Why I’ve not been around online…

Hello! I hope this post finds you well. Not just well, but at that point in the year when you’re savoring your days. When you’re letting in sunshine into your home, your life. When your days, at the brink of winter, are like crunchy buttered toast with a generous dollop of sunshiney honey. It has been like that for us this past month.

My husband, S, was at home with us (much-awaited holidays!) all through November, and we led simple, creative, happy days, gardening, creating, traveling, being a family. We went with the flow. We planned, but didn’t let the plans rule our days. We slowed down and enjoyed the merry trickle of the weeks. We huddled in and held onto the precious feeling of staying together as a family for a whole month. We learnt to connect more deeply with the earth, and cut down on our carbon footprint by a measure. We cooked, picnicked, played, read. It wasn’t a holiday spent jetsetting to luxury resorts, but it was just the kind of holiday we wanted (I’m working on posts on some of those things.)

So while lack of time isn’t the reason why I didn’t post, it was that I wanted to live the real stuff, to stay present to my days, to be out in the sunshine as much as I could, to be around to collect every little star that the days threw at us. And sometimes, living life and getting offline is just as important for a writer. Writing lush with experience has a life of its own, a voice of its own, a tune of its own. Don’t you agree?

So, here are some of the things that we were up to the past month (detailed posts on each of them later):

·         We started composting.

·         We created our own toothpaste and talc powder (and binned the store-bought toxin-laden ones).

·         We stirred up our own body butters, hard lotion bars and lip balms with pure ingredients.

·         We rolled up our sleeves and got down to growing our own food (like most people in India, we have a ‘maali’ or gardener, but we’ve decided that while he’s there to help us, we will get our hands into the mud and do our own organic ‘farming’).

·         We’ve been studying the healing arts of essential oils.

·         We’ve been experimenting with exchanging some of the commercial home cleaning products with homemade ones (which are equally effective, if not more).

·         We travelled to the hills, to this eclectic place called Mcleod Ganj, which is a township of Tibetans in exile.

·         We cooked nourishing meals with fresh winter produce.

·         We enjoyed picnic lunches in our garden.

·         We did some home décor projects (for ourselves).

·         We re-started our potted plant garden.

·         I graduated to Manual mode of my camera, thanks to the online Momotograpie course that I’ve been doing with photographer Beryl Ayn Young.

How was November for you? What intentions do you have for December?

#naturalliving #greenliving #slowliving

text by chandana banerjee + photos by chandana & sandeep banerjee