Lily and I wondered into the barn today to find our most relaxed horse having a rodeo all by herself.

The other horses were scattered around the walls of the barn while Maise bucked and spun in the middle. Concerned by her odd behaviour we took a closer look and discovered she was being bitten by a large bug on her back and was unable to reach it with her teeth or tail. She was trying to buck it off. She is a lovely sensible mare and a few soft words from me and she stopped her efforts and let me brush it away and give a good scratch to the area bitten. It took my two swipes at the bug to dislodge it, it is honestly the biggest wasp looking thing I have ever seen. Saw my first one the day before on Lily’s potty, hope I don’t see anymore now that I know they bite, hard! This evening the horses were still in the barn, waiting for the relief the night will bring when the biting bugs go to bed.

Lily had a great day, puttering about, playing, watching all the animals and I found her favourite book again. It has only been missing since the beginning of the week but we read it many times to make up for the lost time. I love that she enjoys being read to so much, I hope it stays with her as I love books myself. We are all readers in our family so at the very least she will be well exposed to all kinds of books.

The cat just came in, it is a bit freaky being up so late (almost midnight) and the house so quiet, to all of a sudden hear footsteps coming confidently to the room, my heart beats quickened for just a moment before the brain kicked in.

My energy levels are way up these days which is good, lots is happening as I’ve said before, and their is no end in sight but that is good too. Today I challenged myself many times over when placing various phone calls to a few organisations here. I was not feeling very brave about trying to talk in french but in the end I did okay. A few times there would be words I’d never heard before and the person I was talking to had no other way of explaining what they were trying to say. In these moments I would feel a tinge of despair as I really would like to have the answers I am speaking but, in the end I just had to relax and have a bit of a laugh, stress was not going to help. Ice cream did but the bit of stress did not. In the end I found a lead to a bilingual person who may be able to help. Fingers crossed I can get in contact with them tomorrow.

Another beautiful day with the two loves of my life.

Ever battened down the hatches for a bit of peace from the wind and it ends up feeling like you invited a hurricane to try and blow your world apart?

It feels like we are in the centre of a storm right now, hand in hand and solid together, but having no idea which way the storm is heading and how long it will last nor what damage will be left in its wake. Life is like that every now and then, thank goodness for strong foundations, great loves (near and far), Lily cuddles and of course Heilkunst. With all that in place and our strong faith that there is a flow to life, a reason for everything and God as we understand Him, has made certain laws, we do our best to take care of our responsibilities and let go of anything outside that.

Simultaneously while the storm swirls around us so many wonderful things are happening right now that we can’t stop smiling, laughing and being thrilled for where we are going, no matter the challenges along the way. Friends of ours are following their passions, great ones and small ones and sharing their excitement with us; from new bicycles, a puppy needing a name, tiny houses for maximum freedom of energy, and a growing community of like minded souls for the South African project, we can’t help but notice how incredibly blessed our life is. Add that to our daily little joys of Lily’s excitement over discovering her world, two healthy little chicks growing their first feathers, me thinking Denis was crashing about in the kitchen only to discover the two year old horse in the house… again! We have an exciting and fulfilling life.

Housekeeping note: Denis has noticed a few typos lately in my entries. I don’t always prioritise editing above family time. If Denis and Lily are happy playing/chilling amongst themselves, for sure I will read and reread until I have picked out all the issues I can find. However, if time has slipped away from us, as it sometimes does, and Lily is ready for nursing or bed, I am afraid I just don’t care about autocorrect choosing the wrong word, for a missing comma, for a run on sentence, and other little errors. I am telling you now, I am sorry it makes it hard to read at times, that it can take away from the meaning, that it can be a annoying to read silly errors. Mont you, though I am sorry it will probably happen again and again, but never on purpose.

As I touched on yesterday Miasms are a predisposition to certain characteristics.

