Earth Hour Was an Exciting Time for Me

What I loved about last night's Earth Hour experience was the feeling that we were all in it together, I didn't even have to leave home to enjoy it, it was like there was this universal party going on and all I had to do was join in! This fits in well with me as the mother of a toddler. Kahu (my son) and I stood outside last night as I closely examined Nelson's light-life. He snuggled into his mother, while I stood there watching the hill across the valley to see if people were switching their lights off.

Heaps has been reported on Earth Hour, in fact, as I write it's still going on. Check out this Twitter comment:

“RT @mashable: Wow, they turned off the lights on the Eiffel Tower for Earth Hour! http://bit.ly/r6bdv”

Now that's the kind of action that Earth Hour is inspiring around the planet, nothing is off limits. This was always actually the case, I mean they could have switched off the Eiffel Tower lights anytime really, or NZ's sky tower lights (which they also switched off), but it's taken this level of excitement to inspire people to take positive environmental action to such a public level. Who knows what's next? Earth Hour every night? And who knows what else is possible when working with this level of interest world-wide - just goes to show: if you can dream it, it can happen.

Earthhour

How thoroughly exciting!!! It's earth hour and I'm here in Nelson, New Zealand with my whanau (family) staring down a dark valley, that was once lit up with lights - cause it's earth hour oh yeah! I love earth hour. Last year I got really excited and took my dog walking around the dark streets of Christchurch to see who had switched their lights off, then I came home and we played music. It was fun. It's fun now too.

Aotearoa/New Zealand World Leader in Sustainable Technology

Check out the 'Renewable Energy Seen as Hope for NZ' printed in the Press recently. Hello! This is the kind of article we need more of! I love a good vision to get excited about, and this article features an ecological economist saying that Aotearoa could stand as a world leader in sustainable technology, thanks to our relatively low population.

Professor Robert Costanza, who heads the University of Vermont's Gund Institute for Ecological Economics in the United States, had some interesting points to make about New Zealand's potential future:

"New Zealand could be 100 per cent renewable without much effort, compared to other countries," he said.

And:

"Renewable energy in a big way could make New Zealand the centre of a lot of technology change."

Yep. Oh yes it could. I've been talking about this for years with people in my circles. The fact that these ideas are making it into mainstream media is a sign that these ideas are no longer as edgy as they used to be, and may even actually manifest one day!

People need vision, such as these ideas, to get excited about. Inspiration and engagement of the heart is a great way to motivate positive change.

"It's all doable with the right amount of funding," he said, carrying on to say that New Zealand had an opportunity to become a "model" society.

"You've got a low population ... You don't have to be an export economy; you could focus more on sustainability."

Exactly, more focus on sustainability, and less on the stuff we don't want.

Roger that!
Over and out...

Ten Reasons Why Gardening is Great News

If there's one activity that shouts good news, it's gardening, and this seems to have become a national pass time in Aotearoa.

Ten reasons why gardening is pure good news:

1. It connects us to the food we eat

2. It connects us to the land we build our homes on

3. It reminds us to be patient

4. Growing doesn't need to require much money

5. Something about it gives us permission to get dirty and scruffy - the land doesn't care how we look

6. We have control over what we do (or don't) put on our veggies as they grow

7. It reminds us how simple life can be - all we need are seeds, sun and water

8. The food we harvest tastes great

9. It bonds us with our ancestors

10. It's a way to get close to and understand the cycle of nature - something that we as humans are part of, though we sometime forget.

I've been following NZ Gardener's weekly newsletter (which you can sign up to for free, here). It's written by Lynda Hallinan in her mission to get New Zealanders gardening. We've covered her before in Happyzine, she's the amazing woman who vowed to live off ten dollars per week, plus all the produce of her land for a year. She liked it so much she kept going and has built up a following of nearly fourteen thousand Kiwis in the process. If this doesn't tell you that Aotearoa is getting back to the land, what does!? Wishing you a beautiful harvest.

