They’re in season again!
🍁🌼🌰🐿🍃🍇🍁🌼🌰🐿🍃🍇🍁🌼🌰🐿🍃🍇
Are you familiar with pomegranates? And do you like them?
They are beautiful, delicious, and beneficial for our health.
They’re full of antioxidants that help the immune system, fibre that helps digestion, potassium that supports the heart, vitamin C that supports basically everything. Many studies show that they help reduce the risk of cancer, and that they’re great for the nervous system, thanks to their combination and concentration of nutrients.
You can eat them as they are, you can add them to salads, you can press them and drink the juice.
On a less healthy note, pomegranate juice is great in cocktails, and that’s what grenadine was originally, just thickened pomegranate juice, before it became the mix of sugar and chemicals that we now find on the shelves.
You can make your grenadine yourself, by processing the arils, these beautiful juicy pearls, in a high-speed blender. Then you strain the juice through a very fine sieve or cloth, in order to separate the hard seeds, and then you simmer the juice gently for about an hour, stirring occasionally. The traditional way is to add sugar and some lemon juice to it, but I prefer just adding some maple or agave syrup when it cools down.
From a totally different perspective, pomegranates have been a symbol of abundance since Ancient Greece, and probably even before.
You might have heard of the Greek myth of Persephone, daughter of the goddess Demeter, who was abducted to the underworld by the god Hades.After long negotiations involving a pomegranate, it was established that Persephone would spend part of the year in the underworld with Hades, and that’s how winter was born, and part of the year with Demeter on the Earth, and that’s how summer was born.
This gorgeous image of Persephone – or Proserpina, as she was called in Ancient Rome – is a painting of the year 1882 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The pomegranate was also an attribute of the goddess Venus, symbolising again abundance, but also love, and marriage.
Later, with Christianity, it became an attribute of the Virgin Mary, symbolising Christ’s resurrection.
You can find pomegranates in all forms of art, throughout history, and all around the world. And they do deserve their fame, if you ask me!
Autumn is in every way the realm of abundance. That’s when nature is the most generous with her gifts, and also, it’s a great time for us to reflect on abundance in all its forms.
Nature is endlessly abundant and since we, as human beings, are part of nature, this means that we are endlessly abundant too. When we don’t pinch ourselves off from what we really are, that is!
I suggest we all use this beautiful autumn time to reflect on where we are denying ourselves the health, the time, the money, the fun, the growth, the success, the joy, that’s ours by our very nature, and a gift from our Mother Nature, and that we’re sometimes not allowing ourselves to have.
I’ll leave you with this thought and with the item “pomegranates” for your shopping list!
Have a wonderful time, have fun, be creative with food for the body and food for the soul, and be kind to yourself!
