Anyone who knows me well is aware that the first song Paul ever sang to me was If Tomorrow Never Comes (the Garth Brooks version). To this day I can’t hear the song (especially if it’s Paul singing) without tears in my eyes.
If Tomorrow Never Comes…will she know how much I loved her?
This song is a beautiful reminder, if one is needed, that all we have is today. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m the Queen of having projects on the go, and writing to-do lists, but that’s because my Capricorn nature is founded on having a goal. The goat wants to climb to the mountain top. We Cappies need little things to work towards. But I also know without doubt that whether I actually achieve these is irrelevant. What’s important is this moment. This is always where the point of power rests, and is where our greatest joys are to be found.
If tomorrow never comes, my lists and plans won’t matter. If tomorrow never comes, you can be sure: Yes, I did know how much he loved me. I also know that the incredible magic that exists in today is so positive and meaningful, but if we live our lives without seeing the abundance at our feet we end up missing out on the whole point of our existence.
So, today, think about this: If tomorrow never comes, does your partner/best friend/child/mother/co-worker know what they mean to you? How about your mechanic or accountant, or what about the friendly person at the petrol station who is always singing a song when you come by?
If tomorrow never comes, can you say that you’ve lived according to your heart?
If tomorrow never comes, did you leave this world a better place, whether by a smile or a kind deed?
And most importantly, if tomorrow never comes, what might you do differently today?
https://veronikarobinson.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Updated-logo-colour.png00Veronika Sophia Robinsonhttps://veronikarobinson.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Updated-logo-colour.pngVeronika Sophia Robinson2016-05-19 11:00:252016-05-19 11:00:25If Tomorrow Never Comes
This is one of my partner Jane’s favourite cookbooks. It was a tough choice as there are so many amazing vegan chefs out there writing brilliant books; Aine Carlin, Isa Chandra Moscowitz and Angela Liddon to name but a few, but my cooking influences come from all sorts of angles.
The Mystic Cookfire is beautifully written with an open heart and lovely illustrations. It’s the rare kind of cookbook that you could quite happily read like a novel, tucked up in bed, with some hot chocolate. On the rare occasion that I have a day off playing with pots and pans, this is Jane’s go to cookbook, we eat from the ‘Mystic Cookfire’ (what a name!!).
I love eating food with soul, something so intangible, but you know the kind of food I’m talking about. Home cooked happiness! These recipes are simple, plant-based and nourishing; the kind of food that can make a house a home, dishes that will become family staples for years to come.
This book also focuses on the deeper relevance of food and cooking. How it is much more than just throwing some ingredients together. Cooking can be a daily routine that accentuates the lives of cooks, families and loved ones.
I’m a sucker for a good quote and this book is packed with amusing and informative references and quotes. Good cooking for me comes from a place deeper than just sound technique. There has to be some love in the mix!
If you had no money in the bank, how rich would your life be?
Abundance has nothing to do with your bank account, despite what our culture might have you believe. That feeling of ‘plenty’, of having a cornucopia of riches being poured onto you, comes from a deep sense of inner wealth. How do we cultivate such prosperity? The answer is so simple that most people reject it. True abundance rests on a solid foundation of gratitude.
How often do you give thanks for the ground you walk upon, or the car you drive? Do you wake up and give thanks for your life partner (or the joy of being single)? And what of your body, how often (despite your current state of health) do you stop and say “thank you”? What of your home? It protects you from the weather, and gives you a place of privacy from the world? When did you last say “Thank you, home”? Do you have friends in your life? Do you ever tell them what they mean to you?
Perhaps you’re sitting on a bunch of unpaid bills, or have a negative bank balance. Can you say thank you to your creditors for trusting in your ability to pay? Can you give thanks for what you do have in your life? If you’re reading this, you have a computer or access to one. That means you’re not homeless. It means that you’ll almost certainly have something to eat in your home, or know someone who can give you a meal. Look. Look hard. Look around you. Abundance is everywhere. Go and give thanks, and feel that genuine gratitude reach into the furthest edges of the Universe. Fill your heart with a joy so overwhelming that manifesting more good in your life is the only option.
