Living Food – a feast for soil & soul

Daphne Lambert introduces a new model of publishing that connects authors, publishers and readers

Living Food – a feast for soil & soul brings alive the connections between the food we eat and the health of the planet; the book weaves its way through the seasons of nature celebrating each new harvest with simple recipes and shares with you a wealth of medicinal nutrition that supports health through the seasons of life from conception and birth through to elder-ship.

Soil, interconnectedness, simplicity, seasonal alchemy and beauty underpin the Living Food journey. Food is a major part of what integrates every organism into the environment in which it exists, it is our most intimate relationship with nature. By exploring this relationship it helps us to understand that our health and the health of the planet are interconnected: there is no division – we are one.

A diet of natural foods, sourced locally where possible, simply prepared observing traditional wisdom, acknowledges our inter-being with the Earth. These foods support low carbon living, minimise damage to natural resources, help to mitigate climate change and contribute to thriving local economies and sustainable livelihoods. By being mindful about what we eat, we become aware that nourishing ourselves and nourishing the Earth go hand in hand and in this place of presence, awareness and consciousness we find soul.

A new model of publishing
Unbound has created a new model of publishing – a collaboration between reader, author and publisher. This is how it works: in order to get the book published on its initial print run, there must be enough potential readers pledging to support the book financially. Unbound will publish Living Food as soon as the book has 900 pledges. We invite you to be part of this new publishing phenomenon by making a pledge for Living Food.

After the book is written, designed, edited and printed, you will receive a copy of Living Food either as an ebook or a limited edition hardback or paperback. By making a pledge you are simply buying the book in advance of publishing. There is no financial risk as your money is returned if there are not enough pledges to ensure that the book is published.
 
Make a pledge for Living Food
You can make a pledge for Living Food – a feast for soil & soul here. If you make a pledge you will receive a beautiful book full of food wisdom & nourishing recipes, together with essays from four guest writers: Romy Fraser, Diane Osgood, Miche Fabre Lewin & Sandra White; as well as some brilliant rewards.


Living Food – a feast for soil & soul by Daphne Lambert will be published by Unbound. For more information visit Greencuisine or contact: daphne[at] greencuisine.org 

Daphne Lambert is a medicinal chef, nutritionist, author and teacher. She is the founding member of the Greencuisine Trust an educational charity set up in 2011 to deepen the understanding between soil, food and well-being. Through innovative educational programmes and projects the Trust cultivates food knowledge and skills to enable  us to rethink our relationship to food.


                      

Harm into Harmony

Examples of human-inflicted harm surround us. But if we hope for a better future we must cultivate visions of a restored balance. Nurture harmony in our own lives as well as seeking inspiring examples: A child day-dreaming in a field of wild flowers, or the family-run small holding that has turned to edible forest farming, or perhaps a person who has won the tenuous trust of a wild creature’s heart.

I know such a person, who has dedicated the last twelve years of her life to cultivating a marvelous and trusting friendship with a wild dolphin off the coast of Ireland. Though the sea is cold and often rough, day in and day out she braves the elements and the two friends head out into the wilds. They explore reefs and shoals and waving kelp beds, and perhaps most interesting of all, this dolphin introduces her to other creatures in the marine community – seals, sunfish, basking sharks, porpoises and even other dolphins, all presented with that wry dolphin smile. This magical trust is not something that could be bought for any price. It has been earned. 

If there is one thing about humankind that might make it special, it is that we hold at least the potential to befriend all wild creatures and in some manner, speak, walk (or swim) with and care for them all. 

I leave you with a recommendation: a diminutive but most marvelous book on this worthy topic called Kinship With All Life, by J. Allen Boone.

Leah Lemieux is an author and lecturer who works on dolphin protection, education and conservation initiatives. For more information on her work visit:  www.RekindlingTheWaters.com

May

Throughout our lives we too draw the test to ourselves. When the lightening strikes, everything is in that instant illuminated. Our strength, our weakness, our courage, our vulnerability, all becomes visible. We learn our limits, the sweep of our power and that which we can endure.

