Today seems like a most fitting day to reconnect with all of you, my Maggie’s Nest peeps, and wish you all a tremendously happy 2012 filled with infinite joy, unlimited abundance, and true love in all forms.

2011 was probably the hardest year of my life, and at times it’s been hard to stay in gratitude and appreciation for all that happened.  Still, that’s been my mantra.  Probably the biggest spiritual lesson I learned last year was that of wanting something different than what I have, without having to hate or disparage what I have.  Becoming unhappy with what is and fighting it tooth and nail, is the way I had always thought change had to come about, and since I’m an extremely changeable creature, I spent a lot of time and energy disliking my present moment in a strange sort of loyalty to the future I dreamed of.  Can you imagine the energy I wasted in this way?  Always holding a hand up against my now?  Maybe you can imagine it because you’ve done the same thing.  I can’t be alone in this long-held misconception!

Over the summer I spent between 2-3 hours a day in my car, on a long commute to work I didn’t particularly want to be doing.  I was in the midst of what would turn out to be huge shifts in every area of my life – but at the time it just felt like turmoil, pain, grief, railing at God, railing at my own changeable self, and despairing that I would ever find happiness.

My long commute turned out to be a great blessing, though, as I was somehow compelled to buy several of the audiobooks of the teachings of Abraham-Hicks, and listen to them day in and day out throughout the summer.  My long relationship with the Law of Attraction prepared me perfectly to receive and integrate what Abraham had to teach.

One day as I sped along the narrow, winding country road up to work, wondering how I was ever going to get happy about my life, Abraham spoke of our natural human desire to want more, to want change, to reach for better and greater lives.  “We are always joyously incomplete.”  I felt a huge energetic release in my body; years of doubting and berating myself for never being satisfied with what I have left my cells and washed away as I took in the new reality that it’s human to want!  I was reminded of something I heard once:

If you have reached your potential, you’re probably dead.

We all want to reach further, to have more, to chew up the present moment and digest it completely so we have room to experience new things in our lives.  Once I really thought about it, I realized that nothing could be more natural!

But, I thought, why does it always feel so awful when I realize that what I have is no longer what I want?

The missing piece for me was appreciation.

“The way to get where you want to go is to appreciate where you are now,” Abraham spoke to me.  My eyes blinked.  I pressed rewind and listened again, three times.  This revelation slowly settled into my bones.  This was the spiritual practice I’d been missing all my life.  What if I could start appreciating my now?  I wonder what would happen?

I arrived at work with new resolve: to actively appreciate this job.  No more grumbling about it; I could know that I didn’t want to keep doing this work, and I could show up fully and do the best job I knew how.  I’m a bit embarrassed by what a revelation this was for me, but it really was.

Lo and behold, I had a great day at work, and left feeling energized rather than depleted.  I headed home, determined to appreciate all that was there even while I was coming to the devastating conclusion that the relationship I was in, was no longer what I wanted.  I realized that there was actually a lot to appreciate, and that it didn’t change my wanting something new.

I’ll tell you what, peeps: appreciation kept me alive this year.  It became a way out of the often judgmental stance I took with myself as I made necessary but painful changes in my life.  It helped me make those changes from a place of love and respect for myself and the others involved, rather than disdain and judgment.  I am grateful beyond belief for the gift of appreciation!

As life has taken some abrupt and drastic turns, it’s probably no big surprise that I’ve decided to stop blogging at Maggie’s Nest.  I’m diving into a new (well, old and new again) career as a professional performing artist, and will continue blogging, how frequently I don’t yet know, largely about creativity, spirituality, and how the two inform each other.  Domesticity will probably not be covered there, but there will probably be some mention of food now and then.  (Foodie Or Die!)

All of my previous four years of blogging, including the Maggie’s Nest posts, can now be found at http://wandernest.wordpress.com.  My new website, http://www.maggiehollinbeck.com will house my new blog.  I welcome you all there if the content is of interest.

Joy!  Abundance!  Love!  Truth!  Presence! 

May all these and much more find you in 2012, the Quantum Year!

I broke this rule big time, didn’t I?  Gone for a month with narry a word to let you all know what was happening.  My apologies!  And now I have to break the rule again, because I need to take an indefinite break from blogging for the meantime.

Since college I’ve been nursing pain in my hands, wrists, and forearms from too much computer use – yes folks, ye olde carpal tunnel syndrome.  Right about the time I started back up on my daily blog posts, I also dipped my hand into the world of professional freelance writing.  Great ideas, both, but they couldn’t have come at a worse time as my carpal tunnel kicked into painfully high gear over the last six weeks.  I’m putting my hope in acupuncture treatments and avoidance of all unnecessary computer activity.  I contemplated handwriting this blog post and scanning the papers in for your reading pleasure, but let’s just get through this as best we can, shall we?

