Sarah Wilson, Author at Sarah Wilson

When I’m shitty I climb a tree

June 5, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

This week in Sunday Life: I try the “wilderness effect”

On Thursday I woke up antsy. Sometimes we just do, don’t we. It’s the wind, the moon….the half bottle of wine we drank the night before. Whatever.

113125 5 600 When I'm shitty I climb a tree — by RJ Shaughnessy

I’d had a cold for days and I felt as stale as a pair of pyjamas that have been slept in too long. And just to add to the blah-ness I had to go buy eggs. So I fired myself up, tied on my hiking shoes, grabbed $5 and headed bush. I decided to travel the 5km into town (for the eggs) cross-country – through two farms and a national park, which Google Maps indicated has no walking trails or roads.

Which sounds quaintly Famous Five in theory. But things wound up with me stuck in a quagmire. Literally. The trail-less park turned out to be a swamp and about 2km in I was up to my knees in it, lost and stuck. I sunk back on a mangrove tree in a little sunny patch, picked off a few leeches and thought, Sarah, what are you doing?

I can only say I was trying to de-blah.

because i know you’ve always wondered: the best coloured undies to be wearing right now

July 31, 2018June 3, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

Now this is possibly an overly frivolous post. But, hey, it’s Friday. And, strangely, I do actually care if I’m wearing the wrong coloured undies. A while back reader Heather asked me to do a post on colour…and what they do for our moods etc. So I thought I’d consult a woman who specialises in colour…and coloured knicker readings. Seriously!

Years ago, when I edited Cosmopolitan magazine, I called in Australia’s leading colour specialist Chris Brazel to do a feng shui/colour makeover of our office. She walked straight into my office and shrieked, “OMG, you’ve got a fire extinguisher in your relationship corner!!!”. At the time I was extracting myself from a very messy relationship. I called the maintenance dude and had him remove it immediately. Seriously! Again!

This time I got Chris to do a colour reading on stuff in my life…as a way of illustrating some stuff on colour. I gave her five images and she went to town:

1. My orange bike (and brown top)

With the brown top it indicates that someone is bogged down and the orange is about change and wanting movement towards balance or a change in direction with work.

so you’d like to be a writer, yeah?

July 17, 2018June 2, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

Since I get asked this a lot – how did you become a writer? – I thought I’d answer in a jaunty post.

The short answer is: I started writing. From a young age. In journals. For the uni newspaper. And I kept going.

via pinterest.com

The longer one: I started writing and when I saw opportunities I jumped at them. I did work experience at Sunday Magazine while I was studying a Grad Dip in Professional Writing at RMIT (I also have a BA, in philosophy, half a law degree and did a political internship at Parliament House. Plus a year studying on scholarship at University of Santa Cruz, California – philosophy and women’s studies!). The editor asked what I liked/didn’t like about the magazine. I suggested the food pages needed more oomph. She said, Oh, is that so, perhaps you’d like to suggest some changes? Over the weekend I learned Quark from a manual (this was pre-Google and email) and redid the pages, complete with my own food and wine reviews. I presented my ideas Monday morning. She gave me the job as restaurant reviewer on the spot. From there I started writing more for the magazine – volunteering to do the extra work in my own time. Eventually she gave me a fulltime position as a features writer.

I had no idea what I was doing. So. I studied writers whose work I admired. I poured over their opening paragraphs, analysed the structure of their feature, reflected on what made their writing sing!! You become a good writer by being a student of good writing.

some sweet ideas: cooking with natvia

August 10, 2018May 31, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

In my quest to make sugar-free life, well, sweeter, I’ve been scouting different fructose-free sweeteners for you. It’s a minefield. There are a lot of sugar-free chocolates and treats out there…but the sweeteners read like something from a box of Ratsak. I’ve shared on the safe and not-so-safe alternative sweeteners before. One or two alternatives do exist. One of them being stevia, which is extracted from the leaves of a South American plant.

via pinterest.com

It’s a stack sweeter than sugar and is fructose-free. Native Americans used it medicinally as a digestive aid. I first read about it via Donna Gates’ Body Ecology and have been trying it out in a few recipes. It’s great with berries and yoghurt…it has a slight licorice tang to it. Anyway… For this sponsored review, Natvia asked to share three of their stevia recipes. To give you a taste of the stuff. Cut’n’keep!

Natvia is a natural sweetener made from Reb A stevia, and erythritol. Reb A is the purest and sweetest parts of the stevia plant, and erythritol is a naturally occuring nectar in some fruits, such as melons and grapes.

Things you should know about Natvia:

it’s 100% natural
it has 95% fewer calories than sugar
it’s fructose free
it contains no aspartame, or saccharin
it’s great for baking and cooking

almond Tea Cake Loaf

This recipe makes one tasty, coconuty loaf. It’s made denser with the almond meal.

