I can’t believe it’s day 18.
I remember the night I started this blog – I was so full of self-doubt. How would I write every day? How would I find stuff to write about? How would come up with a variety of foods and recipes? The doubts went on and on, but I won’t. Suffice to say that some days the inspiration flowed and other days writing was like pulling teeth; some days I loved eating raw and other days I questioned why I ever started, but looking back I can see each day contributed in it’s way to the experience.
So here I am with three days to go. It feels like a good time to revisit my intentions and reflect a little, if you’ll humour me.
Many years ago I read a wonderful book called The Wishing Year by Noelle Oxenhandler http://www.noelleoxenhandler.com/index.html. The author described growing up within a family who used worrying (about everything) as a method of warding off unexpected troubles. I mean, if you’ve already worried about something, turned it over and over and looked at the possibilities from every angle, it can’t catch you unawares, right? She wrote about being brought up to not be TOO positive, lest it encourage the powers that be to send some troubles to take you down a peg or two. Positive thinking, gratitude, and affirmations? Well that stuff was just ASKING for trouble. Not to mention a bit woo-woo.
I read her book and related so completely to this mindset, which I too had grown up with. Noelle begins the book in a somewhat devastated space having lost her partner and spiritual community (she’s a practising buddhist) in one fell swoop. She decides (on New Year’s Day, of course) to dedicate a year of her life to brazenly wishing without reservation. She sets three intentions: a house, a man, and her soul (which she feels was crushed after losing her spiritual community). She goes about investigating all kinds of ways of Putting It Out There. It’s fascinating to read. And do her wishes come true? Well, I need a spoiler alert here, but yes.
I have read many books about the power of positive thinking, of visualising intentions and desires, but this book affected me the most. I think because she did it all with a degree of skepticism and self-doubt, with a feeling that she was perhaps being naive and, well, wishful, but what the hell, she’d try it anyway. And then it worked.
Since reading Noelle’s book, it has stayed with me. I’m somewhat the dilettante when it comes to most things, I’ll dabble in just about everything, but commit to very little long term. But I also like to think I take the bits I like from philosophy, religion, new age spirituality, and different healing modalities and come up with what works for me. And what works for me is believing in the power of good. (AKA the power of love, but that sounds too much like a poxy love song, so I’ll stick with good). There’s plenty of evidence to the existence of it’s opposite; greed, fear, and evil. But the power of good is to me like the weeds that grow in the cracks of the pavement, you just can’t repress it no matter how hard you try, it will express itself.
I am loathe to sound all Pollyanna about this, but I feel I have experimented in both sides of the good/evil spectrum. I spent my late teens and early twenties in total nihilism and I managed to attract life experiences that confirmed my negative belief system. These days I figure if I live in the belief that I can manifest good things in my life, as opposed to life just randomly happening (negatively) to me, I empower myself in a way that seems to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have learned that worrying is fear-based thinking and is more likely to attract negativity than ward it off.
All this is just a really self-indulgent and long-winded (who me?) way of saying that I started this blog in a spirit of Putting It Out There. I wasn’t even sure what I was putting out where to be honest, but if it meant being more healthy and being more creative, I thought, how could I go wrong? (Apart from all my aforementioned doubts which I just swatted away, ignored, and carried on regardless of).
And well you may ask what I have reaped from this harvest of Putting It Out There? Well, most importantly for me, I written and published my words every day. No matter how much that inner critic told me it was absolute waffle, I knew I had to deliver. That’s huge for a closet writer like me. (Not that I actually write in a closet anymore, not since I was a teenager anyway). I don’t show people my writing. And now I have, warts and all. Daily blogging leaves little time for basic proofreading, never mind any kind of serious editing.
Then of course there is the raw food thing. The blog made me more committed, I knew people were following me and trying the foods I was posting about. This spurred me on through the hardest days when I was tired and the dog was sick and life made me sad. Almost every day I received some kind of feedback that people were inspired in some small way to make changes, positive changes, in their life because they read my blog. People bought food processors and blenders and went shopping with my blog on their iPhone as a shopping list. People brought me books and lent me equipment and dropped boxes of fruit and vegetables at my door.
What was all that if not the manifestation of good?
It’s not at all excessive to say I have been overwhelmed by the reaction. And here I was 18 days ago thinking I’d just make a total fool of myself!
Buy hey, it’s not over yet. And I plan to keep blogging, so don’t think you’ll be rid of me in three days. I have a whole new adventure coming up. The UK Raw Tour 2013.
I guess it’s way past time for a recipe.
Having had no car for a week I was running low on supplies. So I decided I would eat what I had. I was really hankering for some beetroot (my body craves beetroot now, isn’t that something?) and I had the sauces from my raw pizza left over, so last night’s dinner was an experimental hotch-potch, but a delicious one.
Zucchini spaghetti with beetroot bolognese
1 zucchini (made into noodles with spirooli or grated)
Title photo source:
http://wellmichele.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/345660dandelions-blowing-in-the-wind-affiches.jpg
onehundredpercentraw 
