Why I love Freecycle

I thought I had discovered the cleverest thing when a friend told me to "go find it on freecycle", and I did. But, of course, the cleverest thing had already been discovered by everyone else, which was exactly why it worked so well.

For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, go to www.freecycle.org. It doesn't take long to figure out. This is from the front page of their website:

The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,543 groups with 5,477,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on “Browse Groups” above the search box. Have fun!

The more I've used it, the more pleasing I've found it. Here's why:

1. Freecycle provides the vicarious thrill of seeing what other people throw out and pick up.
2. Freecycle satisfies your acquisitional consumerist urge AND your urge to be a green eco-bunny at the same time.
3. Freecycle gives you the opportunity to feel generous and helpful and to make others feel happy and appreciative, for absolutely no cost to anyone.
4. You can get some really cool stuff.

Happy freecycling!

Right speech

"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." - Oscar Wilde

"Be careful of the words you say, keep them short and sweet. You never know from day to day which ones you'll have to eat." - Anonymous

I remember, when I was about 13 or 14, spending a lot of time wondering and speculating about what my schoolmates thought of me. Perhaps it was just the average self-consciousness of being a teenager. Perhaps I was more self-absorbed than most. The flip side was that I also spent ages scrawling into my diary long, convoluted analyses of what I thought about everyone else. Judgement. If there's anything that defines adolescence, it's an obsession with personal judgement.

Thankfully, although the nasty corridor of adolescence seems endless at the time, we do eventually leave it behind us. Well, one hopes. And hopefully, along the way, someone teaches us some more fruitful ways of handling personal judgement. I developed a personal checklist to use as armour against the fruitless urge to submit myself to others for judgement, or to stand in judgement over them.

1. Screw what other people think. Stay true to yourself and let the rest follow. Whatever you are, whatever you do, you'll always elicit someone's disapproval. Trying to defend yourself is a pointless pursuit; smile at their disapproval. They can keep it if they wish.
2. There are only two kinds of criticism. The criticism you can learn from and the criticism that doesn't help. There's no point fighting criticism. Listen to it. If it's the first kind, you can be grateful for it for teaching you something. If it's the second kind, you can be grateful for the opportunity to smile and practice your personal strength.
3. As for your own judgements of others, there is a fine calm to be reached in recognising them clearly before reacting to the impulse to share them. The more carefully you recognise and listen to your judgements, the more you will realise how fleeting they are, how little there is to be gained by sharing them.

Of course, then I knew nothing of the Buddha. Now I wouldn't call myself a practising Buddhist, but I do draw inspiration and instruction from several teachings of Buddhism, simply because they make sense to me. Between these and the principles I have learned from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's Art of Living course, I have repeatedly found a rich reserve of wise teachings that have helped me weather many personal storms.

Right speech is the first principle of ethical conduct in Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. Right speech is defined in Buddhist texts as: "abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, & from idle chatter: This is called right speech." The Buddhists are not the only ones that define right speech negatively, or according to the kind of speech that should be avoided. Similar doctrines are echoed in Jewish teaching, which forbids "Lashon hara" (literally, "evil tongue" or "evil language"). Islam likens talking about others ("backbiting") to eating the flesh of the dead, who cannot defend themselves. Buddhist teaching does, however, go into detail about what right speech is, not just what it isn't.

Right speech is spoken:
- at the right time
- in truth
- affectionately
- beneficially
- with a mind of good will.

"One should speak only that word by which one would not torment oneself nor harm others. That word is indeed well spoken.

"One should speak only pleasant words, words which are acceptable (to others). What one speaks without bringing evils to others is pleasant."

It's worth noting that Buddhist teachers define "pleasant" as "not bringing evils to others", not as simply charming or easy. The teaching is not, therefore inviting us to speak euphemistically or in flattery. Rather it is only worth speaking when the words are not going to bring damage, torment or harm.

Whilst the dark days of adolescence are long gone, the daily challenge to approach right speech is never far away. It is a constant practice, only ever to be approached.

Everything's growing!

Granny Anita takes time out from admiring her new grandchild, and gets weeding the onions...


