Do What You Can.... You Only Have One Lifetime
One of the most satisfying things I have ever done is to grow trees from seeds. I remember years ago a friend said
"Oh no, there is no point planting a tree seed... they takes years to grow and you will not live long enough to see the results."
Luckily I don't let others put me off doing things that my gut tells me are a good thing to do.
This is a false pepper tree that I grew from a seed, just seven years ago and now it is a real tree sized tree. I grew a whole bunch of them in fact, so have a veritable woodland or the beginnings of.
This is how these beautiful trees look a few weeks after planting the seeds ( that are pink peppercorns.)
Even if they had not grown this quickly I would still plant the seeds. If only I live to see small trees I would be equally satisfied, knowing what a beautiful gift I am leaving to mother Earth and those who come behind me.
It is enough for me that someone will get to appreciate the shade of its boughs on a hot day, even if it is not me.
"I can't grow veggies - I don't have the space!"
Then we come on to vegetable gardening. You should not be put off by the fact you do not have a garden. In the past I have grown beautiful vegetables in a few old tomato crates, outside my front door in town with no garden whatsoever. You will be surprised how much you can grow in a few crates!
And if you have just a couple of metres of ground outside you can grow enough kale and salad greens and radishes ( or whatever else may take your fancy ) to last you for months!
You can also fill up a big garden quickly by just buying a couple of plants from your garden centre and then within a few months they will be gig enough to turn into many more plants through simple division. Succulents are particularly easy to do this with. You don't need "green fingers" ... just a a little patience and one plant that cost you just a couple of dollars , euros, pounds or pesos can soon produce many more plantlets that will, within a few months be the same size as the original one you bought.
This can even be turned into a ***VERY*** profitable business if you only grow with the intentions of re-selling.
Growing is ***SOOOOO*** satisfying!
Until you have dropped some seeds or cuttings into a pot of earth and got a little dirt down your fingernails and watched things grow, you will never be able to imagine the ***AMAZING*** feeling it gives you. Once you do know the feeling your life will be truly enhanced, better than before.
To eat the fruits of your labour is of course the biggest prize. The nutritional value of fresh picked vegetables or fruit is so much greater than the nutritional value of the relatively dead veg you buy from a shop that unless it is a fresh farm produce type shop where things were picked at dawn that day, your average veg in the shop has been picked days before, sometimes even weeks before! Veggies lose goodness by this delay in picking to getting to the table.
Your own fresh picked lettuce, carrot, cabbage or whatever has a flavour and goodness that will blow you away!
Even if you can't grow all your food, to just grow a percentage of it increases your health levels in multiple ways.
Gardening is taught and encouraged amongst people who suffer with depression, stress or are bi-polar.
The positive results are well documented and respected.... you can google many, many personal stories of people who have become passionate gardeners.
So do what you can, you can start small but ***START*** you must! You only have one lifetime so take small steps to improve it every day.... the rewards are ***REAL!***
Why you feel tired and sleep after eating.
So many people are feeling tired and sleepy after eating. Why is this and what can you do to enliven your system so sleepiness and fatigue will not be such an issue for you?
If you eat when you are exhausted from a long day at work your body has very little energy left to digest the food you put in it. In fact it will use up the very last bit of energy you have left in the digestion process, so it will send you to sleep quickly to compensate for this. If it is night time then you can just go to sleep for the night and think that is ok anyway but in the day time this would be less desirable after eating.
If you eat your food too quickly and don’t chew it sufficiently the digestive process is put under a great deal of stress. People suffer bad indigestion, stomach pains, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome to name a few and much could be avoided by slowing down your eating, chewing more and being conscious of your food while doing so. The first part of the digestive process happens in your mouth, as the food reacts with the saliva your mouth produces.
If you eat so quickly and chew too little the food reaches your stomach in the wrong chemical state and straight away you will start feeling discomfort as it struggles to digest.
One mistake people make is to snack on foods throughout the day every time a slight feeling of emptiness arises, mistaking it for hunger. Every time you put food into yourself your body must digest it and this takes an amount of energy in itself.
Rather than snacking, it is okay to allow your stomach to be empty for a few hours. Did you know that your brain and body work at their best when your stomach is empty? So it is okay for an hour or so to be empty. Your body can heal and detox itself during this time. If the body is constantly processing food it is stealing energy it needs for other body functions.
When you do eat, it is most important to approach your food with a great deal of gratitude. Consciousness is extremely relevant to your health and how the food you eat behaves inside of you, so HOW you eat is as important as what you eat.
The body is a very complex piece of machinery . If you are not physically exhausted from hours of work yet experience fatigue and sleepiness after eating, it suggests that your body is struggling with the food you have given it. It doesn’t matter how good you think it tastes, if your body struggles to process it, then it is not good food for your system.
I taught myself what to eat and what not to eat by noticing how my body responds to what I put into it. We are all different in this respect to some extent so you must see for yourself what works for you and what hinders you. The most important thing is to be conscious of what you put in there and how your body responds.
