My Call For Humanity

Why are you really here?

Now That I Have Found You

So true…
Sad to say that is something I do not do. 
But maybe but maybe, there is a light in that too. 
…Now that I. Have. Found. You. 

You are so brave to just go, without even a care.
With only a smile, and wind in your hair.
I’ve done it once, but again? Who knows?
But of course there are so many questions I could pose.
What will we do? Where will I be?
Would you want to come and follow me?
Is there really no time but here and now?
The universe clock is ticking with a big tick pow!
The time is here, this is it.
Should I just pout with crossed arms and sit?
Hell no my love, even if I cry!
Even if I’m scared or even if I sigh.
Because I love you, and see?
There is still so much we could be.
I would be a fool, a dummy,
A Wonka McFumbly.
But I will never drop your heart or your hand,
Not for as long as there is air and there is sand.
Not for anything, its you and me til the end,
Until we can no longer walk, or our hearts mend.
Until the universe clock stops ticking with a big tick pow!
I don’t care, I love you; in the here and now!

Inspired by a few incredible people, Dr. Seuss, and the following youtube video.

Creative Commons Photography by Justin Mier (Boston Harbour at Sunrise)

Love Letter Project 2014

Last year, a very good friend of mine, set out to distribute several hand-made valentines around town.

He carefully selected quotes and broke out the art supplies.

This year, I am working with him to make it into an even bigger project!

The plan is to mail or deliver Love Letters to all who wish to receive one. All you have to do is send a private message with your address via Facebook, or Email. (derek AT completehealthcircle DOT com)

Over the next two-four weeks we will be mailing letters we have written and will continue to send them off as soon as they are finished.

In my opinion, it is a little bit of happy that everyone deserves!

Everyone deserves a valentine. Everyone deserves to be told that they are loved and lovable.

Because it is the truth. There is a beauty in every person’s heart. Sometimes opening up to that beauty can be a challenge, but it remains there just the same.

See your own heart, in all its unique brilliance. This is your source of your creation. If you listen closely, you will always hear your heart’s inner voice. Don’t confuse this voice with the voice of ego, however. Within your heart, within your capacity to give and receive love is where we are at one with all other living things in the universe. And it is also where all healing begins.

Each letter will be written in a way that is both inspirational and motivational. Each card will be a unique piece of artwork and prose.

Meditate and reflect on your card when you receive it and notice what, if any, heartstrings are pulled. These letters will be powerful tools for self-esteem, self-acceptance, and of course, unconditional love.

If you give yourself five to ten minutes a day just to focus on the concept of loving your Self, you will be able to attract even more love into your life, because a mere act of self indulgence and nurture releases a changed vibration. This I promise, your life will change. You will begin a conscious path of new beginnings and emotions in your life that will take you to places that you have always wanted to visit but couldn’t. You will become aware that there are wonderful people in this world, who are genuine. Who are kind. Who are sweet. Who are truly beautiful souls. You may experience great wholeness, but we must first start somewhere, and that sometime is today. You will also release issues that you have avoided facing, in your life, and by beginning this process, you will begin to created the things that you desire in your life.

Law of Attraction, it’s that simple. Like attracts like.

If we are lonely and seek only a codependent relationship, that is what pets are for. They offer great unconditional healing love. However, codependence has no place in a long-lasting and loving relationship.

By opening yourself up to this different concept of self-love, you will allow the love, truth, and courage within in you to come forward. All of this will begin to manifest and impact your day to day life. You’ll start to focus on the positives, rather than the negatives. You’ll create this bubble of self perpetuating desire and passion for life that will be inescapable. This is the essential process in healing. By opening up, and welcoming it with open arms, the healing energy, the Reiki, automatically flows through all of the dimensions of our creative energies and begin the healing process in ourselves and those around us, who will be more apt to open as well.

We’ve all felt it from someone before, that uncontrollable urge to be swept up in their arms, whether they were grandparents or a new lover. Love is visceral, and it can be felt for miles away. It is addicting this feeling of calm, relaxed, safe security. But how can we be sure which you are feeling, Lust? Or Love? You can tell, when you really open your heart to the matter and ask the necessary questions. It will always be honest. It will never lie. Yes or no questions are better left unasked: they are far too easy to manipulate when hormones are in the mix. But I will tell you this:

Every card, each letter, will be infused with creative unconditional Love.