Onions:


Potatoes:


Lettuce and spinach:


Sweetcorn:


Broad beans:


And Kolya (with tired mummy just back from allotment):

Friday's child

Kolya Nathaniel Segura, born 10.53 am on Friday 2 May.

It was about the most tranquil, peaceful birth we could ever have imagined. My waters broke on Thursday morning, followed with a few intermittent light contractions. On Friday morning I woke up around 4.30 am with more pronounced, regular contractions. An hour later we called Paula (the doula who would assist with the birth) and midwife. Nik started filling up the birth pool (which we'd inflated a few days earlier).

At first, we were watching election results on TV, but quite soon, the labour pains had me needing to shut out everything except a quiet, single-minded focus on getting through each one. It took me straight back to the experience of my long-distance swims: simply taking one breath at a time, keeping everything very immediate. Besides some quiet background music, the room was almost entirely quiet.

The warm water was amazingly soothing as the contractions became more intense. Paula and Nikolai talked me through each contraction - focusing on breathing and visualising the cervix gradually opening and the baby making his way out. The midwives arrived by about 8.40 am - they persuaded me to get out of the pool long enough for a quick internal exam. They didn't really intervene much more than that though, besides to say that I was 8 cm dilated. I was surprised: after all the birth stories I'd heard, I was still gearing myself up for hours and hours more labouring.

By about 10.30 or so, Kolya's head started appearing, and he slowly eased himself into the world. He took his time: we spent about ten minutes with him underwater waiting for the last contraction to push his body out. Then I lay in the water with him on my chest, Nikolai splashing warm water over him to keep him warm, my fingers full of the rich waxy vernix from his skin.

Huge gratitude to the Meadowside midwives, my lovely doula Paula and, most of all, my ever-astonishing and marvelous Nikolai. And of course to Kolya for making it out with such grace. L x x

What I've learned in 39 weeks

The baby's due date is 3 May, so he could arrive any day now. I've been meaning to write some of my experience of pregnancy, but have managed to procrastinate for a whole 39 weeks - unless I blame deadlines and the more immediate demands of the new allotment. Either way, I'm thinking back on the last nine months. Here are the main things that stick out.

Lesson 1
"Worry does not rob tomorrow of it's sorrow. It only robs today of its joy."

I can't remember where I heard that quotation, but the first few weeks of the pregnancy was a sharp learning curve in not letting other people's worries bring me down. However strange it might look in retrospect, falling pregnant was a surprise for me. I just didn't expect it to happen at the time it did. It came as even more of a suprise for my parents and Nikolai's parents. I guess I hoped for delight and excitement. At the time, though, there was a lot of shock and worry. Maybe parents are programmed to worry. Nonetheless, I knew that as time went on, their worry would be replaced with excitement and joy at meeting their new grandchild. Glad to say I was right. I only hope that I can remember this for future times when I choose to worry needlessly. Whatever for?

Lesson 2
You don't need an instruction manual.

There is way too much literature on the market for expecting and new parents. Tons of it. Looking at the shelves and shelves full of reading material, it's all too easy to forget that the humans have been having babies quite successfully for more than 200,000 years, and only the last 50 years or so have seen us believing that we need experts to teach us how to have babies and what to do with them once they're born. The information is all in your body already. The most popular title on the market is "What to Expect When You're Expecting" (so ubiquitous that it makes an appearance in both the big pregnant-themed rom-coms of the last year: Knocked up and Juno), which might as well be titled "What to Worry about when You're Expecting". Am I the only person who hated this fear-and-anxiety approach to pregnancy and birth? See lesson 1 above, damnit.

In fact, the best books I've read while I'm pregnant have been those that emphasise trusting your own intuitions and having the confidence to ignore most of what's currently on offer. The best books I read were:
Three in a Bed, by Deborah Jackson
Unconditional Parenting, by Alfie Kohn
Ina May's Guide to Childbirth, by Ina May Gaskin

Lesson 3
The stuff on TV and in movies is made up.