Most of us understand DNA and how we have two bits of info for each gene and only one is active. Simple things like the colour of our eyes to family traits including emotional and physical aliments and strengths. Miasms are like DNA in that they are inherited but it is not only genetics that play a part. It is also not just individuals that can express miasmatic traits but also entire societies and cultures.

The Syphilitic miasm has a general theme of Self/Destruction also a feeling of begin trapped. Each of the eight chronic miasms have a general theme, getting progressively more debilitating. Syphilis is number seven. Though a strong Syphilitic presence will not indicate a strong presence in the other seven miasms. Each person will show their own ‘recipe’ of influence from each of the eight, but themes will run in a family.

Syphilis can show in children as excessive growing pains, or bone pain in adults. All ulcerative conditions have the essence of Syphilis, things breaking down, destruction, decay, self harm, excessive ‘permeant body art’ such as tattoos and piercings. are a few physical manifestations. Mentally they man develop strange behaviours, even to themselves but they are unable to stop, often fearing and sometimes succumbing to insanity. They can have compulsive behaviours or feel the desire to do one off weird things. They are irritable often lashing out at others and blaming and criticising nursing a life sucks attitude. This can develop into a deep depression leading to committing suicide, not simply having suicidal thoughts.

They develop addictions easily, often serious hard core drugs are involved. Alcoholism is often present in families with this miasm present, and the familial bond is weak with individuals finding it hard to connect to each other and sometimes people outside the family as well. They are often worse in the evenings with any symptoms and so they can dread the night, (self medicating) to get through until morning.

Syphilis is not much fun, even a mild dose, though mild versions can present in charismatic leaders or self talk they’the energy still leads the follower to do the things they know they should not, whether it is one more drink or other addiction or the more horrific acts of mass suicide or murder as has been enacted out by members of cults run by notoriously sick yet charismatic individuals.

Oh a happy note, Heilkunst will remove the layers of this and all the other miasms so patients do not suffer the seasonal (or when very prevalent, constant stresses) of the Syphilitic energy.

To end things on a lighter note, yet keeping with the theme. Today I was running around France with Denis and Lily trying to sort some paperwork that has been giving me grief. One place gave me a number to call so we found free WiFi at a McDonalds and I watched as Lily ate her first french fries. Not something that will happen often, but she sure loved them with their addictive taste.

Today Lily is seven months old. I shared a tiny bit of chocolate no bigger than my fingernail with her to celebrate. Her dad took her walking in the forrest to watch the trees say in the wind.

Yesterday was the Summer Solstice, our longest day of the year, the first day of summer. It was a gorgeous day here on the farm, it was so nice we ended up being awake until after 11pm. It was also Father’s Day in Canada and many other countries around the world. I called my dad, and wished Denis a happy day, of which we decided, like we did for me, that each day is a special day with Lily in our life. Yep we are that sappy! However we all not all goo, we also have gook, and and that is not nearly so warm and fuzzy. This time our gook took centre stage for a few heated chats, some ending in laughter and some not.

You see, there has been a bit of tension in the last two days as we try and balance our current moods. This is only a problem when we both retreat to the most extremes of our personalities. He with the-devil-may-care attitude and I with the toe-the-line, fear-the-authority mindset (though my heart is libertarian). Time, talks, naps and awareness of the influences of the miasmatic enemies just coming into play with the arrival of summer helped to sort the cause and so lessen the impact of the feelings. Carrying on with Heilkunst care will get us through the rest of the bumps of the season.

Many of you reading this will wonder what I mean when I refer to miasmatic influences. They are the chronic inherited characteristics you possess, passed through the family from one generation to the next but also they can be your karmic baggage. Often both. We all have them, they manifest differently for each of us, but they are there. Depending on our life path they can either be dormant or active at various times and good life choices (from eating well to mental and spiritual health) can help to dissipate the symptoms they cause. There is a lot more to the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How but that will do for now.

Right now we have headed right into the start of one of the eight chronic miasms, Syphilis. I want to spend more time talking about this so I’ll leave off here and start again tomorrow. For a quick example of what a person suffering from an extreme Syphilitic mindset you need to look no further than Heath Ledger’s “Joker” in Batman: The Dark Knight.

