Winter has broken. My bare feet no longer hurt as I put them on the grass each morning when I greet the sun.
The days are warm enough for me to willingly expose my bare skin to soak up some much-needed rays. I do look forward to the mosquitoes this weather will bring, but I am already enjoying hearing my gecko friends return.
The older I get and the more I reconnect with Mumma Earth and Father Sky, the more I appreciate and lean into the seasons. At the same time, whether through cause or correlation, I do not know, I am taking better care of my body.
This includes the food I choose to put in my mouth.
Last summer, I decided it was time to break my breakfast cereal habit. While I wasn't the eating highly processed, sugar-filled, nutrient-depleted cereals that many people in developed countries eat, I knew I could do better. And it started with leaning into what I learned by observing the locals when I lived on the Indonesian island of Bali for more than a year:
Breakfast is simply another meal.
In many wealthy countries, we have been brainwashed into thinking that 'breakfast' is a meal where we eat only certain foods - cereal from a box or bacon and eggs on toast being two of the most common ones.
But I knew that I only had to look back a few hundred years to what my ancestors must have eaten prior to the beginning of the industrial revolution, and it would have been whatever they could grow and/or swap with their neighbours.
It took me at least six months of thinking about it before I finally gave up my breakfast cereal habit and started making salads instead. It helped that I had discovered (through the Human Design profiling system) that I am well-suited to eating cold foods. But still, that information alone wasn't enough to make the change.
It also helped that, years ago, I had watched an interview with barefoot-running advocate and author of Born to Run, Christoper McDougall, who mentioned that he had salad for breakfast while the giant easily ran along a concrete path with bare feet. At the time, my mind was blown open by this radical notion.
I can't remember what finally caused me to start chopping raw veggies soon after sunrise, but it happened, and it was easy, and I loved it.
I felt lighter, cleaner, better. And I ate salad for breakfast more mornings than not for the whole of last summer.
In late May this year, we went to Europe. I ate all manner of things on that trip, trying to prioritise vegetables in every meal but often taking the best of whatever I could get.
When we arrived home in Brisbane (Australia) in mid-June, winter had begun, and it was cold enough for me to spend every day for the next few months in a down jacket or vest. I couldn't bring myself to eat raw veggies in a house that isn't heated and is often not much warmer than the temperature outside.
I switched to something I ate a lot of in Europe - cooked oats.
Since I've learned how to be more mindful of glucose spikes and our higher-than-most-of-us-realise protein needs, I would layer in several types of nuts and seeds into my oat mix that I cooked on organic soy milk instead of water. For good measure, I'd cook in 2-3 eggs as well, as much as I thought the mixture could handle while still retaining its 'oat' taste.
It was good. I enjoyed it. It got me through winter.
But as soon as the weather began to warm, the blue tongue lizard came out of hiding, and the first dragonfly landed on a branch near where I was weeding with my bare feet on the morning grass, I knew the oats were too heavy for this body.
And I missed my vegetables.
So this morning, despite already being hungry when I began, I pulled all the salad veggies out of the fridge and started chopping before I could change my mind.
I snacked on snow peas as I topped and tailed them. I munched on cherry tomatoes I'd harvested from the garden as I pulled their green tops off. I salivated as I chopped a giant cob of corn in half, knowing that, once the salad bowl was full, this would be the first thing I would sink my teeth into.
To the raw veg mix, I added half an avocado, two chopped-up eggs that @new.things had boiled a day or two earlier, a scattering of sunflower seeds, and a couple of big spoons of pesto to help it all go down smoothly.
The bowl was giant - I could never eat that much cooked food. But since so much of it was raw, I devoured it easily and felt lighter and more satiated than when I ate a bowl of my protein-laided oats half that size.
It seems that my breakfast salad has begun again.
