Since Feng Shui had cropped up in a recent conversation, I decided to rekindle my interest and apply some Space Clearing and Feng Shui techniques in my own home, being mindful to perform the former before embarking on the latter, otherwise you could end up doubling your troubles.
One of the missing areas in my home is the Relationships area which occurs as a result of half of my conservatory jutting out into the garden, thus creating an empty space outside the kitchen window. The cure is to hang clear, spherically-shaped crystals in the window. However, until I find these, I wondered what would happen if I squared off the area outside with my garden table and chairs, making it appear energetically as if it is another room, thus completing the bagua.
No one has proposed marriage just yet, but after a long absence of having friends to dinner on a regular basis – basically since I moved into this house 10 years’ ago – I started the ball rolling last Saturday with a dinner for my step-daughter to celebrate the end of her heroic adventure to complete a Master’s Degree in Equality Studies. Everything fell into place seamlessly, I was in heaven preparing the food, and we all had a great evening.
Since it was the Apricot and Almond Pudding that stole the show, I give below the recipe. It originally comes from Claudia Roden, and I have made a few changes.
Apricot and Almond Pudding
½ cup softened unsalted butter
3 eggs
¾ cup unrefined muscovado cane sugar or unrefined Demerara sugar
1 ¼ cups ground almonds
3 drops almond or vanilla extract
½ kilo apricots pitted and cut in half
Preheat oven to Gas 4, 180C, 350F
Oil a 12” baking dish.
Blend the butter and eggs with the sugar in a food processor. Add the almonds and extract and continue to blend to a soft cream. Pour into baking dish.
Arrange the apricot halves on top, cut side down, pressing them into the butter mixture. Bake for 45 minutes.
The pudding is lovely served slightly warm, and if you like, dusted with a little icing sugar.
The recipe works very well with pears, peeled, cored and sliced lengthways.
The signal for our satellite dish had been obstructed by this year’s outstanding growth on the lime tree in my neighbour’s garden. He had cut out some branches, to no avail, and a decision had to be made, cut down the tree or move the dish to the chimney and it was my decision, said my friendly neighbour. I chose to save the beautiful tree and have the satellite dish moved.
On Friday last, my neighbour’s brother, James, an all-round technology expert, arrived to move the dish. Ladders were produced, tools laid out on the garden table, and the operation began. The two brothers worked together until children had to be ferried to various locations and there was a pause of about an hour and a half in the proceedings, during which time James and I sat down for a cup of coffee and a chat. At this stage it was also raining quite heavily and there was nothing else to do other than to remain indoors and do what Irish people do very well, tell stories.
We talked about building houses, losing money, growing up on a farm, mothers-in-law, being true to yourself, Feng Shui, ghosts, geopathic stress, water divining, astrology, nature spirits, cats, music, the passing of loved ones and finding solutions to problems by leaving them aside for a while to give the chemistry time to work, in the interval. Intervals can be as short as the space between musical notes, or as long as it takes to grieve a loss, in each case necessary to make the music or to help us sing our song.
Without knowing anything about my past, James told me the following story. Just before his father died, he had asked James to take him to where he had been born. He didn’t wish to go to the house as other people were now living there, but he went to a particular spot in the fields to look towards a hill which contained a graveyard. He said to James ‘Outside the consecrated ground of the graveyard is where all the stillborn children are buried’. James had listened respectfully to his father, and no questions were asked. He had accepted that his father had wanted to make a return visit to where he had been born, and this observation was by-the-way.
Not long after, his father died, and at a family gathering, one of James’s aunts remarked about them being a family of eight, and James was thinking, there are only seven in my father’s family as he named all his aunts and uncles. He questioned his aunt, and she told him that there had been a stillborn baby girl in the family. And he then knew the reason why his father had wanted to return to this particular spot, to acknowledge his sister, and perhaps even to let her know he would be passing over soon.
In the telling of this story, I was so deeply moved, remembering my own two stillborn little girls, and my stillborn brother whom I had never known about until I had had my own experiences. The lid had been sealed on that particular box in the hearts of both my mother and my father, but thankfully, in more enlightened times, I didn’t have to lock up my grief. However, having been dropped into these memories all out of the blue, I have been plunged into an emotional tour of my own and my parents’ disappointments and sadness, and I realise, in my own way, in order to get on with life, I respond to many situations in ways that are not congruent with what I am feeling deep inside.
James had enabled the signal to reach the satellite dish, and unconsciously unblocked my channels for essential messages to get through. Now I can stop running away and begin living my own truth.
One of our weekly visitors is a wandering, beggar woman who wheels a pram and gathers up what she can from those whom she can persuade to part with something that will be of use to her as a bartering tool. There is often no sense in what she produces in exchange for some food. Last year, she presented me with a tall, wooden, carved ashtray. I told her she could keep it and have her potatoes and carrots for free. ‘It’s an antique, it is Chinese, it is very valuable’, she countered. Telling her that I didn’t smoke, and it wouldn’t suit my home fell on deaf ears, because all she wanted to do was make an exchange. She always gives me something. It can be a holy medal, a set of rosary beads, a book of prayer, a set of screwdrivers, a religious calendar, and without fail, when she is leaving, she says, ‘I will pray for your mother’.
For a long time, I would allow myself to get into a state of barely-concealed anger and agitation each time I saw her, wishing she would disappear and I wouldn’t have to deal with her. One day, realising that I and I alone was responsible for the way I was feeling, I decided to change my attitude, look at her properly, treat her like any other customer, and ask ‘What would you like today?’, instead of my usual thought of ‘let’s get this over with as quickly as possible’. I can assure you, I felt a million times better with this approach and knew if I practised enough, I would improve.
The next time she came back, she had a beautiful bunch of flowers for me, a mixture of buddleia and St John’s Wort, the purple and yellow complementing each other perfectly, and tied together with an elastic band. I told her she couldn’t have brought me a nicer present. She said she had picked them up the mountains. And now instead of praying for my mother, she is praying for me. On my way to collect my car that evening, I noticed a little space in a local garden that matched the content of my bouquet, rather surprisingly.
Since the source of flowers has dried up during the winter months, with the exception of a bunch of heather, it has been back to holy pictures and prayers, but now that spring is just around the corner, I can look forward to daffodils and a much eased conscience. Thank you, dear lady, for being my teacher.
Nestling into an old stone wall off the busy main street of Donnybrook in South Dublin is the gourmet food market where I have been working for the last 12 years’. It is a place to delight the senses as colours contrast and harmonise in the fruit and vegetable displays, where the aroma of freshly-baked bread draws you in further, and the fresh herbs and spices entice you to add that little bit of extra magic to a meal.
There is great satisfaction in being able to fulfil people’s daily and weekly shopping lists or supply all of the ingredients for a new recipe which they are trying out at the weekend, whether these are for Indian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, North African, European or South American cooking.
“Would you have harissa, turmeric, hing, rice vinegar, lemongrass, Jerusalem artichokes, pak choi, horseradish, fresh figs, pomegranates, quinoa …………..”, I am asked in any one day, and the list goes on.
It is fitting that this Aladdin’s Cave of food treasures, drawing people from all over the world as well as the local community and its hinterland, tucks into a corner of an ancient site dating back to the 8th century when a church was established here by a Holy Woman named St Broc, after whom Donnybrook took its name. What remains in the present day is a graveyard where Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Huguenot people were buried together, and it is this sense of unity which expresses itself to me everyday as I and my co-workers provide a service which forms a modern-day pillar of this ever-evolving, dynamic business with its roots in the soil of the area’s spiritual beginnings.