Lightning strikes come in many guises. Illness, accidents, unemployment, separation, financial difficulties, bereavement, bullying, they inevitably test us in the arena in which we feel most vulnerable. We each have our own lessons to learn and we will be tested again and again until we learn them.

Often at this time we seek objects in the woods that symbolise the lightning strikes both past and present that have tested us and continue to do so. These we mark with a flame to show the burn. We share our stories of strikes past, how they hurt us and how they made us grow. Together we learn about the gifts that the lightning brings. This helps us sit now with the strikes present, with the tests that we now face and seek to endure. We combat fear with trust, self doubt with expectation. Then we make a fire out of all we have gathered. Standing together around the hearth we take turns to suggest ways of raising the fire within ourselves. We leap, we roar, we chant, we dance. We stand in silence holding hands, drawing the heat into our bodies. Then we are ready. Ready to face our tests.

Ian Siddons Heginworth is an environmental arts therapist, founder of the Devon-based Wild Things community programme and author of Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life, Spirit’s Rest Books. www.environmentalartstherapy.co.uk

The Minute and Miraculous

After the long, lagging winter, the season of singing is at last upon us. Fuzzy buds and blossoms burst from the trees and shoots come burning up from the ground in a colorful profusion.  Minute wonders surround us, yet they are so easily overlooked. The petals of magnolia or bluebells when examined closely reveal how they draw and translate their beauty from water and light – into prismatic glory.

In these signs of vernal renewal I find a kind of counter balance issuing from Nature; an answer to the human-created chaos unfolding around the globe. We wage war, poison Earth and sea – yet still, she sings. The exquisite trills of robins, spinning out like dewdrops along a spider’s silken line are, just like the flowers, awash in light. 

In spring perhaps more than any other season, we sense reminders of the divine all around us.  This ancient, eternal dance of renewal brings into perspective this current blink of history, overshadowed by the rage of homo sapiens. Flowers and birds were here first and in one form or another, they shall endure and in this, there is a certain solace. And for those so inclined, invitation stands, that if even for a few moments, we may set down the human drama and “be as the lilies” – discover to our delight, that there exists a place for us within the symphony.

Leah Lemieux is an author and lecturer who works on dolphin protection, education and conservation initiatives. www.RekindlingTheWaters.com

March

The ash tree is the tree that the Celts associated most with the month of March. In Norse mythology, it was Ygdrassil, the World ash. This ancient and shamanic image illustrates three levels of consciousness, as well as the journey of a human life.

The roots of Ygdrassil are found in the underworld, the unconscious self. Because it contains all the material that we have chosen to repress it is also our past and in particular our childhood. It is our foundation, the place that we are growing from. In the myth, the world serpent gnaws incessantly at these roots. As a symbol of the dark feminine, the wounded feeling self, this is the gnawing of our wounds demanding attention. This dark material is the compost from which life blossoms.  The alchemists call it the prima materia, the dark lead that lies heavy on our hearts.

At the beginning of March, down among the dark roots of the World ash, we can connect very deeply to this prima materia and feel it as raw and intolerable once again. Up among the branches at this time, the buds of the ash tree are black as lead.

The trunk of Ygdrassil is the here and now, this world that we live in, the present. It is here that the alchemical transformation of the prima materia takes place. When we allow ourselves to be in relationship with our feeling self we begin the transmutation of our wounds, changing the lead into gold. This is conscious adulthood, our life work. Here the trunk of the tree becomes the sealed container in which the process unfolds as naturally as the spring.

In the branches of Ygdrassil, we find the future and those elders who having worked their alchemy are now harvesting their gold. In the myth, the lower branches are the home of deer, which graze upon the leaves while the eagle, the higher self looks down from above. As symbols of love and gentleness, the deer are an indication of the nature of this harvest. We may strive for material wealth, but it is in the fruiting of relationship, both with ourselves and others, that we find real gold. This is a harvest of the heart and it can be there in all our futures.

