Zentangling my way to more energy

At the beginning of this year, I found the days passed in a blur of many tasks and I had little time for art and creativity. I was feeling the absence of art in my life and so I began to search for something I could pick up and do quickly and easily. I discovered Zentangle.

I was attracted right away to the abstract designs. First I started by copying designs I liked. But soon I was experimenting with my own designs and patterns.

Though I draw designs that are pleasing to my eye, the end result is not the best part of Zentangle: it's the meditative quality of the actual process of creating a Zentangle. One Zentangle author calls it "yoga for the brain" and I think that's a wonderful way to describe it. I took Hatha yoga for two years from an excellent teacher and after two years of yoga practice, the benefits to my body and mind were numerous. Just like with yoga, the more I practice Zentangle, the more benefits I get from it.

A lot of the zentangles that I saw online were just black and white. But I adore color so I started adding color to my zentangle drawings.

I had colored pencils already so I used those to start with. But filling in the spaces completely with colored pencils was taking months. So I decided to buy some watercolor pencils that have been on my wish list for years. I went to the art store to buy Derwent Graphitint watercolor pencils but came home Lyra Aquarelle watercolor pencils and water soluble crayons too!

And oh the fun I've had with these water-soluble media! On this turtle zentangle I knew from the start I wanted a simple line drawing so I could really play with the color.

I just love the mosaic effect I could get with this water soluble medium for the water around the turtle. Drawing the lines to mimic broken glass took all my focus and was therefore just as meditative as the more complex patterns of some of my other zentangles. I suppose this turtle piece could really be called a Zia. Zia is a more planned zentangle. A true zentangle grows as you go without plan until that moment. I planned this turtle piece before I ever started working on it. But for my purposes, Zia or Zentangle, line drawing or pen and ink...it doesn't matter what it is called. Currently this is my preferred form of meditation.

And meditation renews my energy. For several months I zentangled when I was too tired to work on my fine art or do chores, or really anything. I could zentangle and that was better than just playing golf solitaire on my iPad! At least I had something artistic and fun to show for my time! But lately I use Zentangle to get in the art "zone" so that I can work more focused on my fine art. It also serves as a rest that gives me energy for whatever other work I need to do for the day.

This latest Zentangle fell in the middle of a burst of creativity. Suddenly last week I was able to paint on several of my acrylic works-in-progress for 7 hours one day and 4 1/2 the next. The idea of this Zentangle popped into my brain on the third day. I'm not exactly sure how it works, the brain is a mystery, but Zentangling gives me more energy to do the creative work I want to do! And that, after all, is the whole purpose of the quest I am on.

Nutrient-dense recipes for autumn

It's autumn in the Pacific northwest! And I've been experimenting with some seasonal recipes to reduce the "empty" calories and increase the nutrient dense calories.

Zucchini Chocolate Chip Muffins

For these delicious muffins I started with a recipe for zucchini bread that I found online. I then doubled the zucchini, replaced the white flour with 100% whole wheat flour, added flaxseed meal and chopped walnuts for extra protein, and added bittersweet chocolate chips.

Crustless Sweet Potato Pie

I think I was in junior high when I discovered a recipe that became my signature Thanksgiving dessert called, "Impossible Pumpkin Pie". I loved this recipe so much that I even wrote the whole thing out and sent it to my maternal grandmother. Instead of a crust, the recipe called for adding Bisquick to the batter. Since last Thanksgiving I have been improving on this recipe. I swapped out the Bisquick with Bob's Red Mill Whole Grain Pancake and Waffle mix and replaced the white sugar with sweetened condensed milk.

 I then decided to try the whole recipe with sweet potatoes I roasted myself, and the result was fantastic.

Sweet potatoes are easy to roast. I just wrap them in foil for faster cooking and poke them on the top a few times with a knife. After about an hour, depending on size, the skins slip off pretty easily. And I plop them in the blender to puree. They usually need some water to blend up into a nice smooth puree.

Spaghetti Squash with marinara and edamame

A lot of my focus has been on improved desserts but I have also created/modified meals to make them packed with nutrients and flavor.