I stopped eating meat when I realised that after eating meat - and red meat particularly I would have a great heaviness in my stomach that caused discomfort and lethargy in me.
I also found that if I ate mostly raw foods that my energy levels were not impeded in any way. So I make sure that at least 60-70 % of my diet is raw fruit and vegetables.
The most easily digested food for the body is fruit and thus it gives you the most energy. Because it is fast to digest you will find your stomach feeling empty quite soon after eating even a big plate of fruits. But this EMPTY feeling is ok and your body functions fine with energy still.
If you get to the point that you are running out of energy then it is HUNGER not EMPTINESS your body is experiencing and you need to feed your machine again.
Don’t fill up the machine until HUNGER arises. You can learn how to deal with an EMPTY feeling if you consciously understand that this feeling should not be fed and is actually good for your system. You can always drink a glass of water if you find the EMPTINESS uncomfortable. Learn to focus on your body energy levels, not your stomach fullness levels.
Eat food when HUNGRY. Not when EMPTY
Be grateful for your food, and chew properly before swallowing.
Eat consciously and study how you feel after eating different types of food.
Eat fruit and vegetables for meals if you need to remain energetic afterwards.
A physically exhausted body will always sleep after a heavy meal as it takes the last of your depleted energy to digest the food.
*Eat well, Be well.*
So.... You think ghosts aren't real?
When I was just five years old....
I had a very scary experience which I regard as my first time seeing ghosts. I use the term loosely, you may prefer the word "spirit" or even "inter-dimensional being" but I think they all add up to the same thing.
At the time I was living with my family at the edge of a small rural hamlet ( a hamlet is smaller than a village consisting of just a handful of houses) in the scenic depths of middle England.
My mother was the cook at the vicarage there and we lived in a house on the small estate of the vicarage itself. We had only been there about a month when "stuff" started happening. I have learned later in life that there are definitely places that are prone to extraordinary spiritual activity. Looking back I would say this hamlet was for sure a place that fell under that heading.
My mother was the first of our family to experience the phenomena first hand. She would start work in the vicarage kitchen early very day to prepare breakfast for the vicar and his wife. So it started to happen that on arrival in the kitchen she would find all sorts of mess. Pots and pans scattered around, cupboard doors left open and even broken plates. She was obviously rather disturbed by this after having left everything spotlessly clean the night before, but for a few days thought it must be either done by the vicar or his wife late at night - even though that seemed unlikely there was no other conclusion she could draw at that point.
When it continued to happen she began to feel very unhappy that these people were causing her so much extra work to tidy up on arrival at work that a few weeks into these happenings she brought it to the attention of the vicar and his wife asking if they could please be a little more respectful and leave the kitchen tidy if they must use it late at night. Their response was absolutely jaw dropping! They had been nowhere near the kitchen on any of these evenings after my mother had left for the night.
So the next time it happened my mother called them into the kitchen to observe the mess. They were visibly shocked to say the least. They then concurred that a couple of times they had heard noises coming from the kitchen before they retired to bed but had always assumed it was my mum working later for some reason.
A special priest was called who was said to have had success in ridding places of such problems and he arrived a few days later to "exorcise the Poltergeist ". In layman's terms that means - get rid of the noisy spirit.
The definition of a Poltergeist in Wikipedia is , and I quote
"In ghostlore, a **poltergeist** (/ ˈ p oʊ l t ər ˌ ɡ **a**ɪ s t / or / ˈ p ɒ l t ər ˌ ɡ **a**ɪ s t /; German for "noisy **ghost**" or "noisy spirit") is a type of **ghost** or spirit that is responsible for physical disturbances, such as loud noises and objects being moved or destroyed."
My mother did not witness the exorcism but spoke with the priest on his arrival to give him an account of what she had witnessed. She saw that he had brought with him some tools for the ritual, namely a Bible, a bell and a candle.
Incredibly, whatever he did, seemed to work as after that exorcism my mother never found any disturbance in the kitchen again.
So that was my mum's experience while we lived in this small English hamlet and also interestingly my siblings and I was told nothing of this for years as my parents did not want to scare their children with such things.
Nonetheless, then came my own experience.........
Every Sunday my mother and my siblings would take a walk after Sunday lunch in the woods and fields surrounding the hamlet. Like I said we were living on the vicarage estate and outside the courtyard leading to the back of the vicarage and our living place was a narrow country road with a high wall along one side with woods beyond it. At one end of the road was an old abandoned Blacksmiths forge outside of which was a big metal water trough always full of rainwater.
As I ran back from our walk in the fields on one such Sunday, I was far ahead of my mother and younger sister and trying to catch up with my brothers who were already disappeared and playing in the woods beyond the high wall. I could hear their voices in the distance. As I turned the corner of this narrow country road at the opposite end to the Blacksmiths I saw two middle aged men sat against the water trough talking with one another. They were dressed in what I would now describe as mens farm labourers clothing, but from back in history, maybe a hundred years before. Baggy sleeved off white shirts with the sleeves rolled partially up and coarse cloth trousers with suspenders of a brown colour tucked into calf length working boots.