Ian Siddons Heginworth is an environmental arts therapist, founder of the Devon-based Wild Things community programme and author of Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life, Spirit’s Rest Books. www.environmentalartstherapy.co.uk

Photograph: Ash Tree Marmit www.sxc.hu/profile/marmit

February

As the days grow longer and warmth returns, that which has been frozen begins to thaw and feeling returns to the Earth. 

The month of February begins with the ancient festival of Imbolc. Meaning ‘in the belly’, Imbolc marks the first stirring of life in the womb of the Earth. Dedicated to the goddess Bride, it is the first fire festival of the year. 

Bride, or Bridie, is the virgin goddess and all brides represent her as they walk towards union with the solar masculine. Hers is the new, soft body of the Earth as the water begins to flow again and the soil becomes the womb, dark, moist and enveloping. As she nurses the seed within, it begins to reach out to her.

As feeling returns we too find ourselves again in a womb, but one of our own making. The life that has contained and sustained us until now becomes the soil from which we must spring

The tree that the Celts associated with the month of February is willow. Known as the Queen of the waters, the willow is the most feminine of trees. Its Celtic name Saile, means to leap or let go, which is why the leap year falls in February. Willow calls upon us to make this leap, but the only way is to release feeling, to grieve for all that has passed and so cut the ties that bind us to the past. As we do so, life changes and we surge ahead.

To go willingly into grief, to learn and develop its ways as a practice for life, is a great gift to ourselves and to our children who then learn not to fear it as we did. Once the practice of active grief is learnt, we can feel our way all the way back to our beginnings seeking out the grief that was held there and releasing it now. Letting go, letting go, letting go. Each time we cut the strings that hold us back and bind us into familiar patterns and self-fulfilling prophecies, we take a leap. We leap into the unknown, into a place where anything is possible and long forbidden dreams can manifest themselves at last.

Ian Siddons Heginworth is an environmental arts therapist, founder of the Devon-based Wild Things community programme and author of Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life, Spirit’s Rest Books. www.environmentalartstherapy.co.uk

January

As the sun returns it reaches like a bridge across the divide between Heaven and Earth to stir the cold body of the feminine back into life. This return of the king is essential because it is the masculine, the active principle, that must kick-start the inertia for change.  But there is new purpose here too, for the king is returning from descent.

When we descend into the underworld, as we do every winter, it is our dark and wounded feminine, our feeling self, that we find there. All those unwanted feelings hung upon the hooks like old coats, many in child sizes.

Our masculine selves, the active principle within us that thinks and does, now knows about this hidden feminine, having embodied her suffering. This knowledge is transformative because he now rallies to her defence. This is why we make New Year’s resolutions because we return with a strong sense that something must be done to create change.

For the returning sun to awaken the seed it must first break through the cold crust of the earth. This breaking through, this release of power, is also required of us to cross this bridge. But power resides in the house of anger and of all the feelings this is probably the most repressed in our culture.

But our anger is our essential and elemental fire. It is our power to say “No! Stop! Enough!” Without it, we are defenceless. With it, we are empowered. How we use it is up to us. This power is the sun’s power and now we reclaim it from the shadow just as the sun is reclaimed from the underworld.  This is the primal push of the masculine towards life made all the more urgent by the lessons learnt in descent.  “You will not do that to me again!  I am worth more than that!  I will break free!”  So the horse kicks open the stable door and runs.  The dog rips off his muzzle and barks. The eagle breaks out of his cage and soars.

Ian Siddons Heginworth is an environmental arts therapist, founder of the Devon-based Wild Things community programme and author of Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life, Spirit’s Rest Books. www.environmentalartstherapy.co.uk

Cycles of Change in Nature

On the surface, life appears to be ever-changing. Everything is continually being transformed by the interaction between internal forces inscribed in the blueprint of nature's design, and external forces, like sunlight, wind, rain and innumerable environmental influences.