When you open that envelope, you will feel oneness with creation, and your heart will swoon with undeniable Love, and Light, and Peace.

Namaste.

Why not welcome in some real mail for a change?

Here is a sample:

Beloved, from the moment I saw you,
I saw beyond the suit and tie.
I saw your smiling spirit, embracing mine.
I saw your shining heart, embracing mine…
And I saw your strong hand, embracing mine.
In that moment, I knew –
That I wanted to share my All with You.
You are the wind that whispers in my ear.
I am loved and lovable.
You are loved and lovable.
Together, we shall create
A more loving world.
– This I know in my deepest Deep.

Related Articles

• http://staceyvalley.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/i-love-love/
• http://abeautifullifeministry.org/2014/02/07/a-letter-of-love/
• http://hannahlperrin.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/frida-kahlo-to-diego-rivera/
• http://www.angelfire.com/realm/LadyCatherine/HistoryLove.html
• http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/wayoflife/02/12/mf.love.letters/
• http://www.thedatereport.com/dating/love/the-10-best-love-letters-ever-written/

Photos courtesy of: schipul, camerabee, Sarabbit, sporkist, 

“O Sacred Season of Autumn” by Edward Hays

O sacred season of Autumn, be my teacher,
for I wish to learn the virtue of contentment.
As I gaze upon your full-colored beauty,
I sense all about you an at-homeness with your amber riches.

You are the season of retirement,
of full barns and harvested fields.

The cycle of growth has ceased,
and the busy work of giving life
is now completed.

I sense in you no regrets:
you’ve lived a full life.

I live in a society that is ever-restless,
always eager for more mountains to climb,
seeing happiness through more and more possessions.

As a child of my culture,
I am seldom truly at peace with what I have.

Teach me to take stock of what I have given and received,
may I know that it’s enough,
that my striving can cease in the abundance of God’s grace.

May I know the contentment
that allows the totality of my energies
to come to full flower.

May I know that like you I am rich beyond measure.

As you, O Autumn, take pleasure in your great bounty,
let me also take delight
in the abundance of the simple things in life
which are the true source of joy.

With the golden glow of peaceful contentment
may I truly appreciate this autumn day.

Forty Days by Paul Kingsnorth

Earlier this morning I stumbled upon a youtube video on permaculture, which led me to discover the Global Oneness Project.

Think TED Talks, but without the classroom-lecture setting.

Their collection of inspirational films, articles, photo essays, and interviews are sure to get your mind, body, and soul moving.

When I read the following article, I knew I just had to share it. Lately, I have been drawn back with the call of the wild as you might say, or have been beckoned by the soft whisperings of the woods as I like to call it. I hope you may glean some insight and inspiration as I have for yourself. Now I prepare for a lovely hike with the whispering autumn winds…

May you withdraw and retreat like Paul says, “not with cynicism, but with a questing mind.”

Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you.

Paul Kingsnorth urges us to contemplate the productive meanings of loneliness and withdrawal. He explains and reinterprets his childhood dreams of withdrawal from the modern world as an active quest and implores that retreating into wilderness is a necessity for change.

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.” Albert Camus

When I was a child, I wanted to be a hermit. I can remember in particular a strange background desire I had for some years to live alone in a pine forest. Why a pine forest? I have no real idea. I have never spent much time at all in a real pine forest (as opposed to the serried ranks of plantation pines which layer the hills of the north of England.) But that was where I wanted to be. I could imagine myself dwelling in the dark, dank heart of a pinewood. Life there, I knew, would be more intense, more magical, than life at home.

For a time, as a romantic and imaginative child, I entertained the idea that my desire to be surrounded by pines was due to my having been a Viking in a previous life. I was fascinated by the Vikings: their gods and their runes and the dark magic in their cold fjord culture. Looking back now, I suspect that the root cause was more likely to be an overdose of Tolkien, followed later by Stephen Donaldson and Ursula Le Guin. There were a lot of wizards in my childhood.

