Happy

Ahhh! So that's what it feels like! I don't know how long it has been, probably not as long as it seems, but feeling happy like I do today is like a distant memory. It's amazing how we can somehow cope, and frame our challenges in a way that we can just keep putting one foot in front of the other. It's not that I have been unhappy, just more like a nervous wreck. Living with stress is a life sentence for mothers, but we need to understand that managing it is imperative to our health and well-being.

I'm not the best at stress-management, so the recent stress has, indeed, taken a toll. Long-time MLV readers might remember that, 18 months vegan, I had my first MRI ever which showed no additional MS plaques on my brain in two years! I really can only thank the vegan diet for this result, since nothing else had changed during the timeframe. But with the recent stress, I lost the use of my left hand for one morning -- something that has never happened before. The hand has come back, but is tingly most of the time.

Knowing how crucial stress-management is to my health, I do take certain steps which I believe have helped. Here they are:

• Go to bed as early as possible.
• Exercise almost every day.
• Eat greens every day - more than once if possible.
• Keep the "spa" channel playing on the stereo all day long (this helps the mood of all the others around here too, which further lowers my stress).
• Keep the Kindle charged and filled not only with"self-help" books, but also vegan and macrobiotic books, and most surprisingly, "escape" fiction (not trashy romance novels - I never liked those - just good fiction. It's such a relief to get lost in someone else's life. I just recently enjoyed "How to Be Good" by Nick Hornby) You may wonder, if I'm so stressed, where do I find the time to read? The answer -- in the middle of the night as I'm not sleeping because of my racing mind.
• Meditate -- so much easier said than done, and I'm not as regular with it as I should be, but everything is always better on days when it happens. Some days I don't know where to start, so a guided meditation is appreciated. My favorites are from "The Life Program" I put them on one of my hand-me-down ipods I got from the kids as they upgraded.

When I am stressed I have no appetite, so creativity in the kitchen goes away. Some days I am reduced to standing at the kitchen island, in front of a bag of dill-pickle flavored potato chips for sustenance. Those days are rough. Instead, if I can pull it together enough to feed body and soul, like I did last weekend, I can come up with something wonderful like the early autumn stew in the photo above. I simply cleaned out the crisper. I boiled a piece of kombu in filtered water and added five chopped cloves of garlic, a yellow onion, a sweet potato, four small organic carrots, a couple of organic celery stalks, a big handful of shredded kale, a can of garbanzo beans and about half a cup of dry orzo. I found a few grape tomatoes in my garden and threw those in too, and added a little organic veggie broth as the orzo swelled and made the mixture thick. Finally, once everything looked cooked, I turned off the heat, added some sherry and a couple of scallions. I squeezed a little lemon over each bowlful, which made it taste like sunshine, and we ate it in front of a crackling fire outdoors. Happy!

Today I can only be grateful for this happy feeling. Everything is not perfect, it never is, right? But it is fine, I am fine . . . no . . . blessed! I'm going out now to smile at everyone I see so I can spread the happy around. I hope you have a happy day too!