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Welcome to this week’s Sunday reflection. These Shortcasts are mostly unplanned and are created as a way of connecting with you through whatever is occurring for me in the moment.
Last week I had a piece of music running through my head. It had been ghosting me for days and is a particular recording of the Lou Reed ‘Perfect Day’ song that was done by the BBC years ago. It’s a personal favourite of mine that often pops up when I reflect on my perfect days. I believe songs that ghost us are there as a reminder of something and that’s why I did Perfect Day last week.
However, on this occasion I realised the song had been triggered by a topic of conversation in the Change Your World Everyday personal development group. The coach that week was Sally Baker and as always it was an interesting conversation.
Last week I forgot to add Change Your World and Sally Baker into the footnote links. I have gone back and added them, but I just want mention it here because they both do some great work and are worth checking out. Link here to the Perfect Day Shortcast.
This week’s topic has arisen out of a conversation with my Mother-in-Law, which directed my thoughts towards the question…
“What are you missing that is right in front of you”.
I love making wild food. It has been fantastic bringing food in from the newly established garden plot this year, and this is something I will expand on in years to come. I also love foraging for free food, there is a lot of satisfaction in picking something up that would be left to rot and making good use of it. Or trying out something new like I did with last year’s acorns.
One thing that has always fascinated me is the rarer foods. The things we don’t see very often. My mother-in-law recently pointed out that the two bushes in my front garden are quince. These bushes have been there for years and I keep trimming them back when they get big, but I never knew what they were.
It was right in front of me and I didn’t know it!
Apparently they are Japanese Ornamental Quince and they produce a fruit that has an amazing perfumed smell and makes a delicious quince jelly. Having discovered what they are, I have now discovered that the riverbank opposite our house is full of them! So I have been out foraging and started making my own quince jelly.
All the years I have lived here, and I didn’t know that resource was there – right in front of me. Which made me wonder what else is in our lives that we don’t know is there? What is it that we don’t do, that we are not aware that we could do?
Looking at my health journey, if you had told me years ago that I could be this healthy at 57, I wouldn’t have believed it were possible, and yet this resource has always been here for me I just never explored it. The same thing with the Podcasting journey.
Inner Resources
There are so many things that are just in front of us, and we don’t reach out and grab them. The quince has been such a fascinating eye opener. An opportunity to look and see what’s out there, all around us and within us. Unless we look we don’t see what’s available all the time, just waiting to be grasped.
In the business world companies are starting to do an audit of the resources they have within their organisation that they weren’t aware of. They have been used to looking outside the organisation to pull new resources in, and all along they already had them and didn’t know it.
So this week’s gift, thanks to the quince is to be open to what’s possible, be open to what’s in front of us, because sometimes what we want is staring us in the face.
So my invitation this week is have a look around your life. What is there that you are not seeing, and what could be useful?
Before I go, just a quick reminder that I will be back Live on the Facebook page at 5pm on Wednesday evening with my LIVE@5 where I will be talking about the forthcoming event Spirit-duality and sharing a bit about my personal journey..
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