Good day inspired daily actors!
Great gads of goodness. Not only did you double our local goal for the Community Resilience Challenge, registering 7,058 actions, but through your support Daily Acts helped partner organizations register over 16,000 actions locally, regionally and nationally! This is the power, the promise of our cumulative daily actions. And if you are ready for more drought relief, skill-building and community connection, join us at our upcoming Urban Oases Garden Tour and Greywater Presentation.
Wow, there is so much to celebrate. And still there is struggle, which brings us to an even greater gift in returning to wonder. But first, we have to marinate on success. I am astonished and filled with gratitude at what you, this community and our partner organizations just accomplished together. Through the Community Resilience Challenge, together we just registered 20 times the number of local actions from our original goal for the first 350 Garden Challenge. Over 5 years of the Challenge, we have registered over 14,000 local gardens, projects, actions and pledges. This is 41 times the original target. With the Challenge being taken up by dozens of partner organizations and networks, collectively over 5 years we have helped catalyze almost 100 times the original aim in hundreds of communities.
Take a moment to be with that. Breathe it in. Feel the astonishment, the wonder and accomplishment. Feel the power of overwhelm and despair being transformed into hope and inspired action.
Breathe into the bold and audacious dreams you have in you, the ones that are commensurate with the scale of the issues we face. Know that we have in us the courage to ask scary questions like “Can we mobilize 350 gardens in a weekend?”, “Can we inspire 10 or 50 or 100 times our current impact?”. Because, together we have done these things, and each time we step into our potential, more becomes possible.
And still, there is more work to be done. There is still struggle with the growing need and demand and figuring how to get these skills, solutions, and models in more hearts and hands. There is also struggle with balancing how to embody our vision and values while doing this work and spreading these models. It’s not just about working a zillion hours, it’s time to live it, to harvest the raspberries and plums coming on, to get those root bound tomatoes in the ground, to connect with neighbors, ferment with friends and just chill with my lil girl and family in the garden. This is a challenge for many of us in this movement of engaged citizens and leaders trying to do good work and live what we love and value at home.
Last week after a rich but tough day of chewing on these issues both myself and as a team, I came home and before entering family time, I took a couple of minutes on my meditation stool. Sitting there with journal in hand and struggle in my gut, I remembered, that I needed to figure this out alone. So as I often do, I breathed in a moment in the garden and asked for guidance from this wondrous, living, breathing world that we are of and care so much for.
The next morning I went out in the garden to meditate and write about just this, taking the time to immerse in the wonder and reverence of nature connection and to affirm our purpose, vision and values. In the instant I wrote these words, a red-shouldered hawk swooped down and flew just feet over my head leaving me awestruck. While there was a time when I wouldn’t have made the connection, in recent years, I’ve developed a strong relation to hawks and have had similar experiences when asking for guidance.
This week Daily Acts staff had a team retreat, which began in a redwood grove meditating on our personal and organizational ecology. We reconnected to self and nature, revisioning how to better support you and this incredible community, to live your potential and to build resilience in our lives, neighborhoods and world.
I know you are stepping up in big, vital ways in life, work and community. Are you due for a bit of wonder and nature connection? Do you need to seek some guidance or to recenter on what gives you power, affirms your values and helps you live your inspiration day after day?