With much love, until tomorrow.

Truth or Ignorance? That was the real question being posed in The Matrix, but unlike The Matrix it is not a one time only choice. You make it every day, often you are unaware of making the choice because it is easy to autopilot the normal choice you have always made. Changing the norm is not always an easy choice.

The hero in the movie when faced with his turn to ‘make the choice’ seems to understand intellectually that the red pill, though packaged with liberty, (the ultimate goal) tastes like crap, burns, cuts, isolates you and will make you suffer every imagined and unimagined horror. All along you know you are responsible for all this new personal suffering. The blue pill is packaged in slavery but its what you know, it is highly attractive, it supplies instant gratification and the best part, lack of accountability.

It’s easy to want the hero to choose the Red Pill. It would not have been much of a movie if he chose the blue one. It is easy to say we want the Red Pill ourselves but the reality is not so cut and dry. You see if we pick the Red Pill we have to keep picking the Red Pill over and over and over. We have to keep picking it when times get tough, when the ‘Oracle’ tells us we are not the one, when we are in despair.

What I wanted was a map of this land of accountability and liberty, I wanted to cut down on the amount of suffering I would face in choosing my path. I found it in the genius of Rudi Verspoor and Steven Decker who discovered Heilkunst hidden within the works of many great men who came before them. They distilled down and translated discoveries of a few great thinkers/scientists/philosophers and others who questioned what they had been told. Who chose the Red Pill though they were often vilified for it, some even murdered. This map allows for many opportunities to say ‘enough of the truth, I am okay with this amount of good and bad’. But it also allows for those who want to see how far the rabbit hole goes, to keep digging.

I am a digger, and so is Denis. We want more, we want to go as far as possible. When Denis asked to join me on this journey four years ago I warned him, it will change everything, you might lose everything and you will at times not like it. He wanted in on the ride. So we started at the beginning, diet. First you correct the regimen to remove symptoms of poor health that are caused by not taking care of your body correctly. Then we looked at our history of traumas, going over each big one to remove the shock of it, the impingement it left on our life energy. Then to the chronic miasms, the false beliefs and deeper and deeper the rabbit went.

All this hard work and we still find time for horsing around.

She’s made it off the bed, thank goodness we moved the mattress to the floor yesterday.

Lily’s crawling efforts have been improving dramatically and I had become a bit nervous that one day soon she was going to plop off the side when we were distracted for just a second to long. So we moved the mattress to the floor and today I hovered over her as she put first one hand then the other on the floor, she pulled and got her belly off without bumping her head! My nerves could not take the knees going off so I snuck in a bit of help. She is such a little thinker, she did not cruise off right away but felt the wood beneath her fingers, rocked a bit, looked around and waited until she found something she wanted to get. She has since been off the bed and back on a few times. She is getting it sorted, and fast!

As she is sorting so much of her world. She has this insatiable quest for information, such curiosity and a bit of crankiness when she is not able to get as much info/action as she wants. She watches everything we are doing, is starting to make her first mama sounds though it is not used to get my attention yet, she is simply finding her voice. Her sometimes very loud voice! She is currently on the floor with an empty bottle of water getting cranky because she wants the full bottle of water. However, her daddy took that one away when she drank so much she puked.

Our little chicks are also growing fast, one has a bit of a sore leg, from some research on the internet it seems it has probably twisted its leg, something time will fix. I offered a couple applicable homeopathic remedies for twisted joints and we will see if the little one heals quickly. I sure hope so, but for now I have named it Hoppy, as it travels more like a bunny than a chicken.

The plumbers came today! Hooray for hot water. What more can I say about that? 🙂

There is so much going on in the world, it seems like everything is on fast forward, I would have loved to have been able to be in a few countries this week, just sitting on couches offering support to those who have had heartache and pain. To make a few meals, run a few bubble baths and offer protection from the sometimes confusing world that can seem so unfair.

