Photo of Wendyl by Emily Hlavac-Green
In association with Ti Ora Tea, Good Magazine presents to you a series of motivational podcasts covering a wide range of wellbeing topics. If you’re looking for new ways to care for the planet, the people around you, and yourself, Ti Ora Tea Talks is a great place to start.
Living the good life in Hokianga, journalist, broadcaster and author Wendyl Nissen has embraced the switch from city to country living.
Her new book, A Natural Year, is a guide to living a simpler, less complicated life.
Nissen also describes it as a series of essays written over a year “that was not the year she expected”.
“It’s a book recording a year of learning to live in the country but also being about positive ageing and other stuff,” she says.
That includes talking about her depression, anxiety and the mental wellbeing she has gained from her back-to-basics lifestyle and the practical things she does to live in a sustainable, natural way.
“I realised that depression and anxiety, which so many of us deal with in our lives, should be talked about more openly instead of hidden away as I had all of my life because I was ashamed,” says Nissen. “I started writing about that. When my publisher, Jenny Hellen, read the book for the first time she said: ‘It’s hard to believe that someone (you!) who appears so confident and out there can feel like that.’ Exactly.”
A Natural Year is a wonderful resource, too, with 100 recipes, including how to make yeast from grapes and yoghurt using chilli stalks!
And if you are a lover of cheese, try her hot camembert recipe by simply piercing the cheese with fresh sprigs of rosemary and garlic cloves, and baking in the oven for 10 minutes. Delish!
This book will also have you laughing as Nissen shares honest antidotes in a way that you have you smiling as well as nodding because you can relate!
But best of all it will help you make sense of the world right now, our place it in, how we can make better decisions for the environment and work with the earth, so that it can support us, too.
Listen to our podcast interview with Nissen below:
