Field Notes #3: Carrot Cumin Soup from Smitten Kitchen, Q&A on perimenopause, Blessings from John O’Donohue

Comfort in a small book, gut healing in an easy soup, and clarity about a major life phase for women in Evil Witches newsletter

Hello! Welcome to Field Notes #3 — collections from recent travels on this Odyssey of the Body, sharing favorite glimpses of wisdom, nourishing recipes, guidance to movement, art and exercises, and other tips. If you have a Field Note to share, please send it to brianne@daybreaknotes.com.

1} Carrot Cumin Soup from Smitten Kitchen

Delicious and so nourishing, this has fast become a favorite winter soup recipe (even for someone in my household who shall not be named who doesn’t love carrots). This smooth soup is also great for times when you need to give your GI system a little rest. You can elevate the healing mojo by using bone broth, like Kettle & Fire. Cozy, with comforting flavors, the soup leans on ordinary items already in my fridge and cupboards: Carrots, broth, onion, garlic, coriander, cumin. Simmer everything together until the carrots are tender, and then puree in a blender. Sometimes I drizzle coconut milk on top. Deb Perelman, the genius behind the Smitten Kitchen blog and cookbooks, offers toppings as part of this recipe, including “crisped chickpeas” and “lemon-tahini dollup.” (I skip them, but maybe I shouldn’t? Another confession: I added “cumin” in the recipe title because “carrot soup’’ alone sounded so blah, and this soup is not that at all.) Make it this weekend and have Monday lunch figured out, too. Take me to the Carrot Soup recipe on Smitten Kitchen.

2} “Maybe she's born with it; maybe it's perimenopause”

Evil Witches is a “newsletter for people who happened to be mothers.” Writer Claire Zulkey is funny and frank and packed full of information on seemingly random (but not random) topics. Like What your friend in a marriage crisis could maybe use.

Or her issue earlier this winter: Maybe she's born with it; maybe it's perimenopause.

Who learned about perimenopause in school? Maybe it was tucked between puberty and menopause in 5th grade sex ed, and I just forgot those two paragraphs?

Claire is mystified, too, so she reaches out to interview Heather Corinna, author of What Fresh Hell is This? Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You. (Heather emphasizes: “There’s no shame in us not knowing things. It’s not our fault that we don’t know these things. Where would I have learned these things?”)

The interview is a long, lively read that details misconceptions about perimenopause.

Here’s one section from Heather:

“Menopause itself, when we’re not using it as an umbrella term to describe this whole entire journey and adventure that starts with perimenopause and goes until we’re dead, is a moment. Menopause is at most a day — just the moment when, if you had regular periods or whatever, when it’s it’s been a full year since you had periods. When your periods and cycles are all done, and you’re not going to have them anymore.

After that, it’s all far more predictable when it comes to what’s happening with your hormones and their impact on you. It’s just this slow, gradual change of a decline, primarily of estrogen and progesterone. Testosterone is declining too. … On the other hand, the lead up to that, when all of this gets started? Perimenopause is a rollercoaster.

Hormones in peri are all over the place. It’s chaotic. It is massively different from person-to-to person, with when things are high, when things are low, in what order it happens. How it all impacts you is also very different. … Peri and what goes on in it is all over the freaking place for people. There’s no predicting.”

Well, wow.

And how long does this last? Heather says:

Everybody has a different amount of time. I think that everybody should count on a decade of their life. If it’s not, you’re going to be super pleasantly surprised. If it’s about that, or it’s more than that, you’re at least prepared.

Whew. Read the whole thing here.

3} To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donohue

Books can be pure comfort. The voice of another human in a difficult time can be solace. The visible words on a page can acknowledge a seemingly invisible realm of life — You’re not alone, they say. Others have crossed this desert, too. Here are words for the journey.

To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings collects reflections and blessings (prayer-poems, I like to think of them) from the marvelous Irish poet, philosopher, and scholar John O’Donohue. These are carefully laid words of solace and connection for nearly any moment, in pain or longing, in joy or celebration.

John divides his blessings into 7 sections, including Beginnings (“A Morning Offering,” “For the Artist at the Start of the Day,” “For a New Home”), Desires (“For Love in a Time of Conflict,” “In Praise of Air”) and Thresholds (“For Your Birthday,” “For a Friend on the Arrival of Illness,” “For a Parent on the Death of a Child.”) Each blessing is considered, reverent, delicate, and yet mighty. John was a priest for a time, but he has kept these blessings open for readers to bring their own spiritual sensibilities.

He also carries a deep sense of both the hardships of life and the great joys. In the chapter on thresholds, he contemplates:

“To acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge. It demands courage and also a sense of trust in whatever is emerging. This becomes essential when a threshold opens suddenly in front of you, one for which you had no preparation. This could be illness, suffering, or loss. Because we are so engaged with the world, we usually forget how fragile life can be and how vulnerable we always are. …. Think for a moment how, across the world, someone’s life has just changed—irrevocably, permanently, and not necessarily for the better—and everything that was once so steady, so reliable, must now find another way of unfolding.”

Read one of John’s blessings, A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted.

Do you have a book that you turn to for comfort? You can leave a note in the comments or reply to this email. I’d love to hear.

To our journey and healthy days ahead,

Brianne