Boris Trajanov, who organized the planting of 6 million trees in one day in Macedonia, knows that such huge efforts are not impossible when you put your heart and some great organization into it! Now, Mokugift, a leading online tree gifting service, pledges to plant 5 million trees by the end of 2009.

Mokugift is in partnership with the United Nations Environmental Programme’s Billion Tree Campaign. The UNEP is sending out the call to citizens globally to plant over 7 billion trees, or roughly one tree per global citizen, by the close of 2009.

It’s being called Plant for the Planet: The Billion Tree Campaign. The campaign got a head start in the first 18 months following its launch in 2006. Individuals and communities, private sector companies, organizations and governments in 166 countries have planted 2.5 billion trees already, making it one of the UN’s most successful environmental campaigns yet. The campaign has exceeded all expectations because of strong grassroots support and well-planned global outreach strategies.

“Plant for the Planet: The Billion Tree Campaign” stresses the power of solidarity because everyone matters, and every tree counts.

If you missed out on the action in Macedonia, Mokugift makes it possible for ordinary people to join in the fun!  Each tree planted cost only $1. All you have to do to plant a tree is make a few refined turns of the index finger, click the mouse and – this could be the hard part – choose a country in which you want your tree(s) planted. In mere moments, you can go from web surfing to becoming a global tree planter participating in the reforestation of the planet.

Giving a tree really is as easy as sending an e-card.  When that someone special receives a tree, they can proudly display their trees online at Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle and other popular Web sites. Mokugift even enables iPhone and iPod touch owners to plant a tree and they make it as easy as buying their favorite song.  Plus, Mokugift plants a tree when iPhone and iPod touch owners purchase A Real Tree application on Apple’s iTunes AppStore.

Image: McPig

Here we are, in the holidays again! This time brings many celebrations. I acknowledge December as a month of gatherings, sharing warmth and connecting to the winter season. It is a time that crosses over from the social glow to the inner warmth of reflection – the deep stillness that rests just beneath the buzz of parties and gifts.

And tipping us into January is New Year’s and our flurry of resolutions. May I recommend you give yourself plenty of time and start on something now? Choose a habit that doesn’t suit your well-being. Set a gentle and consistent pace with yourself to release a habit that isn’t working and to start a new one that does! How brilliant will you feel doing that?

It takes 90 days, they say, to establish a new habit.  That time marker varies – some say 45.  Just know, no one expects you to dial in a whole new life in 48 hours or less.

The real beauty of starting with something now is that you get a chance to practice! Start small. Just the practice of taking notice of your habits and choosing one each week to play with can bring vibrancy to your winter months.

Here’s one habit I realized I can change really easily: I notice I drink more tea and coffee than water to beat the lack of sunlight and to give my hands that cup o’ warm when it is colder outside. What happens is my body feels more dehydrated, my face looks more drawn and my skin seems to age. So, my habit to shed is substituting tea for water. Here’s my habit to adopt: next time I order a warm drink, I’ll order a warm spring water with fresh lemon slices and maybe a sprig of mint. The next time I go to market, I’ll remember to buy a few blissfully bright fragrant organic lemons to keep on hand for around the house. I’ll turn my warm lemon water tea time into a sweet ritual. And when I am feeling brave, I’ll ask those people who run the cafes I patron if they use organic produce and if they know the benefits to their local economy of buying organic.

Even while you are traveling, you can use this habit shedding and habit adoption process to stay connected to yourself and your ongoing commitment to your well-being. Others learn from our examples of self love.

Image: darkpatator

December is a month of many celebrations. The one celebration that holds a special place in my heart is Winter Solstice. It is this celebration that has, year after year, deepened my connection to the Earth as a glorious planet that is enveloped in a beautiful and mysterious sea of space and stars. Out beyond the immediate sea of stars is the universe in full.

The fact that my mind simply can’t comprehend it all is in itself a reason to celebrate! When I begin to feel that slight sense of overwhelm in the crowds from too much to do to make the holidays shine, I find special spots in nature that nurture me back to center.

One such place I visited last year was Spirit Rock, an absolutely stunning sanctuary of barren rolling hills on one side and forested hills filled with redwoods on the other. Spirit Rock is also a Buddhist retreat center. The quiet and peace of the land transcends all the hustle and bustle. Making the time for a meditation or for a hike there in December restores balance and brightens my spirit.

Stay centered and vital this holiday season by making special occasions to retreat from it all for 20 minutes to an hour. What you will have to contribute from your nurtured sense of wellbeing to others will be worth the few minutes here and there! You will notice an increase in positive mood, find yourself able to enliven holiday tasks, strengthen your immune system and boost your ability to smile radiantly.

