First food post! Avocado pasta

So, since I told you I am on a journey for health, I should also tell you I've been doing a lot of research about how to eat and feed the body rather than my face. :) Since starting this healthier diet, my nails have gotten stronger, my skin has been clearer, and I have had nearly abundant energy. Green smoothies have been a really easy way to get veggies in first thing in the morning. It also has changed the way we feel about how food tastes. I've noticed that when I skip veggies and fall back into bad eating habits, I get sick easily and get tired and feel yucky. Since February, our diet trends have been increasingly more healthy and each day I learn a little more about what to eat and how.

Today's little slice of yumminess was an avocado pasta recipe. I found it on Pinterest, like most yumminess out there.

http://www.blissfulbblog.com/blog/2012/2/16/blissful-eats-with-tina-jeffers-creamy-avocado-pasta.html

I followed the directions at this blog, but changed a few things. I used one more avocado than they called for, I also probably used a bit more spinach, we didn't garnish with basil and cheese and I used a box of noodles, no idea if it was a pound or not. I wasn't particularly worried. Oh, and I used three jalapenos instead of 1/4 of one. They're early in the season, so they weren't hot at all, but added a nice flavor.

Avocado Pesto Pasta just after I made it.
I am no pro at photos, but it looks pretty tasty.

This meal is gluten-free. I used Quinoa noodles. I have a picture of the box of noodles above. We get them at Whole Foods and find them more hearty than regular pasta and really prefer the taste. They have just as many carbs (which our bodies need anyway, just in the right distributions, and not simple carbs, but I digress), but they're more work for your body to break down because they're not made from just wheat flour.

Anyway, this meal was amazing. I could really taste the fresh flavors. I have a really REALLY small food processor, so this took like 3x as long as it should have, but it was really pretty easy anyway.

Enjoy!

My yard before anything got done to it. It's not the best view of the yard,
but you'll see how different it looks in later pics.
This is one of my main projects for the year.

Sprouts growing on my window sill. We have covers
for them so they are in their own mini-greenhouse, but
we got a little mold, so they're airing out.
These little guys are Cantaloupe. They are supposed to grow
indoors until July when we can plant them here.
All around them are tomatoes, jalapenos and celery.

So, this (to the left) is my BIG project for the year. That and my garden. I am giving gardening a good old first-run this year. This weekend, we're breaking ground on it. Can't really plant much more than carrots until after the frost. This last week, we got a decent frost and our yard looked like it had been attacked by the laundry. We covered everything and it made it just fine, but there's no reason to make it harder on ourselves. :) The garden is starting indoors. We got these little pallets. They're really brilliant. You sprout seeds in them and then the containers come out and you can plant the plants and reuse the containers. The tray on the bottom lets the plants drain and then these plastic covers convert it into a little greenhouse biodome thing. It's excellent. We have lettuce and carrots and cantaloupes sprouting right now and several more on the way.

Some of my very favorite memories growing up are of gardening with my dad and picking strawberries with my mom. My dad did all the hard work (tilling and fertilizing the garden and he dug the furrows and little holes for the seeds) and then he'd tell us how many seeds per hole in the ground and we'd plant them and cover them up and water them with him every day. Later in the summer, of course, it was my dad doing the weeding and us eating radishes, cherry tomatoes, strawberries and raspberries in mass quantities, but we were "helping." Gardens are for eating, right? Well, my dad and mom are coming for Easter and they're going to help me start my first garden of my own this weekend. It's going to be really fun.

Yes, my husband routinely closes his eyes for pictures and the dog usually looks away, that means we have a LOT of pictures like this. This was one of our early hikes this year. We are looking forward to getting a lot more of these in!

My other favorite passtime lately has been the hiking of the amazing and lovely hills that I live near. I am thankful for the mountains and for the chance to enjoy them. We have our tent ready to go and plan to spend a weekend out camping soon. Hope you are enjoying Spring.

Remember the mantra and live each day a little better than the one before.

God bless you.

Getting right down to where I've been

Hello to all of you.

Before I really launch this blog, I should give some background and history. I intend this blog to be a place where I share my experience as I journey every day towards health and wholeness. I need to find who God made me to be. I need to sing when I am alone, I need to dance in the rain, and run races just because I can. I need to live my life instead of letting it fly by while I work in the wings. I've spent 27 years of my life slaving away to please some unknown factor. I think at the bottom of it all is me. I have been working to earn my own approval, and as my own worst critic, I have driven myself beyond reason to achieve something vastly and ultimately unachievable.

And I am done! I am free, but a change like that doesn't come easily.

My dog, Sheba and I in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa

This past year has brought me to the absolute edge of myself and beyond the brink of anything I thought I could survive. I'd actually had nightmares of this exact situation unfolding....and then it did. Several of my friends and family have followed my blog postings at www.thefeuchts.com and know what the last little while has been like, others of you probably have no idea.

When your bike breaks down in Africa, you walk.

Brief synopsis (as brief as it can be): My husband and I got married three years ago and basically immediately started working on plans to move to Guinea-Bissau, West Africa to work as missionaries. Since the time we decided to go, absolutely everything about our vision, project, and even the organization we went with has changed. We ended up moving there in September after long, hard work to produce the funding needed for such an endeavor and all the "normal" things you do when you're moving yourself, your spouse, and your 100lb dog (did I mention our "little" pup is a rescue pet?) to Guinea-Bissau as the first people on a project and first missionaries with a new organization. Everything was new, and everything was like wading through frozen molasses. We pushed through. That had been my outlook for a long, long time. Honestly, as long as I have been alive, I have expected to need to "beat the odds" in life and I have seen it as my responsibility to PUSH as hard as I could to make things happen.
In September, I finally made it to where I had been going for years. In September, my life felt like it took off and was just beginning. And then a couple weeks later in September, the unthinkable happened.