Other factors contributed to my long absence: two musical concerts which took up a lot of time; a new job and a long commute, with not much access to the internet; and a whole lot of soul-searching as I sit with some big questions about my personal and professional future.  Ah, just when I thought I had it figured out!  What a silly notion.

I really appreciate all of you who have enjoyed this blog over time, and I hope I can come back to it on a fairly regular basis, but for now please expect posts to be sporadic at best.  There’s a ton of past content to click through, and you are welcome to continue leaving your thoughtful and thought-provoking comments – I love the conversations!  And thanks, everyone, for understanding.

Bloggers: have you ever had to step back from your blogging commitments?  What worked for you?

This is great news!  It means, among other things, that when I forget to pack a lunch I don’t have to starve.  This afternoon, halfway through a long rehearsal, I found myself really hungry and without any pre-packed food.  After a quick trip to the deli counter at my co-op, I returned with a poached chicken breast and a golden beet & kale salad – featuring raw vegetables, ladies and gentlemen, all of which went down just fine, thank you very much.

The kale was a big step, and the fact that I seem to have digested it without incident means that less-fibrous raw lettuce (a Stage 5 food that I haven’t officially introduced yet) won’t be a problem.  This is a very good thing, and just in time for summer; I don’t have to slave over hot soup during the dog days of August – I’ll be able to enjoy cool salads and smoothies again.  Ah, smoothies!  I’d almost forgotten about you!

And maybe in the next week or two I’ll work up to these absolutely luscious, completely GAPS-legal brownies from Cheeseslave – holla!

So, as I near the end of the introduction phase of GAPS, I can absolutely say that it has been worth it.  It has not been easy; that I’ll admit.  Although I haven’t blogged much about this side of it, the introduction phase dredged up some significant healing crises for me over the last six weeks: I endured some of the worst depression and anxiety I’ve ever experienced, plus a crazy case of hives across my back and chest that burned and itched for days and days.  Even though these were painful experiences, I knew their origins and knew that some powerful healing was taking place through the diet, so there was no question that I would stick with it.  As a pleasant side effect, I’ve lost almost 15 pounds and feel more energetic.  I recommend the diet highly to anyone who thinks they might benefit from it, and would be glad to provide support for those who are ready to take the plunge themselves.  Feel free to comment here, or contact me privately (see the About page).

Full GAPS (and Cheeseslave brownies), here I come!

Friends, it’s time for some recalibration here at the nest.  I realize that my post-a-day ambitions have flown out the window of late, in the midst of some serious soul-searching and “personal earthquakes” as I called them in a recent post.  And as I’ve watched myself unable to keep that commitment, it’s given me a lot of time to think (and since I was in Texas with nothing to do during my off-time except think, it really was a lot of time) about why I write this blog and what I’m really here to share with you.

Over the weekend I listened to a podcast with the powerful, dazzling Danielle LaPorte of White Hot Truth; she was talking to Jonathan Fields and a worldwide audience about entrepreneurship and the nuts and bolts of What It Takes.  You know what I mean by that, don’t you?  I mean What It Takes To Be Big.  Bold.  Brilliant.  To take up space and stake your claim of the human experience, to be a beacon of something larger than yourself.  To become significant, which is a searingly honest end-goal of any entrepreneur.

Maggie’s Nest started as a platform for my personal musings about my life, a place to write letters to whoever might read them.  Over time I discovered that I loved to write, and to engage in the peculiar brand of conversation and community that happens in the blogosphere.  Earlier this year, inspired by other blogs that are becoming Significant, I felt pulled to widen my audience and turn this blog into a platform for what I have to offer, as a human being, to the world.

The inevitable question, then, has become: what do I actually have to offer?  Or, put in more spiritual (and for me, more salient) terms, How am I meant to serve? If this sounds like a compliment-fishing question, be assured that it isn’t.  It’s the central question that every entrepreneur (and maybe every person) has to ask him- or herself.  And the answer has to be compelling, or you’re dead in the water.

This question has been consuming me for the last month…and I still don’t have a clear answer.  Ain’t that a bitch?  Still, I keep asking.  Because it’s a question that reaches into every part of life, and without an answer, there is no wind.  No wind means no movement.  Dead in the water.