Here are my top 6 recommendations:

Instead of meeting your holiday friends for a hot chocolate indoors, get it to go and take a wintry walk together somewhere peaceful. Devote some of your time together to walking in silence, observing and connecting with the stillness in nature. While you are there, spend a little time exploring in nature collecting beautiful objects to add to your gifts.

Give yourself an extra hour before or after your holiday shopping to visit the ocean, a nearby walking trail or drive into the mountains where you can reset before rushing off to the parties.

Watch out for increasing your caffeine intake! It’s super easy to fall back on caffeine and sugar to boost you when sleep is low and time is tight. Yet the cycle of boosting and dropping energy levels can set you up for adrenal fatigue that you have to struggle with for the rest of the year.

Add 20 minutes of stimulating exercise to your day to perk you up. Remember jumping jacks? Get your whole body moving and add some kind of jumping or bouncing into the experience – as long as it feels comfortable – for one version of a full body hello.

Try breathing exercises like the ones Dr. Andrew Weil provides in his CD, Breathing, the Master Key To Self Healing. There is simply not enough good stuff I can say about breathing exercises to relax the body, calm the mind and provide a balancing shift to the nervous system. When done repeatedly, breathing exercises can cleanse your system and literally breath new life into you, waking you up. This makes a great stocking stuffer, too, by the way.

Try presence meditation for 15 minutes. You can do this almost anywhere.

Image: zarajay

If you have noticed new ways to be happy or are one of the cheeky tricksters out there contributing to nurturing talent and improving normal life, you might be unwittingly participating in the growing field of something called Positive Psychology.

In 1998, Martin Seligman chose this theme for his tenure as the president of the American Psychological Association. Whose inspiration gave us the term? Maslow coined the term in 1954 in his book, Motivation and Personality.

Positive psychology might have gone against the grain, since prior to Seligman, “the previous 50 years had been primarily dedicated to addressing mental illness rather than mental ‘wellness’.”

I have always felt a draw to nurture talent and to improve normal life. I found, while growing up, there wasn’t as much support for that as I would have liked. My own studies in the field took me down the path of looking for the problems, because those were the resources available to me educationally at the time. Can anyone say, OUCH! Perhaps, you, like me, find this newer direction in psychology a big plus.

Three overlapping areas highlighted in the field of Positive Psychology that are being explored are:

1. The Pleasant Life or the “Life of Enjoyment”
2. The study of the Good Life or the “Life of Engagement”
3. Inquiry into the Meaningful Life or “Life of Affiliation”

Like “Mental Wellness”, “Green Wellness” – personal ecology – has a nice ring to it, if you ask me!

To find out more, check out this link and peek around on the web, too. Answer the call to wellness on every level and enjoy an outstanding life.

Image: Victor Bezrukov

T. Boone Pickens has been putting his fortune to good use, it seems – and he’s certainly putting himself in the limelight. Mr. Pickens supplied $7 million to victims of Katrina. Since then he’s made a huge splash in the green energy debate.

But you may not know that his wife, Madelaine, is passionately involved in conservation efforts. After Katrina, she helped to rescue 800 animals, dogs and cats, and had them flown to Colorado and California for adoptions.

More recently, the wild mustang population has had need for someone’s full attention and Madeleine has once again come up with a plan.

Wild horses have roamed freely in the Southwest since the times of the Spanish conquistadors. Today, the land the wild horses call home is under the supervision of the Bureau of Land Management and is shared with domestic cattle. It’s becoming a bit of a squeeze, as the BLM tries to keep the number of horses in the wild to 27,000 in order to ensure enough food for all the creatures. The rest of the horses are then herded, gathered and sold at auction or adopted.

This year there are 33,000 additional mustangs being held in holding pens at a cost of $1500 a year to feed.  Without people to buy or adopt them, they will be put to sleep.

Why are there so many horses in the wild? Madeleine explains, “They have no natural predators. Their only predator is mankind when we do the wrong thing.”

And, inviting us into her vision, she says, “If all the cattlemen have access to all this BLM land, what if I buy a ranch and I can get access to the BLM land and then we share it. This way, I could create a sanctuary. This way nobody will ever be turned away.”

She’s currently negotiating to buy approximately a million acres. Hey,  Rhode Island  doesn’t even have a million acres!