Morning sickness: I thought I wasn't actually pregnant because I never got morning sickness. Fact is, only 1 in 3 women suffer from it. That's a minority.
Cravings and aversions: I got kind of fond of yogurt and fruit and went off chocolate and coffee. I didn't wake up at 3 am demanding weird combinations of deli produce. Your body will tell you what you want and need.
Exhaustion: No one told me I'd need 2-hour naps daily for the first ten weeks or so. They were the best, though, feeling the wave of exhaustion creep up on me, and then curling up in bed, simply because my body was giving me strict instructions to do so. I think what I liked best was the strong sense of simply knowing from my physical state what I needed to do.
Rushing off to hospital: This is the biggest myth - that women go into instant and agonising labour, and need to pile into a car and screech off to the hospital before anything goes wrong. Screenwriters love it, because it's an excuse for instant dramatic action. Actually, these days, most hospitals want you to stay at home for the first stage of labour at least, and giving birth at home is (thankfully) returning to its rightful place as a normal option. Which brings me to

Lesson 4
Hospitals are not the best places for labour or birth

For most of this pregnancy, I was planning a hospital birth. Friends asked: what about a home birth? I shook my head. I would feel safer in a hospital, thank you.

It wasn't until quite late in the process that I stopped and thought about where I'd gotten this idea that birth was "dangerous" and that hospitals were "safer". Turns out that all the research points in the opposite direction. Birth is only risky to mother and/or child when things go wrong. Which should be very uncommon. Hospitals are places that are full of people who are ill, injured or traumatised. They are not soothing or comfortable environments. If you ask someone where they feel most relaxed and safe, chances are that they won't say "at a hospital".

Instinctively, a labouring mother - like an animal in labour - seeks out a place of comfort and safety, preferably somewhere reasonably private, and not too bright, where she can be closed in and feel safe and enclosed for the labour. Big open spaces, bright lights, a sense of the unfamiliar - anything that makes the mother feel instinctively threatened - can shut down the labour process or even reverse it (as Ina May Gaskin documents in her book recommended above). Even the NHS, these days, supports home birth and documents better outcomes for mothers that give birth at home (shorter labours, fewer complications, fewer medical interventions) than for those who give birth in hospital.

It took me months to realise that the idea of going to hospital for an uncomplicated birth was making me anxious and uncertain. I don't have any problem with going into hospital if I need to - but going into labour is not enough of a reason to need a medical setting. If the day comes, and there's some sort of complication, I'm quite open to having medical technology available to me. But for now, the plan will be to have the baby at home.

Lesson 5
There's no need to rush

Pregnancy can be a delight. It slows you down immensely, and without much choice, you have to do things at a manageable pace, forgive yourself if you're less productive than usual, and let it all go, because of course all this slowness and gentleness is simply in the interests of the little life inside you. It's a lovely reminder to be present in each action, and it's also a somewhat sterner reminder for those of us that forget to do so for ourselves the rest of the time. I know many women who only go the extra mile for others, not for themselves. Women who are extraordinarily gentle on every person around, except themselves, on whom they are extraordinary harsh. Pregnancy is great practice for being gentle on yourself. I've found myself eating with care, moving with care, thinking carefully before I do things that might make me tense or pressured or tired or anxious. I've smiled at myself and forgiven myself more often than I usually might. I only hope I remember this practice of gentleness when my body is separate from my child's again.

Allotment progress!

So I've managed to put in a couple of hours each day, just a little digging (and a lot of meeting the neighbours and making new friends). Even Nikolai got into it today, and we're well proud of our progress after a week...

By Friday afternoon, I'd dug most of the far plot, and with some help from Martha, found a few scrap boards with which to start some very basic raised beds:



Nothing like getting the man involved:

We've planted potatoes in the big middle area, and the two end beds are ready for some onions to go in soon.

My allotment!

So you want people to be friendly to you on British buses? Try being 8 months pregnant and carrying a garden fork. (Wearing wellies helps too.) Everyone smiles. Old ladies ask you whether you've planted tomatoes yet. Old men will talk about anything. Children stare (but then, children always stare.) And all this because I've managed to secure myself half a plot on an allotment not far from here.

I know sweet f***-all about gardening, of course. But the internet is my friend - there are several wonderful online chat forums where I'm gathering all sorts of new ideas. Bought a spade and a fork. And off we go.

The whole plot:

I decided to start with the end next to the beanpoles. The pictures show before - and then after yesterday and today's few hours of digging.... more progress to follow :-)