I don’t know yet the answer of what Maggie’s Nest is here to do, or how it will evolve as these questions become answered.  I do know that I still love writing here, and sharing and connecting with you all in the strange ways that happens.  So my intention is to keep writing through the questions; to, as Rainer Maria Rilke so beautifully put it, “live the questions”.  In fact, here’s the full quote that has been salve on my heart in recent weeks:

I intend to be here about three times a week to write through the questions, and I guess we’ll all live our way into the answers.

{top photo credit}

I just learned this word while reading a magazine article about a local foodie. A jag is apparently an obsession, or as dictionary.com put it, “a period of unrestrained indulgence in an activity; spree; binge.” This seems to describe me quite well – much to the chagrin of many of my loved ones. I get on jags, I collect them, I circulate my jags and give them time to breathe. Like shoes. If I stick with a jag too long, it loses some kind of magic for me, but coming upon a fresh jag (or better, coming back to a pleasurable old jag) keeps things lively.

So, my local-food jag isn’t necessarily gone, it’s just getting freshened. I’m proud of the local-foods movement for taking the prize as Oxford American Dictionary’sWord of the Year. I’m still keeping an eye on where my food comes from, and I’m pleasantly surprised to find that most of the food I buy is already local – as long as I shop at the co-op, the farmer’s market, and my CSA, it’s quite easy actually. Trips to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s or (eek!) Safeway throw the whole local-food thing out of whack – it’s nearly impossible to find things made locally and, even when I do, I know that it can’t truly count as local because even if the food was made by my next-door neighbor, it’s still traveled an average of 1500 miles to a distribution center in Austin or Monrovia or Salt Lake City before coming back to my neighborhood.

But back to my point about jags. Because folks, Mama’s got a brand new jag. And it’s an old one, one you might remember me blogging about this past spring. But I believe I have finally found my knitting legs, so to speak, after many attempts. I credit Debbie Stoller and her awesome book, Stitch’n Bitch, for me finally understanding how to tangle yarn artistically. And I thank Lisa and Martha for inspiring me.

Reconnecting with knitting has reconnected me with the deep feminine urge to create useful things, and to do it beautifully. And to do it for others. I can’t stop thinking of things I’d like to make for people close to me – right now I have no plans to keep any current projects for myself, and this is a really pleasurable departure from my usual narcissism. Thus, I have decided to make as many Christmas gifts as I can this year, given my schedule (in rehearsals for maybe the best play ever and preparing to go tropical for the holidays) and how quickly my fingers can work. There will be sewing, baking, slicing, dicing, and yes, knitting. None of it can be displayed here until after gifts have been given out (who wants to spoil the surprise?) but believe you me, my camera will be busy documenting the fun. Isn’t it lovely when a gift can bring pleasure to the gifterand the gifted?

What’s your latest jag?

{Top photo courtesy of EnglishPointers.  What does it have to do with jags?  Absolutely nothing.  I was browsing Flickr for a picture, and this one was just so beautiful I had to share it!}

This reminded me that my mom, also a rockin’ blogger, awarded me the same honor a few months ago, and I forgot to thank her properly.  So thanks to both of you lovely women!

The Versatile Blogger Award requires me to share 7 facts about myself, and shout out to 15 bloggers who make my blogosphere a little bit brighter.  Are you ready?

First…7 Things About Me

1. I got the musical theatre bug in the 9th grade, and I got it BAD.  It was my first great passion, and one that stays with me almost 25 (wow…yeah, 25) years later.  I love to sing just about anywhere, but most especially in the car while driving. There’s something about speeding along at #$ mph while belting out my favorite MichaelJohn LaChiusa tunes at the top of my lungs.

2. Since it’s musical theatre, I act while singing.  I act real hard in the car.  Risky at stoplights, but totally worth it.

3. This weekend I had a wonderful conversation with someone I’d known for about six hours.  She recently began training in Reiki, and talking with her reconnected me to how much I loved the Reiki training I received several years ago.  I spent a year studying and practicing, and eventually earned Reiki Master status…and then, over time, I moved on to other interests and passions, until I had nearly forgotten how much I loved this subtle art.  Maybe it’s time to touch into that part of me again.

4. My favorite place in the world is Yosemite National Park.  I have fantasies that I’ll move there in my retirement and work as a trail maintenance worker, or maybe leading hikes up to Mirror Lake in the crisp fall mornings.

5. I haven’t worn a pair of shorts in 12 years.  True story.

6. I’ve been a spiritual seeker my whole adult life, checking out services and classes in just about every religious tradition.  I always wanted to find a spiritual home, but never felt comfortable anywhere, so remained basically a solitary spiritualist.  But in the last couple of months I’ve been attending unprogrammed Quaker meetings, and like Goldilocks, it finally feels just right.  I might have found my spiritual home.

7. I wasn’t sure I would share #6, but I’m glad I did.

Second…15 Awesome Bloggers

1. Small Notebook

2. Pink Coyote

3. Holistic Mama

4. Cheeseslave

5. Nourishing Days

6. Nesting Place

7. The First Gates

8. SouleMama

9. Simple Mom (and its sister sites – see the tabs at the top of the homepage)

10. Tiny Buddha

11. The Debt-Free Family

12. chicken tender

13. Modish

14. Rowdy Kittens

15. Wisdom Heart

There you go!  I highly encourage you to spend the next hour clicking through all these blogs and enjoying great content from all across the blogosphere.  And don’t forget to check out Genevieve‘s and my mom‘s blogs, too.  BlogLove!

If this is your first time visiting Maggie’s Nest, welcome!  You might enjoy reading some of my other food-related posts, including How to Make 3 Meals from 1 Chicken, Bone Broth 101, Traditional Fermentation 101, or How to Make Homemade Yogurt.

Recently I started my journey on the GAPS diet in order to heal my gut; I’ve since learned numerous 20th and 21st century ailments that have been successfully healed with this diet.  If you’d like to know more, click to read What’s GAPS? and Why Now? or, 5 Ways to Make Intro Easier.

I talk about more than food here at Maggie’s Nest, so please feel free to browse around in the various categories.  Travel articles are in the “Wandernest” category; posts about creative process abound in “Nurturing Creativity”, and more philosophical articles about family, home, living on purpose, and practicing self-care area also littered throughout the site.

I hope you enjoy your visit and come back often!

Photo courtesy of borogoves.

The last month has been characterized by a sort of emotional/spiritual malaise that has settled on my soul like dead weight. I haven’t been motivated to do much beyond what’s necessary; nothing has ignited excitement or passion lately. Work leaves me flat, and a bit worried. I’ve always felt like I had to find THE THING that I’d want to do for the rest of my life, and then do it with absolute dedication and focus. The problem? I have gone through two and a half careers that I loved for a year or five, then lost interest in. Is that happening again? I’m too old to keep changing careers! But I don’t want to spend the majority of my week doing something that I don’t enjoy…

A couple weeks ago I pulled Barbara Sher’s book Refuse To Choose off the shelf. Her books have meant a lot to me over the years; when I was ready to leave acting I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, and her books I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was and Live The Life You Love were exactly the books I needed to get my bearing and move forward.

Refuse To Choose is about a particular type of person that Barbara calls a Scanner: a kind of modern-day renaissance person, who loves exploring all sorts of different interests but who often gets bored easily and moves at various rates of speed from one subject (and/or career) to another. All my life I’ve considered myself flawed because I often become obsessed with something and study everything I can get my hands on about that subject…for a few weeks, or months, or maybe years. Once I’ve reached a certain level of competency or understanding, I usually lose all that passion and feel restless to find the next thing that will consume me. It’s been a source of embarrassment for me, feeling that I can’t finish things…that I never stick something out until I achieve mastery…that my life is full of half-done projects…stacks of half-read books…I’ve felt like a failure in many ways.

This book has turned my perspective on its head! For the first time ever, I don’t feel ashamed of this pattern of mine. I don’t feel like every interest has to be turned into a career, or that it’s not worth delving into if I can’t make money at it. That’s surprisingly liberating! So I’ve started doing some things that I enjoy, just for the enjoyment and just for as long as I find them enjoyable. The upshot? Work feels lighter and more interesting, which is a bit of a relief even though I’m also opening myself to the possibility that I work best when I do a few things part-time, creating an stimulating and varied workweek. I feel lighter and more interested in learning just for the sake of it.

So, I’m learning Irish Gaelic, hearing all I can from Glen Hansard, The Frames, and Interference after seeing the sweet Irish film Once last week, making tasty Coconutty Cubes (see recipe below) so I can get my daily dose of coconut oil, writing a bit of a song on the mandolin, and allowing myself to dream freely about trips abroad. Next week I’d like to finally get a few aprons made, and I think I may let my knitting project sit tight until fall, when knitting seems more in season.

Coconutty Cubes

Mix together some coconut oil (get good quality, organic, virgin, unrefined) and some dehydrated coconut with a bit of cocoa powder or carob powder and a dash of sweetener like maple syrup, honey or stevia. Mix well and spoon into an ice cube tray, and leave overnight to solidify. The end-product is chewy and sweet, and in my tray one cube provides about 2T of coconut oil. Yum! For information about the myriad health benefits of coconut, read this!

Furled.  Photo courtesy of Davedehetre.