But beyond the Viking theme, there was something else in here: something about being alone. Why should a young child, and later an early teenage boy, want to be a hermit? Isn’t this the opposite of what teenagers are supposed to want: company, parties, crowds? I don’t think I ever really knew what teenagers were supposed to want, but I didn’t want any of those things. I wanted to be like Ursula Le Guin’s Sparrowhawk, living alone in a small hut in the hills, divining the mysteries of the world beyond sight. Life as a Gontish goatherd still seems pretty Elysian to me.

My late father helped propel me in this direction, entirely against his will or intent. I spent my childhood years trekking across the lonely moors and mountains of England and Wales, following the routes of long-distance paths. My dad was the opposite of a romantic dreamer, but he was an obsessive walker, and I had no choice but to join in. I’m glad. It sank deep into me. I am still an obsessive walker and a lover of those wild open spaces, but I think perhaps their loneliness sank into me too. Not loneliness in the negative sense in which that word is so often used in our culture – a culture in which individuals are perhaps more isolated than at any time in history, and which seems to compensate for this by mocking or belittling the idea of chosen solitude.

‘Wilderness is not a luxury,’ wrote Abbey, ‘but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.’

It wasn’t that kind of loneliness. Rather, it was the loneliness of which John Muir or Edward Abbey wrote when they in turn retreated to open, empty places, places which were not created, bounded or defined by Man. ‘The mountains are calling and I must go,’ wrote Muir. ‘Wilderness is not a luxury,’ wrote Abbey, ‘but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.’ What Muir found in the mountains, and Abbey found in the deserts, I found on the moors and fells of England, and later in ancient forests and on open plains in other parts of the world. Wild loneliness, ringing like a bell. A sense of connection to something far greater than me in a place which is not controlled by my kind and is not in thrall to us. A sense of smallness, from which can come greatness.

I still have that connection. Conditioned by those wild walks, by that time in the silence of the Cheviots and the Pennines, and perhaps also by Tolkein and Le Guin, I have spent much of my adult life fighting, in both word and deed, to protect the natural world which gave me so much as a child. I am as passionate as I ever was about protecting the nonhuman world from the increasingly violent excesses of our civilisation. But the environmental movement I once considered myself to be part of has in many ways moved in directions I don’t feel comfortable with. Technocratic, staid, too afraid to challenge narratives of technological progress and economic development, and too willing to buy into a notion of ‘sustainable development’ that often looks like business as usual with fewer carbon emissions, the mainstream green movement looks to me like it has veered off course.

Three years ago, I tried to explain my feelings about this in a long essay entitled ‘Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist.’ The essay was published in the first annual anthology produced by the Dark Mountain Project, a network of writers, artists, and thinkers that I had co-founded the year before in an attempt to create a space for new ways of thinking and seeing in a rapidly changing world.

That essay has probably been my most talked about piece of short writing in twenty years as a writer and journalist. At the time, it was also one of the most controversial. One of the passages that really jumped out at people, and made them either joyful or furious, was this one. It came at the end of the essay, as you might be able to infer:

… I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking.

I am leaving on a pilgrimage to find what I left behind in the jungles and by the cold campfires and in the parts of my head and my heart that I have been skirting around because I have been busy fragmenting the world in order to save it; busy believing it is mine to save. I am going to listen to the wind and see what it tells me, or whether it tells me anything at all.

Many people wrote to me – and still write to me – telling me how much they liked this essay; how it had connected with them, even put their own feelings into words. But others were, shall we say, unimpressed. I wasn’t quite prepared for the barrage which this extract brought upon me from activists and campaigners, though perhaps I should have been. I was condemned as a burnout, a doomer, a nihilist making matters worse by running up the white flag. If I wanted to ‘withdraw’, I was told, that was fine: I could go off and be depressed in the corner, but I had no right to tell other people about it. I needed to shut up and let the activists get on with their work of Saving The World.

Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you.

