Inner Transformation for Planet Restoration
Beautification from the inside out.
Looking up from my uncle Ben’s balcony, I marvel at Scrub Jays wandering the skies. They perch themselves between branches of Ponderosa pines. I’m in the San Bernardino Mountains. Ever so often, my family makes it up the winding roads to Lake Arrowhead, celebrating the exchange from suburbia to a cabin escape.
These visits nurtured my affinity with nature. Don’t you feel surrounded by love, the swirling wind carrying you to the scent of bark like an IV in your veins, activating another level of aliveness.
These rivers and valleys bind us. We prosper when the natural world thrives as an extension of ourselves.
Balance of Yin & Yang
LA-based artist, Yumi Sakugawa mentioned in a workshop I attended about thriving in cycles rather than in a perpetual state of ambition, the inhales and exhales of our life. This is how we sustain ourselves, translate to our land and overlap in our communities. Humans are meant to live in the exchange of absorbing and creating. Rest and hunt.
When both the energies of yin (being) and yang (doing) are in balance, the harmonics of life are restored.
Feeling stuck in a 9-5 cubicle, this continued boredom drained the energy from doing anything else I dreamed of.
I had a constant yearning to be in stillness. Unconscious consumerism is a machine. We’re not here to hustle, but like the natural world we are meant to have seasons. Seasons of inwardness and ease, productivity and flow.
In hot yoga, we are taught to connect with our breath and bend our way into pumping our heart out, strengthening our core at a controlled pace. Towel off the hard-earned sweat until we find our way down in savasana (resting pose). For all your tomorrows, I hope you remember to bend with a steady heart, with the wisdom of your inhale and exhale - our innate flow.
We cannot have ECOLOGICAL PROSPERITY without stopping to appreciate our beingness on this Earth. We cannot change the climate crisis without adaptability or flexibility.
So tell me, how will you arise to restore yourself and our home?
Conscious Creativity & Art Activism
As a child, I explored my Grandpa’s lemon trees to his garden of mulberries, pomegranates, and fragrant roses. I began to learn the act of noticing, when the summers were long, Maman Joon and Baba Joon gave me a fortress to play in. Curiosity was a muscle I used in their home.
In this state of mind, I flowed with the rhythms of my desire, seeking untold stories in the drawers, memories tucked in bedroom mirrors, mysteries inside Danish cookie tins, a collection of glass jars lining the curtains, cheeky spiderwebs, an English language book and a magnificent glassed moth.
The way we are CURIOUS about our world gives us all the initiative we need to conserve it. We are the keepers and lovers. We have the benevolent duty to uphold ECOLOGICAL PROSPERITY.
My first time away from family was at Outdoor Ed Week in 6th grade. As we went up to Mount Chai, the school bus was bumping in goofy camp songs up the steep roads. While girls were crying, reading letters from their parents, I was elated to get away and get immersed in the forest.
Our guides taught us about the flora and fauna through hikes between running water. I saw my first planet under the lens of a telescope, widening my world forever. I created art with dismantled twigs and branches assembling a pack of M&Ms. This week defined what lay ahead of my contributions to the land I loved.
What are some of your early memories with the land? What do you love about your backyard garden, local surf town or footprint-dusted trails?
Habitat restoration is not only an outward rehabilitation, but an inward transformation. While art is in itself activism, it can also inspire it - a love for and binding to the land. Healing is not all in the mind, but integrated in the hips and the heart.
Exercising your creative potential in embodying the sensual world feeds CONSCIOUS CREATIVITY. Honor your wilderness. Create those bridges between us.
I advocate for planet restoration through creativity, allowing for vibrancy to flow. We must exercise our unique talents. We all hold truths that contribute to something universal.
Listen on Substack.
Yours Sincerely,
Ode to Mel