Spaghetti squash is simple to roast. I used my huge kitchen knife to slice it in half. Then I put the cut sides down on a cookie sheet and roast for about 45 minutes. Using my oven mitt, I test them by giving them a squeeze. If they squeeze really easily, they are done. I then scoop out the seeds, a cinch after cooking, and using a fork I scrap out the squash that separates into strings like spaghetti pasta.

For years I bought Newman's Own marinara sauce in the jar and loved it. Then I discovered Trader Joe's marinara this year.

The flavor is incredible and it has less sugar that Newman's Own which already had less sugar than most jar sauces.

I add the marinara to onions and garlic that I've sauteed in a pan. Sometimes I add ground beef to the pan first and brown it with the onions and garlic before I add the marinara. This last time, I also took some edamame that I bought frozen, boiled for 3 minutes in water, drained and then added to the sauce. I layer the spaghetti squash, a little grated parmesan cheese, and then the embellished marinara sauce and this makes an extremely satisfying meal bursting with flavor and nutrients.

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Cookies with Chickpeas

The best for last. These pumpkin cookies are maybe my best recipe yet! I started with Jessica Seinfeld's chocolate chip recipe that calls for a can of chickpeas (garbanzo beans) drained and rinsed. (Chickpeas are high in fiber and protein and can be counted as either protein or veg on the Supertracker.)

Added Trader Joe's Organic pumpkin plus ground cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and ginger.

 I replaced half of the brown sugar with half a can of sweetened condensed milk, swapped the semisweet chocolate chips with bittersweet and the all-purpose flour with whole wheat flour. Instead of old-fashioned oats I added oat flour. I left out the raisins and walnuts. These cookies froze beautifully but they actually didn't stay in the freezer very long! :)

I find that the quality of food I eat has made a significant difference in my energy levels. I think because of my Lupus I have more immediate feedback about how certain foods impact my body. When October arrived, Trader Joe's started carrying an array of tempting pumpkin treats. I bought the delicious Pumpkin Bread Pudding from the frozen section. But it is made with white flour and white sugar and after eating it my ankles swelled alarmingly and my energy plummeted. I suppose I can think of my Lupus as a gift in that it allows me to see more easily the harmful effects of an unhealthy diet. So I am making my desserts at home with with nutrient dense ingredients for better health and more energy.

the message of the dragonfly

Recently my husband reserved a campsite for us and we spent a couple of nights tent camping on a lake far away from the city. I was surprised at how the little trip away was so rejuvenating. I guess sometimes getting a little distance and change of scenery can be just the ticket for a breakthrough.

The first afternoon after we set up our tent, we took a little nature walk. The golden wheat color of the tall grass was beautiful enough, but to my delight resting on the grass stems were damselflies and dragonflies.

They stayed still for long periods of time, allowing me to capture some of the most detailed photos yet of these magical insects.

But the second day was even more amazing. In the evening we took another walk this time to the dock area of the campground. Just as we started to walk up the ramp, a dragonfly landed right on my shirt.

I've never been so close before and I was able to see every small detail of its intricate body. It was a stunning experience. Stephen took a few photos with his phone while the dragonfly held on to my shirt for several minutes.

It seemed as if the whole time we camped, dragonflies were saying, "Hey! Look at me! Pay attention to me! So I thought to myself, "What is the message of the dragonfly?"

Dragonflies represent transformation, change and living into one's full potential. Transformation doesn't mean tweaking, it doesn't mean small adjustments. It means completely taking on a new form and having a completely new set of skills and abilities. Dragonflies go from nymphs that propelling themselves around in the water to mature dragonflies that flying through the air. And not just any old flying, they can fly in six directions, change direction mid-air and hover for up to a minute! They go from the drab color of their larval state to brilliantly colored bodies with transparent wings. My choice of the dragonfly as part of the title of this blog was purposeful. I aim to completely transform, to go from swimming to flying.