The same blade of grass is not the same from one moment to the next. The process of erosion is always at work, causing the fading of one substance into another. The grass and rocks melt into the earth, only to re-emerge as perhaps the fibres of trees and flowers. Time rules the outer layer of life. The outer material level is subject to the inexorable law which determines the natural span of life of everything in creation.
However, every change is governed by the laws of nature. The cycles of change in Nature are the means by which Nature evolves and progresses. Every change at the surface level is determined by specific laws of Nature operating at a deeper level.

Nature is perfectly organised. Intelligence is evident in every shape, form, line color and texture. Not only does everything in Nature harmonise with everything else, but every structure is harmonious in itself. It is a manifest expression of the propagation of unmanifest impulses of intelligence creating specific forms with precise internal relationships. The order that is evident at the surface of Nature resonates with an unmanifest source of order deep inside us and it is this resonance which gives rise to the perception of beauty.

Barbara Briggs is a writer, poet, teacher of Transcendental Meditation and author of The Contribution of Maharishi's Vedic Science to Complete Fulfilment in Life. This excerpt is from Vision Into Infinity, her first book, which is out of print but will hopefully be reprinted soon. Email Barbara

December

As the days grow short the shadows creep in. The blanket of leaves grows dark and lies like a shroud upon the cold body of the earth as she draws back her fluids into herself. Winter sucks the life out of the land with a harsh and oppressive hunger, and all that is soft and warm recoils in the face of her advance. The woodland creatures hibernate, sealing up their dens to salvage and sustain the heat in the heart of themselves. They wrap themselves around it and sleep, little pockets of hot life imbedded in the cold clay. Secret dreamers among the black roots, spirits of fur and claw and snuffling snout, cave dwellers, fire keepers, as silent as grubs they hide from winter’s fierce and probing tongue.
We too are called upon to descend. Into stillness. Into the heat of ourselves. Into feeling. Yet so often we fear descent and struggle to resist it. We fear the death of what we know, the collapse of all that supports us. We fear the shadows that we meet there.
Yet every winter, Nature surrenders painlessly to this descent. She follows the cycle of her own being back down into the heart of herself. Of all the lessons she teaches us this is perhaps the most profound, that descent is not to be avoided but embraced. Entered into voluntarily it is a sweet release and the doorway to transformation. It is the death and dissolution of the caterpillar in the cocoon.

Ian Siddons Heginworth is an environmental arts therapist, founder of the Devon-based Wild Things community programme and author of Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life, Spirit’s Rest Books. www.environmentalartstherapy.co.uk

Perfect Symmetry Between Humans and Nature

Is not everything in nature a reflection of a feeling etched deep within the consciousness of all human beings?

On the boundless palette of the infinite, we behold ourselves. In the clear blue of the sky in mid-afternoon, do we not perceive a symbol of the clarity of human consciousness when fully open to itself? In the flight of birds, do we not have a foretaste of the exhilaration true freedom brings - to soar beyond all earthly fetters? In the rushing of waves out to sea, and the rapid pulsing of blood through our veins, can we not feel the excitement of a new adventure or whatever we wish to make of it?
In the first sprouting of a plant as it pushes through the earth, in the rain - sometimes torrential downpours, sometimes gentle, caressing - is not nature the supreme art form, capturing the totality in every expression?
Just as one may find abstract ideas and feelings in oneself embodied in nature's forms, so should one be able to find deeper, more subtle levels within oneself through an appreciation of art. The mission of the painter, poet, dancer and musician is to guide people to ever-deeper levels of attunement with the source of harmony within themselves. This attunement with deeper levels within oneself will lead mankind to perfect attunement with Nature, because at the deepest level, there is perfect symmetry between humans and Nature. Indeed, they are one.

Barbara Briggs is a writer, poet, teacher of Transcendental Meditation and author of The Contribution of Maharishi's Vedic Science to Complete Fulfilment in Life. This excerpt is from Vision Into Infinity, her first book, which is out of print but will hopefully be reprinted soon.

