Why Walk? Well, it’s good for body and mind

I love walking in my neighbourhood at this time of year. It’s early summer here in South Africa, and the city and surrounds of Johannesburg is a fabulous display of trees, shrubs and vines in flower and fruit, notably the Bougainvillea and Jacaranda trees which light up the horizon as you look to the distance. The best time to be out walking now is early morning- things start heating up from about 8.30, so I go out well before then for a fast walk, usually with my hand-held 1kg dumb-bells. I’m usually out for a half hour maximum, depending on which route I take. I don’t always walk daily; it depends on what else is lined up for the day, but I know that for me to feel ok, I need to move and to feel mobile and to know that blood is circulating freely through my limbs and organs! Luckily, I have plenty of tricks and tools of the “fitness trade” that I’ve collected over the years. I practiced and taught Hatha Yoga and Pilates, one-on-one and group classes, for about fifteen years, and the things I’ve learned through direct experience and much repetition over the years have not left me in a hurry. I know how to pack a lot into just ten minutes of exercise a day, such as with a few simple pilates moves, or a few rounds of Surya Namaskar aka Sun Salutations. And dance! The radio station I listen to on Friday mornings plays a non-stop routine of fifteen minutes of dance music if I feel like a change.

This post was partly prompted by Brian here, where he talks about his efforts and challenges in returning to exercise and a healthy eating plan. Here are three small suggestions I can make for others in his situation, especially the over-50’s:

• If you’re not sure what’s right for you at your age and stage of life and health, talk to your GP or to a professional in the health and fitness field, preferably someone who has worked with individual needs on a one-to-one basis.

• a little every day or second day is far better than trying to burn up the track once a week.

• Weight-bearing exercises benefit the muscles, bones, and joints. Try including some of these in your exercise regime or build them in along with regular walks. Take advice on things like squats and lunges (many benefits to be had here!), especially if you are overweight or have knee troubles.   

Meantime, please enjoy some of the photos I took while walking in my neighbourhood yesterday. On this occasion I left my weights behind and took my phone along so that I could snap up some of the local scenery. The Jacarandas will have dropped all their blossom within the next few weeks, and I didn’t want to risk missing that window of opportunity. Sometimes you have to strike while the oven is (still) hot ;).

Photo of Feet Walking: Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com.

All other pics by me (Amanda) on my modest Samsung J7 phone camera….

In My Garden: it’s Springtime in the South

September is Springtime down here at the very tip of Africa. Been hanging out in my garden a lot, enjoying the slow shedding of the last bits of winter, and the happy signs of summer popping up everywhere:

Beautiful Indigenous Clivias: happiest in the cool of the shade

Potted Strawberry in flower: always worth the wait…..

From the lemon tree, up a slope full of shrubs and succulents, to the cottage-on-stilts behind…..

These two little eggs belong to a family of Cape Robins who set up nest in our garden shed a few weeks ago!

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  Strelizia, aka Bird of Paradise flower. Most variants have an orange headed flower. This beauty, from the Mandela’s Gold variant, is golden yellow with touches of blue.

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Cape Gooseberries: Sweetly tart and delicious….

Apple blossoms with backdrop of leafy green almond tree

Bulbanella succulent surrounded by ornamental grasses.
The leaf of the plant exudes a gel with many skin healing properties.

And more……

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  Pear tree coming into bloom

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  Lemon with blossom

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  Lobelia flowers

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  Granadilla (Passion fruit)

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  A small oasis for thirsty birds

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  Happy just hanging here….

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  Calamondin fruit and flowers
  

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  Sweet Rocket and Violas

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  Last of the winter spinach

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  Baby almonds inside velvety husks

And so turn the seasons! wishing you all a beautiful week ♥

Knowing when to Run

View of Golden Gate, near Clarens, South Africa

‘True self-care is not bath salts and chocolate cake, it’s making the choice to build a life you don’t need to escape from’ – Brianna Wiest

Talking of escape, that’s exactly what I happened to do this past weekend. We (my husband and I) spent a weekend in Clarens, a little town about three and half hours from where we live in Johannesburg. It is a beautiful little town, surrounded by hills and mountains and with an abundance of little shops and restaurants and places to enjoy a home grown craft beer or two.  Amazingly, the place seems to be flourishing despite the devastation of Covid, although sadly there are probably casualties that I am not aware of. From Wikipedia: Clarens is a small town situated in the foothills of the Maluti Mountains in the Free State province of South Africa and nicknamed the “Jewel of the Eastern Free State”. It was established in 1912 and named after the town of Clarens in Switzerland where exiled Paul Kruger spent his last days.