Now swimming isn't a bad thing. In fact I love to swim. The swish of the water around my legs and arms is a wonderful feeling. But think of the freedom in flying! What came into focus during our brief camping trip (with the dragonflies to stimulate my thinking), was that I just have too much stuff cluttering my life. Too many books and materials from past careers and old hobbies. Too many clothes and shoes. Just too much stuff from my "swimming" days. And it needs to go because it's draining my energy for absolutely no good purpose and keeping me from "flying".

So in the week following our camping trip with the dragonfly encounters, I tore into the many boxes that have been stacked in our dining room. By the end of the week the room was neat and orderly.

A lot of stuff is gone, thrown away or given away. Our dining room is now a functional multi-purpose room. It's a dining room, art studio, and computer work station all in one. I have more work to do to simplify life, to better focus my attention on the things I want to put my energy into. But the clutter is down to a manageable level as evidenced by the fact that I have actually been getting a few hours of artwork in each week! That's a fantastic feeling! And a very dramatic sign that transformation IS happening.

Cameron Diaz's The Body Book

The same day that I wrote the first draft of my introductory post for DragonflyKoru, I bought Cameron Diaz's "The Body Book: the Law of Hunger, the Science of Strength, and Other Ways to Love Your Amazing Body". Before reading her book, I was feeling some trepidation about publishing my posts. But once I started the first chapter, Cameron's book reassured me that my quest for energy was a worthwhile focus and sharing that with others was maybe a good idea too.

If you've watched "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" do you remember that scene at the beginning where Cameron Diaz is dancing and Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu join in? Man! When I watched that I thought to myself, "Wow Cameron Diaz has a STRONG body! You can't dance with that much ENERGY unless you have amazing STRENGTH! I wish I could move like that!" Not surprisingly, Cameron writes that training with a Kung Fu master for Charlie's Angels changed her life.

I love it when celebrities (who have ridiculous amounts of power and influence that our culture bestows on them) actually use their power and influence to do something good in the world. I think Cameron has done something very good in writing this book.

In the introduction she writes: "Here's what this book is not: It is not a diet book. It is not a workout regimen. It is not a manual to becoming a different person. Here's what it is: a guide to becoming yourself." And by that she means the healthiest strongest version of yourself. And it's not about form, it's about function. What she has been able to DO because of her strong healthy body and what we can DO with a strong and healthy body. It's a book filled with information. Because as her introduction states, "Knowledge is power."

Cameron did a lot of research and interviewed many experts in their fields to get the information in this book. She writes that she "...got all CSI about the body..." So that the end result is almost like a collection of several little textbooks: anatomy and physiology, nutrition, biology, chemistry, behavioral psychology...but the presentation is fun, accessible, and understandable. And it echoes what I have learned from the HBO documentary "Weight of the Nation" and what's on the USDA website.

I really really like Cameron's definition of health. As she points out the word "health" gets thrown around a lot these days. Here's what she means when she talks about health. "...I'm talking about having a body that is working at its optimum, a body that has the energy to go all day without crashing, a body that can fight off illness and keep you strong. I'm talking about feeling amazing in your skin...I'm talking about having a mind that can be clear productive, thoughtful and happy." Wow, now that's the kind of health I want!!

I learned from this book that Cameron has always been skinny. She could always eat whatever she wanted and didn't gain weight. But something even more interesting than that is what she wanted to eat. And it wasn't sugar. In chapter 7 she confesses that she doesn't like sugar. And she's not kidding: she stir-fries zucchini to put on her morning oatmeal, just so she can get heart-health oatmeal into her diet. I find Cameron's aversion to sugar incredibly interesting because maybe a large part of why Cameron is "naturally" skinny is because she doesn't like and therefore doesn't eat much sugar.

In my 20's I drank a LOT of mochas. Sometimes fattening but always sugary mochas. Then sometime in my early 30's, one day I didn't like the taste of mochas any more. Just out of the blue, chocolate in coffee tasted yucky to me. At that same time, I worked to lose 40lbs. And I've never gained it back. I have a strong suspicion that eliminating those sugar- laden mochas from my diet has a LOT to do with maintaining that weight loss. And it's why now I'm rigorously cutting out sugar whenever and wherever I can.

