“What are the conditions that make a city want to take such a good thing from the community?” - Karen Washington

This week, I'm appreciating my patch of backyard where I can optimize the quiz and send letters to the NYC Mayor. How about you?

Acknowledge Earth Is Our Home

Over the past two weeks, I've started the habit of writing 3 morning pages as recommended in The Artist's Way. During the sunny mornings, I've sat in a camp chair in my backyard facing southeast. 

Because my one story place is only about 10 feet away, it takes some time for the sunrise to peak over — hitting the 2 story tall tree tops to the right of me first. With the angle of the sunlight, it’s definitely a type of the proverbial magic hour full of beauty.  And I found myself pausing to look and breathe between writing lines.  

Then something interesting happened.  Something internal shifted. Where I went from inhaling the beauty to…

Exhaling gratitude.  

It was an interesting shift in my body from receiving to expressing. The energy flowed differently. From a experience that seemed to travel my vagus nerve as the air entered to one where my heart extended to the leaves.

Thank you!

Discover Your Earth Archetype

The most interesting part of watching the results on the What is Your Earth Archetype? quiz is seeing the trends between high scores of super powers and low scores on challenges.

So I'm considering some remedies:

1. Rephrase the challenges so it's something like "Something I'm working on (or have worked on)...."

2. Only have super power qualities

3. Simplify the overall quiz to look like Love Languages where, you choose between one of two options. Each type can be paired up in 10 questions so I could do 2 different versions of each pairing to test for consistency.

Thoughts?

Work Together in Community

In the world of food justice, Karen Washington is a powerhouse.  Dating back to the 80s, she will have corrected you if you claimed here NYC neighborhood was a food desert.  After all, food was around.  But it was crap. HEALTHY food was hard to come by.  And community gardens had the power to change not only that, but a whole lot more…

• Green spaces

• Community gatherings

• Educational opportunities

• Just to name a few

So as I start to reach out to climate orgs in NYC and Atlanta to consider filming “How on Earth?” there, I knew I had to reach out to Karen.  The image in my head was the powerful woman that took the stage a Bioneers a couple years back called “911 Our Food System Is Not Working.”

Who joined me on zoom was a humble woman who had been turning her compost bin all day on her farm.  In the 30 minutes we shared, I feel in love with a woman I now get to call “Momma Karen.”  

She brainstormed with me and offered big ideas and concrete actions.  She solidified that the biggest power “How on Earth?” has for climate orgs is as a media source to amplify questions being asked by the community. For example, Elizabeth Street Garden (a mainstay of the community) is under threat of being “developed.”  

The questions she pressed for were….

• Why take that heart from the community when have other areas in jurisdiction for housing?

• What makes an administration do this?

• Why that area?

• What's the underlying reason?

• What are the conditions that make a city want to take such a good thing from the community?

• What is their take on it?

So until How on Earth can put a megaphone to these questions, join me in writing a letter to the NYC mayor — no matter where you live!