Archive for Travelling

May Schedule; New Yoga Barre Class; Plastic Bags; Love Your Tree Day

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy May!  I am back from a fantastic vacation to Sedona. I highly recommend traveling to this beautiful area of our country for amazing hiking, sight-seeing (ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs, an artsy old mining ghost town, new age stores and crystal shops), and delicious food (found the best vegan garden restaurant and chocolate bar for lunch, and an incredible gluten-free pizzeria).  If you go, email me for travel suggestions!

A few exciting announcements:

First, I have a new 3-week class at Integral Yoga Institute for the next 3 Monday nights: My “Yoga Barre” at 6:30- 8 pm combines yoga warm-ups, pilates, and ballet barre to strengthen and tone the body, and increase balance and coordination.  Come to any one or all three classes! Go to http://www.iyiny.org  to sign up!

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Second, on May 22, please come join my West 80s Neighborhood Association, our elected officials and community board, environmental organizations, non-profits, students, businesses and city agencies, as we clean and green across the UWS. It will be a fun afternoon as we care for our important NYC street trees by adding mulch and compost, clean up litter, engage in a voluntary trash audit, and join with other New Yorkers who want to see our city be cleaner and greener.  Free goodie bags will be distributed with gardening tools, curb your dog signs, and other free items.  Compost and mulch will be provided in free take-home buckets, and coffee and snacks will be served.  We need volunteers to help that day, as well as volunteers to help market our Second Annual  “Love Your Street Tree Day”.  Please let me know if you are interested! To sign up for May 22, go tohttp://loveyourstreetday/eventbrite.com

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Finally, the most recent The New Yorker magazine has a great article on the plastic bag issue, and I am quoted in the middle of the article as the author shadowed me and my neighborhood group as we trained with Bette Midler’s organization, NY Restoration Project, learning how to remove plastic bags from trees with a tool called a bag snagger.  The article is very thorough regarding plastic pollution issues, laws seeking to curtail plastic bag use, and obstacles to that environmental fight.  I do hope NYC’s carry-out bag law currently pending before the City Council gets signed by Mayor De Blasio this week.  The Speaker just endorsed it, and there are 26 co-sponsors now in the Council!   Please see http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/saving-america-from-plastic-bags

January 2015 – Happy New Year and Travels to Colombia

Dear friends,

Happy New Year!  Wishing you all wonderful things for 2015 – peace, happiness, abundance, health, love, joy, and more!

I just returned from a enjoyable trip to Colombia – a beautiful country with lovely people, great sights, and delicious food.  I am so happy that tourism is increasing there, as the country has gotten safer.  I enjoyed our sight-seeing there – from the small Caribbean city Cartagena, the coffee and wax palm tree region of Pereira, to the mountainous capitol of Bogota.  When travelling, whether nationally or abroad, I am fascinated by observing and experiencing both the commonalities and the differences between people from place to place.  The more I travel, the more I realize that basically most humans want the same things – connection, security, good food, love, safety, peace, fun and laughter (in no specific order).  And within these common desires, is often the uniqueness of how one’s culture expresses them.  So travelling for me is a study of the beautiful blending of commonality and diversity on this glorious planet.  It makes me a better person as I open myself to ways that are different from my cultural and societal upbringings, and yet I can still find the universal commonality of humankind.  It may sound corny, but I do truly believe that the more we are exposed to others by direct personal experience (rather than through the lens of the mass media or propaganda), the more we can find connection and engage in less discrimination.  After all, at the end of the day, we are all just finite skeletal structures encapsulating infinite souls.