The scary truth behind my cosmetics… and why I’ve ditched foundation

July 31, 2018May 29, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

Sunday Life: This week I detox my cosmetics

a little note: in my next post I will be listing the safe products I’ve decided to use as result of this week’s experiment, as well as those used personally by the top experts in safe cosmetics around the world. Check in tomorrow!

In 2009 Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie, two Canadian environmentalists locked themselves in an unventilated apartment and polluted themselves with household items like hand sanitiser and antiperspirant, which saw their triclosan levels rocket, and tinned tuna, which led to mercury poisoning after just seven serves. They offered themselves up as guinea pigs and emerged with a bestseller, Slow Death by Rubber Duck, their toxic tales influencing the Canadian government to ban BPA from baby’s bottles.

This week I share with you a similar experiment. This time I’m the intrepid guinea pig and my poison of choice is beauty products. My aim is this: to find out whether my makeup is making me sick. And what I should be using instead.

what’s the deal with coconut sugar?

May 26, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

OK. Still on the hunt for fructose-free sugar substitutes. Jo and I came across coconut sugar this week – a health food shop here in Byron had a bunch of very wholesome treats using coconut sugar. I reckon you’ll start seeing it everywhere. A few of the health food companies are starting to market it.

Via David Anderson/Glenn Allsop 2011

I asked the chick behind the counter about it. She said it was evaporated coconut water. Which would make it fructose-free. Hoorah!

But, alas, I got home and discovered the truth.

some pretty bike storage ideas

October 23, 2018May 25, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

Personally, my bike comes with me everywhere. It travelled with me into the Apple store in Sydney the other day. The security beef looked after it for me. I bath it. What more can I say…

I’m often asked where I keep my bike at home. Most places I’ve lived, inside. Mostly for security. And rust. I found these lovely shots of bikes-as-interior-accessories the other day. Why not work them into your decor? You got any clever ideas? Send them in…

lentils: how to really eat them

April 16, 2018May 24, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

A few posts back Julie Cowdroy wrote about the Below the Line campaign – a program in May that sees well-fed westerners live on $2 a day to experience what it’s like for the world’s poorest. And to raise $$. I promised to give it a crack and did so for a day. As, it seems, with most people who did it, I resorted to lentils.

Lentils are cheap. And Dr Weston A Price considers the little buggers the most nutritious of all legumes – high in minerals and they help assimilate protein and iron absorption. But they can be bland and horrible and really crook on the gut. If you don’t play right.

Here’s some tricks for eating them.

Just mine. It’s not a comprehensive list.

1. Add red lentils to soups and casseroles and curries…

for extra bulk and fibre and protein. A cheap way to spread out a meal. Simply rince a handful and toss in 15-20 minutes before the dish is cooked. They disintegrate and you’ll barely know they’re there.

2. Soak your green and brown lentils a few hours.

Most recipes will say you don’t need to at all because they’re quite low on phytic acid. Soak in warm water with a bit of lemon juice. Seven hours is good.

3. I make dahl…
by boiling soaked brown lentils (1.5 cups) in water to cover, adding a tsp of turmeric (a great anti-inflammatory), pepper and garlic. I simmer for an hour (covered) and then whisk the lentils til creamy. In a pan I saute cumin seeds and 2 small hot chillies in butter (or ghee) and then fold that through the lentils with some coriander.

4. I sprout lentils.

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we’re bone-heavy creatures…keep close

October 23, 2018May 23, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

I wrote yesterday in Sunday Life about going retro with my work habits…that I write out things longhand and that I’ve taken to using index cards to map out ideas before sitting down to a computer screen. It gets me closer to my creativity and slows things down to the pace at which I create and think.

So happens I was reading David Malouf’s essay The Happy Life in The Quarterly Essay yesterday. He writes longhand, too. Then types. And he discusses – beautifully – the idea that part of our unease, our contemporary unhappiness, comes from having so much our life occurring at a speed that our bodies are not aligned with.

He writes that it is integral to our happiness to be curious and to delve and to investigate. And that our bodies are our reference point, to determine direction.

“We start always from the body, and relate all thing back to it.”

And indeed everything about our bodies are in relation – think of Vitruvian Man (Da Vinci’s figure that shows every bit of our body is proportional and symmetrical.)

But life goes so fast now.

“These days we can travel around the globe at hundreds of kilometres an hour and project ourselves into space at several times that speed; but in some part of ourselves we are still bone-heavy creatures tied to the gravitational pull of the Earth, lumbering along as our great-grandfathers did…at four hundred paces, and tiring.”

Yes, and tiring.

The question, he writes, is:

“whether emotionally, psychologically, we can feel at home in a world whose dimensions so largely exceed …what our bodies can keep in view.”

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