The ink isn’t dry yet, however. The sanctuary, if all goes well, will open in a year. And to share the glorious sight of the  horses galloping  together with streaming manes and tails, Madeleine is already planning that “there will be Hopi log cabins and little hotels, children will sit outside and we’ll have bonfires. They’ll be educated about the West, about our heritage.”  

You may want to set your vacations plans for a Southwest adventure.

“I can’t wait for the day the first horse is turned loose and you’ll see him kick his heels up and gallop away with this herd together,” says Madelaine. “It’s going to be so beautiful.”

Way to go, Madeleine!  Let them ponies run! 

Source: Washington Post

Oh, for the love of food that brings you alive instead of putting you to sleep!  Memories of too many Thanksgivings spent snoozing on the couch after that big meal sent me in search of something that might leave me giddy and perked up for an afternoon hike!  And, believe it or not, raw food contributes to weight loss, even (in healthy amounts of course) the desserts. If you’d like to tempt your tastebuds with a raw recipe for a change, try this creamy, dreamy Pumpkin Cheesecake for an after dinner bliss pie.

Ingredients

Crust

    * 1 1/2 Cups Pecans
    * 1/3 Cup Raisins
    * 1/4 Teaspoon Cinnamon
    * Salt

Filling

    * 1/2 Cup Soft Dates, pitted and packed
    * 1/2 Cup Agave
    * 1/4 Cup Lemon Juice
    * 2 Cups Cashews, soaked 2 hours, drained
    * 1/2 Cup Young Coconut Meat
    * 1 Tablespoon Pumpkin Pie Spice
    * 1/2 Cup Coconut Oil, warmed to liquid
    * 1/2 Cup Irish Moss Paste*
    * Pumpkin Topping
    * 3/4 Cup Pumpkin, chopped
    * 1/4 Cup Carrots, peeled and chopped
    * 6 Tablespoons Water
    * 2 teaspoons Lemon Juice
    * 1/4 Cup Dates, soaked
    * 1 Teaspoon Pumpkin Pie Spice

Directions

   1. To make the crust: In a food processor, process pecans, raisins, cinnamon, and salt until the mixture begins to stick together. Press the crust mixture evenly in the bottom of an 8-inch spring form pan.
  
2. To make the filling: process the dates, agave, and lemon juice in a food processor until smooth. Add the pumpkin, cashews and coconut meat and process until completely smooth. Add the coconut oil and Irish moss and process until well incorporated.  Pour the filling onto the crust.

   3. To make the topping: place the pumpkin and carrot along with the water and lemon juice in a blender and blend until smooth. Add the dates and pumpkin pie spice and blend again until smooth.  Spread the pumpkin topping evenly on top of the filling.

   4. Chill at least 3 hours before serving.

Servings: 8

Notes

    * If you don’t have Irish Moss, don’t fret. You can make the cheesecake without it, but serve it straight from the refrigerator.
    * If you have an aversion to eating raw pumpkin, peeled carrots can be substituted for pumpkin.
    * To make a pumpkin drizzle instead of topping, replace the dates with 2 tablespoons of Agave.

(recipe courtesy Rachel Fracassa)
Image: creampuffsinvenice

6 million trees can’t be wrong, especially if they are all being planted in one day by thousands of people joining together, united by visionary, inspired activist and opera singer, Boris Trajanov – and even more so if they are replacements to forests that have been claimed by wildfires two summers in a row.

1000 soldiers were included in the good works alongside of thousands of civilians in a collaborative effort to bus the busy seedling planters to the hillsides of Balkan Macedonia. If John Lennon were alive today, I imagine a song or two would come forth from this real life metaphor for the global environmental awakening taking place all around the world. More soldiers planting trees, please!

Speaking of imagination, Boris planted a few seeds for the minds and hearts of the world at large by saying, “If Macedonia, a country of two million people, can plant six million trees, we can only imagine how many trees can be planted in other, bigger countries.”

Somebody send Boris an eco-friendly airline ticket to the (new growth in need) forests of the world and tune up the veggie oil buses! How long would it take with that kind of peaceful tree-force to reseed the forests of the world?

Source: Reuters
Image: nzgabriel

If in the next four years we are all going to be investing in doing what works to heal our social and environmental ills, the very idea of examining the dress code of our new first lady might need a wee revision.

Don’t get me wrong, I longed for the fashion runway savvy and the budget to back it up ever since the old days of buying those slick pages of glossy fashion magazines showed me what a real woman wears in November. Now, we have a total trendsetter as our first lady to be. Simultaneously, a new type of fashion is being born in the form of organic and sustainable design.