Happyzine on Radio

Great news! The good news is spreading. Soon you can tune into Happyzine on Fresh FM. The wonderful team at Fresh are supporting me to record the weekly editions of Happyzine into audio form. Then they'll be posted online and available for any radio station (or individual person for that matter) to download. We hope to make Happyzine available on community radio stations nationwide - every week. Cool huh? Soon my cunning plan for national happiness will eventuate ... he he he.

Happyzine on Twitter

So what is this strange Internet social exchange that people are talking about? Well I'm not completely sure yet, but I'm working on it and I'm having fun! Happyzine joined twitter and now I get to tell the world what we're up to in any moment of the day. And I can watch what other businesses and people are thinking about and doing. The 'tweets' (comments) can range from: 'I'm making peanut butter on toast' to 'check out our great deal online'. It's strangely fun. I do feel connected to these people. The cool thing about Twitter is that it's simple and easy and it doesn't seem to take to long to process, unlike Facebook or Myspace. I like that it only has four million users (I'm looking forward to saying this about Happyzine!!!). Somehow it seems more intimate 'tweeting' in such short sentences (you have to keep them down to under 160 characters) with a these people. I've hooked up with other good news media, and with whole food organisations, and kiwi businesses and I'm enjoying feeling that we're even a tiny bit a part of each other's lives. In fact, I'm not the only one. A recent study has shown that Twitter is helping families to recconect accross the generations. What a quirky, yet delightful idea.

Feeling Happy, Staying Happy

I'm often considering the topic of happiness, and recently I've found my way back to meditation. For years I practiced Seido Karate and a key component of this style is Zazen meditation. I remember my teacher chastising an angry Karate student by growling 'More Zazen!'. I've found that since I've reclaimed my meditation - which I simply do in bed when I wake up, during the day while I'm breast feeding my wee boy, and just before I return to sleep at night - my life has become more peaceful. I've calmed down, I feel happier, and I'm relaxed enough to be able to sleep during the day if I need a rest. Some days I find it easier to relax and meditate than others, but in general I notice it making a positive difference to my state of mind.



I found a great article, written for the Winter edition of YES! Magazine - Sustainable Happiness, titled This is Your Brain On Bliss. The author Matthieu Ricard, who quit his career as a cellular geneticist nearly forty years ago to study Buddhism, had this to say about happiness:



"Authentic happiness is a way of being and a skill to be cultivated. When we first begin, the mind is vulnerable and untamed, like that of a monkey or a restless child. It takes practice to gain inner peace, inner strength, altruistic love, forbearance, and other qualities that lead to authentic happiness."



This reminded me of the fact that our brains are muscles, and with a little perseverance they can be trained in all manner of ways. Ricard goes onto say:



"The most important time to meditate or do other types of spiritual practices is early in the morning. You set the tone for the day and the “fragrance” of the meditation will remain and give a particular perfume to the whole day. Another important time is before falling asleep. If you clearly generate a positive state of mind, filled with compassion or altruism, this will give a different quality to the whole night.


"When people experience “moments of grace”, or “magical moments” in daily life, while walking in the snow under the stars or spending a beautiful moment with dear friends by the seaside, what is really happening? All of a sudden, they have left their burden of inner conflicts behind. They feel in harmony with others, with themselves, with the world. It is wonderful to fully enjoy such magical moments, but it is also revealing to understand why they feel so good: pacification of inner conflicts; a better sense of interdependence with everything rather than fragmenting reality; and a respite from the mental toxins of aggression and obsession. All these qualities can be cultivated through developing wisdom and inner freedom. This will lead not just to a few moments of grace but to a lasting state of well-being that we may call genuine happiness.


In this state, feelings of insecurity gradually give way to a deep confidence that you can deal with life’s ups and downs. Your equanimity will spare you from being swayed like mountain grass in the wind by every possible praise and blame, gain and loss, comfort and discomfort. You can always draw on deep inner peace, and the waves at the surface will not appear as threatening."



