So, today I'm pleased to be able to co-ordinate some time to write, with it being the correct day to write about #ThreeThingsThursday.  You can read more about this regular day of appreciation and gratitude  here 

#1 - This week  I was part of a fab group of people in my local community in Spain, who got together to chat about composting toilets! We met at Trinity and Paul's home, who are keen have a composting loo as part of their guest facilities. As a group we came up with hopefully what will be a great design for them. I'll hopefully be writing more about the compost loo here as the design progresses! We also got to see some of the beautiful permaculture inspired garden design work, Clair, another friend, had been undertaking on the land. 

#2 - Its been the second week of my annual leave from my nursing work, and I've really enjoyed spending many hours of each day sat in the sun reading books and hanging out with my furry family!

#3 - bean, cucumber, courgette and squash seeds sown last week are already starting to make a very welcome appearance for the edible garden  here in Spain 

Today has a been a beautiful day and I've very much been inspired to join in with Three Things Thursday - An Exercise in Gratitude again. 

The sun has shone on a crisp, cold January Thursday, and I have been off work. I had a beautiful walk up Buckden Pike with little, George the Jack Russell,  from the fab George Inn at Hubberholme, followed by a trip to spend time at the farm further up the Dale. My currently 'pausing' Edible Garden is to the naked eye, overgrown and abandoned. On closer observation, the raised beds and growing baby trees were full of birds and other evidence of all kinds of diverse, healthy flora and fauna flourishing. 

As the sun went down and I made my way back to Skipton, I called into one of my favourite Fair Trade shops, Namaste, which I visit about twice a year, and bought some lovely new clothes there, with money my dad had sent me for my birthday.

And then to finish the day I met my lovely freind,  Yvonne, a wonderfully talented textiles artist,  for chats about art, life, death an getting older, over great Kashmiri food at The Aagrah. Yvonne gave me these beautiful felted gloves she had made. You can check out her website here. 

So actually, many more than three things to be gateful for today. Looking forward to more Thursday gratitude reflections throughout 2017.

This has been on my "would love to do" mindmap for a long time. Its something Jan Martin from The Snail of Happiness (TSOH) writes every week, and its so inspiring. Word from TSOH is that Three Things Thursday was invented by Emily of Ms Emily’s Home for Full-Grown Nerds , who writes ...

​....three things that make me smile: an exercise in gratitude – feel free to steal this idea with wild abandon and fill your blog with the happy....

There has been a lot of writing about the personal and community (global?)  benefits of expressing gratitude, recently. One article I particularly like is from happierhuman.com 

​So here it is, my first Three Things Thursday post
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Dried apples and tomatoes snack - care of my lovely friend Pippa who I met up with for a drink last week. Pippa and her husband Andrew run a permaculture project Those Plant People near Keighley, West Yorks. Their North facing land grows a massive variety of food all the year round. They use a dehydrator as one of the ways they preserve the harvest. 

Urban Death Project

The Urban Death Project is developing an innovative new model of death care that honours both our loved ones and the planet earth. At the heart of this model is a new system called Recomposition that transforms bodies into soil.....In our vision of the future, Recomposition will happen inside buildings designed for the communities they serve. Gardens are nourished by the soil created inside, as we connect with the cycles of life...and death.

I feel so connected to this project. Its inspiration has been key to my own design around permaculture and death - Creative Dying - 

The start of my own mini-indoors garden design, in my current accommodation. Just having a few plants on a window ledge has made such a difference to my life in the last few days, especially as the days in the UK are SO short and dark just now - more to follow about this design!