Looking back on this, I can see their point. If I were still deep in campaigning mode, perhaps I would feel the same if somebody else who had stopped doing it told me I was wasting my time. Yet something about this niggled at me. The main point I was making, when I talked about withdrawal, was not about walking away from engagement with the world. To me, in fact, it seemed almost the opposite. I dwelled on this for some time, and then came back to it last year in a kind of sequel to my first essay, which I called ‘Dark Ecology.’ It was another exploration of what a post-environmentalist world looked like, and of what still seemed to make sense to me, personally, in a situation in which none of the answers I had previously believed in were working any more.

At the end of the essay, which appeared in the third Dark Mountain book, I laid out five courses of action which seemed appropriate to me in a world in which climate change, population overshoot, economic collapse and mass extinction were not future problems to be prevented but realities we were already living through. First on my list was withdrawal, of which I wrote:

Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.

This time around, perhaps I had explained myself better, or perhaps the world had moved on, or both, but the reaction was far less furious, though it was sometimes still bemused. Certainly, people with a political or an activist mindset still regarded this as self-indulgent nonsense. But there were other reactions too, from different kinds of people. This time around, more people got it. More to the point, I was beginning to get it too.

For the first twenty years of my adult life, I forgot about my childhood fantasy of the hermitage and the pine woods and solitude. I threw myself into everything I was doing. I attended protests and occupations and meetings, worked for NGOs, set up my own NGOs, edited green magazines and worked hard to write things, from books to pieces of journalism, which I hoped would be read by a lot of people, because I thought that was the best way to change things and because I wanted to be noticed.

As I get older – I’m 40 now, and I have young children – I not only have less desire to be noticed, but I seem to understand my childhood desires better than I have done at any time since I experienced them. And I begin to see that my odd childhood dreams of withdrawal from the modern world were my call from the desert. Something I needed, and then ignored for a very long time, had been speaking to me. Now I can hear it speaking to me again.

Physical withdrawal is hard for me these days: I have a family to support, and too many commitments that I cannot and do not want to run away from. Forty days in the desert is not an option right now. But in my fortieth year I can feel the need for that withdrawal growing stronger with each passing month. There will be weekends this year when I will be able to be alone on the moors, and in November I will be attending a five-day Zen meditation retreat in an unheated cottage in the Welsh hills: the first time I have done anything like this. I can’t wait. But my moments of withdrawal can be much shorter than that. Sometimes I go running on the Lake District fells, which I’m lucky enough to live near now. Sometimes I just walk the dog down the green lanes and fields near my house, and on a good evening these can be acts of meditative withdrawal in themselves.

There is something out there, beyond the rational mind, beyond the everyday commitments, beyond the cities in the valleys and the cities in our heads, which we need and have needed for much longer than we would care to admit.

What am I running from, people have asked me occasionally in the past? It doesn’t seem like the right question to ask. I’m not necessarily running from anything; rather I feel drawn towards something. Not just that old connection with the wild spirit of the world which I once found and can still sometimes find in the green open places, but also a search for a place in which my mind can be still, and there is nothing in my head. Activism, journalism, even family life: all of these require you to play a role, to take positions, to stake claims, and all of those things in turn can scream at you, use you up, ossify you. Old, rigid trees are the ones that come down when great storms blow; it’s the flexible saplings that survive. All great artists, Bob Dylan once said, must be in a permanent state of becoming. I like this phrase. Becoming is not achieved amongst the everyday, or not only there. Becoming needs withdrawal. Something has to be sought, and found.

There is something out there, beyond the rational mind, beyond the everyday commitments, beyond the cities in the valleys and the cities in our heads, which we need and have needed for much longer than we would care to admit. Every spiritual code, every religion, every indigenous culture, every society, in fact, before the advent of modernity, has seen an act of withdrawal from the excesses and excrescences of the world as a spiritual necessity. The lives of the Christian Desert Fathers, the khalwa of the Sufis, the Dark Retreats of the Taoists, the exercises of St Ignatius: days, weeks, months of withdrawal were, still are, central to all major religions. The retreat to the desert or the forest, and the return with wisdom to the village or the town, runs like a silver brook through our folktales and fairytales, myths and legends. There is a reason for every story.