I     got      sick.

Not like a cold. Not like anything ever before. My body just refused to keep on going. I had been in West Africa for a month out of 48 months I was planning to spend there. A month later, I came home.  My life stopped moving.

The farthest West you can get in Africa

I have not ever had a moment where I didn't have a project, a challenge to overcome, a difficulty to push through, etc. I had FINALLY made it to Africa where I dreamed of being, and it felt like the continent had somehow spit me out and I was back home in a sad daze. The thing I had the entire time was confidence that I was not ever outside God's plan, no matter how far outside my plan I had arrived. Aside from that, I still know almost nothing, but I am certain that He holds me every day and that His plans for me are good and right and that He has never let me go.

I came across Exodus 14:14, which in its entire context is medicine to a hurting soul. Just the verse says,

"The Lord will fight for you, you need only to BE STILL."

I have never EVER been still in my life. I finally hit a junction where I had literally no other choice and I fell into stillness that began to heal my heart.

Poor large dog doesn't really fit in that space. She's a trooper. This is on her way home.

At the beginning of December, with doctors completely stumped, my husband and I decided he should come home. We spent a total of two months on separate continents before we were reunited. He began the process of leaving a life we'd only just set up. I continued to remember being a prospective missionary and being told a story of someone who had done all their fundraising and got to the field and shortly thereafter had to return home because of the wife's health. I remembered hearing that story and feeling my heart flip and squirm and stop for a second at the thought of that happening. That story had haunted my fundraising and my sleep and everything until it actually became MY story and I watched the fringes of my own life come unraveled and break away in a strong wind that surrounded me.
At the end of December, my husband, my father (who had gone to Africa to see this country we loved and to help my husband with the process of moving back home), a great friend, Fernando, and our 100lb dog were in a car moving between the borders of three African countries in zones currently torn by guerrila warfare. My husband got out of Guinea-Bissau a DAY before the country's roads were closed down because of a coup attempt. At the same moment, I sat at a doctor's visit that radically rocked my tattered world to its core.

In September, I'd had a feeling, like a whisper, in the back of my head that said something terribly wrong had happened inside my body. In December with my family strewn across the globe and out of communication, two different doctors confirmed that the whisper had been the truth. I had been pregnant....about two months along....and lost the baby in September. We weren't trying to get pregnant at the time, but so many things haunted me; some strange, some standard, all areas deeply hurting. I had flushed my baby down a toilet in a country that doesn't have a sewage system and I had no idea where the pipes I flushed had taken my child. Had my ambition, my insane inner drive to accomplish something, been the thing that killed my own child? How does someone tell her husband over a bad Skype connection that she miscarried his child. And is there any way to KNOW months later and across the world if this is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what really happened.

No.

 I haven't shared that with the world publicly, but it's freeing to have it written down. It's one of the truths of my life and it makes me who I am today. I don't owe it to anyone to share that, I want to share it because I believe that our weakest, most painful moments make us stronger in the end. I believe that sharing this with other people who have had similar experiences is healing for all of us. Why is it that when our hearts break, we seek isolation? Why is it that when I hurt the worst, I don't reach out and ask for help? I don't know.
I am moving through stages of acceptance of many things. I spent years driving my entire existence to move to one of the world's poorest, most underdeveloped countries so I could make a difference. I had lived there in 2007 for half a year and vowed to go back and change the place. I had faces, names, and known needs in my hands just 8 months ago and I walked out. Had this been God's will, or my own? Was it God's plan all along for it to go this way? I don't know. I may never know and that is alright.

Back on the same continent again after 2 months

Meeting my husband, my dad, and my dear world-traveling dog (who saved our lives in Guinea-Bissau, and for whom I am extremely thankful) at the airport was surreal. I remember feeling so disconnected and so unfamiliar. My husband lost over 40lbs in Africa and when I saw him again, it was like meeting a stranger. My Dad had returned my family to me and it meant the world to know he would literally go to the end of the earth to help bring us home. I saw God the Father reflected in my dad's heart for us.

Since then, we spent a month (the sixth month out of the last year and our ninth since getting married) without a home; living with parents and friends. We bought a house in 2009 about 9 months after we got married, and it took us about 3 months longer than we expected to get the house, so we were "homeless" then, and then again for 6 more months while we left the country and then tried to settle in West Africa and then moved home. We had months of having a home in there, too, but it was a long (and circular) road.

This house we bought (I will have to tell you about it in another post some time) is a tremendous blessing. We live in our home again and are enjoying simple things like watering the plants and not working feverishly on projects. My husband, Jason, is still looking for a job, and I am confident he will find the right one at the right time. Right now, I am recovering, I am spending time looking for things that bring me health and wholeness. Everything from learning how to eat to feed my body to planning house projects and a garden. I plan to post my experiences as I journey to wholeness and joy here. I intend to share my garden, my home, my cooking adventures, new yoga experiences, my life lessons and experiences and I hope you'll read along and share your life with me as well.

This is my mantra lately:

"Each day, I am a little more whole, a little more settled and a little more myself. It's a baby-step process and I am getting where I should go in no particular hurry. Each day is a gift and I am thankful for it." ~ From me.