Rachel Zakrasek

I hear a lot of advice that, every time you receive a new gift or buy something new, you can donate or regift something you already have. That seems reasonable to me! I think also, just being more mindful about what I really need will help, especially when there are meaningful projects I'd like to save money for. Instead of buying something that I'm drawn to, I can look around my household first and see if I may already have that item, but it might need repairing, or transforming. 

In struggling to forgive others and myself for things in the past, I found I was still haunted by these people and experiences. Trying new ways of thinking about forgiveness, and going through a focused forgiveness process, helped me tap into pent-up anger I was carrying around with me. I learned a new perspective, which is that anger is the work of the ego to create separation between things. Working hard to see that all things are connected, and that experiences happen to help us grow, helped me to forgive and let go of anger. 

I really loved this quote "Resentment is like taking poison, hoping it will harm your enemy". I thought back on other things I've learned about the capital punishment system and prison system. Forgiveness is powerful and can result in freedom for all involved parties. A more active practice of restorative justice could provide all with more opportunity. With more opportunity comes more kindness, and less survivalist instincts.

Beauty, Openness, Growth, Connection, and Pride/Dignity. I used a personal values card sort. This involves starting with 30 personal values and sorting them into categories of importance, from most important to not important. Then, ranking the most important values and finally narrowing to top 3-5. I completed this exercise over a few days, helping me see what I kept coming back to in my list of most important values as the "can't-live-without", "second-nature" values I live by unquestioningly. They are also values I found encompass other, secondary values I also find important. Interestingly, these values correlate a bit with other "personality assessments" or "strengths assessments" I've completed over time. But I didn't realize that until afterwards.

In watching "The Black Power Mixtape", I really appreciated the candid sharing from Black Power movement leaders which helped articulate their perspective, how they lived their lives, what they had experienced growing up in America, and what mattered most to them to change about our society. I thought the philosophy presented about change, and what it takes to make change happen, was fascinating, namely, that when the pain of remaining the same outweighs the power of changing, all fear goes away and you become capable of sacrificing everything of yourself. I think this relates to sustainability in that our world, those things that must break through will, like a bank pressured by the flow of the river. It is in resisting the changes called for in our communities that we are unsustainable - preventing the inevitable. Soil that surrenders to the flow of the river changes gradually over time.