"The Body Book" has 3 sections: Nutrition, Fitness, and Mind. Nutrition is the first and largest section. I agree that it's the best place to start. Before I got Lupus, I seriously never thought about eating food for FUEL. It was always just about taste. Then when I was in my huge Lupus flare, I noticed that certain foods caused me a LOT of pain. Carbohydrates. Sugar.

Even the lactose in milk increased my inflammation and my pain so I started drinking soymilk that had only 2g of sugar per serving. Getting Lupus really motivated me to understand what was going on INSIDE my body and I tried to read Stephen's college Anatomy and Physiology textbooks. But they were just too difficult. My science background is pretty weak. But this book that Cameron has written is a great primer, a good place to start. The more I learn the more I want to know. It's really so very interesting. Understanding how things work is really a motivator for me. The knowledge of how nutrient-rich foods FUEL my body and how nutrient poor foods DESTROY my body, is causing a fundamental shift in my thinking about food. When only one month ago I thought I HAD to have delicious tasting food ALL the time. Now I find it's pretty easy to give up half and half in my coffee and turn down donuts! Whoa!

How many of you have heard, "Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels" ? Well I always thought, "Yeah, right." But if I change that phrase to be, "Nothing tastes as good as being FULL of ENERGY feels" now that I can really agree with. If eating nutrient-rich foods gives me the energy to do the work I want to do, then those are the foods I want to put in my body, and taste is secondary.

I've already mentioned here and in my other blog that cardio is something that's easy for me to do. I love to run, ride my bike, do aerobics, swim, play tennis...so Cameron's encouragement to sweat everyday was for me, "oh yeah, no problem." But she reminded me again how sitting, being sedentary, is really really harmful to my health. And so I'm trying to work more movement into my day. I don't get any credit on the Supertracker for "standing in the kitchen while cooking" but I know that any time I break up my sitting time, I'm doing something healthy for myself.

The last section of the book, Mind, has more good information.  One of the topics she talks about is discipline. I've applied discipline to several areas in my life: piano practice, cardio workouts, going to work every day, being on time consistently to my clients' houses for piano lessons...Now I'm applying discipline to my health. Cameron acknowledges it "isn't easy" to make changes and by "isn't easy" she means, "can be really super-freaking hard." She reminds us to be kinder to ourselves and practice, practice, practice.

When I think of the word "practice" I think about piano practice. Practice isn't performance. In practice I am working out how to make a passage fast and smooth or bring out a voice in one hand over the other, and I experiment with different ways to achieve that objective. It doesn't work in the beginning, it often sounds awful and NOTHING like the beautiful performance I've heard. So in piano practice, I had to learn to go very slowly and repeat, repeat, repeat. I had to have patience in the speed with which I improved. I had to be consistent and go every day to the practice room and just put in the time. And I had to have faith that my consistent focused practice would eventually pay off and I would be able to play the piece the way it was meant to be played. Another very important lesson I learned from my piano practice was that the more I went to the practice room, the easier everything got and the more rewarding each session was. But if for whatever reason I missed a few practice days, how easily it all fell off the rails and felt hard and frustrating.

Last week I took a short trip and I stopped practicing good health for a few days. And it hasn't been easy to get back to good practice. But just like I used to start with scales on the piano (because they were easy for me) I started with going to the gym (because cardio is easy for me).

There is a term in physics that seems helpful here: inertia. My husband understands physics and so he explained it to me. The more inertia something has the more difficult it is to get it moving (think heavy boulder). And once it is moving, if it's not going very fast, then it's relatively easy to stop. But once something with a lot of inertia gains speed, it's very difficult to stop. The concept goes even further. What if you don't want to just stop that high inertia object, you want to send it in the OPPOSITE direction? First it will take a lot of effort to stop it and then even more effort to get it going in the new direction.

I can see how this concept applies to me. And that I have a lot of inertia. Over the course of my life I've picked up a lot of speed in my energy draining habits. And now I want to stop going that direction and go in the opposite direction. I want my habits to be energizing, not energy depleting.

