Dare to dream on purpose

For most of 2020 I had post-it notes up and down one wall of my apartment.  

As I worked through my writing goals, drafting three books thanks to the pandemic, I kept seeing the words, “How Do We Love This World”, on a large green post-it. That is the title of a project I started in 2019, subtitled “if mushrooms could talk and trees could hug.”

Intention

In 2021 I had an opportunity to attend an artist residency. At the time I thought I would be heading there in April and writing.

As situations changed I arrived at the residency in July with my green post-it note and my goal of finally creating the immersive audio/video experience, How Do We Love This World. 

The project itself didn’t start out as a project. It started with an idea and an intention to share an emotion.

In 2019 I met up with my friend Patricia and her boyfriend Angelo for a film screening of the documentary, “Hambi, the fight for Hambach forest”, about efforts to save an old growth forest located west of Cologne in Germany, from being destroyed by a coal company which had been tearing away the earth, towns, forests everything with their machines to expose the brown coal that is near the surface of the land.

After the film Angelo Novelo talked about staying in the forests of Papua New Guinea which have been shrinking because of the palm oil industry.

The documentary told a powerful story but what I was missing was the emotional element of what the activists were feeling. Why did they love the forest so much? How did the forest feel? What did they feel in the forest? What did it feel like to see the forest being eaten by excavators?

Following an Impulse

The stories Angelo recounted of this time in the rain forest in Papua New Guinea brought those feelings to life.

So I asked if I could interview him. He was leaving for Italy in just a few days but we squeezed in time for an interview before he departed.

Later that summer I was speaking to Ula Löw who shared her experiences with nature in Germany and her project of growing native plants in order to bring back the wild bees in her home in Western Germany not far from the coal activities.

I asked her if I could interview her and in November that year I took a train to Cologne where I saw her garden in Mönchengladbach and a small piece of land that was converted into a space for wild plants outside of her office in Cologne.

Waiting

In 2020 I transcribed the interviews.

And there they sat.  

In the back of my mind I was thinking–I want to create something thoughtful, inspiring, that resonates emotionally with these times of natural disaster with these interviews that express a deep love of nature.

I couldn’t move forward but I couldn’t let the project go.

This is the way many of my dreams have unfolded.

I had an intention, I had goals, I did the work–but the unfolding took its own time and its own direction.

This is the way of art and entrepreneurship.

This is the way of life, too.

The Unfolding

There are very few of us who started out with one specific goal in mind and then 20 years later find ourselves having the same goal.

In fact, companies and countries are the same.

And with the advancement of climate change, climate migration and global pandemics, we have all seen the shift at the same time. We will all have to become more flexible, agile and adapt our ways of getting to our intentions to the reality as it unfolds.

There is a dance that takes place between the larger intention, your pathway forward and your next step.

If you want to stay motivated, engaged and moving forward on your chosen pathway, one way to do this is through micro goals.

For How Do We Love This World, the intention came from the moment. I heard the story. I was thinking about nature, the environment and hidden extractions that our lives are entangled in without our awareness. I was thinking this story could bring some light on the life of a forest itself through the words that Angelo shares.

The Way Forward

The micro goals flowed from there. Do the interview. Find a counterpoint to bring hope to the story.  Complete the transcripts. Create a paper edit of the overarching story. Test Angelo’s story, test Ula’s story, create the video, create the complete immersive audio experience. Now I have new micro goals of sharing the experience in forests and abandoned places and creating art book for the project. 

Holding the intention lightly I navigate each micro goal which then leads to the next micro goal as I keep moving  forward toward the general intention of completing and sharing the project.

Stay the Course

We all had a year and a half of uncertainty. It is okay that things are taking longer to unfold.

Here is what I wish for you for the coming months and years.

Hold on to your dream.

Stay open to the unexpected.

Keep taking steps forward, even if you find yourself at a dead end.

Take another step forward.

Celebrate each milestone.

Find your own flow.

Keep going one micro goal at a time.