Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you.  —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

In my 20’s I was the life and soul of the party. On any given fresh new morning I would be pulsing and twitching on a dance floor in a dingy Sydney basement. I knew everyone in the little scene and thought it was all so fabulous. The one person I never bothered to invest in was myself. She was the only one that stuck around.

My personal healing journey started recently, I got sober and started to eat clean whole food.  The process of becoming my own friend however, that has been years in the making.

I love living a nomadic life. I often write about the wide open spaces and the skies that stretch forever but my gypsy dream life comes at the cost of community. My friends and family are flung across states and oceans. Even though technology makes connection so much easier it has been a long time since I sat with my soul mates over a pot of brewing leaves.

I often write about the wide open spaces and the skies that stretch forever but my gypsy dream life comes at the cost of community.

Over the years I have battled loneliness like a physical ache. I have worked as a cook on a Northern Territory cattle station and a resort on the Kimberley Coast where I helicoptered in to manage the kitchen and ended up marrying the boss, my Rock.  This was the single best decision of my life and a whole other story. Love is an anchor; it physically tethers you to a place that you could never have imagined yourself. For seven months each year I spent a decade in a place of perfect raw Beauty. The ancient country  untouched for millennia. The sandstone rocks alive with watchful eyes of the Wandjinna figures and the grace of the Gwion Gwion. I learnt what it means to connect to nature and I learnt that in wide open space you can no longer hide from yourself.

In isolated space you journey in. The road in was a little bumpy for me but I learnt to know myself. I became a friend to myself because I needed one. Of course, I also found an amazing friend and soul mate in Rock. He is a bear of love and support but you can only be fully present and engaged in a  relationship when you are fully present and engaged with yourself.

Being your own friend is a transformative experience. It makes life so much easier. I have learnt to find that inner coach voice

“You’ve got this. Just try and again. Well done Bell that was awesome”.

If I had not made a friend of myself this gypsy life would never have been possible. We spend weeks with no interaction but each other and the bounding roos. I am with and of myself, undistracted, purely me.

Solitude is a gift and I hope I have used it wisely.

In accepting and loving myself I have discovered a resilient friend who is kind of awesome company. Solitude is a gift and I hope I have used it wisely. I learnt what Rilke means when he says that feeling solitude means that the space around you is vast. I learnt to sing out with the pain it caused me. I got to like myself. I came to love her.

We are just three weeks from the next adventure. The caravan of courage is getting her first coat of colour. We went for 60’s colours in keeping with her birth year. We vacillated over names but as Rock was painting her this morning it came to me; She is Lou Lou Lovely.

Soon she will wind her way North, her candy colours separating us from the herds of grey nomads, though we seek the same things; quiet beautiful spaces in which to revel in our lives, barefoot and bound for the sea.

The recipe I am posting this week is simple and delicious. A bowl of tasty nutrition that I dreamed up on the road. Somehow it tastes even better eaten outside with no shoes on.

Moroccan Quinoa and Carrot Bowl

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Carrot puree

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Dressing

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To put this together, drizzle the assembled salad with the dressing. Quinoa can really droop under too much dressing, so just a few table spoons.  Scoop a dollop of the carrot puree on top or on the side and dress with fresh herbs, more nuts, and a few slithers of preserved lemon.

Enjoy x