SuperForest

I came home from compost bin material shopping (more on this in another post!) and wanted to light some incense. I grabbed my box of incense but alas found that I had misplaced my incense holder! Excellent opportunity to make something:

Take some stiff cardboard… my incense holder cardboard is up-cycled from old whiskey bottle cases.

Shape a flat piece into an open faced rectangle to serve as the ash tray.

Next, cut a small rectangle and fold it in half. Cut a triangular notch in the fold and set it up inside the tray like a little tent.

The notch should serve as a capable holder. If your cardboard isn’t as heavy as mine, then secure with a little tape.

Presenting… Up-cycled Incense Holder!

Jackie

Good Evening, SuperForest!

Check out this amazing piece of architecture!

Designed and constructed by German Architect Matthias Loebermann, this temporary pavillion was built in 2005 for the Nordic Alpine Skiing World Championship in Oberstdorf, Germany.

via GBlog

via GBlog

It was made entirely from 1300 shipping pallets and held together with tie rods and pull straps. The pavillion was used as a meeting place and media room for the athletes competing in the championship.  Apparently they dismantled and recycled the structure after the event, however I think this would be a pretty amazing permanent structure if it could survive in a particular climate without any major damage.

via GBlog

Upon further research into this subject, I discovered that there is a lot to read out there on “palletecture”. So search away, SuperForesters! Let’s learn more about sustainable building ideas! Incidentally, SuperForester Julius and SuperForester Jackson have also expressed their love of upcycling pallets:

A social way to upcycle pallets

Pallet sweet pallet

Have a seat

Yours in love with this gorgeous piece of art,

SuperForester Heather

Hello SuperForesters! I’d like to share with you my very first D.I.Y. project! I have to admit that this is not a unique idea; you know what they say about there being “no original ideas”, however I didn’t let that stop me from doing the project! The first thing you will need is an abundance of corks. I amassed mine from my family’s passion for good wine, but you can also visit a local restaurant or wine bar and ask them to save the corks for you, they just might do it!

After you’ve collected many corks, get yourself a basic frame. I found mine at a craft store, but it would be even better if you could reclaim some wood and make your own frame.

Take some time and practice patience when arranging the corks within the frame. Because the corks are not all the same size and some may be slightly warped, it will take a calm, creative eye to arrange them so they all fit nicely.

When you are ready, pick the corks up two by two, and glue underneath them, gently pressing them into the glue as you put them back in place. This will keep your design together while you glue the corks down.

After all of the corks have been glued to the frame, place some heavy books on top to help the glue set and adhere the corks securely. Leave the books on overnight or for a few hours.

Ta-da! The frame is now complete and ready to hang on your wall! I am going to use mine as a “vision board” to keep myself mindful of my goals and intentions on a daily basis.

What do you think, SuperForesters? Should I leave my frame minimalist or should I paint it?

Yours in recycled crafting,

SuperForester Heather

Self-pride and self-love are distinct. I have at various points of my life mistaken the two. My project now is to defuse the former and infuse in myself the latter.

Pride is rejection. As we all take to believe, pride springs from the ego. Pride is a wall that separates ourselves from our insecurities, as well as other people.  We may hide behind or stand above it in order to feel content in who we are. Through the conveyance of pride, I make myself the other, safe in my tower. When I push away others I do the same to a part of me. That security is a fiction; we were never separate.

Self-love is an acceptance or embrace of what I am, and the universe suggests that acceptance is the right path. I seek to love every iteration of myself: before I was born, when I was an infant, when I was eight, when I was seventeen, when I was twenty, who I was last month, what I was last night, and, of course, that which I am today. I cannot deny any single instance of me; for if I have anything, I have myself.

Pressures from without and within, the lingering hurts of past days, tug at our hearts. We shrink away  from the hurt we felt then, and in doing so hide that part of ourselves. The key is to accept, even to love, that hurt. Without noticing, the pain evaporates.

To reject a part of our past is to lose a piece of our living flesh. We must gather up the many selves that we have been and love them, appreciate the beauty in them, rejoice in them. We find parts of our history banal and insignificant, but we must listen to the poets when they urge us to find equal beauty in a blazing sunset as in the hairs of our arms.

With this trust, we may bound into the future knowing that you and I will love whoever we become.

Off the hook. You best be enjoyin’.

I have been thinking lately about the weight of ideals. Being raised on comic books and other myths I’ve always been attracted to them, from the dark heroism of Batman, all the way to Plato in my studies in philosophy. That influential Greek thought that the “forms” were more real than reality, that all chairs are a (mis)representation of the perfect chair, which exists somewhere, but not here.

As many readers may know, I have lived in Asia for the past six months, and it has engendered a change in my thought. Westerners think in categories, while East Asians think in relations. In Eastern thought, the world is a continuous substance, not broken apart in into chairs, tables, and glasses of water. Do not separate the tones, Lao Tzu cautions us, for that does harm to them. In the West, we might call this “monism,” but the application of such a label misses the point entirely. While abstractions, such as logic, are useful, a cacophony (or symphony) of inputs exist in every situation. Existence is complex. Difficult to understand.