Growth and transformation. It's work baby! Hard work. So I'm really glad to have found some useful tools for tackling that hard work in Cameron Diaz's "The Body Book".

Supertracker: good nutrition = lots of energy? I hope so!

My baking did the job I hoped it would :  create the momentum I needed to start thinking about doing harder things.

In Cambodia I stumbled upon the USDA Supertracker. After watching the HBO documentary "Weight of the Nation" I became almost obsessed with learning about nutrition and understanding how it worked. (click on "Weight of the Nation" to follow a link to the website. The films are free.) The information in those films made a huge impact on me, and I wanted to learn more. At first, trying to find good information was pretty frustrating. All the most popular sites, the ones that pop up first, want to sell me something. It's actually hard work to wade through the garbage and dredge up the trustworthy credible sources on nutrition. I shared my frustration with my husband and he suggested the USDA website.

I've heard quite often that tracking your calories and keeping a food journal are helpful tools for losing weight. I kept a food points journal with weight watchers and I could handle that as long as I was losing weight, as long as the numbers on the scale were going down. At a different time I tried writing down what I ate in a notebook and the calorie count next to it. That felt like soooo much work. It seemed that all I was doing all day long was hunting down the calorie counts of food. The result of that was I started eating the same food so I didn't have to look up any new calorie counts. And then I just quit because that was a boring diet and the whole food journal process was too hard and not at all rewarding.

In Cambodia, after 9 months of cardio training, I knew I needed and was ready to take a serious look at my nutrition. So I started tracking my food and physical activity on the Supertracker. (the highlighted word is a link to the website) And it was surprisingly FUN! On the Supertracker there are all kinds of graphs and reports to show what kind and how much food I'm consuming. I can look at a whole list of vitamins and minerals individually in a graph over time. I love graphs! For some reason it's really like a game for me to watch how my food choices affect the graphs. And it's funny because just recording my food, and seeing what happens in the food tracker, caused me to change what I wanted to eat. Since I wanted to see the bar for vegetables go up in the Daily Food Groups Target bar graph, I added vegetables to my food plan for the day. Each day I made adjustments to fit what I ate to try to match the targets and limits of whole grains, vegetables, fruits, dairy, protein, saturated fat, oils, sodium, dietary fiber, iron and a whole list of others. I pored over the graphs of my own personal nutrition. And when I saw I was low in iron I looked up foods that are good sources of iron. I learned that beef, chicken, tuna, broccoli, spinach, dried apricots and surprisingly black strap molasses are a few of the foods containing iron.

I discovered the Supertracker in the middle of October and had only used the tool for a couple of weeks when we moved back to the states. In November I tried to keep up my new habit, but it became too time consuming and difficult with all the transition.

But on July 1st I signed into my account on the Supertracker and started tracking my food and physical activity again. And the same kind of adjusting of my behaviors resulted. Simply from entering the food I ate each day and noticing what happened on the graphs and in the reports!

One of my favorite features of the Supertracker is My Recipe. I can enter the ingredients of any recipe I make, assign a number of portions, and the Supertracker will tell me all kinds of information about a single portion of that recipe. I've done the same thing by hand several times: adding up all the calories and saturated fat and dividing by the number of portions I want. It's way more work! And I don't get all the interesting information about nutrients and minerals that I do with the Supertracker. Lately I've been comparing my veg puree filled desserts to a regular version to see how they stack up.

This week I made a banana nut bread recipe that I created over the winter. And because I'm on a veg puree kick, I added 1/2 cup of butternut squash to the batter. Then I compared that to Starbucks Banana Nut Bread. On the Starbucks website there is nutritional information for many of the items they sell in the stores. This is how 2 portions (I cut my slices in half) of my banana nut bread compare to 1 slice of Starbucks banana nut bread.