We are living, breathing, vibrating, attracting magnets. Want more money? Give thanks for the abundance around you. Want better health? Be kind to your body, and say thank you every day for all it does for you. Want more love? Start with loving yourself. Every relationship you will ever have begins here. Don’t expect a soul mate to turn up and rescue you if you treat yourself shabbily. Love yourself into full being, and you will attract a love so great that you’ll pinch yourself every day.
We naturally enhance our energetic resonance and amplify our vibration every time we give thanks.
Gratitude is the foundation of my life. It hasn’t always been this way.
I live an undiluted life, something which I have consciously crafted over the years. It means that I have spent a lot of time investing in myself. Our culture teaches us to invest in an assortment of things, but how often do you get advice to invest in you? My school teachers certainly never taught me that.
What does my investment look like? It is about every time I do something which nurtures or nourishes me, whether it’s going to bed before I am utterly exhausted, or taking a long walk in the woods.
It might be sitting under the plum trees to read a book, or standing under the waxing Moon in silence. Sometimes it’s about slowing down to sit in the garden with a cup of tea, doing nothing but listening to the birdsong and feeling the sunshine on my skin. I invest in myself by keeping good company, and allowing laughter to be a daily vitamin! Investments also include plenty of time for daydreaming, listening to music I enjoy, and watching the sunrise. It means creating meals which are delicious and nourish my body. The more I give to myself, the higher my vibration. Every time I love myself enough to indulge in my pleasures, I am helping make the world a better place. Why? How? When we walk through this world with a sense of gratitude and contentment, we are always going to make positive, healthy, life-affirming choices which have a ripple effect. We don’t need to see how far those ripples extend, only that they do.
At secondary school, I was the student voted by teachers as most likely to fail in life. This was almost certainly because I spent more time wagging (playing truant) and heading off to the river to swim naked with the boys than I did at school. It still makes me laugh.
Silly fools! What is success? Indeed, what is failure? I reached A grades for Swedish, Catering, Drama and English. Who gives a toss that I got Es for Science and Maths? That I was kicked out of biology class for drawing love hearts instead of dissecting frogs should have been an indicator of my life’s path! A wise teacher would have seen far into the future that I’d one day live in a House of Hearts, and that I’d be, amongst other things, a marriage celebrant. So, perhaps even back than, I recognised the power of love above all else.
I’m 48 years old. So what if I don’t have a high-flying career or own a house in the Hamptons? Who cares that I don’t earn £100 000 a year?
My life is rich beyond measure. My life is not based on the sound of an alarm clock telling me to go and sell my soul. I have the freedom to potter in my garden and work from home. This morning, I came back from the gym and planted wildflower seeds under the butterfly bushes before starting work. The joy that gave me, and knowing the riot of colour that will manifest in that part of the garden, isn’t something I’d trade for a ‘normal’ life.
I have the luxury of recognising that I’d rather attract my ideal clients than have ones I don’t resonate with. That, of course, will inevitably mean fewer clients, but if the goal is living with integrity then I can tell you the path is all the more richer. As an independent author, I am free to write the books that live in my heart, rather than trying to fit into a traditional publisher’s definition of what a book should be like.
My younger daughter leaves home in three months. That my husband and I have raised two daughters to adulthood who are healthy, independent and oozing with creativity simply amazes me. If this is my life’s work, then I don’t believe I have failed.
After twenty one years with my husband, I can honestly say he still makes me laugh more than a dozen times each day. That I feel giddy with joy when he smiles at me is something no school report card could have predicted.
When I was nineteen years old, I had several past life regressions. One of the things I really appreciated was when the lady who was facilitating me decided that instead of focusing on the past, I should look into my future.
It was so odd. There was a man with stubble (I had no idea how much I would come to love stubble!), and two daughters playing in the snow. Snow seemed like an alien concept given I was living in South Australia where it can get to 40C in the Summer.
So here I am, with two daughters and a man with stubble, living in a place which snows each Winter.