Sometimes you need to go, and sometimes you need to stay away for some time. The world we have created is terrifying in its complexity and power and in its ability to destroy the small, the precious, the immeasurable and the meaningful, inside you and in the places around you. Perhaps to a political activist, sitting by a stream in a forest seems like self-indulgence in the face of mass extinction and climate change, but it is the opposite. If you don’t know why that stream matters, you are not equipped to protect it. If you have forgotten how to listen to it, you may end up on the wrong side, as so many have before you.

If you don’t go out seeking, if you don’t retreat, if you don’t put yourself into the wilderness with nothing to carry you, you will never see what you need to shed or what you need to gain. You will never change. And if you never change, neither will anything else.

Photo courtesy of the Eastwick Press. 

Paul Kingsnorth is co-founder and Director of the Dark Mountain Project, a growing global network of writers, artists, and thinkers dedicated to challenging the myths which underlie our civilization.

A former journalist and environmental campaigner, he is also the author of two books of non-fiction and a collection of poetry. His first novel, The Wake, will be published in January 2014. His poetry has won several awards and his essay ‘Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist’ was recently selected as a winner of the 2014 Pushcart Prize in the US.

Paul currently lives in Cumbria, in northern England.

Global Oneness Project 2013 REEL

The Global Oneness Project believes that stories are a powerful way to connect us to our greater human potential. They produce and distribute films, media and educational materials that challenge us to rethink our relationship to the world.

They’ve been traveling the world since 2006 documenting a range of stories including: films on food issues in East Africa, youth gangs in the barrios of Ecuador, an artist who paints with tea, and photo essays about street art in the Bay Area and prayer in New York City.

Through their screening and education programs, they hope to stimulate dialogue, support community engagement and inspire action.

Check out more films on their website, globalonenessproject.org

Holistic Choices

I am so often asked why I am not a “bargain” shopper?

Why I choose to spend so much more money on certain products instead of the cheaper alternatives.

I get this alot from my family and my budget conscious lover who always do this out of love.

Now, I live pretty modestly and like alot of people live mostly paycheck to paycheck. I live on a budget. And am also a firm believer in quality over quantity.

Since the big consumerism phase of fast food and proliferated plastics, things have gotten cheaper, but they also have gotten less safe for our health.

Almost indestructable mason jars have been replaced by plastics because they’re cheaper to manufacter. Even though canning jars are pressurized and you dont have to run the risk of BPH leeching into your food.

But I’ve gone on a tangant.

The point of this post is to not get on a soap box. My point in this is that we all have choices.

Choices as to the words we say and write. The choices to the food and drink we put in our bodies, and from where those foods and drinks were derived. The choices to the products and clothing we put on our bodies. The choices to the time we spend with loved ones versus working that extra hour to afford the unrenewable natural resource-guzzling yacht that our neighbors just took out a loan on.

To quote Starhawk,

[Holistic] magic teaches us to be aware that we are viewing the world through a frame, warns us not to confuse it with ultimate reality or mistake the map for the territory. Moreover, part of our magical discipline is to make conscious choices about which frame we adopt. As soon as we start making choices , we have entered the realm of values. The criteria we use for choosing one frame over another come from what we ultimately value most, what we consider sacred. To consider something sacred is to say that it is profoundly important, that it has value in and of itself that goes beyond our immediate comfort or convenience, that we don’t want to see it diminished or denigrated in any way.

That is what I feel mainstream thought has grown to lack. That is what I feel we as a society have grown to lack: the sacred value of foods and drinks, and therefore our health.

I feel that we look at our health as some outside concept seperate from our Selves.

It is a disease not us. It is the factory that allows the percentage of filth, not us. It is my chronic pain from having poor posture that causes me to take out my anger on you. It really isn’t me.

You need to understand. We all do.

Our choices have consequences.

This may sound like a stretch, but really nothing in our lives goes without a cause and effect, or really, does not go without several chosen causes and several effects due to those choices.

This is why I choose to vote with my spare dollar.

