Excuse my video skills. This completely rusted old wood splitter was lying round outside our house since we moved in. It was/still is jagged and chipped, but I gave it a good sharpen on Thursday and now it's quite sharp and has even some shine. I find it so cool to find use and value in old broken things. Also the process of sharpening/polishing and improving physical things feels like a metaphor for polishing and improving internally/energetically. Does anyone else have some kind of processes, tasks or crafts like this? I find it especially rewarding sharpening all my chisels, and knowing the way I work them now is going to influence how I cut the wood later.

It's wild experiences can seem so accidental, yet also fit perfectly into your life puzzle. This week I busted my knee doing a pistol squat as a joke (lol). But it's actually opened up an old injury to give me a second chance at taking in the experience and healing from it. I can also feel how it's changing the energy flow in my body, from what has been years of imbalance in order to compensate for the original injury. I've got new sensation and movement all the way up the right side of my body, especially in my leg. And even some on my left side, which has also been compensating a lot. Anyone had similar experiences?

This morning on my walk with my dog I thought about alchemy and how we can combine and forge new energies, or new levels of energy, through internal practices and external experiences. I was thinking about 5 hunyuan form (level 3 zhineng qigong practice) which I've been practicing recently, and how the goal is to reintegrate qi that's been separated into the 5 elements (and 5 organs, 5 emotions), and merge them in the centre. The principle seems to be that at a lower frequency things separate and conflict, whereas at a higher frequency (or state, plane, dimension, whatever), they have more potential to interact and merge with each other, or combine to create new qualities or substances --- hence the 'dan tiens' ('elixir fields'), merging and transforming crude qi and matter into refined qi and shen (spirit/consciousness). My hunch (and interest/exploration) is that the higher quality qi that we are able to create our of our raw material, is unique from person to person. That there are new 'substances' to be created through the heat and pressure of both internal practice and the experiences imposed on us by the world. Interested to hear how this relates to others' perspectives and experiences!

Recently I've renewed my interest in herbs, especially things growing wild in my local area. It's super inspiring to me that things that just grow on their own can contribute to my internal ecosystem and balance. It's also so cool to develop a more personal relationship with my local environment, and how things growing in it interact energetically with my system. It's harder to have this in the city where everything's a bit more flattened and managed. Everything in nature has its own signature and personality, which directly correlates to its energetic makeup. It's also exciting to me that you can just engage, pick flowers and leaves, smell them, dry them, make tea, and get to know them in a way you wouldn't by studying them in books or online. Especially in relation to the wider, specific, unique, ecosystem. Actually, this is the thing that inspires me about engaging with any facet of life, the situations we find ourselves in are arranged like systems of elements that become reflections of ourselves, and the deeper we look, the deeper they reflect.

Hey! I'm Sylvia I'm starting to practice as a birth doula based around the philosophy of Do Nothing - originally I found this from Masanobu Fukuoka's Do Nothing Farming which can be applied to anything in life and I believe applies to birth. I'm really interested in old skills like birth support, farming, foraging, cooking, bookbinding, weaving, all sorts of crafting etc ! I'm really keen to have some community through world pool!