They looked up at me as I ran into view of them and I stopped and stared at them feeling instantly nervous. I was only five years old and had had prior scary episodes with middle aged men ( another story yet to be told ) so was instantly on my guard.
To my left was the gateway leading into the vicarage yard and my house but the door of my house was locked and there was no one around there. To my right was the high stone wall beyond which I could hear the distant sounds of my brothers playing.
One of the two men got up and started to slowly walk in my my direction. Let me add at this point this road was at an estimate about 60 metres long.
The safest yet not the easiest option to get away from this approaching man seemed to me to climb the wall and jump down into the woods where I could catch up with my brothers. I scrambled on the stones, scraping my bare knees in my desperation to climb up and over. Every few moments I looked over my shoulder seeing the man getting closer and closer. He seemed to have increased his walking speed a little too.
By this point I was virtually petrified on the verge of complete panic, I managed to get my hand up on the top of the wall and summoning all my strength pulled my body up flat to lay on top of the wall. I knew by this time the man must have been virtually below me.
I turned my head to the side expecting to see him right there... but he had totally disappeared from sight! As had the other man who had been sat with him on the water trough! I can say without any doubt whatsoever that in the time between my last view of him to the moment I turned to see him gone there was nowhere obvious that he could have disappeared to, nowhere! He disappeared into thin air, along with the other seated man at the trough.
I tumbled down the far side of the wall into the woods, now flooding in tears..... funny how sometimes tears will wait until after the traumatic happening to let go, once your body somewhat relaxes again.
It felt like for those few minutes, a parallel dimension had opened up to me and then closed again.
Experts say that children under the age of six are much more likely to have such supernatural experiences as this as their pineal gland (third eye) is still open and functional.
We only lived in that hamlet for a little over six months but is seemed like half a lifetime! I was happy to leave as was my mother!
So if ever asked "Do I believe in ghosts ?" My answer is always " I don't believe... I KNOW of ghosts.
Thanks to you ALL for making it this far. I appreciate every one of you!
NatureGirl23
Manx Cats Make Wonderful Fathers!
I have been fortunate to have recently come to know Manx Cats. I had sadly lost my previous beautiful pair of orange cats to the wilds and was in need of some more mousers and fluffy snugglers on the homestead.
A friend mentioned three Manx kittens that desperately needed a home as their human had died.
Before I continue let me just clarify for any who are unfamiliar with the Manx Breed they originated on The Isle Of Man and they have a naturally occurring mutation that causes their tails to be very short, more of a stump often than a tail. Their heads are round and their hind legs are slightly elongated. They come in lots of colours.
So to return to my story, my three kittens arrived , two cream coloured and one silver grey. One of the cream coloured males didn’t make it to adulthood, which left me with one cream coloured male - Snowy and the silver female, named SuSu.
Fast forward 12 months and SuSu gave birth to two cream coloured kittens. This is where the root of my story starts taking shape.
You often hear that male/father cats should be kept away from new kittens as they can be violent and even kill kittens sometimes. That they don’t appear to have paternal instincts and don’t generally help in the rearing of kittens.
As with many things in life though, you learn most from personal experience. On day one after the birthing Snowy stopped by the nest of mother and babies to see what had occurred. This was their first time making babies after all - they had been just kittens themselves only months earlier.
SuSu immediately hissed at him and looked ready to attack him if he didn’t quickly remove his nose from their space.
Over the next week Su-Su moved her nest to a corner at floor level so it was harder for any one to see the babies and no chance to interfere in any way. They were so tucked away I could barely get a photo of the dear new little kittens
.
Forward two weeks and the little ones start coming out to explore a little bit but Snowy seems to be hissing at them which is worrying. The smaller of the two kittens is much thinner and weaker and I fear it may not make it.
I pass by their shed a day later to find Snowy is trying to relocate the bigger of the kittens to another area - but just the big one, not the weaker one. It runs back to the nest two or three times and he picks it up and carries it away again. SuSu is outside somewhere having an exercise break I guess so sees none of this.
Within eight hours of watching this I return to find that the weaker kitten has sadly died.
I totally felt at that point that Snowy had been trying to separate the healthy from the weaker for a reason. I feel he knew the other was dying.
Since that day I have found Snowy spending lots of time with the kitten while SuSu gets out and about again. She is a capable hunter and brings home baby rabbits from time to time.
I see Snowy lick-washing the kitten quite often and hanging out playing with him just like a mother cat does. The kitten certainly has a wonderful bond with his father and I feel very touched that Snowy is such a loving parent and interested to take care of the kitten a lot of the time while the mother is absent hunting and then when she returns the three of them snuggle all together. It is beautiful. So no matter what google might say, and to be fair, maybe other breeds of cats are not so paternal in their ways, but the fact is that Manx cats make wonderful fathers!
@NatureGirl23