I choose to perfume my room and home with essential oils and herb rolled incense instead of toxic Febrese aerosols. This is why I choose to eat local produce and organically as much as possible. Truthfully, you can make some killer deals at a Farmer’s Market, there is a great misunderstanding that you have to have the right paycheck to buy organically.

But this is why I chose to live my life sans chemicals and pollutants, because I value my Self. I value my Lover, and I value my family.

I chose to:

“Align myself with what is truly sacred, which means serving those things that also feed and renew us, that give us the greatest joy and pleasure, that evoke our deepest love”

And our deepest health.

Starhawk and so many other environmentalists are right. We as people of the planet Earth, have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to our planet, our families, and our Selves. We have a responsibility to make considerate choices for our communities. We can choose to let the problem build and build and build until it explodes, or we can be wiser more caring by massaging it out periodically, and hopefully gain the knowledge to work the problem out for good.

By seeing the world as a dynamic whole, then we can learn to ask the first question when we face a choice: “How does this action or decision impact the whole?”

The whole may at first be beyond our complete knowledge, and acts do have unexpected consequences, but we can and should learn from those choices, not keep repeating them.

We each make decisions all the time, small ones and large ones. Do I spend an extra dollar to buy the organic tomatoes? If I consider the impact on the whole, on ny own health and the health of the whole system, and if I have the dollar, then yes, I do. Do I spend the time and effort to grow tomatoes of my own? If I were to pay myself for the hours I spent gardening, account for all the money and effort and thought I expend, each tomato probably costs me thirty dollars (or more if I decide to raise my hourly rate)- terrible value for the money. But if I’m looking at more than the tomatoes, at the whole of what I need and value and take pleasure in- the value of the fertile, healthy soil I cultivate in order to grow tomatoes, the seven-year-old who lives in our house and likes to pick them off the vine (and the introduction it gives her to nature and the garden), the joy the bees take in the borage that grows with the tomatoes and the fruit the bees pollinate, the positive relationship with my friend Brook, who adores the green-tomato chutney I make, the uncountable value eating something I have a real relationship with- then growing tomatoes is obviously of great benefit to the whole. There are many small ways we can bring our daily lives into greater balance…the hundreds of consumer choices we make are each an opportunity for affecting the greater balance of the whole.

But there are errors in becoming obsessive purists. And there are errors in believing that those individual choices are enough to change the world right away.

You see to make an impact on such a large scale means everyone needs to pitch in and do their fair share. Communities coming together in collective action in our current destructive reinforcing cycles at play is the only hope to stay the damage and restore health.

It truly takes a village, and we can do this by doing our each individual part in whatever way we can and watch it ripple outward by…

Choosing to look at more than tomatoes.

Namaste.

What needs liberating in your life?

“Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.” — Wilhelm Reich

There always comes a time when the outdated routines of the past become too constricting for our present hearts.

It takes courage to liberate and free oneself from the chains of oppression and monotony.

There have been many liberation movements in the past, which a great legacy of strength can been drawn from.

Activism runs at the core of the human spirit because it is linked with our passion.

For every wrong to humankind, there is an equal uprising of hope and change that will proceed it.

So, the question today is this: what cause or force is rising up inside of you? What is screaming to be acknowledged and honoured?

What begs to be liberated from your mind, body, and soul? And do you have to do it alone?

“The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.” — W. Somerset Maugham

Namaste.

Solar question prompted by Caitlin Matthews, Celtic Devotional
Photo by an Unknown Artist

More alive, more wild, more at home in a vital and dynamic universe

Excerpt from The Earth Path by Starhawk.

What motivates your lifestyle?

For me, what motivates my lifestyle, is this notion of “being a stronger healer than a killer.”

Of protecting the Earth as much as I can.

Of living in balance with it and its energies.

By being a force of love and natural healing.

By listening and honouring my higher Self… and teaching others to do the same.

This is what motivates me.

What motivates your lifestyle?

Solar question posed by Caitlin Matthews, Celtic Devotional.
Video trailer of  One Act of Courage, by Starhawk. A film in the making inspired by her book and one of my favourites, The Fifth Sacred Thing.