Om Fairy

n o u r i s h m e n t


Everything we take in, from our food to the sunshine on our skin, the cool air and the beauty of nature, to the thrills we get from adventuring or watching an action-packed movie affects us.

This week I was feeling called to nourish myself. Summer-like weather has me shaking off the instinct to hibernate, and I decided to play with the fresh veggies from Spade & Plow, making a beet & cara cara orange carpaccio with pea shoot pistou and a crispy-skinned king salmon seasoned with with caraway and coriander.

Luckily I had sprung for some fresh flowers this week, so I pulled together quite the beautiful tablescape for my late lunch, and just like that, I was enjoying all of the aliveness around me. Singing birds, blooms, fresh produce & fish, sunshine & warmth.

Treat yourself. You are worth it.

Beach reads.



Rest, stimulation, inspiration, more rest. Nature, nurture, nature and a dose of that vitamin D. 🌞 Times of stress call for going in, exploring the shadows and darkness, seeing what lies within, which I've always been good at. The reemergence, however, has always been a boomerang for me. You've wallowed enough; time to get back to work. Try to make up for lost time. Guilty for taking the time and making the time.


When I teach asana, I always stress to release slowly, to not let the body boomerang back to it's previous shape. In engaging the muscle to stay as The hand, gravity, the prop releases, we build strength in our flexibility, strength at the end range. As within so without, right? To slowly emerge from rest, introspection, and nurturing, we build strength, finding our way back with more ease, instead of knee-jerk-return from busybuzzybizzydizzy to collapsing into "rest".

When your donut matches your yoga leggings 😍



Thanks for the yummy haskap berry glaze (and even more so for the pistachio cardamom!) and for making the comfiest, coziest forest fiber leggings to teach in and then lounge around in on this sunny Sunday! 🌞

Even when you're in the middle of the storm, there is light somewhere.

You just have to take a step back to see the whole picture.

Literally one of my favorite salads recently and so easy to make! 😋
Do yourself a favor and try it while you're still working from home - there's a lot of garlic and onion here! The only change I make to the recipe is adding a little more lemon juice (2 tablespoons at least), and I add the paprika to the dressing instead of sprinkling it over the cheese. Also always, always, always season your greens!
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1022039-escarole-salad-with-smoky-halloumi-croutons

treasured (time)


Treasured time to check in with myself. This has been a theme lately. How much time do you dedicate to checking in with work, email, social media, your family versus checking in with yourself? How does your body feel? The muscle tissue, the joints, the bones? What is the state of your mind? What thoughts are playing on loop up there? How often do you say, "How am I right now?"

Self-care is health care. Self-care starts with understanding what's happening in the Self.

✨Magical Mondays✨



😁

Does anyone else have this set of photos on their phones that shows all the crazy that their hair is? So often I look in the mirror (really often in the morning), and I just start laughing. It definitely has a life of its own, and I always think, if I really wanted to do *this* with my hair, there's no way I could ever make it happen.

Can being by, on, in, or near water be called a hobby?
🌊

For as long as I can remember, my free time has been spent somewhere near the water if at all possible. Growing up on a lake, it was skipping stones and staring at the lakebed in the winter, swimming and hitching a ride on someone's boat in the summer. Swimming in the pool, beach trips where the day was spent going from beach to water, drying off, hopping back in again. Wading in a creek brings an amazing sense of calm over me, moreso than anything else. Moving to the west coast made me really search for how to enjoy the water because 50 weeks of the year it's too effin' cold. I still love a good hike along the water, or a beach day, but paddle boarding has become a new favorite activity over the past few years.

Truth be told, so many of my hobbies have worked their way into my job description the past 8 years. Yoga, cooking, photography fuel the Om Fairy business, and while I still love it all, there's a clear delineation between doing these things for my own enjoying versus sharing them.


day 15: hobby • @ Carmel - by - the - Sea

What is now years ago, I attended a fine art college and ended up focusing my work in photography. I loved being in the darkroom, the saturated colors one could create in a photo with a simple change of film and paper. I've always seen the world in this saturated view, something that was often the topic of discussion. Should one print the photo as they see it, or try to balance the colors to a more "normal" looking photo. A strange thought for me, because really, what is normal? Are we saying what I see is not normal?

These days I can capture anything with a quick snap of my phone, very different from the care I needed to take with the limited number of frames on my film roll. These days instead of peers it is the camera that decides my photos need to be "normal", the algorithm processing what was captured and spitting out an image corrected and optimized for any number of common scenes. It's interesting to watch how the processing has changed over time, even becoming more concerned with laugh lines and wrinkles.

This is one of my favorite photos from the Taj Mahal. Walking away, pausing to smell my favorite flowers, the frangipani, I snapped a photo. Why not? Later, as I was editing it, I was surprised to see how quickly it looked like an old hand-colored black and white photo reminiscent of old postcards I have seen. These always look fake to me, but maybe this is the way someone else experiences the view? I'll never know. In the end, we're all living in the illusion of maya, experiencing every moment through our own lens, in this case, quite literally.