Check out YES! Magazine and this article, if you're open to the discipline of meditation - whether you practice for five minutes or five hours a day, the results equate to one path towards increased, and sustained happiness.

In the End... the Goats are the Real Winners

We mentioned the National Cheese Awards in last week's Happyzine, but we just found out that Happyzine sponsors Aroha Organic Goat Cheese tasted sweet success last week in the Cuisine Champions of Cheese Awards. They won two awards - the Champion Goat Cheese Award and the Champion Flavoured Cheese Award. They also won three Gold Medals, one Silver Medal and one Bronze. What I love knowing is that these people adore their 'girls' - check out the care they take to make sure their goats lead happy, healthy, well nourished lives. And if you're interested, check out their cheese range, they sell them online all over the country.

Congratulations Aroha Organic Goat Cheese!

Love,

The Happyzine Team.

xxxxx

Some businesses are still feeling the love ...

I recently met Elliot from Endemicworld.com via the e-waves. This is what they have to say for themselves:

"We want to make New Zealand design accessible worldwide and help our designers build their businesses and brands."

They've got some funky, affordable gear available on their site. Aotearoa designs have this wonderful edge to them, a fresh way of speaking out to the world and I feel so proud to check out this site and see what my people have been up too. Knowing that guts it takes to put yourself out there as an artist, and to keep doing so while you build up a following, I think these designers deserve all the support they can find. Endemicworld.com are onto a great thing here.

I checked out an Endemicworld.com promo video (made by the Made from New Zealand team). And you know what? These dudes feel good about their future as a business! Right on. What I loved about their video was that they basically said their sales were still increasing and that their future looked strong. It's so refreshing to tune into some visual information that is inspiring (for me as a business-minded-girl) and where businesses people are referring to their futures with relaxed expressions on their faces.

Long may the people relax!

Candy on a Beach

How I LOVE walking my dog on the beach. Tim Shadbolt (wonderful Invercargil Mayor) once mused to me that the beach is a place of negative ions and is thus a great place for 'letting go'. I was down on the waters edge a few days ago laughing at the confederation of happy dogs that appeared out of nowhere, when I got chatting to a fellow dog walker on Tahuna Beach. It turned out that her name was Candy Clarke and she's an artist. I checked out her site and fell in love with her self-described 'post-modern pop' style. I love her strong, bold colour; her use of words and her familiar subjects. Some of her work just seemed MADE for Happyzine!

One Straw Revolution meets Good News Revolution

Oh the revelations of these revolutions! I've just read 'The One-Straw Revolution' by Masanobu Fukuoka and I was filled with 'yes-ness'. It just made so much sense. This book was written in 1975 by an agricultural scientist who had turned farmer on his family's land in Japan. Over decades he developed a method of 'no dig' growing that resulted in crop yields rivaling that of the best growers in the country, who were using conventional, more energy intensive methods. Don't discount this no-dig thing, I always left the gardening to my brother, father and grandfather, the result being that my confidence in myself as a gardener was pretty low until recently and even I'm inspired to give this no-dig thing a go.

This book is partly about growing healthy crops, whilst replenishing the earth, via nature's divine tendency to mulch. Oh how I love mulch, and this book has inspired me to mulch with a fervour. And Fukuoka, who died just last year at 95, talks passionately about his feelings that people, nature, spirit, emotions - all aspects of life are connected. I think that many of us know this already.

What I loved about this book was that it largely points to the amazing, way beyond anything we human beans could ever imagine, intelligence, complexity, beauty and sheer power of nature. Ever since I can remember I've had the urge for things to be 'natural'. As a 'grown-up', the more I live, learn and experience, the more certain I feel - that planet earth has got it sussed and if we'd only step out of our way and allow nature to get on with what she's good at, health and balance would return.