	Starbucks Banana Nut Bread	Sabrina’s Banana Nut Bread (with flaxseed meal and butternut squash)
Calories	420	376
Total Fat	21g	21g
Saturated Fat	3g	2g
Sugar	31g	18g
Fiber	2	7
Protein	6	9

I love charts. :) With the help of the Supertracker, I can make this chart for myself and have a real measurement of my effort to improve the quality of my food. "What gets measured, gets improved." I read that in an article on fitness and I think it makes sense. So I'm trying to find ways to measure the things I want to improve.



Man, I want the energy of this toddler! Just think what I could do!!! Here's hoping good nutrition will get me at least closer. :)

where to start? how to start?

How much energy a person has is determined by multiple factors. I know I need to look at every possible factor. If I'm going to get the kind of energy I need to do the things I want to do, I'm going to need to exhaust every avenue. But I can't look at ALL of them at once. That's way too overwhelming! And in June when I felt weak but determined, I knew I had to start with something FUN.

In Cambodia I started dreaming about baking. I didn't have access to an oven for 2 1/2 years while we lived in our apartment in Cambodia. So once we landed in the states, I immediately started searching through cookbooks and making lists of the recipes I wanted to try.

Through the winter I started experimenting, modifying the recipes I found. When a recipe called for white flour I replaced it with whole wheat pastry flour or oat flour. When a recipe called for a 1 cup of sugar I reduced it to 2/3 of a cup or even 1/2 of a cup. When butter was in the ingredient list I used vegetable spread made with olive oil or even part yogurt. And the recipes were actually really delicious. I started baking because I wanted a healthy version of pastries I often buy, but the process of creating recipes and making muffins, cookies, cakes, and scones was just as enjoyable if not more than eating the delicious result.

So I got out one of my favorite cookbooks, "Deceptively Delicious" by Jessica Seinfeld. She developed the recipes to get her children to eat more vegetables and fruit. Her secret weapon was puree. She hid vegetable and fruit purees in lots of different foods from cakes and muffins to chicken nuggets and tacos. She was able to get more nutritious food into her children's diet while they happily ate the food they liked. Well, for me, it's not that I don't like vegetables. I do. Vegetables, prepared well, are absolutely delicious. So I wasn't going to use the recipes so much to get vegetables into my diet but rather to make pastries nutritious enough to be included in a healthy eating plan. My husband wants us to give up dessert entirely. Because traditional desserts really have almost no nutritional benefit. They're just a bunch of empty calories. But what if I could make desserts that had some nutritional value? What if I could enjoy a muffin and also get some whole grains, some fruit, and some veg?

Well I can, and I have. I used Jessica Seinfeld's brownie recipe as a starting point and created these cherry brownies with spinach, carrot and cherry puree. They are made with 100% whole grain oat flour and vegetable spread made from olive oil. For the chocolate I used dark chocolate chips. Each brownie is 106 calories. Two brownies give me 1/4 cup of vegetables, 1/4 cup of fruit, 1/2 oz of whole grains, and heart healthy dark chocolate  My husband loved these and kept going back for more. To try to limit how much he ate, he cut them into thirds. Which made them a really fun snack size.

For a about a week I devoted a lot of my time to baking. And it was so fun. And I realized that baking is CREATIVE!

Because I am so unhealthy it is really hard for me to paint. My art is a main source of peace and tranquility for me, but it's also extremely taxing. When my fatigue becomes severe, it seems that doing my fine artwork just depletes my energy tank instead of filling it up. But being creative is like air for me, I have to have some artistic outlet to live. Cooking and baking can be my creative outlet, until I can get back to drawing and painting. As I mix, blend, and puree, I am observing and making note of every artistic element that develops. Like this pattern in the peach smoothie I made for my husband...

...or the gorgeous color of this beet puree.

Something else pretty great resulted from my baking. I was standing up in the kitchen, a lot, and that means I wasn't sitting. I've read in a number of different sources (and hear it from my husband all the time) that being sedentary kills. I can work out a lot, and when I do I think I'm doing enough physical activity. I consider myself "active". But generally when I'm not working out, I sit and sit and sit. Many of things I like to do are sedentary activities: writing, painting, drawing, quilting. But cooking and baking require that I stand. So cooking and baking is like a one-two punch for good health. And that's really fantastic.

