Ailin

Yurt Living

I just read about a girl camping and blogging about it as she hits the road. What a great way to return to the gypsy way of living for a minute..who is more fascinated with what is rather than what may be? I want to do the same thing, yurt style. Its my new fascination.

Bikes with baskets - on my wishlist this summer

I have the mountain bike, I use it, even with the roadies in the city. Climbing hills is no fun. But what I really want this summer is a bike with a basket. Easy riding.

A la carte kitchens- on my wishlist

A la carte kitchens are ideal for office interior as well as for those who are frequently on the move. It provides various options, both in look and in construction. 

Tree House Love

La Cabane Perchee is a French architectural firm devoted exclusively to the creation of treehouses. 

They maintain the integrity of the tree without breaking any branches or using nails in the tree when they build. 

Their website also hosts a series of other locations that offer tree houses for rent. How cool is that?

Thats what we all need, instead of a country home, we all need treehouses.  

Vintage Jansport

Jansport is reissuing their backpacks from the 1960's. They remind me of old school salvation army packs, one of which I just purchased. 

I love the vintage pics on Mt. Ranier and in the Cascades. Wish I could be there now..

The GreenHorns, Supporting Young Farmers Across America

I came across this group at the Young Farmers Conference back in December. The Greenhorns is a documentary film that explores the lives of America’s young farming community—its spirit, practices, and needs. With the agricultural revival in its infancy and spreading fast, the film explores how young farmers’ efforts feed us safe food, conserve valuable land, and reconstitute communities split apart by strip malls. 

Beyond the documentary, they have some outstanding programs to help support the regeneration of local communities:

The Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles, which highlights job opportunities, events, letters from young farmers, food politics and young-farmer relevant banter.

Serve Your Country Food is an interactive online mapping and database site. The map collects a variety of economic, ecologic, demographic and cultural information about farmers under forty in America. It is the start of a very ambitious mapping initiative, as well as a critical census of discovery about the obstacles, networks and political vision of the 'next generation' in agriculture.

The Greenhorns Guide for Young Farmers Our book, free to download, is co-authored by four young farmers. The book was born out of our wiki foryoungfarmers.wikispaces.com, where you can find hundreds of links and suggestions. Please do join the wiki and be a part of creating a resource for future farmers!

The Effects of Flower Essences

The effects of flower essences are pretty amazing. Its hard to say whether they are really doing anything substantially significant when you take them. But I recently came across this study affirming that regular intake of flower essences over a specific period of time shows calming effects to mental stress. It has the ability to strengthen overall emotional equilibrium.

According to what I found, flower remedies work by vibration, the body taking on the vibration of the remedy and using what is needed by that body. Every cell in our body, 50 trillion to be exact, has thousands of “gates” in its covering membrane. These gates are used to pass through, in either direction, a range of chemicals either needed by the cell, or needing to be excreted from inside to the outside of the cell. The input gates are known as receptor sites and the output gates are known as effector sites. The effector/receptor sites are units of awareness and perception, or how well we are perceiving stimuli from the external environment. How well these gates work is modulated by proteins in the cell membrain. It is my understanding that the floral remedy assists the cell membrane in the metabolism of proteins, thereby enhancing perception of external stimuli. 

The flower essences were found to reduce physiological activation and stress on the human organism. This physiological homeostasis may be evidence of the ability of the flower essences to strengthen emotional equilibrium and equanimity in the face of stresses environmental impacts, thus reducing the typical "fight or flight" stress response.

A great resource for flower essences is Tree Hog Farms. They know exactly how to cultivate floral essences to be ingested for enhanced awareness and optimal health.

Public Meditation Project- Display your Peace!

The Public Meditation Project is a social and spiritual movement dedicated to aligning inner peace with collective world peace/sustainability. The movement is intended to encourage mindful living amongst mindless living. It consists of using public meditation sessions as a form of social and spiritual activism. 

The goal is to embody change from the dimension of the heart field - accessed by feelings through the practice of meditation in public spaces. The embodiment of inner-awareness and inner-stillness amongst the busyness of mindless living in public spaces is a powerful tool in which to positively shift the collective frequency of the planet - shifting the energetic space so that it affects all. It also is a powerful symbol for self-reflection, slowing down and taking on the role as observer as you live out your life. 

check out the website here

The Story of Stuff - The Real Story Behind the Materials Economy

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuffexposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

This film strongly resonated with me as an entrepreneur directly involved with the materials economy, specifically the apparel sector of manufacturing. One of the most difficult and frustrating endeavors I have yet to take on. It took me two years alone to even grasp the materials economy, from research and development of the various stages that a finished piece of apparel goes through throughout its "lifecycle." Learning and researching about "sustainability", how to source "eco-friendly" fabric, where to produce the apparel, how to find my trim, what about packaging and labeling, warehousing and distribution? The list goes on. I pounded down doors looking for "green" fabric five years ago, nobody was interested and the big suppliers didn't want to have anything to do with a small producer like myself. Green fabric means nothing. Among the many things I have learned throughout this five year journey is the power of localization and community. Growing our own fabric from localized farms, spinning and weaving that fiber locally and packing and distributing the end product locally. My intention with my product was to design for multi-purpose use, not obsolescence, as Annie points out is the main intention for the majority of junk that is produced collectively in our materials economy. 

I enjoyed this film and the way it has been distributed, authentically, throughout the Internet - our collective information highway and virtual community. Free from the mainstream media and its cannibalization of people and their reputations for profit and rankings. Pass the film along..

Livable Streets

With the majority of the world's 6.5 billion human beings now living in cities, building healthy, livable and affordable urban environments is critical to the mission of today's global environmental movement.

The Livable Streets Network is an online community for people working to create sustainable cities through sensible urban planning, design, and transportation policy. They provide free, open source, web-based, resources to citizens working to create a greener economy, address climate change, reduce oil dependence, alleviate traffic congestion, and provide better access to good jobs in healthy communities. Their website has a StreetsBLOG which is a daily news source, online community and political mobilizer for the Livable Streets movement. StreetFILMS produces videos that show how cities around the world are reclaiming their streets for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders. StreetsWIKI is a community-created, online encylopedia where you can read, write, and learn about sustainable transport policies, practices and ideas from around the world. 

Check out this video that highlights people doing this in NYC and SF by clicking here : Livable Streets

I found out about this amazing collaborative one summer day in NYC on a Saturday morning near Union Square  on Park Avenue. There was no noise. No traffic. No screaming. No sirens. It was this very peaceful silence. People were wistfully walking down the streets. Families were parked on the sidewalks having picnics. I thought that there must be some festival going on, until I stopped someone and asked her what was going on. She told me it was an initiative that the mayor was doing for NYC, to close down different streets once a month throughout the summer to promote community and the environment.  Livable streets is an excellent venture that is committed to promoting this kind of living on a regular basis. What I love about them is that they are delivering this very powerful message through education and self-initiative.  People can take this principle and this concept into their own hands, with their friends or family, for instance by converting public parking spaces into livable parks via benches, grass and maybe some trees. Getting the local government's approval for such an endeavor is unnecessary. 

They believe that people make a city great. Yet, so many of the world's great cities dedicate too much of their precious, limited public space - their streets - to motor vehicles rather than people. They are working to redesign our communities around public transportation and walkable, bikeable streets. They are transforming parking lots into public plazas, busy intersections into town squares, and congested highways into bike paths. They are taking back our cities, one street at a time.