As I reflect back on the beginning of my relationship, I remember writing the article below. It has been a year full or growth, wonder, love, amazement and diving deeper into my own awareness as a human being. I want to share this experience with you because before this moment I did not know what the possibilities of love could bring into my life. I thought I had an idea but until I shared this hug I hadn’t experienced it.

This is the key. To experience. To feel it in the body.

After working on a Saturday afternoon and evening to catch up with accounting projects, I decided to go home to Vallejo, taking the Ferry at Pier-1, SF.  

In the Abounding River Logbook, one of the six currents is creation. We say that active creativity is essential to achieving abundance. We must both actively create things in the world, and actively see and create a vision of abundance.  I access creativity through taking personal responsibility. I take responsibility for how I’m acting, what I’m producing, but also what I am actively creating and envisioning. I take responsibility for my vision of the world, and recognize that I can not only create a new vision, but recognize that I have been actively creating my vision of the world all along.

I created a design that was six years in the making that I made become my vision of the world. Out of my education and work in social justice, I envisioned an invasive tree that took too much from the soil. The tree represented the power structures and oppressive systems I wasn’t committed to. In my design (see second image) I created a tearing up of the tree through various metaphorical imagery (vines tugging down the branches, something rotting away the roots… branches being cut off). All of these metaphors I lived by- on how to deconstruct the tree that I saw as being damaging to the overall environment.

And deconstruction is how my life looked for 6 years. I used criticism against everything without much idea for how to instill hope or rebirth after the death of the system. I used various methods of social change to address problems that I saw, and constantly came across seeing that I was never bringing answers or solutions to them. My experience of the world was through that vision that I was actively creating and recreating.      Two weeks ago I really noticed that my tree metaphor wasn’t working for me to create hope. So I set off to find a new image, a rebirth of the tree, or something that I was committed to. I created the image above, the conclusion of the oppressive tree, and a new habitat for a rebirth. In my vision, the roots have been torn away to where all is left is love. Rooted in love, a new sprout is born and there is pure possibility.

As a means to re-train myself in my new vision, I’m taking on the 365 day challenge. Every day for the next year I am creating a piece of art with this new image. Every day through this creativity I am actively creating hope in the world by transforming my vision and by physically expressing my vision to others. I am day by day re-inscribing a new belief through my repeated creations.

The Idea for the practice of 365 projects came from Noah Scalin, who took on creating one image every day with a different medium himself, and then created a journal to encourage others. Check out the book here; check out some of the variations of my design here.              This week I invite you to look at what belief you have that’s causing you suffering. Taking responsibility for it as your creation and not truth is empowering. What can you actively create in its place? What belief can you adopt that serves you and serves the planet? We say that a belief is a thought practiced over and over again. What new thought can you begin with today?

My name is Andrew, I’m a brand new employee at Cafe Gratitude’s central office, and I want to share some inspiration with you. What inspires me is compassionate food--food that’s kind to the soil it’s planted in, the people who prepare it, and the hungry bodies that make it part of them. This inspiration has lead me to work with Cafe Gratitude, and also with another organization re-imagining good food, and one I’ll talk about today: the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, or CoFED, which empowers college students to launch food cooperatives.

What both these organizations have in common is that they empower people to transform their lives, with compassionate food as a catalyst. We like to call the Cafe a school of transformation disguised as a restaurant, because our core mission isn’t to sell you food - our aim is to give you tools to shape your life how you want it to be. Part of actively taking control of your life involves loving yourself, and a key part of loving yourself is feeding yourself really awesome food. So when you decide that you’re worthy of nourishing your body, mind and soul with meals that are kind to the Earth and her animal and human inhabitants - meals that make you feel and function great - you’re taking the first step on the journey of self-transformation.

This year, the California Label GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) Campaign is committed to proposing legislation to ensure that all GMO foods sold are labelled as containing GMOs. Currently, food distributors are not required to label their food as containing GMOs. Cafe Gratitude is a stand for the labeling and regulation of GMOs, the use of which pose untold threats to the health of our community and planet.
Why does this matter? If you are not currently aware of the social, economic, ecological, and health dangers posed by GMOs, check out the video of Vandana Shiva, Ph.D. below.  She is a philosopher, environmental activist, and ecofeminist, who is regarded as an authority on the global implications of GMO crops.

What can you do?  Take action today by:
- Spreading the word in your social network, website, or neighborhood: Click Here to Share
- Visit LabelGMOs.org/pledge to pledge to collect signatures to help us meet our goal.
- Donate to help this grass-roots campaign succeed!
- Learn how to avoid GMOs when you shop, by going to a local California farmer's market, or by checking out the Center for Food Safety's Non-GMO shopper's guide.
Thank you for sharing your inspiration with us, and for helping us to create this world as a safe, healthy, just place for future generations.

