Sarah Wilson, Author at Sarah Wilson

Buy my soup in a jar. Help the homeless (my new project!)

November 6, 2018August 25, 2015 by Sarah Wilson

I have recently hooked up with the The Inside Out Organic Soup Kitchen charity. A little while back I gave away artwork to raise money for one of their projects teaching disadvantaged young mums how to cook. Now, we’ve joined forces to provide you with some of my soup. As well as the homeless folk in my community.

Two Good Soup, Kung Flu-Fighting Chicken style!

Here’s how it works:

* You place an order for one of their organic Two Good Soup online (sadly, this service is only available to those in the Sydney metropolitan area).

* You choose from a range of different soups for each order. At the moment, one of those is my Kung Flu-Fighting Chicken Soup from my One-Pot Wonders Cookbook.

* Better still, you place an order for your work crew. Orders will be delivered to your door. And for each soup purchased, one goes to a person in need. Plus you’ll get a photo of where your soup delivery ends up and a shout out.

* You pay just $10 for a big jar of the stuff.

This simple act ALSO buys a soup for someone without a home or living in a domestic violence shelter. Yep, a two-for-one deal.

Too much attention, not distraction, is the issue

November 6, 2018August 20, 2015 by Sarah Wilson

Blimey, we’re all very focused on the Distraction Problem, aren’t we. Our electronic devices ruin dinner, corrupt young minds. Our frenetic toggling is reshaping our brains in disconcerting ways.

I don’t disagree with the concerns. An inability to sit soundly and in flow with ourselves and life (or a culture that drags us from this very human need) is at the core of much of contemporary ill. But what about this new theory of distraction explored in The New Yorker recently by way of a critique of Matthew Crawford’s new book “The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction”?

The idea posited toward the end is that perhaps distraction is an antidote to the real issue: too much attention.

Nietzsche on haste

November 6, 2018August 19, 2015 by Sarah Wilson

Nietzsche was known for a few utterances. And for being a prolific walker. (When he lived in Eze, France, he made a daily habit of scaling a steep 1,400-foot mountain to reach a medieval village perched above his home.) It’s in this context of walking he shared this:

“Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself”.

So said Fred in 1874.

His antidote was to walk. Walking, which is quite slow and roughly at the speed of considered thought, quashes haste. Which allows us to play with the inverse of Nietzsche’s observation. Walking reduces haste, which, in turn, brings you closer to yourself.

So said me, just now.

We really do know that we don’t want to flee from ourselves. We’d like to sit calmly with ourselves. The

Another benefit of doing nothing for four weeks

November 6, 2018August 18, 2015 by Sarah Wilson

On my recent post in which I announced I was off on a break (to India) to try the art of doing nothing, reader Leonie shared the below quote in the comment section (thx Leonie!).

xxxx — Me on the beach as a kid…doing nothing…

“You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.”

Essayist and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb is responsible for the wisdom.

The civilized bit is the salient part for me.

Why civilized? I didn’t get it before I left. But after spending four weeks in “nothingness retreat” I fully appreciate the judicious use of the term.

You see, forced to sit with yourself, you have to flay and squirm and cry and rail…with no

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

November 6, 2018August 13, 2015 by Sarah Wilson

I think this says it all: I thought this confronting tale of life in a Mumbai slum in the early 2000s was fiction (such was the “unrealness” of it) until I got to the end and read the epilogue where the The New Yorker poverty correspondent Katherine Boo explains that every single detail is true. And that she spent four years living in the slums to get the full, graphic, stranger-than-fiction story.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Rebecca Boo — Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo

Background: Two friends had mentioned Boo’s book. Then I saw it in the library at the India clinic, shoved down the back. I have a three strikes rule. So I had to give it a crack. The upshot being that it’s now One of My Favourite Books Ever.

The gist: Boo follows a collection of slum characters as they navigate their daily human-ness in slummy filth, throwing up inevitable observations on capitalism, consumerism, corruption and character. The reader is forced to confront their own grubby lives. And their narrow take on poverty.

