Hello, welcome, and thank you for being here. 

Whether you are dropping by or staying to join the community, please check out my feature posts on what is a flourishing commons and my learning philosophy on being human. I hope you will find resonance in collective healing, (re-)learning, and sharing beauty. If you have a beautiful experience of your own to share, please consider leaving the story here to inspire others! 

In this feed, I will mainly be posting quick updates related to my artwork, writing, and advocacy work. If you want to read more essays, you can find blog posts on spirituality, social theory, and philosophy on my personal website. This post on the ethics of flourishing will explain the theory behind my focus on human flourishing. 

Lastly, remember to check out the shop. There's a selection of free digital downloads waiting for you!

In an increasing world of artificial intelligence, digital interactions, and physical social isolation, do you wonder if place still matters? Where is place without the groundedness of a physical body? Can the Internet ever be a place? This is the predicament we face living in a hyper digital world. 

This was originally a presentation for a virtual expo on virtual worldbuilding. However, I took the the concept of worldbuilding literally to apply to our real physical 3D world.

In this presentation, I expand the idea of forest therapy as a nature mindfulness practice to a spiritual philosophy. The message I extract from forest therapy is that we can trust in life and trust in our nature even when we are not in a forest. Therefore, a paradox exists in the teachings of forest therapy. On the surface, it is an outdoor nature activity, but at deeper spiritual level, it is a practice of discovering our nature within.

A portion of this presentation was created for an Introduction to Forest Therapy workshop for high school students that I co-hosted with a fellow forest therapy guide. 

Years ago, I happened to watch a lecture recording of James Hillman talking about how the internet is not a place. I can no longer find that video but I know that the lecture was given well before online courses became ordinary. Even though a lot of the work I do happens on the internet, I agree with Hillman. I also believe that the internet is not a place. Yet, most people, including myself, find ourselves continuously involved in virtual worlds.

The internet has changed the way we relate to each other. Social media has become the norm for people of all ages to engage with other people for personal reasons, business purposes, and creative expression. Since the start of COVID-19, the time we engage in virtual communications has increased tremendously. From business meetings to family gatherings to online classrooms, much of our everyday interactions have shifted to a digital screen in front of our faces. In the last few years, the mainstream use of AI has added to the mix.

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Dropping in to share a few pieces of a new style of artwork that I've been focusing on. I took a little course on digital handwriting and calligraphy a while back so now I'm creating a bunch of art pieces that combine inspiration quotes from literary classics (mostly for children except the Hermann Hesse quote I absolutely love shown in the post cover) and nature-themed illustrations. My goal is to merge literary and visual art to bring out the cultural nostalgia and childhood innocence of longing and belonging to nature.

I'll eventually be sharing the artwork on social media, but I want to make the little animations I made for the pieces exclusive to this site. Enjoy!

Young people today are more socially conscious than ever before. Through school, media, and everyday discussions, they are exposed to the weight of social-ecological issues like climate change, racism, food and job security, addiction and mental illness, etc. What heavy burden it is for young people to live in a world that has been deemed "damaged" and now they are the ones responsible to fix?

Commonsense tells us not to go into a dark forest without a flashlight. To find resilience in a world of chaos, we also need to cultivate a light within us to remind us of the inherent beauty, hope, and worthiness of life. This was originally a live workshop designed for an event held for high school students. The workshop examines how our own personal experiences of landscapes can be the spark of hope that we need to keep on living compassionately and purposefully within times of uncertainty. 

Landscape experiences allow us to be moved by the world, reminding us that 1) the world is interconnected; 2) we inherently belong in it despite the labels that humans have given each other; and 3) we are more supported by nature, including our human nature, than we think.

This is the replay video for the presentation I made for the research study Reclaiming the Passive Voice: Stories of Women Who Leave Landscape Architecture. This project inverts a traditional approach to research (i.e., as a deterministic tool to leverage knowledge for something else) into a process of collective healing. By seeking out what is not traditional examples of success in a profession (specifically, landscape architecture), I disturb a patriarchal narrative for human worthiness. 

The research was awarded an annual research grant from the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation. Quotes from participants have been removed from this video but can be found in the final research report. 

This is the second part of the presentation Finding the Heart to Placemaking (Part 1: https://youtu.be/aVxp0xel0JI). In this video, I look at the importance of landscapes during times of social chaos. I start by going back to the original questions of "why do we design" and "why do we make place." 

My PhD research on poignant landscapes sheds light on belonging and flourishing. These landscapes reveal to us that the first place we belong to is the internal place within ourselves. Our interpretations of the world, the place we nurture ourselves in, changes our environment, our actions, and ultimately our reality. 

So in times of social chaos, the landscape work we need to focus on is the purposeful "design and reconstruction" of our inner environments, our perceptions, and our humanity.

This presentation was originally prepared for a job-talk I did a while back for a prospective academic position. Despite knowing that I was speaking to the wrong audience (who wanted to see landscape architecture in its traditional way), I wanted to make a manifesto-style presentation on place, belonging, and humanity via the notion of the landscape architect archetype. 

Whether you call yourself a landscape architect or not, a person who is motivated to make the world a better place is empowered by the landscape architect archetype. So this presentation is for people who feel numbed by the daily routines of life and work; people who are seeking more meaning in the work they do; people who are troubled by our world's current social and ecological challenges; and people frustrated by the limitations of the patterns of social, cultural, and institutional systems. 

To unravel the burdens that we carry in navigating outdated systems and to flourish in our nature, this presentation invites you to return to our original place of belonging: the openness of our original hearts.

This video is an edited version of a webinar I hosted in 2022. [Sorry about the audio quality. There was an issue with my mic that day.]

This presentation explains how knowledge hierarchy (in mainstream Western society) has created faulty perceptions of the world that has led to destructive social and psychological systems. Consequently, the life force that nurtures the world, anima mundi or "soul of the world," has deadened. At the root of this worldview is a “not-enough” paradigm: we are not enough, we don’t have enough, and we must compete, commodify, and separate humanity from the rest of nature to compensate. 

Our systems of education perpetuate this paradigm through hierarchical and patriarchal ways of producing and disseminating knowledge. To heal our collective social wounds, a re-balancing of the archetypal "feminine" and "masculine" ways of knowing (e.g., intuition vs. empiricism) needs to be made. To live with soul is a choice, and not a scientific study. This is the opportunistic time to re-assess our participation in destructive systems that deaden our sense of being and re-align ourselves to a more wholistic way of understanding the world.