There’s a natural ebb and flow to life, with seasons of effusing one’s essence out into the world, and seasons of pulling in to gather strength for the next storm.  I am in the midst of a decidedly furling season.  Some personal earthquakes are in process, taking place in private corners of my life and very much needing my attention and energy.

The only thing arousing much enthusiasm or passion at the moment is the thing I keep coming back to on the blog: healing through traditional foods wisdom and the revolution that’s taking place far and wide across this country for free access and choice to real food.  I catch a spark of excitement every time I read about things like the recent rally on Capitol Hill, protesting the year-long FDA sting operation of an Amish dairy farmer and fighting for the right to drink raw milk.  Or the mother who healed her son’s cavity with cod liver oil and butter oil.  (You read that right.)  Or why Ron Paul is my new favorite politician.  These stories represent a shift toward self-reliance, choice, freedom, and independence from the centralized food system that is doing much more harm than we are being told.  People are taking back their food freedom, and sometimes it’s a hard-won battle!

I’ll have some exciting news to share next week about Maggie’s Nest, and in this moment I am realizing that I really, truly love learning and sharing all this food wisdom.  I love hearing about people who are healing their families with food.  I love the healing I’m witnessing in my own body as I continue with the GAPS diet, and I love the thought that by the end of the year I may very well be a certified GAPS practitioner, so that I can spread  the word to those suffering with diseases I now firmly believe to be originating in our modern relationship to food.  I love helping people find their way to their best selves, and there’s hardly anything that could be more fundamental than the vibrant self that comes forward when the body is well nourished.

Today I’m grateful to witness in my furled self the spark of passion that keeps lighting up the dark places in my weary soul.  And I’m eager to stoke that spark to life and see what’s wanting to come forth.

I spent the weekend in Austin with a dear friend (the same dear friend that drove quite a ways to see me for my birthday on Tuesday) and brought a grocery bag of GAPS-friendly foods to eat: a thermos of chicken-veggie soup, a container of homemade yogurt, the rest of my fermented salmon, plus jars of ghee and raw honey.  On Saturday evening I attended a game night with some friends of friends, and there was quite a spread of delicious-looking foods.  Nothing was GAPS intro-friendly, however (why would it be?) and at some point I eyed the black olives.  Hm…I thought.  Well, they’re not raw, they’re cured.  And olives are pretty fatty, and not very fibrous.  I gave it a try, and ended up eating seven big fat olives with no problems.  Then on Sunday I ran out of the food I had brought with me for the weekend, and scoured Central Market for something from the prepared foods aisle – grilled salmon and asparagus was the best I could find, and those both went down just fine, even without probiotics or broth to go with them.  I think my body is starting to heal!

So this week I’m finally breaking out of my soup rut, and trying some solid foods that I can eat on their own – with sides of broth and probiotic, of course, but not necessarily mixed right in.  This post from Keeper of the Home, called “Recipes and Ideas for What to Eat on the GAPS Introduction Diet” has inspired me to try some more daring ideas, like maybe stuffed mushrooms or meatloaf – exciting, right?  Right now there’s a small butternut squash cooking in the oven, to be used for the Stage 3 pancake re-introduction (more below), and also for the squash meatball recipe that got me salivating on that Keeper of the Home post.  If I end up handling the squash okay, I feel like it’ll open up my options quite a bit.  It’s also one of my very favorite foods, so no complaints there.

The Stage 3 pancake also includes nut butter.  The first time I re-introduced nut butter it was an awful failure, but it was very early on (day 3?) and the nuts had not been soaked so I’m sure they were full of anti-nutrients.  This time around I was careful to buy pecan butter from a source I trust (Artisana, which makes exquisite nut butters including my beloved coconut butter) so if it’s a failure, I’ll know that my body just isn’t ready for it.

I’m a little confused as to why, in Stage 3, a relatively complex food like the pancake is introduced.  Of the three ingredients (egg, nut butter and winter squash) only one has been previously re-introduced, and it occurs to me that if the re-introduction doesn’t go well, I won’t be exactly sure how to attribute the problem.  So, I’m reintro-ing winter squash separately, first.

Also, in a bold move, I bought two apples and a banana over the weekend.  Whole eggs seem to be giving me a problem still (although the yolks seem fine) so ripe banana may have to be tried as an egg alternative in the pancake.  And the apples…well I suppose it’s just wishful thinking more than anything else.  I might slice one reeeally thinly and saute it in a ton of ghee…and see what happens.

Overall I’m feeling better than I have been for the last two weeks, although I can’t say that I feel all the way better.  More resilient, though, for sure.  So we carry on.