How can we revise our attitude towards Michelle Obama to show her our respect for whom she is on the merits she has already shown while keeping our love for fashion as the holistic passion it deserves to be? Perhaps by giving Michelle a little space to show us her authentic style and, perhaps just throwing a few eco hints her way to find out what she knows! Maybe Michelle will share with us her own organic secrets for glowing skin and turn us on to her favorite hemp silks?

Obviously, her radiance starts within – as all true beauty does. Michelle Obama and eco savvy fashion seems a natural fit. We look forward to what she can share with us to enlighten our union in fashion, beauty, and eco-intelligence.

Image: mlive

Have you gone to look for your handbook to life lately only to find that pages are missing and that the maps in the back of the book are no longer current? They keep saying these are times of rapid and accelerating change. Maybe it’s time to tune up your navigation system and rev up your intuition! What’s involved in getting to know your intuition, intimately? If you want to feed your left brain, try tuning in to a few definitions. This one for intuition comes from Wikipedia. 

Intuition (knowledge) – understanding without apparent effort, quick and ready insight seemingly independent of previous experiences or empirical knowledge. 

My favorite example of intuition? Intuition is that amazing quality that allows me to show up at the right time and meet the right people without having to “think about it”, like when I met our editor, Sara. Tuning up the intuition is like tuning up the equipment before a treasure hunt!

In my quest to find out more about my own intuition, I was first guided to explore what intuition is not. One way to describe what it is not is to say that intuition often works its way through filters.  Those filters, says Lisa Hartnett, a therapist in San Rafael, California, can confuse intuition with other qualities like delusion and fantasy. 

Try this exercise for an experience of the differences between what intuition is and what it is not:

If you have a meditation practice, on a day when you are especially centered, spend an extra ten minutes asking to feel, see, taste, touch, hear and receive pictures on the nature of delusion. Make sure you are firmly seated in your meditation as the witness or observer and from there, explore as the qualities of delusion arise.  Be prepared that the energy associated with delusion will not feel as good as when you do this process asking to feel intuition in its pure state. Notice where the feelings of discomfort associated with delusion are in your body, paying close attention to your belly and solar plexus. It is also recommended to journal about your experience. As you bring the meditation to a close, be certain to use a practice that helps you to ground your energy and complete the experiment with delusion.

You can try the same thing to experience what fantasy is and how it is different from intuition. Make sure to also sit and observe what pure intuition is. 

Get to know these distracting filters so you can let your intuitve light shine! And if more and more, you end up at the right place at the right time, enjoy the treasures you find. For a fascinating scientific exploration of the mystery of intuition, check out Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink.

Image: ana rodriguez

Just as I began to roll up my sleeves to see what my part in the coming four years would be, I decided to take a walk with Deborah Anapol, Ph. D., author of The Seven Natural Laws of Love
(sevenlawsoflove) and relationship coach to discuss the growing concern shared among women about the way women have been relating to each other – and where do we go from here as we build community and grow in virtues of sustainability?

I am a 30-something and Deborah is a 50-something.  In fact, she had changed a great deal in her physical appearance in the year and a half since I had seen her, and is now embodying her gentle presence with a decidedly more Elder flavor. In indigenous cultures the world over and through out time, the Elders have provided a level of support to the culture through years of seeing human nature reveal itself as well as by taking part in Mother Nature’s cycles. They have experienced love’s coming and going and by tuning into what creates harmonious relationships among groups of people who are invariably deeply interdependent on each other, have gained wisdom. Modern life has given us the airplane, car, jogging shoes and fast track to escape many group dynamics if we so choose. In the coming years, our ability to create unity is going to be our greatest natural resource.

Deborah spoke of her own journey to claim herself as an Elder with wisdom to share. The talk from other women in their late forties and beyond is the same. They are speaking of the confusion of nearing 50 and finding themselves considering if they are at the crossroads of youth, needing to enjoy the fruits of single life or graduate into life as an elder.

Creating a healthy and sustainable planet involves knowing what you are here to share and how, not to mention the role women play with each other as they address the increase in longevity, longer and longer cycles of youth and vitality, greater opportunity in careers, sexual freedom in part due to fewer people being in long term marriages and many more women choosing to not have children. How will the West adopt the Elder woman in larger numbers to the social circle so her beauty, vitality and wisdom are viable and not based on false glamours or harsh cosmetic approaches? And how will the Elder woman make what she has available, not just to herself but to serve the sustainable collective?  How will younger women embrace Eldering women in the West? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image: Powderruns