Grateful for my family and hot water tonight.

So all that power in me did not want to sleep until the sun was coming up.

Denis and I just shared a thought about how good we are at change but that we are knocked off rhythm’s easily. We can’t even keep to the tune of our favourite songs when they are playing. I have currently played Johnny Cash’s ‘Get Rhythm’ to inspire me. We get a good rhythm going and then it gets interrupted for some reason outside of us and like a bird our rhythm just flies out the window. This is not a new eureka moment but maybe, just maybe this time we will protect our good rhythms and let go of the others. A good rhythm is having clean nappies for our Lily all the time, with 14 that means almost daily washing so they have a full day to hang dry. Add a late washing to a rainy day and we are running into trouble.

Which reminds me, last nights interrupted rhythm started with Lily turning her evening cat nap into a sleep. I was unprepared, the bath water (still pot bathing) was heated and in the bathtub waiting for us to get in, she was nappy-less and I had not bothered to do my evening routine of hygiene. The first 30 minutes went by and I waited for her to wake, then and hour, and two and then at three hours (now 11:30pm) she reached up and touched my face. I gave her a cuddle and put her on the potty! We made it in time and within half an hour she was ready for bed… properly ready for bed. But not me, that plus my big day and chatting with a friend until 11pm had me watching the sun come up just after 5am.

One day of lost sleep is not the end of my productivity but I sure appreciated a couple naps with Lily today and I am looking forward to crawling into bed tonight. To find our rhythm again tomorrow. I think that will be my goal, to find the rhythm within the chaos. Teamwork is the way to go. Together we can do the work of 3, if we try it alone we are not very productive. Like right now I can only write because Denis is playing with Lily. Tomorrow I will help him by writing a letter, and he will play with Lily while I work on the computer updating files and organising our paperwork life. He will make me giggle and sit up straight. Together hopefully we will both get the nappies out on the line in time to have the day to dry.

Never had a day like this before.

Woke up to my emails, as normal, and had an unusual email with good news but it was a bit daunting for me personally at first. Our girlfriend on the west coast of Canada has been storing two large boxes and two kitchen toys (VitaMix blender and a KitchenAid stand alone mixer) for us. Her news to me this morning? They have bought a new house and are moving in about five weeks. Since she is due to give birth in about seven weeks she has admitted that if we don’t want our stuff to be lost for the foreseeable future we need to ship it to Ontario before they move. I do want a few thing so I might as well ship it all to my mom’s for the summer, so I can go through it. Now I need to sort out shipping from here in France, which was as a bit overwhelming at first but then I felt this long since sleeping power of mine reawaken.

It is time! Time to come alive, to step out of my hard earned skill of chilling and time to get a whole bunch of stuff done!

I feel good, I feel ready, more in control of how I spend my energy, I can discern between productive, heathy choices and dead ending, false belief choices.

This feeling has stuck with me and I have had more than one test of its ‘stickiness’. Lily lost it coming home from shopping. So bad that we had to pull over, for the first time ever, to see what was wrong. Still not certain what it was but the cool part was every part of me remained calm.

Then I got news that someone very close to me lost their custody battle. I imagine there is nothing worse (outside illness and death) that a devoted and loving parent could suffer. To not be part of their child’s day to day life. To have a stranger decide that for you. Court and other such systems (insurance to name one) have such power to destroy lives and have no liability to those lives.

Still my inner peace holds strong. There are no painful emotions I can feel that will help my loved one. There are no feelings of panic that will get my belongings across Canada easier. There are no feelings of worry that will help my Lily when most likely she is simply overtired.

The sun is setting and I just finished reading about the power of love from a letter Albert Einstein wrote to his daughter. Profound that I would read that today, a day when I could have been thrown off balance and into any one of the versions of a fear state, but instead I am peaceful, filled with strength and motivation, and not so concerned about the trials I am sure to encounter. I need to keep moving in this direction, to get to that place of unshakable contentment.