The weekend had been planned some weeks back, and I was looking forward to the break- a change of scene, a breath of fresh air, the pleasure of a mini holiday at a place that we had visited and delighted in over previous visits. However I was not really thinking of it as an escape. That’s a strong word. The feeling of escape came towards the end of the weekend, while we were driving back on the Sunday afternoon, when I reminded myself that I had not checked my phone for messages or notifications, or even gone online the entire weekend since the Friday morning.  And it felt good. It felt liberating. There is a kind of delight in the nonchalance of not feeling inclined to keep checking your phone, when you really feel in your bones that it’s just not important right now, that you have bigger fish to fry, and that fish is called Enjoying Your Day, Unimpeded. And I think that we all need to go there sometimes, to that place where you don’t feel FOMO tugging at your sleeve, or your heart strings or whatever, because that thing that’s REALLY tugging at your heart strings is often what you see when you just lift your eyes from the screen and look beyond your arm’s length to the trees and the clouds, and the Maluti mountain range out there in the distance.

  

Prompted by Linda’s #1LinerWeds Challenge: 31/03/2021 : Had To Run

How to eat noxious weeds and worms, and why you would want to.

Photo by Dawn Brown on Pexels.com

It’s possible that you are inadvertently downing more critters than you realise, especially if you buy organic leafy greens or grow your own at home and pick these to eat at your table. Insects have a way of attaching to organically grown produce, and I recently found a tiny, bright green mite, still alive and attached to a curled leaf of a head of lettuce after several days in the fridge. I returned it to a sheltered spot in my garden and wished it a happy life. Even after rinsing- that’s all you need to prepare organically grown greens- I’m aware that I may miss a few, and they may be going down the hatch- MY hatch!- along with a mouthful of salad. This is not much of a concern for me. There are worse things in life! It seems that currently there is a high level of interest in the viability of insect protein as we try and explore more creative ways of feeding the millions who occupy the planet. There is plenty on the web about the nutritious properties of insects and grubs, including other pertinent food awareness issues, such as why we all need to get over ‘ugly food’ and learn to eat weeds and certain foods that we, especially Westerners, typically consider unthinkable.

It’s eco, it’s online, and it’s part of the new normal.

Corn based, biodegradable dental floss packaged in glass

Near where I live there is a retailer that I used to frequent, where the doors remain closed after months, with no sign of change. While the harsh Lockdown regulations of a few months back have been eased more recently, this particular outlet has stuck to online trading only, and it seems they may keep it that way. From what I see, they are doing well and flourishing in the wave of online shopping that appears to be a big part of the new normal. Buying online is not something that has interested me much in the past: now and then I would order a book or two from overseas, or a DVD (although these days we use Netflix at home rather than DVDs), or something nice from Faithful to Nature in Cape Town. I have always enjoyed purchasing from FTN from time to time, because they sell the kind of products that I like and believe in from an ethical standpoint, and I love the way that they consider the environment and other pertinent issues as part of the normal run of their business. At a time where I sometimes feel that trying to get things done in an efficient and ethical way is like pulling teeth or jumping through hoops, it is  pleasure to find a local, home grown company that just gets it right in so many ways.

