When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
Our final day on Maui was much more relaxed (at least for me) than the previous. While Ryan went on a scuba diving excursion to the Lahaina Cathedrals (which was one of his favorite parts of the whole trip), I got a prenatal massage at the spa at the neighboring hotel to ours and read a book on the balcony. We then spent the rest of the day lounging in the pool and enjoying some farmer’s market soursop (a fruit I’ve only ever had in Hawai’i and am obsessed with).
Read MoreHowever, post-undergrad, I moved into an apartment alone for the first time, and I was forced to confront a difficult question: did my consumption reflect my environmentalist views? This was around the time zero-waste living (producing no plastic waste) was going viral, and it provided a new lens within which to examine one’s environmental commitment. So many of us grew up with that adage, “Reduce, reuse, recycle,” but how many of us actually paid attention to reducing—both consumption and waste—and reusing what we already have?
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