As the year draws to a close, I feel an enormous aching feeling in my chest. Depression is rare for me, though it's only a step away from anxiety. If you let your anxiety horses run wild, they'll end up depressed, I suppose. I know where it is coming from, I guess. It's not been a good year for the world, and Dad's getting progressively worse. It's hard to feel hope, and there's that feeling that everything is changing so rapidly that I have no hope either of holding the reins. I understand I don't need to, and I must let the universe flow - but the tugging and pulling hurts.

It's made more difficult from the pain in my body. I woke up on Boxing Day with a stiff hip, and stretches didn't help. Before lunch I was crippled - I could barely sit down to pee or roll off the couch. When I could, I had to pace a little and breathe to get through it. Perhaps all the Christmas wine and emotion had just landed around my hips and stuck. Those wild horses of my mind can over react some when my body fails. What if I can't surf again? What if this limits my ability to travel in an old Land Rover to Morocco? What if it's hip bursitis? Arthritis? My horses tug and pull and limp and strain.

I remind myself to say 'banana' every time I feel what I would normally articulate as pain. It's best to play tricks on the mind horses. It changes the experience. I tell Jamie that I won't tell him I'm in pain or I hurt, because I am fooling my brain into recovery. But I also tell him that when I say I'm 'uncomfortable', I'm probably struggling and he should make tea.

What has this got to do with cabbage? I guess I force myself not to wallow, and instead do things - I walk, I do sit ups and donkey kicks and meditate and stroll around the garden. And when the fatted cabbage is fatted, it must be dealt with.

Part of the way I know how to deal with depression is to exercise and eat well. Sure, I can lean in and listen to it's lessons and feel what I'm feeling, because if you cage those horses, they just start to kick harder. But I can do that and distract myself, because it does me no good to return to the same thoughts, over and over and over.

This cabbage pickle is adapted so it has no sugar, because I'm trying to avoid inflammatory foods. I finely chop the cabbage, and add 1 part apple cider vinegar to 1 part of water, a generous pinch of salt, and a tablespoon of raw honey. As it's absolutely garlic chive season, I add a heap of those as well. After 24 hours, it's good to go, though it's better after a few days, and will last for weeks.

For lunch then, it's tempeh with coconut aminos which I was gifted - kinda like a sweet soy sauce or a teriyaki style sauce - with wilted spinach, udon noodles, and cabbage pickle.

I also used a Japanese seasoning called furikake, which is a spice blend made of toasted sesame seeds and nori seaweed and salt, and that gets added to rice. A Japanese friend of mine has it in his rice at work, formed into triangles and wrapped in seaweed - that is, when he's being healthy and not eating custard croissants. But it's delicious on noodles, rice, salads, vegetables, anything really. This one has yuzu in in it as well, an east Asian citrus with tang.

And so I pull the horses in and show them the way out. Good food, gratitude, and tiny joys - very tiny, given my state of mind, but there and attended to none the less.

With Love,

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