My life hasn’t always felt joyous. Contentment has been an evolution. The journey has required daily inner work: a spiritual practice of taking 100% responsibility for my life, and primarily my thoughts.
I find myself thinking from time to time that if I were to die now, that would be perfectly okay. I’m happy. Could it be that I’ve reached the inner pinnacle of success?
There are of course a lot of reasons to hang about and play on Earth for another forty or fifty years: to watch my children’s lives unfold, enjoy time with my husband, meet my grandchild/ren, write more books, travel, and mostly, to sit in the sunshine and watch the cat chase insects as he scampers across the lawn daisies.
My undiluted life has come about because I learnt to recognise everything that brings me pleasure, and to self medicate with these gems every day: a hug, my husband’s fab coffee, sunshine, cello music, exercise, gardening, creating food to nourish my family, laughing, spending time with friends, reading, listening to my husband sing in the shower, chatting with my daughters, writing books and articles, creating ceremonies, reading astrology charts.
I have created a beautiful life for myself. My greatest wish for my daughters is that they can do this for themselves. I hope I’ve been enough of a role model for them.
I said to a friend at the gym this morning, that I only have one goal: to live a peaceful life. Each day, I make choices that contribute to my inner calm.
So, I’m not a doctor or a lawyer. I haven’t changed the world. There’ll be no obituary in a national paper when I die. But you know what? I don’t care, because I do believe I have touched the face of Happiness, and there is no higher purpose. #creatingabeautifullife
It’s late at night, my feet are bare on the cool terracotta kitchen tiles, as my husband and I chat happily about various things. Debussy fills the air, lending a gentle tone to the evening. Leek and potato soup simmers on the stovetop. I’ll freeze batches of it for my daughter’s school lunches later. I wash the evening’s dishes, and pop the vegetable and fruit scraps of the day outside to the compost heap. I take a moment to enjoy the birdsong and twilight breeze before heading back to the kitchen to join my husband. He is tending to some jobs, and the scene of domestic bliss is one that makes my heart sing. It might bore the pants off some people, but I don’t care. For me, moments like this are amongst my favourite.
My daughters would laugh if they could have seen me in the late 1980s, what with my killer high-heel shoes (what was I thinking?) and padded jackets. Don’t even start me on the permed hair. Ouch! Feminism was my middle name. I was all about career plans, and the rights of women. Power to the girl, and all that. Hello, I read Cosmo and Cleo magazines. But even then, I think I had a hunch that feminism was about so much more than equal pay!
I learnt about feminism at my mother’s feet, even though she was a stay-at-home mum for all her parenting years rather than a career chick. She was strong, feisty, followed her heart, and wasn’t bound by anyone’s rules. From her, I learnt that women could do anything. From my father, I learnt that it was important to believe in yourself. Pretty good grounding for life, really.
Maybe, though, feminism was about learning to find my voice, too. Perhaps it was standing on my own two feet and not being treated shabbily. I didn’t have the impact of Germaine Greer, but in my own small way I created change that to this day has gone on to help others. In my early twenties, I was sacked from my job as a phlebotomist (the person who takes your blood [and gentlemen, your semen!]) in my local hospital. Why? What had I done wrong? My crime was daring to put in a formal complaint against my boss for sexually harassing me. He thought it was his God-given right to grope me and make lewd comments from 9 to 5. The general manager was sympathetic, but in the end said his hands were tied. It was easier to hire a new lab assistant than to hire a new scientist. Can you feel your inner feminist rising? Mine sure as hell did! As it turns out, at the time, for some odd reason, Queensland hospitals seemed to be exempt from any laws against their staff being sexually harassed. That is no longer the case after my time with the Ombudsman. This was never about me getting revenge, but about speaking up for women and for the underdog. It was about saying ‘wait a minute, we’re important too!’
