A Return To Love

[heads-up that this is a more vulnerable piece about my spirituality journey]

beautiful world from my room window

Following up from my last post, I'm writing this to express a return to love. The last post might have seemed like a frustrated one, but I assure you it's not. Even anger is a shade of love. Anger that comes from a place of fear or ego, is very much different from anger that comes from a place of love. How else are we to empathize with those who are mistreated and taken advantage of? Our anger on behalf of them is an intolerance towards violence and injustice, and is an act of compassion in itself. I have to constantly remind myself, whenever such a feeling starts to creep in, any feeling at all which we might mostly consider 'negative', to sit with it, feel it fully, and let it out healthily if I have to, and all the way, because to pent it in would allow it to latch onto us and so we'd be carrying it around for days, and risk letting it consume us.

Thoughts On The World - A Ramble

How quickly things can change over the course of a few months or a year! I mean this with regards to my 'sustainability' journey (and when I say 'sustainability' I don't refer just to the environment, but to the way we sustain ourselves, physically and emotionally, our relationships with ourselves, people around us, and of course, the earth). This meme I came across some days ago perfectly sums up one of those big changes:

Vegan Recipes, Waste-free (Savory Ver.)

Just some meals that I like to make, with as little waste as possible when buying their ingredients. Of course, always having a folded tote bag handy in my bag when I go out is a given! Or literally just anything to say no to plastic bags at check-out.

* - Bought at any grocery or farmer's market, with almost no plastic packaging (fruits and veg can be put directly into the cart without wrapping any of those flimsy plastics round it. they'll be washed later anyway! Glass packaging and metal cans can be recycled continuously unlike plastic that gets downgraded quality-wise each time it's recycled, til it finally can only be discarded)
* - Bought/refilled in bulk at a package-free grocery like Nada or The Soap Dispensary, reusing any container that I already own.
* - Refilled from the extensive bulk section at Save-On Foods grocery. I fill my plastics, transfer the food into my reused glass jars back home, wash the plastics and then bring them back to the grocery each time to keep reusing them.

So the pics here might not look the best because I've been getting by with dim lighting and my iPhone, but I promise they taste great!

SCRAMBLED TOFU

Intengine's Sustainability Leadership Congress - plus some deep topics

As more and more blessings pour in over these past few months, one of them was being funded (thanks to UBC Sustainability) last month to attend the Intengine Global Change Foundation's 2-day Sustainability Leadership Congress. Having taken away new showers of information and inspiration from this weekend, here I'll try to coherently condense 12 pages of my notes from the conference, into a single post. I'll mention from the get-go that sustainability talked about here was concerning literally everything to do with our lives - from the environment, to society, to economy, to our communication and connections with one another, to ultimately, love. So much thoughtful discussion was going on that it'd be a waste to not share it.

(My Personal) EASY Tips to Break Further Away from Plastic

While it definitely is great to see growing awareness and attention surrounding plastic pollution in the recent year or so - even in Southeast Asia which I'm super glad about, I think we're still a long shot from alleviating it, probably due to the common notion that a single action or a single individual 'doesn't make that much of a difference' when it comes to tackling this big of an issue. I'm a strong believer of the opposite opinion though, and have seen with my own eyes people changing (their mindsets, their habits) at least partially through following the examples that others around them set - and it's definitely a happy sight.

First I'll set the mood of urgency around this topic using this lovely infographic (I've started to LOVE infographics - appealing, visual, informative, condensed. Great communicators) about the whale in Indonesia that recently died, plus a nice lil tweet: