Maybe this is the time we create the culture we've always hoped for in the US. The last couple weeks, I've found myself uplifted and healed by family, phone calls, dance, painting, cooking, yoga, gardening, song, and connecting to the natural world around me.
This newsletter is full of a few of my favorite sources of inspiration right now.
I have had the extraordinary gift of working in the OAEC gardens throughout my time here and seeing the winter soils emerge with an overwhelming array of colors, flowers, and life. One of my favorite parts of tending to the gardens are the conversations with the garden managers and interns as we weed, plant, and water. Last week, we came to the topic of love. You know, a casual Wednesday morning conversation. I asked each person if they had ever fallen in love and how they knew. Michelle, the garden manager's, answer has stuck with me, finding resonance in many arenas of my life.
Michelle explained that love is like a dance. When you first meet your partner, everything is exciting and new as you figure out how to move with one another. After a few months, the dance can stagnate. What is comfortable becomes boring. At this point we crave something EXCITING! FUN! The simplest way is to find someone or something new. The challenge is to learn how to keep dancing where we are with the people we're with. How do we infuse the mundane with new energy? How do we find lightness in the heavy? How do we find creativity from what our eyes have grown accustomed to seeing?
In these times of quarantine, I find myself craving the next adventure! The next most exciting thing. The challenge is to create the culture that US culture, with its busyness and stress, generally lacks. I am not saying this is a naturally carefree time. Just the opposite.
But we are learning to work the muscle of finding joy when our surroundings may otherwise seem bleak. We are learning skills for resilience. We are learning the songs, dances, food, and people that get us through tough times. We are learning to simultaneously grow roots downwards and flowers upwards.
HERE'S SOME OF WHAT'S INSPIRING ME!
Yoga with community has been an amazing way to stay joyful and connected! Join me Weds and Sat at 9 AM EST: zoom.us/u/ad9kJwA6yM
I am also extraordinarily grateful to my friend Gareth Dicker, who recently recorded this truth-filled song: Mama Gaia. "
"Do we love the living breathing being we’re on? Apparently not, our planet, our parent we treat wrong. We the people could change this, pick up the song We used to sing to each other in another eon.
Mythologies can pivot, the plot is not rehearsed. Do we cause cataclysms in a cold universe And operate as separate and spread that curse Or do we pause in this path, realign and reverse?
I am also super inspired by the "Gangsta Gardener", Rob Finley, who attended a Permaculture Design Course here at OAEC and, "has set about revolutionizing attitudes to gardening in inner city areas".
I'll leave you with this quote:
"The first commandment of economics is: Grow. Grow forever. Companies get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percent each year. People should want more, make more, earn more, spend more - ever more.
The first commandment of the Earth is: enough. Just so much and no more. Just so much soil. Just so much water. Just so much sunshine. Everything born of the Earth grows to its appropriate size and then stops." - Donella Meadows, Co-Author, Limits to Growth