November

Sometimes we find rope swings in the woods and this is always an invitation for the child to re-emerge.
We have found here how we constantly swing between the wounded child that we were and the archetypal child that we are seeking to manifest. The wounded child reacts to situations and relationships that trigger its fear, subtle transferences that keep us trapped in familiar patterns and sabotage any hope of escape. But the archetypal child is a beacon that is never truly extinguished, our infinite potential for renewal, for wonder and for real and enduring freedom. The rope upon which we swing is our tenuous link to the elder, high up in the branches above. It supports us and allows us to play. Sometimes it wears thin or even breaks and we fall on our face in the mud. At those times we may need another elder, a therapist perhaps, to help us tie up another rope and reinstate our connection. But this is only a temporary state of affairs for our true elder, the one within, never stops watching over us from above.
This connection between the old and the new is rarely felt more keenly than in November when the trees sow their seeds in the presence of death, in their fallen leaves, in the compost of the old year. Here the elder and the child lie side by side, one on her death bed, the other in her cradle. There is great ambivalence in this, our grief and our hope so united.
Ian Siddons Heginworth is an environmental arts therapist, founder of the Devon-based Wild Things community programme and author of Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life, Spirit’s Rest Books. www.environmentalartstherapy.co.uk

October

As we walk through the forest and feel the old year dying around us we can look down and see the seeds of the year to come nestling among the fallen leaves. All must die, but in the heart of death we find life waiting.
A tree that the Celts associated with this time was the elder and the honouring of the elder within ourselves is a beautiful ritual that we share at this time. Working outdoors in a group we decorate a chair with elder. Then we find or make gifts for the others, to represent qualities that we wish to honour in each of them. One by one, we sit in the chair and the robe of the elder is placed upon our shoulders. The others in the group honour us with their gifts and then we are asked to own the qualities that we respect in ourselves.
Regardless of our age we are all elders of our own lives and of the cycle that is closing now. Our elder hood comes not from what we have done but from what we have felt, from the lessons that life has taught us and continues to teach us. In this respect even a child can honour the elder within themselves.
Others too. Honouring is a gift that we can give to even the most dishonoured. In a world that respects only achievement there are many that live with a perpetual sense of shame, disempowerment and failure. But regardless of whether we live in prison, in a mental hospital, in a night shelter or in a care home, we too are eating from the Tree of life and can honour the lessons that we have learned. We too can be honoured by others for the feeling qualities that they see in us. We too can accept the robe of the elder.
Ian Siddons Heginworth is an environmental arts therapist, founder of the Devon-based Wild Things community programme and author of Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life, Spirit’s Rest Books. www.environmentalartstherapy.co.uk

Autumn

Even before the leaves start yellowing, we know that autumn is here. We feel the change of direction within ourselves, a desire to return like the snail into the spiral of our being. The sun may still be shining, but it is lower in the sky now and it picks out the cobwebs in the hedgerows and sets them ablaze in the morning when the dewdrops held upon them sparkle like diamonds. The days can be soft, hazy and warm, but the nights are growing colder. Life is beginning to pull inwards, collapsing its systems, folding its wings about itself, settling down and preparing for the endings to come.

The Celts associated this time with the ivy. They considered it the strongest of trees because it can choke and kill anything it grows on, even the oak. It can block paths or pull down walls and when we meet a huge and ancient ivy we do not just meet the plant, with its thick and serpentine sinews, but we confront also that which is hidden within. Something suffocated, ruined and forgotten. So ivy draws us inwards, into the labyrinth of our being, to meet that which still blocks our path to freedom. As the cycle of the year nears its end it is often here that we meet the aspect of our self that we keep most hidden from ourselves and others. As we return from the Summerlands it awaits us.

Ian Siddons Heginworth is an environmental arts therapist, founder of the Devon-based Wild Things community programme and author of Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life, Spirit’s Rest Books.
www.environmentalartstherapy.co.uk