Saffron crocuses in my backyard. Every day or two there are new blossoms from which to harvest the red stigmas. What luxury!
Years ago, while waiting to hear back from a job application, I gave myself orders to: Take a walk. Talk to someone. Write something. I see now that that recipe served me to balance Body, Mind and Spirit. Nowadays, I find myself looking for balance again (without any specific orders, alas).
As mentioned last week, my therapist says “The only thing to do is to do it.” I squeezed in that blog between putting my son on a plane and attending a noon meeting. The next thing I knew, I was weeding and mowing a section of the front yard. Aha! I thought: Life in Balance, both head and body alive.
But I haven’t worked in the yard since. Maybe after this blog goes to press?
Balancing a diet is what is needed for Sophie Dog. She’s had troubles since last June. Back then, we were fighting diarrhea. I think there was a parasite dogs were getting into at the park. Anyway, it took a long time and finally some antibiotics to clear up the matter.
That bout of diarrhea spoiled Sophie against ever going back to her very nutritious kibbles. No, only chicken and veggies for her, thank you very much. But by then, she had also been diagnosed with kidney disease, stage 2.
So now she needed to switch over to an approved kidney diet. As her chief cook, I’ve been preparing batches of food for her, keeping tabs on the ingredients in each recipe, slowly folding in a bit more kidney-approved kibble into each new mix, but . . .
We began Recipe # 10. Sophie certainly ate a few meals of it, maybe a quarter or a third of the batch, but then she quit cold turkey chicken.
Aargh! Nothing interested her. I didn’t have anything to offer until I’d cooked up more chicken. By that time, she was refusing everything. After several meals of chicken broth, she finally agreed to consume chicken and sweet potato. Now she’s up to chicken, sweet potato and some oatmeal. But no kibble yet.
This morning the vet assured me that occasionally going off food is par for the course with kidney disease. And Sophie is at a good weight for her arthritis complications, since we don’t want her carrying around too much mass.
Judging from yesterday’s meals—three of them—she’s back to doing well.
Okay then. Life is one big balancing act for us all! Sometimes it feels like we’re tensely straddling a tight rope.
I hope you all find a chance to relax and enjoy the view.
