in my kitchen, around the farm

with a few little extra morsels

Ahhh, the end of August and with her the cooling evenings and fading bugs. Our fruit trees bow down under their embarrassment of riches. Apples fall on our heads as we eat under the sun while we still can. The cows are spending more time outside our door yelling at me to bring them their share of the apples after having gorged on the puddles of them around all of the old apple trees in their grazing forest. My root cellar shelves are filling nicely. Our freezers are being cleaned out and, soon enough, will be full, too. It feels good. I feel good. Things are where they should be whether I think differently or not. And to that intelligence I heed.

I’ll get to the food and the farm, but I wanted to just express my pleasure and joy in getting back into a consistent weightlifting program. I hired a coach about a month ago now. It took me a good, long while to find someone that I thought was the right fit for me. I’ve only had a coach once before, long ago in my twenties and she was more a friend than a coach, but I loved her. Since then I’ve just winged it on my own. So far, it’s been such a positive experience. I’m eating more than I was before. I’m moving more. I’m waking up those dozy muscles. I can feel my body enlivening and that’s pretty darn exciting. But the thing that I’m most enjoying is my altered perspective in approaching my fitness which is, of course, my health.

Throughout my adult life, I’ve always “hit the gym” when I was fed up with myself. It was out of exasperation or a desire to change something that I used as motivation to “finally get my arse in the gym”! Then, once I was regularly working out, I’d wonder “Why did I ever stop? This feels so good!” and then something would happen and I’d miss a day or a few or a couple weeks and next thing you know, I was berating myself to get back into the gym already. At a certain point, I think it’s this very perspective that keeps us from properly taking care of our bodies. We interpret exercise as some sort of punishment or restriction looming and we, consciously or not, reject it. No body responds well to some grumpy authoritarian whipping it into shape.

My goal is to just enjoy my time growing my muscles again. That’s it for now. I have faith that as I go, my body will do what my body does brilliantly. I have no aspirations to lose twenty pounds in three months or anything of the sort. I just want my muscles back. I want more of me. More strength, more joy, more peace and energy. In fact,