Restorying the Earth

Craigies Farm Café serves up local, wholesome gluten-free fare

We finally managed to get to Craigie’s Farm today with our dog, Piper. I’ve been meaning to go for a couple of years, but it’s really best reached by car (or bike) and as we only have one bike between the three of us and no car at all, it’s taken us a while to get there. This weekend, we had a City Car booked for a jaunt around Fife and since the weather was way better than predicted, we took a side trip out to Craigie’s. Well worth the journey.

Craigie’s Café serves up healthy, locally sourced food, with a gluten-free menu. On the gf-menu today was the soup of the day (lentil), a variety of salads, frittata and a ploughman’s platter served with gf biscuits. There were some gluten-free treats as well, including fresh gf shortbread from The Wheat Free Bakery just down the road in Broxburn. I had the ploughman’s which featured a generous array of cheese, pate, chutney and salads. My partner enjoyed his non-gf pie with home-grown carrots and greens. There’s a special (outdoor) area for eating with canines, which was full when we got there, but no one objected to us eating a picnic table on the lawn.

The deli also had a decent gf section, for its size, with a range of products from Scotland and beyond.

Lunch for the two of us (Piper had already eaten) came to £17 including fresh apple juice from the farm.

Restorying with Charles Eisenstein

If there’s one person who has been the Indie Press champion of overthrowing the old story and bringing in the new, it’s Charles Eisenstein. His name has popped up on my blog a couple of times for his inspiring articles in Resurgence, so when he made his appearance in Edinburgh, post-New Story Summit, I promptly boughtt a ticket.

That was well over a week ago, and although the event was inspiring, I’ve struggled to find something coherent to write about it. This partly stems from the style of Charles’ talk. He did not arrive at St John’s Church with a ready-made speech. Instead, he asked four people in the audience why they had come and used their responses as a springboard to jump off of. The result was a rambling talk full of interesting insights but not something that can be summarised in under 500 words.

He did give quite a bit of attention to our being at a transition point. We stand at the edge of what the old story of separation can achieve. We know it is no longer serving the best interests of the Earth or its inhabitants, human or otherwise. We’re teetering on that edge, gathering the courage to launch ourselves into a new story, one of interconnection or even of interbeing, but we haven’t quite got around to leaving our comfort zone yet.

A week later what has stayed with me are a set of sound bites to mull over. These memes have the potential to help me through this storied transition, I’m sure of it, but at the moment I’m still mulling. In the meantime, I’ve ordered a copy of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.

Top three thought bites from Charles Eisenstein in Edinburgh, 5^th of October, 2014 (paraphrased):

Synchronicity is an invitation to be part of changes you do not know how to make yourself.
You can’t push the idea, you can only serve the idea
A miracle is something that is impossible when look at from the old worldview/story, but perfectly possible in the emerging new worldview

Charles’ Edinburgh talk was sponsored by The Edinburgh Peace and Justice Centre and The Salisbury Centre

Friday Findings: Storying Mindfulness in Place

Checked out of the public library on my ebook reader: Elizabeth Gilbert‘s Eat, Pray Love

Join the call for a mindfulness approach to climate change: One Earth Sangha

This year’s Scottish International Storytelling Festival takes “Once Upon a Place” as it’s theme.

The myth of religious violence, Guardian article by Karen Armstrong

The seals are beginning to birth their pups on the Isle of May, sometimes you can spot them on the Scottish Seabird Centre webcam.

Picked up at a recent workshop on integrating deep reflection into University teaching and learning: The Tree of Contemplative Practices

Open source mapping at OpenStreetMap.org is teaming up with Medecins sans Frontieres to fill in some Missing Maps of the neighbourhoods where the world’s most vulnerable people live and they need the help of you and your laptop.