The best bits: The tale in itself is gripping (made more so by the fact it’s true), but the prose is what got me

Two funny stories from my time in India

November 6, 2018August 12, 2015 by Sarah Wilson

Funny moments, like sad songs, say so much. But really only when you’re still enough to notice the wonderful connect. In fact, humour, wryness, irony and calamitous coincidence are mostly joyful by virtue of the fact that we’re ensconced in stillness when we notice it (and can only notice it when still).

Here’s two you might like to get still with from my India stay:

1. The Perfect Cow Puja

One day we did a nine-hour cow puja. This entailed eight hours of chanting and adding flowers to an elaborate shrine of candles and gaudiness from 8am until the climax when the big old cow, that’s been waiting outside chewing cud, is led inside to the mud-brick meditation room. It’s positioned, with a fair bit of fuss and opining from all involved, to face east with its back to the shrine, its docile face to us. You get

The Aboriginal healing gift Australians need right now

November 6, 2018August 11, 2015 by Sarah Wilson

There’s an indigenous practice called dadirri for healing trauma.

It also brings wisdom and wholeness.

Dadirri means inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. It’s a “tuning in” experience (best done outdoors) with the specific aim of reflecting on nature to find, and connect with, our inner selves.

It entails going bush.

It’s something everyone has, but it’s not always tapped.

It’s a technique that, when practiced often, can neurally rewire us, can heal us.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

November 6, 2018August 6, 2015 by Sarah Wilson

I gravitate to reads about walking. Especially those that extrapolate the connection between mindful reflection and walking. Hence today’s review of What I’ve Just Finished Reading.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit

Background to why I read this book: Walking and reflection sustain me through my angst and anxiety. My current theory:

Walking works to the same pace as reflection, thus the former ekes out the latter.

So much in life works too fast for discerning reflection. Most of what we do frazzles us. Walking brings us back to a dignified, even, expansive space.

Hand-writing (journal writing) does the same.

US-based writer Rebecca Solnit touches on these themes in her dense and often feminist treatise on the purposeful stroll. Nicely, I read it during my clinic stay in India, which prescribed no movement apart from a little gentle walking. I found the book in the clinic “library”. Of course I did. It was exactly what I needed to read. Life works like that.

The gist you need to know about: Wanderlust is a series of essays that esoterically explores random

A One-Pot Wonder Skillet Cookie recipe!

August 5, 2015 by Sarah Wilson

It is no secret that the new IQS One-Pot Wonders Cookbook is possibly my favourite cookbook yet. It’s all about making delicious meals simple, affordable and sustainable. To give you a little glance at what’s inside, I thought I’d share one of my favourite dessert recipes from the book: The Choc Chip Skillet Cookie.

Choc Chip Skillet Cookie from the IQS One-Pot Wonders Cookbook

This giant cookie is the perfect way to serve up dessert at your next dinner party. Place it in the middle of the table, serve it with a side of cream and watch the happy faces. Just like all the other recipes in the book, the Choc Chip Skillet Cookie is prepared using only one single dish. Less time spent preparing and washing up, more time talking to your mates!

What else can you find in the book?

A stack of recipes, all prepared in one single dish.
Most meals are under $5, some even under $3 per serve.
There’s a whole section on Sunday Cookups, geared towards creating waste-free dinners and delicious leftovers for the week.

Louis C.K.’s decision-making rule

November 6, 2018August 4, 2015 by Sarah Wilson

Making decisions is a theme on this site. It’s a theme in my life as I grapple with the confidence, laissez faire-ness, certainty and surrender inherent in good decision-making.

Today I share brilliant US comedian Louis C.K.’s approach. He, too, grapples with the descent into despair that decision-making can induce. He’s developed a 70 Per Cent rule:

“These situations where I can’t make a choice because I’m too busy trying to envision the perfect one—that false perfectionism traps you in this painful ambivalence: If I do this, then that other thing I could have done becomes attractive. But if I go and choose the other one, the same thing happens again. It’s part of our consumer culture. People do this trying to get a DVD player or a service provider, but it also bleeds into big decisions.

“So my rule is that if you have someone or something that gets 70 per cent approval, you just do it. ‘Cause

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