Several years later, when working as a media officer and author for the Royal New Zealand Society for the Protection of Animals, I became incensed by the many cruelties to animals in the name of ‘human food’. In particular, the fact that a battery hen spends her whole life in a space the size of a piece of A4 paper: denied her biological needs of sunshine, dust, and freedom of movement. My inner feminist began to boil. The way a culture treats animals is usually a fair indication of how it treats its women, too. My daughter Eliza thinks it’s pretty cool that I launched the Ban the Battery cage campaign. The highlight for me was when my boss, bless him, called me into his office because five ‘top’ men from the Egg Production Board were there. They wanted me to stop what I was doing. My campaign was hurting their lucrative industry. I was about 24 years old, standing in a room with men all aged 55 or older. It’s fair to say it was one of the more empowering moments of my life.
So, I stand here today, in my cosy cottage in rural Cumbria, a thousand years away from that young feisty girl, barefoot and content, but as much a feminist as ever.
Feminism has meant that marriage for me is easy. I’m with a man wouldn’t dream of thinking I was anything ‘less than’. My husband is my greatest supporter. He’s the first person who’ll encourage me to sit and write an article or book before I do the vacuuming. You’re more likely to find my husband washing the dishes than me, and I am just as happy to put the rubbish and recycling on the kerb. I mow the lawn (though, in fairness, he has to start the thing for me), and he repairs clothes with his little sewing kit. My daughters find this endlessly amusing.
There are some feminists who’d see the scenes of my domestic harmony the antithesis of their rally cry, and yet…this is exactly what it’s all about. Equality is about looking into the mirror of a relationship and knowing the scales are fairly balanced. Surely the heart of feminism is harmony, whether it’s at work or home?
I enjoy cooking, and it’s fair to say that most of the meals in this house are generated by me. If, though, I was with someone who demanded a meal on the table at 6pm each night… Never mind, scrub that thought, I’d never have ended up with someone like that!
Feminism, to me, is freedom. It’s not a fight. It really shouldn’t even be a cause. It’s had to be, of course, because, like battery hens, women have been treated shoddily for a good chunk of history.
Not all men are like that, of course. In my life, I’m blessed to know men who are thoughtful, kind, considerate, generous and fair. I guess it’s indicative of the journey I’ve been on in life, but every time I meet a man like this, I do a silent cheer.
What have I learnt after decades as a feminist? Feminism isn’t about what’s out there. It’s not even about changing the world. Sorry! Feminism isn’t actually about men and women, or worse: men v. women. It’s about loving yourself. To be a feminist means valuing yourself enough that you won’t tolerate any situation that doesn’t match your ideals and values, whether that’s in the way an animal is treated, or an employee, or how our planet is raped and pillaged. A true feminist is a woman who values herself enough to make lifestyle choices which honour who she really is, and what she loves to do: whether that’s having a career, or being a stay-at-home mum (or in my case, both); or being a humanitarian or anything else that makes her heart sing.
So, to the young women coming along who think feminism is a fight. Stop. Put your weapons down. Instead, slip your shoes off and go for a walk on the grass. Look up the stars. Feel the rain on your skin. Recognise your place in this Universe. Love yourself unconditionally. Don’t buy into the cultural hype about what womanhood means. Be kind to yourself, and be gentle. Define your own values. Live a heart-centred life. After all, isn’t that what the feminine energy is all about? Listen to your heart. It has the answers. Inspire yourself, and you’ll inspire others, whether you’re at the kitchen sink or landing a multi-million pound deal. Being a feminist means being free to write your own script!
My mother was the first person to teach my daughters, Beth and Eliza, about eating dandelion leaves.
To my eyes, dandelions are beautiful: first, with their bright yellow flowers, and then with their fluffy ball-like seed tops which beg me to blow them off with a wish.
that beautiful happy face!
In the early years of mothering, I would take my daughters out for our daily walk around the block (about three miles around the farmers’ fields), and we’d sing a song called Dandelion, Yellow As Gold.
I would sing:
O dandelion, yellow as gold
What do you do all day?
And then Beth & Eliza would sing:
I just wait here in the tall green grass till the children come to play.
Me:
O dandelion, yellow as gold, what do you do all night?
Beth & Eliza:
I wait and wait till the cool dews fall and my hair grows long and white.
Me:
And what do you do when your hair is white, and the children come to play?