A Life of Love

Two fluffy little balls of fun joined us over the weekend.

On Saturday two of the remaining three eggs had their occupants starting to break free and on Sunday we had two fluffy little yellow chicks popping in and out from under the two hens. I got Denis to say prayers for them each night with me since Saturday so that they will be safe from the ‘stealer of eggs’, who I am guessing is a rat. So far so good. We just spent about 10 minutes watching them eat and drink before they tucked back in under the hens for bed. This is Lily and my second time doing this today and last night when we did it the rooster kept peeking at us from the other side of a low wall. Lily did not forget and she kept checking to see if the rooster was going to look at her. He never did but she was waiting.

Her attention, her memory and her understanding of what we are saying is incredible. When I was heading out to do the evening chores I asked Denis if he wanted to bring Lily to feed the hens and chicks. He said to ask Lily and when I did she got the biggest grin. She is also wonderful at following what you want her to see by pointing at it, she almost always spots the thing you are pointing out.

It was a busy weekend with people again, our little girl is a social butterfly. She is developing a reputation of the little girl who is all smiles and never cries. We were actually asked if she does cry! She loves meeting people and certainly has her favourites.

Today was a typical Monday for us, we regroup and rest and try to start our week off with a bit of work to get the momentum up. Today I had the brilliant idea that Denis could use the tractor to cut the laneway grass down and then I would pick it all up and throw it in the bucket on a second sweep of the lane. I figured since I’d be the one picking it up he’d be out of the grass, nope, at one point it looked like it was softly snowing there was so much grass seed in the air. Poor man, he is so good to me, he never complained and just kept driving. We still have no hot water so he had to follow up the work with a cold shower to try and save himself from the allergies that would plague him if he was covered for too long.

Lily is giggling with her daddy right now and I am distracted, they took the dogs for a run for the first half of this post but now they are home and I, as always, have trouble focusing when they are with me. I don’t imagine it will get any easier as she gets older, the fun will just be more active.

Friday already?

Today zoomed by, and so did the week it seems.

Last night I stayed up to late thinking I would catch a lecture at 1am. I gave up an hour before it started as I was certain my brain would not handle the topic in its semi comatose state. I will have to catch the recording. This morning we awoke to the plumbers arriving. Denis helped them around the house and they left. Due to the language barrier we are not sure when they are coming back. We get to bucket bathe again tonight.

Lily and I had a bit of fun late this morning while Denis was out with the chainsaw. We had just finished nursing when we heard the very distressed cry of a bird, in the house. We ran to its rescue and had to discuss with the cat who was holding it in its mouth why we do not bring home our dinner alive. The kitty (Alfie) was less than impressed with our opinion and growled at us. Undaunted, we harassed the cat until the bird was let go and we pounced on the birdy. Taking it upstairs to our bedroom, Lily and I sat quietly with the little sparrow until it had recovered enough that we opened the door and away it flew to the forrest. I am so happy Lily is having all these experiences for me to tell her about when she is older. She was so gentle she barely moved the feathers on its head when she asked (in her way, by staring at my eyes and then what she wants then back at my eyes) to touch it.

I had a big baking day, the rain fell steady and warm outside until well into the evening when we all went outside to enjoy the freshness since the heat never left. It’s been a fun day.

I spoke with a friend, watched a TedTalk, hung out with Lily and Denis and I think I have come to a conclusion. I think I will retire from the work force. When people hit retirement they are supposed to spend all that time they used to on working to make a living on simply living. Enjoying life. Exploring all the things they have wanted to do for so long but felt they did not have the time. It does not mean I won’t contribute, nor does it mean I won’t make money to support our family, it just means I will do things because I love to and not because it makes money alone. There are all sorts of speakers who talk of this, inspirational speakers, successful business people, simply happy people, people who have been so close to death that doctors wonder how they are alive… they all give the same message and today for me I am applying it to my life by retiring.

Happy retirement to me! I can’t wait to meet everyone who wants the same freedom to choose to only do what you love.