Idealism is wonderful, and necessary, I think, to live in this world. It can sometimes be a yoke in social relations. What I mean to say is this: I have wanted so much for this love to define my life, to be some great story. And while this is great for narrative, a life  — or two lives — is not steered by some ideal that I project. That is to put the cart before the horse. This, then, is an important realization: it is not that a story is my life, but my life is a story. I  need not  put pressure on it. I must concern myself with the matter of living, to be present in existence, and not as much in abstraction. While I often act as though it were, my heartbeat is not a metaphor; it’s right here in my chest, pumping, pumping, pumping into this body, into this world.

Hello Beautiful SuperForesters!

I admire so many qualities that Mother Teresa exemplified while she was with us but one of the most striking was her ability to convey entire lessons in just a few words. One of my favorites - if I have to pick - “Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.”

The Sapling Project conveys this belief marvelously.

The seed of the idea, Satish Vijaykumar recalls, started as something tiny and simple: “One day I was just sitting and thinking about how the average Indian is always worrying about something, but we don’t do anything.”

One thing that sounded doable to the young man of Mumbai, India was to pool together rupees with friends, buy a few saplings, and plant them. “It’s the least I could do,” he thought.

Now called “The Sapling Project,” Vijaykumar and his friends’ tree-planting movement has delivered over 1,200 trees and involved roughly 700 people people, with plans to plant 10,000 trees in Mumbai, preferably before the monsoons.

In a city that loses 3,000-4,000 trees a month due to development, Vijaykumar’s “little act” has rather large ripples. They’ve even been asked to share their experience with people in Kenya and Zimbabwe!   “We don’t want to change the world or end economic sanctions in Zimbabwe, we are working towards a simple mission, to plant and share plant saplings to one and all in different parts of our city.”

While most tree plantation drives are done in Parks or Forest areas, the colonies and buildings need more trees and makes it easier to monitor the health and progress of one’s planted sapling.

The model, simply, collect funds, buy Plant Saplings and distribute it free of cost to anyone who sign up on the website or turn up at the event. All that is required is to  nurture and monitor the health and progress of the sapling for at least 2 years.

with gratitude,

sheri

“In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.” mother teresa

Good Evening, SuperForesters!

Last week, I shared with you an eye-opening video that showed the work of Electronic Recyclers United and how they handle e-waste. The recycling bit was pretty neat, to say the least, but what stayed with me the most was the demonstration of the sheer amount of waste that is created by mass production. Today, I share with you a story that is completely on the opposite end of the “make” spectrum. It’s a story about the Mast brothers who are a pair of chocolate-makers in Brooklyn but above all, it is a story about craftsmanship.

Despite the fact that I’ve never been a big chocolate fan, this video does two things for me: (a) It makes me want to visit their store and buy their chocolate really bad, and (b) it makes me really happy.

Love to all of you artisans,
Carla

(via the scout)

Image via Somewhat Sketchy (Micah Donovan)

Hello SuperForest! A while back I interviewed the guys of Food Jammers on my blog, After the Harvest.  Food Jammers, a.k.a. Micah Donovan, Chris Martin and Nobu Adilman are three creative individuals that are artists, food enthusiasts and builders/makers of amazing things! Up until recently Food Jammers only aired in Canada, but  the boys made the virtual jump over the border and can be found on the Cooking Channel for all of you in the USA.

Food Jammers (L to R):Micah Donovan, Christopher Martin, Nobu Adilman

Photo provided by Micah Donovan

One of the food dudes, Micah Donovan, has his own blog called Somewhat Sketchy where  I recently read about his totally rad grow tubes! I love the “About” section of Somewhat Sketchy: “somewhat sketchy chronicles attempts to construct possibilities!” 

Micah and Nobu recently presented a project at the Subtle Technologies Festival in Toronto. Subtle Technologies is “a multidisciplinary event where artists and scientists come together to discuss, demonstrate and exhibit their work.”

As Micah explains, the grow tubes are meant to use “as few inputs and as little energy as possible. The design takes little space and is suited to hanging in a window where the LEDs act only as a light supplement.” He also talks about indoor gardening and vermicomposting on his blog. There is a lot to learn from his creative experiments for anyone wishing to grow their own food indoors. He attributes some of his knowledge from his “mind blowing” experience at Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Interestingly enough, the presentation for Subtle Technologies took place at Innis Town Hall, a lecture theatre at my alma mater, The University of Toronto. Seeing photos of this room brought so many memories back to me!

Congrats to Micah and Nobu for conceiving of, constructing and presenting these amazing, beautiful grow tubes and sharing them with us through the magic of the internet!

Yours in sustainable enthusiasm,

SuperForester Heather

Hihi SuperForest

I’ve been entertaining myself with a papercut recently and thought it would be a good opportunity to share, along with a couple of tangentially related quotations that I like:

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)

papercut-in-window action

and one more that speaks to me, from Vincent:

Someone who has been wandering about for a long time, tossed to and fro on a stormy sea, will in the end reach his destination. Someone who has seemed to be good for nothing, unable to fill any job, any appointment, will find one in the end and, energetic and capable, will prove himself quite different from what he seemed at first.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 – 1890)

Because we all face our own stormy seas sometimes, but the clouds do clear.

Love

P