It’s summer in the south: stepping into the sun

Indigenous South African Vygies. Good for water wise gardening

Most of the bloggers that I follow are based in the global North where winter season is round about now making its entrance. Here in the South, we are welcoming in our summer with that distinct lift to the spirits that accompanies this time of year, where you can feel yourself stepping out of the cold and into the light. We too have had our Covid related challenges: South Africa at one point this year was carrying the third or fourth highest infection rate globally, but thankfully that has changed dramatically for the better (not to take anything for granted here). Right now there is plenty of fresh green growth abounding- we have had one or two of the afternoon thunderstorms that are so typical of the Johannesburg Highveld, with some light hailstones- so cooling to the earth as they soak the soil with their nourishing nitrates following a dry and dusty September. This week we find ourselves in the midst of a bit of a heat wave, and yesterday I was in the garden before 8am in bare feet and a sundress, and by mid afternoon the temperature peaked at around 33 degrees celsius on our south facing slope.

Is there something wrong with this picture?

Brown  MushroomsPexels.com

In the early years of microwave ovens, when I still lived at home with my parents, there was the adage of ‘don’t cover your food with cling film in the microwave, it will give you cancer.’ Whether the whole truth or not, a lot of people remain instinctively mistrustful of single use plastics, whether out of concern for personal individual health or environmental health. I for one choose not to use cling film. I have not used it for many years and never have it in the house. I prefer to find other ways of wrapping and storing my food. There is enough evidence to conclude that single use plastics ultimately do our health no favours, and it cannot be argued that it is wreaking havoc upon our natural environment as we speak. They remain however, a cheap and convenient kitchen and pantry aid. It is this convenience that attracts us, and keeps us coming back for more. October is breast cancer awareness month in South Africa. And while thankfully it has not affected me personally, I know plenty of women (it can affect men too), including a sibling, who are breast cancer survivors.

A touch of Insomnia: how to tread the lonely path in the wee small hours

Photo by Vedad Colic on Pexels.com

 

Sunday night was one of those nights. You wake up in the early hours to make a quick trip down the hall and then that’s it. Sleep is well and truly interrupted. The rhythm is gone, never to be seen again– for tonight, anyway. After twenty minutes or so, despite tissue salts (#6 Kali Phos may help), conscious slow breathing and counting backwards from 100, I’m still there, firmly in the grip of something that is bigger than my toolkit and all my best intentions. Sometimes I even forget about the toolkit—I forget to check on myself and what is happening with my thoughts, and how these may be affecting my breath and heart rate. A sudden recollection of a disagreement at work or at home may lead to an unexpected welling up of outrage, resentment, or whatever, and before you know it you are confronting that person in your head, you are feeling the steaminess of anger and righteous indignation, your heart rate goes up as your blood starts to boil, and in no time you are wide awake, living those unpleasant memories, and any hope of sleep has left the building!

In Times of Trouble: Living with yourself in Lockdown.

In my garden: flowering Crassula with Bees

 

Here at the Southernmost tip of Africa, we have just passed our twentieth day in Lockdown. There is that distinct and awkward feeling of trying to carry on as normal, as if nothing unusual is happening. And interestingly, whether unusual or not, we get on with life anyway, don’t we? And many of the challenges are the same as they ever were: the frustration of a laptop which suddenly plays up, or knowing that you need to make that difficult call, or deciding what to make for dinner. But we are fortunate if those are the extent of our concerns. There are people I know who are wondering when, and even if, they are going to be able to get back to earning an income, and others, far worse, who may not even know where there next meal comes from and are dependent at this time on the goodwill of others. On the positive side, there has been a groundswell of individuals and organisations who have reached out and stepped in to help, to try and offer something to people in our midst who are living with very little means of support.

Chocolate Box pretty, but what’s inside?

The packaging is often the first thing you notice when you spot something new on the shelves, and a product’s packaging tells you a lot about the company that it’s connected to. For instance: are they using a lot of single use plastic, is the packaging unnecessarily bulky in relation to its contents, does the writing on the packaging contain helpful information about the company and its products, and what does the written information say about the ingredients used, especially in edible products? But there is a lot of other stuff to consider if you really want to understand if the company is running their business ethically, for instance how they source their raw materials, how their business impacts the natural environment, and how they treat their workers. If you visit the wonderful The Green Stars Project site, you will see that consumers (you and me) are encouraged to submit reviews using an amended version of the gold star rating system found on many retailer’s and review sites, by including a green star rating system based on social and environmental impact.