things for yourself comes from mindfulness.

Mindfulness can come in many guises, I am learning. There is focus on the task at hand, which clears the mind and feeds the soul. There is awareness of the materials you are using also; gathered or homegrown ingredients have their own special energy. Also, and this is what I think I was missing out on, is the anticipation of sharing that energy and satisfaction with others.

I have a fear that what I make is not good enough to share. What if my cordial goes mouldy? What if my biscuits go stale? What if the fabric I used wasn't special enough? These things stop me from freely sharing the things I make, and give me a stick to beat myself with when I feel selfish for not sharing.

So here's a recipe for shortbread. When I've got through this batch and I'm happy that they're not going to go rotten overnight and kill people, maybe I'll make you a batch...

Shortbread
Makes 10-12 fingers

125g/4oz butter
55g/2oz caster sugar
180g/6oz plain flour

Cream together the butter and sugar until they turn pale. Stir in the flour to make a very soft dough. Knead as little as possible - just gather the bits together and squish once into a mass. Roll out to 1cm thick and cut into fingers. Prick with a fork and sprinkle with a little extra caster sugar. Place on a baking sheet and put in the fridge for 20 mins.

Once chilled and firm, put the fingers in the oven at 190C for about 15 mins until pale golden (you might want to turn the tray once just to get a more even colour and prevent one edge burning). Cool on a wire rack.

Thank you BBC Food for this one.

Midsummer Madness

I can hardly believe that next Saturday is the Summer Solstice. Where has the year gone? I don't mean that in an absent-minded way; I really want to know. It seems as if five and a half months have passed in the blink of an eye.

I am enjoying my life on the whole, but sometimes in the last few weeks I have felt that I am running downhill with the wind behind me and my legs can barely keep up.

My body certainly can't. I'm just not fit enough to work hard and play hard anymore. I'm exhausted. I feel bone-weary. My creative juices have almost dried up, and I feel like the only way to get them flowing again is to... actually, I don't know how to get them flowing again. A change of job? A change of living environment? All of the above requires effort and energy.

What I am managing to do at the moment is to brew. Not the full-blown, creative pottering, but micro-brewing. Snatching a session here or there, but not really getting much more out of it than a sense of continuity.

The Midsummer Night's Dream soap in the picture sums this up. It's pretty, but it lacks substance. It ticks all the right boxes - herbal, seasonal, original (to an extent) - but its research credentials are lacking. What have I learned from making this soap? How has it deepened my connection to this sabbat? The answer: it hasn't.

The reason I started making sabbat soaps was to distill something of the season into each bar. What Bex and I make are soaps with intent - it should be possible to actually feel something of my intent in the soap. It has been suggested to me (by someone important to me we shall call "R"), that since I alternate sabbats with Bex, I should spend a full three months researching each new recipe.

What a beautiful luxury that would be.

But I feel at the moment that I don't have the creative space. That's not to say that I want to become a recluse and to spend my days alone thinking only of soap - far from it. What I want is the headspace to come up with new ideas, and the free time to research and experiment. In the past this space was part of my day job. Lately however, my working day is crammed full of work (how dare they!) and my evenings and weekends are crammed full of feeling and experiencing rather than thinking or pondering.

Do I want anything to change? Well maybe not right now. I wouldn't want to swap the experiences for creative solitude. I like the experiences and the company too much. I think what I want to change is the working day. I feel like I am working myself into the ground in a job I no longer love and it is sapping my physical strength and mental reserves. I want a job that is intellectually challenging (and not just because I am thinking of ways to reinvent the wheel), one that gets me off my chair and away from my desk, and one that values space for thought.

So where do I find one of those?

***

And my micro-brewing (recipe slave that I have become!)

(l to r) Sloe gin, orange syrup, mint liquid soap (quite exciting to make but a boring creative choice for colour and scent) and elderflower cordial.

Hand-stitched bags. No purpose in mind, but it was at least fun to vary the designs (drawstring vs self-tie).

(below) Tansy dyed silks. Again exciting to make but without a purpose in mind it becomes mechanical.

Sloe right down

*breathe in*.....*breathe out*

Ahhhhhhh.

After my Janet and John-style post on the merits of woodcarving, I feel the need to stop, take a breath, and rediscover why I blog. Having spent a glorious (pain-free) morning pottering around the house I have the headspace to write. My wrists are beginning to twinge already, but we'll see how far I can get.

I have noticed that my ability to write improves immeasurably when I have the time to sit comfortably and contemplate my navel for a while before hitting the keyboard. Now, I feel that after a stressful week that seemed never to end, it is important to stop and find my balance before I head into battle once more.

So far, May has been a busy month. It started with a back-to-basics camping trip that saw me rediscovering my inner survivalist and was followed by work, pain, and a heavy dose of the life laundry. Today, I have decided to put all of that out of my mind and get on with making time for those things that are healing for my soul.

With Beltane just behind us, there is a feeling of coming abundance - of warm days and time to be spent with friends - and in a way I spent today preparing for a party even if there is nobody coming round to enjoy it. I have made molasses gingerbread with fresh ginger, there are heart-shaped fruit juice lollies in the freezer, and I have just decanted the sloe gin from its preserving jar into its permanent home.

It's a delicious feeling, and I want to take the time to savour it, and to record it here. I get such pleasure from my Nigella mixing bowls (seconds but who cares) and the wide-necked le Parfait jars with their orange rubber rings. Is this materialism, or is this enjoying simplicity?

My plan for this afternoon is to use the spent sloes to make sloejacks, and maybe save the stones to make a heat pad with a remnant of fabric from my stash (something else I love to hoard). Three useful things from one simple fruit, and a connection to a passing season is medicine for my soul.

Ace of Cups

I have a new toy - it is a crook knife. These curved knives are used for scooping out hollows in wooden items like spoons, bowls and cups. I'm currently trying my hand at making a birch cup. These are traditionally called Kuksa and are used by the Sami people of Scandinavia. They're also normally made from birch burl, which has less tendency to crack than a birch log but I'm using what I've got. Townies like me don't often get the chance to wield an axe and chop up our own kitchenware, so I shouldn't be choosy!

I'd like to write something about the joys of working with your hands to make something useful, or the meditative quality of gradually scraping away the layers of wood to reveal a pleasing bowl shape, but my hands hurt from too much copying and pasting in my day job and my brain is fatigued from staring at a computer screen... so there's your answer right there. Time to get out more and enjoy life - my desk job is killing me!

For the birds

Aww... how cool is this?

Spinners and knitters in the US are reminding each other this week that it is nesting time and they need to put out their fibre scraps for the birds. There's something lovely in the idea of providing a little wire feeder filled with silk and wool next to the boring old red peanuts.

I think I might try it with some of my scraps and then look for multicoloured nests in my neighbourhood next month!

Oh, and Mars is now in Cancer until May, so it seems an appropriate time all round to be nesting. Sweet.

Yarn porn!

Oh yes. Unadulterated woolly goodness.

The nostepinde was an unfinished wooden one that I stained and oiled as part of the general productivity binge. All of the rovings came from here. When I grow up I really want to be as good as Heike. She's incredible.