What's in a name...

I am so excited to begin writing this blog. The idea has been whirling around in my brain for awhile. But I had to have a good title. And then one afternoon it just came to me.

I have long been drawn to dragonflies. I have wind chimes, coffee cups, jewelry, clothing, wall decor, even a shower curtain all designed with dragonflies. The aesthetics of them, their colors and shapes, are so pleasing to my eye. It wasn't until my husband and I bought our dragonfly cast iron tea pot and matching tea cups that I learned of any meaning attached to these insects. When I decided to start this blog I did some searches for meaning associated with dragonflies. And the results were delightful.

The dragonfly symbolizes change, transformation, living life to the full and reaching one's full potential.

For the Japanese, the dragonfly is an emblem of joy and rebirth.

For the ancient Mayan civilization, the dragonfly was an emblem of the goddess of creativity.

The second part of the title, Koru, is a Maori word (of the Maori people, pacific islanders, native to New Zealand) that means: growth, new beginnings, harmony, peace, and tranquility.

In DragonflyKoru I am going to chronicle my quest for the energy and strength I need to pursue my life goals. I am at the beginning of what I hope will be a transformation and I'm going to use all my creative power to do it. My hope is that this will lead to joy, peace, harmony and tranquility for me and others.

Joyful by Angela Mia de la Vega

In June 2009, I was diagnosed with Lupus. Since that time I have been learning how to live with this auto-immune disease, how to manage my symptoms of Lupus.

I used to think of myself as a strong person. In elementary school I was a strong swimmer and I beat boys in swim races. In high school I was a varsity starter for my high school basketball team and I won 1st and 2nd place ribbons for shot put and discus in track. And I was always a runner.

Though years of poor self care had led to a decline in my overall health, lupus stripped me of my strength. Suddenly I couldn't run any more. I couldn't open jars. I felt WEAK. Because I was weak, my husband had to help me with all kinds of things I had easily done for myself before. And that was hard. I had a debilitating disease. My rheumatologist told me that some of his lupus patients even qualified for disability status in the workplace.

In addition to the weakness, I have unbelievable fatigue. Before lupus I was tired a lot, I've never been a high energy kind of person, but the fatigue I experience now, since getting lupus, is in a whole different category. It's really awful.

Lupus has changed my body and that has completely affected the way I live my life. Because I am now sick, health has a whole knew meaning. I long to be strong, full of energy and capable of high productivity.

While my husband and I were living in Cambodia, I decided to try exercise as a path to health and strength. I started working out on our apartment's gym equipment 1-2 hours almost daily. After 9 months I did feel a significant improvement in my fatigue levels and overall strength. But I was still a long way from normal.

We moved back to the states 8 months ago and my health steadily worsened with each passing month. So that now, my fatigue levels are super high. I have pain in my shoulder, symptoms of a lupus flare coming on. Two weeks ago I had to go to Urgent Care for an abscess. My immune system has become weak and susceptible to infection. My blood pressure is high. I've gained back the pounds I worked like a dog to lose in Cambodia. And to add insult to injury I have plantar fasciitis in my right foot, which makes it super painful to walk or even to put any pressure on my heel!

A month ago my husband was offered a job and we moved from Montana to Washington. Though the move was a good thing, I struggled with depression. I grieved the loss of my health. But slowly I started to think of this as a new beginning, an opportunity for transformation, a time to get healthy. Really healthy and strong. And I would use my artistic personality and creativity to do it.

For those 8 months I didn't write my blog. My RhinoCrashSafari blog is a blog about culture, the experiences my husband and I have had because of the work we do with poor populations, what we've learned from them and how that changed us. The material for that blog comes from living overseas so when we are living in the US there is little to write about. But I missed writing my blog so much. So I started to think of an idea for another blog. So I could WRITE. Writing is one of my most joyful creative outlets. Because I have an artist personality, I don't feel alive unless I have some way to express my creativity. Every day.

So I'm writing this blog for myself. But my hope is that maybe people will enjoy reading about my journey or perhaps even be inspired to figure how to do something they really want to do too.