Beautiful Flowers
The month of March is an excellent time to decorate our homes with some beautiful flowers. To treat yourself, try making a special occasion of visiting your local florist and make a gorgeous bouquet by choosing your favourite flowers.
Let your creativity flow as if you are a young child exploring all the different flowers in a field! :-) Choose the flowers that uplift you and the colours that excite you. What an experience this can be! And a beautiful small bouquet can be just as joyous an experience as a large one. I recently had an experience which taught me just this:
As many of you know, I love flowers! Last month, I bought a beautiful candy-coloured bouquet, with twenty tulips, which I set in a large tulip vase. Returning home later that day, I suddenly remembered Mothers Day was just two days later (on February 12th in Norway). I quickly decided to visit my mother with some of my beautiful new tulips. Since her favourite vase was smaller than mine, I divided the bouquet into two bunches and arranged the rest of the tulips in a glass to stay in my favourite flower spot in my living room. The idea was fabulous!
In addition to thrilling my mother with a Mother´s Day bouquet of gorgeous tulips, I found that I have been admiring this smaller bunch of tulips more than I had admired a flower arrangement in a long time! There is something so wonderful about the simple beauty of the arrangement. This same phenomenon has happened to me before with other flower bouquets. By buying one beautiful potted flower, instead of three or four, not only does it immediately brighten up the space in which you place it, but it will also get your attention every time you are nearby. It is as if the flower almost shines and radiates even more when it is all by itself in a room, just as my little tulip bouquet has. By having twenty tulips in a vase, you somehow miss seeing the beauty in each of the flowers. So, next time you visit a florist’s shop, pay attention to the beauty of each single flower, over an entire bouquet, and let this shine and lighten up your day, filling you with happiness and warmth :-)
While beautiful flowers will always brighten up our day, nutritious food that nourishes our bodies also makes us happy and content in a very similar way. Whether you enjoy cooked, raw or vegan plant food, here are some short words to describe my plant food journey from last spring up until today’s wintertime. Sometimes things changes quite quickly, from season to season or year to year. This is my natural evolution throughout the year:
Nordic Winter Food
Last spring I was in California to learn about raw gourmet cuisine. After a truly joyful time, which included meeting many wonderful people, I went home to continue my natural, organic plant food journey :-) When summer came filled with warm and sunny days, it was, as always, a pleasure to eat fresh vegetables and make many delicious smoothies with fruit and berries galore. With the cooler weather in autumn, I was naturally drawn to more filling nut patés and creamy treats like avocado and almond spread (still uncooked and fresh :-) This way of eating came naturally and was easy and fun! This ease continued until winter came with its snow and subzero conditions. After spending many days outdoors in nature and skiing in very cold conditions, I truly started missing bread and cheese, my favourite food of all, and I soon understood that Nordic wintertime was not suited for pure, raw food. Quickly, and happily, I began bringing sandwiches with soy cheese in my lunch box when working outdoors as ski-instructor. The winter season has a vastly different climate than warm, summer days and those in winter may need more filling foods than in other parts of the year. The temperature difference between winter and summer is - amazingly - over 30 degrees C lower in winter than in summertime! A change that is also reflected on the happy winter faces of skiers everywhere with fresh, colourful cheeks :-)
So let this story guide you as well. Know that my experience can also be applied to others living in temperate climates that experience four pronounced seasons. In the colder months you may find you are most fully nourished with sandwiches with vegan cheeses or soups and stews with root vegetables and wholegrains. Notice how the climate we live in affects all of us and how denser, warmer foods can make you feel happy and satisfied in winter and how fresh, raw foods send us soaring in the spring and summer :-)
Have a wonderful, healthy and happy month! (Amazingly, up in the North, we are already into the last winter month – in a few short weeks it will be spring time! :-)
(For all of you living in the Southern atmosphere, with two seasons, going from warm summer days to autumn, you will notice that the monthly articles in Butterfly Nutrition follow the Nordic Season, which is a temperate environment with four distinct seasons. Currently we are enjoying a white winter, soon to be followed by spring and then a warm summer from June to August :-)