Beth and Eliza:
They take me up in their dimpled hands, and blow my hair away.
They never tired of our vocal trio, and indeed, the dandelion song was the soundtrack to their early childhood. (It is from a book called Sing Through the Day. The song was written by Noreen Bath).
Why do I love dandelions? Apart from their obvious beauty, there is something about their tenacity that makes me smile. That persistence in growing through asphalt, and finding the light, is deeply inspiring. What a life force! And here’s what really makes me laugh: no matter how often people rip those plants up, or knock ‘em down with toxic products, they come back year after year. Do you think they’re trying to tell us something?
Maligned and unappreciated by many, dandelions have so much to offer us.
Imagine if Wordsworth had written about dandelions rather than daffodils? Perhaps we wouldn’t be poisoning our gardens!
My garden is a reflection of me. A bit wild.
Clearing the vegetable beds after Winter.
I see similarities between myself and a dandelion: I have been a source of food, medicine, nourishment, wisdom and strength. My hands-on mothering days are coming to an end, as my younger daughter leaves for university in three months and 26 days.
Eliza Serena Robinson
Reflecting on this, I am reminded that dandelions have been my teacher: they’ve shown me that I have put down roots, and even when the culture around me had completely different values, I continued to grow. I mothered from an intuitive place, and learnt from watching my children play and live free from formal education. Dandelions have also taught me the importance of being adaptable to changing circumstances.
Like my garden, my wild mothering heart is a place that’s overgrown, and the paths have to be navigated through thick, so-called weeds. It was always in my blood to mother from this fertile ground. Dandelions have shown me that I can be a woman and live with beauty in this world, even when the culture tries to trample me down. I stand tall, and continue to do my work both as a mother and in my career.
Enjoying sunrise in my garden
Dandelions always have a home here in my garden, and are amongst the first flowers in Spring that bees can rely on as a source of food.
I rejoice at this time of the year to see fields, verges and, indeed, my lawn, bustling with these happy yellow faces. I don’t see dandelions as evil and pesky weeds. Quite the opposite. They’re welcome in my garden for their beauty alone. But did you know that their leaves are highly nutritious, their flowers are also edible, and their roots make a wonderful caffeine-free coffee?
Dandelion greens have found their way into my fresh juices, salads, and even steamed with other vegetables. Medicinally, they’re brilliant for treating gall-bladder and liver complaints. The bitter leaves are an excellent tonic. Ideal for treating skin issues, such as acne or eczema, dandelion is excellent for purifying the blood. The dandelion is rich in nutrients including protein, calcium, iron, Vitamins A & C.
Daffodils, gorgeous as they are Mr Wordsworth, have inedible bulbs and let’s face it, no one ever told the time using them. But dandelions, oh beautiful dandelions, can be used from root to flower.
NOTE: Do not pick dandelion greens from a roadside, near railway lines or telegraph poles (due to toxic car fumes and weedkiller).
oh how I love to rest amongst the daisies and dandelions
Have you ever wondered what it might be like to hang out with likeminded people for a five days? We have a few places available on our family camp in August (18-22) in North Yorkshire.
This is a wonderful chance to step into Nature, and watch your children run through wildflower meadows. You might like to take part in one of our many workshops, or simply enjoy a walk in the woods on your own. Perhaps you dream of gathering around the campfire at night, and sipping tea under the stars. Maybe you feel drawn to gathering with others for a ceremony in the Ironage replica townhouse, or sampling some reflexology. You might be inclined to take part in a drumming workshop or engage in art therapy. The forest school activities are always a hit with young and old.
Labyrinth at our previous camp
Lunches and dinners are being prepared on site by Rocket Catering.
Camp kitchen at our family camp 2013
All in all it will be a nourishing experience.
You can find more information here, as well as a booking form. Places can be secured with a 20% deposit.
https://veronikarobinson.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Updated-logo-colour.png00Veronika Sophia Robinsonhttps://veronikarobinson.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Updated-logo-colour.pngVeronika Sophia Robinson2016-05-13 14:34:512016-05-13 14:34:51A Time To Gather