When we describe the United States, “sustainable” is not usually the first word that comes to mind. Our nation is the leading contributor to global warming, and high material consumption has long been taken for granted. But in little pockets across this country, people are forming communities that embrace environmental sustainability as a way of life. And not only environmental sustainability, but social sustainability too. We’re starting to learn that in order to form communities that can endure and thrive, we must not only manage our ecological resources wisely, but also our personal and emotional resources. We must learn to care for and understand each other if we are to form truly sustainable communities.

This Saturday, an exciting new film, Within Reach, enjoys its world premiere in Berkeley. The film chronicles a young couple’s 19-month bicycle journey across the U.S. in their search for what they call “sustainable communities.” They visited 100 communities that seek to live sustainably, exploring not only how these communities interact with the Earth, but also how they practice commerce, how they raise children, and how they build a cohesive social structure. The communities visited are diverse: they range from an electricity-free “radically simplistic” farmstead in Missouri, to a household of Buddhists in Wisconsin (who flourish while spending only $40 each per month on food), to the urban, creative Berkeley Student Housing Co-ops right in our backyard. Not all visits were harmonious—on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, the filmmakers were chased out of a secluded squatter community by an unstable man—but overall, the directors Ryan and Mandy discovered that living in loving harmony was a common thread amongst these communities, which not only brought them together but also sustains them.

At Café Gratitude, we attempt to cultivate a loving, supported community--a socially-sustainable community!—that is also nourished in an environmentally sustainable way. After all, shouldn’t the two go hand-in-hand? More importantly, can they exist without each other? For when we learn to love each other, the people around us, we learn that we can extend this love to future generations as well by protecting our environment. And when we take care of our planet, we nourish all her people. Achieving a sustainable nation may still be a long-term goal, but we can start right now in our own communities.

Every day new products hit the shelves of stores that can do more, better, faster, and smaller.  I'm sure you or someone you know owns a laptop, a smart phone, or a ipad (the mico-powerhouses of modern computing).  Not only do we have access to a world of information in the palms of our hands, we also have access to more mundane technological masterpieces: fridge magnets that play digital videos, ant farms that project moving images of the ants onto the ceiling, and laptop fans to keep your laptop cool as you stream video while playing solitaire.
In our modern experience of high-tech saturation (both necessary and superfluous), I would like to serve up the technological equivalent of some down-home cookin’. I present to you three low-tech, high-impact appropriate and responsible technologies that are transforming the lives of regular people worldwide.

Solar Bottle Lights: In the town of San Pedro, just outside of Manila in the Philippines, a local transformation is occurring.  Men salvage used plastic bottles, fill them with water, and cast light into dark places. Huh?  That's right.  In an area where most buildings are made of corrugated steel, most families have had to rely on expensive electrical lights to see in their homes during the day.  Not any more.  At the price of $1 per installation, many families are opting to let the sunshine in, using plastic water bottles filled with water to create solar ceiling lights.  Not only is this diverting waste from landfills, it is also creating green job alternatives for people ready to embrace this new technology.

This week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Eric-James Horton, Certified Health Counselor, Chef, and co-owner of "Conscious Nosh Chef Services." Conscious Nosh is a bay area business that helps customers create personal health and diet plans, and delivers hand crafted healthy and delicious foods to their doorsteps to help them stay on track. (They also make overwhelmingly delicious raw vegan macaroons!)  I caught up with Eric to find out about what has led him down this path, and what inspires him about his work.

To find our more about Eric, or to sign up for his "Farm To Table" Cooking Class on Sept 6th, visit: BayAreaHealthCoach.com.

What are you passionate about? I'm passionate about the work that I do; one-on-one health and wellness counseling, one-on-one cooking coaching,  teaching group cooking classes and personal chef services. I love connecting with a huge network/community of movers and shakers in the health and healing world, learning about permaculture, becoming a homesteader and a family man.

What motivates you in the work you are doing? Setting up a good home space for the future generations! I want my kids to live in a world that they feel safe and healthy in. My clients motivate me. Their strength and courage to create a life they feel powerful in motivates me to do all that I can do that too.

Kaci Christian is a woman with a mission.  Her life has seen her through various careers: as a lecturer, investigative reporter, TV news anchor, sign language interpreter, motivational speaker, and more.  At heart, she is a storyteller - a bridge between the worlds of those who know and do not know, see and do not see, hear and do not hear.

The connecting thread for her has always been a genuine passion for people, animals, the our planet, and a desire to make a positive difference in the world.  That mission is clear in her latest endeavor: The WE conference.

The Raw Food Family are a couple of parents, Katie and Ka, and their four beautiful children, who have been enjoying a lifestyle full of raw foods and travel together for over 6 years. 

Their journey began when their second child, Jaro, developed a persistent cough, and was diagnosed with asthma.  "Our small, pure son with asthma? I just thought 'I don't want this to be true! I want to have two healthy children and not to worry all the time." Ka opened himself to guidance, and found it while perusing his mother's bookshelf: "If you want to be healthy, forget about cooking."

Jaro bounced back quickly, and was a vibrant healthy baby by the time he was 2.  The family decided that they were all committed to living vibrant, healthy lives together, and transitioned from 80% raw, to 90%, to 100%.