Earth Day

I set a goal, 10 blog posts this year. I thought it’d get me writing…

….but it didn’t actually because it was more of an idea than a plan. So I changed how I went about it. I’ve made it a weekly habit: “Blog Wednesdays.” and here we are, 3 weeks in, showing up with the half hour of my time, to practice forming thoughts into coherent bits for someone else to digest.

Growing up I spent most of my time outside. Building forts, gardens, and making potions of pansies and mint. Running with the neighborhood kids through yards we shouldn’t be in, and jumping off things too high for my adult comfort as I look back. I am a proud millennial who has cultivated these skills and have brought them into professional existence.

Today’s inspiration for speaking about myself is ironically Earth Day. Something that I consistently find peace and comfort in is fresh air and green space. Touching my feet in the grass, getting down to find new buds on plants, and up cycling anything that I can for the sake of saving a buck and preventing things from taking up space in the landfill.

The idea of upcycling is really a hippy way of being able to take something and make it better. A core value of many families is “leave it better than you found it.”

Making a habit of up-cycling has opened my ability to be creative and see things for something that they can be. A wood pallet has endless free potential with the right power tools, baskets are a versatile way to organize items and make them accessible, yet out of the way, even precious memories of keepsake items can be staged as art within your living space. With a different minds eye on a problem, a greater solution for use can be applied, and items and resources are saved.

This idea of repurposing things started when I was young, we literally washed our garbage because it was only picked up once a month. “can’t have dirty garbage.” Plastics bread bags were re-used instead of zip-locs, mushroom containers were used for a bowl-on-the-go when we took breakfast to school, and construction site dumpsters were rummaged through for bend nails and broken boards to build our sheds for backyard tools.

I can get frustrated when I look at up-cycling on a grand worldly scale, but on the real, I am proud at my efforts on eliminating waste into the world. I say that with the way I speak to people, about my self, with how I treat items in my environment. Leaving it better than I found it has kept me in jobs and relationships, it has me picking up after others, and it has me checking my surroundings frequently. My desire to make the world a better place for everyone has been a cultivated balance between giving skills and effort to others, and knowing how to receive a lesson on something I’ve experienced as a lesson learned, rather than a failure.

Upcycling is growth mindset opportunity to take something once we deemed as broken, or garbage, and building up from there. Making a once terrible thought, into something beautiful.

This earth day I want to share my ability to upcycle what you have, and make it more beautiful and peaceful for you.

Here’s the equation: My effort + your stuff = Peace.

This is what I can offer, paintings and murals, garbage and shed organization, yard arrangement and gardening update. And also arranging your weekly schedule so to-do’s turn into things you actually want to do.

During 2020 when everyone* turned to hobbies, I reconnected with painting. No new supplies, just previously thrifted paint and a Marshalls printed canvas of a map, here is the first piece of art that I did that I looked at and said “I can do cool things,” and it lit something within me that said: “keep going.”

So here we are, seeing my light, building from darkness, and helping others along the way.