Living on a developed barrier island, Ponce Inlet Florida, USA, and floating in the ocean daily has built an even more intimate relationship with nature. What a contrast from the island of Manhattan, New York City to this island, and thinking back on the years being on the Small Island States, such as Fiji and Samoa. The opportunity to learn from biodiversity and interact with nature is immeasurable and teaches so much about how each species is organically wired to survive.
When I moved into a home on the beach during recovery to regain my health, floating with the dolphins led me to an ocean curriculum. Then two mama sea turtles chose to make their nests on the shore of the beach where I live. We have learned so much about being able to witness the life cycles of sea turtles during this time and these precious endangered species we are called to team-up with others here to help protect.
The mother lays her eggs onshore and goes back to the sea. Months later, the sea turtle hatchlings’ journey to the ocean for the first time by themselves. Watch this little leader:
The learning that is unfolding is immeasurable and inspires the sharing of the love for biodiversity with new experiences in the wild with birds, fish, crabs, whales, dolphins, and sea turtles grows from being in the ocean.
Being immersed in the ocean and island, life breath by breath strengthens that interconnection to all species. But the key is how to not merely survive, but to thrive, with interdependency on one another beyond siloed life systems, using both science, consciousness, and life’s ultimate mystery to discover how to better protect nature. Urgent action on both local and global levels to approach this change is needed, but it begins with becoming aware of the challenges and opportunities.
When we are immersed in nature, each one of us can come into a more balanced relationship, not just to the ocean, flora, and fauna, but one another. This island has a team that supports marine life, with wild species education, rehabilitation, all in the effort to support, conserve and preserve sea turtles, and more!
Actions on Biodiversity World Team Now is taking include:
From a global view, biodiversity worldwide is rapidly decreasing. Urgent action is needed as witnessed in the United Nations’ just published 5th edition its Global Diversity Outlook.
The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 (GBO-5)
The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 (GBO-5), published by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), offers an authoritative overview of the state of nature. It is a final report card on progress against the 20 global biodiversity targets agreed in 2010 with a 2020 deadline, and offers lessons learned and best practices for getting on track.
The report calls for a shift away from “business as usual” across a range of human activities. It outlines eight transitions that recognize the value of biodiversity, the need to restore the ecosystems on which all human activity de-pends, and the urgency of reducing the negative impacts of such activity.
There was to be a UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon Portugal in 2020 but that is moved to 2021, date TBD.
United Nations Ocean Conference
One of the Sustainable Development Goals, #14 Life Under Water, mandates the conservation of our worldwide oceans.
Leading to COP26 in Glasgow Scottland 1-12 November 2021.
HOME - UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) at the SEC – Glasgow 2020
The 26th UN Climate Change Conference will take place in November 2021, at the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) in Glasgow.
Observing nature, and organically discovering natural-based solutions from the ocean, is leading to new pathways forward for our common future.
Biodiversity: The Ocean’s Role Webinar Wednesday September 30 2020
Marine life, the world’s climate, our economy and social well-being depend on the existence of a healthy ocean. Although some improvements have been observed, recent assessments show that the Ocean continues to be exploited in an unsustainable manner. Climate change and competition for natural resources are adding further pressure on the marine environment. The decline of biodiversity, the Ocean’s degrading health, and the ongoing climate crisis demand special attention and a nexus approach.
On the margins of the 2020 Biodiversity Summit, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean, Peter Thomson, in coordination with the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), is organizing a High-Level Side-Event on “Biodiversity – the Ocean’s Role”. The event is being held for the purpose of discussing the Ocean’s integral role on this planet as the largest reservoir of biodiversity and life.
The webinar will feature a number of High-Level speakers, who will participate by video message or in the event’s livestream.
Wishing you and your loved ones to be able to breathe in the abundant love that is here for us right now! Then exhale all fears doubts, and surrender our mind’s idea of life in the past or time. Every breath we take in, can we give back out to the world loving compassion, in a spirit of contribution?
During this pandemic period, we have realized the key is to go within and notice the “pause” between each breath metaphorically— where we each are in our lives here now.
World Team Now continues to find our truth in nature. The photo also represents our campaigns beginning with: the blue (ocean and sky), and the green (of nature), and the biodiversity in between. Nature and the highest part of our own human nature need to breathe. How do we take greater consideration in our “global economies” for our future? Learning to better listen to, not only, our own voices within, but also the rising “collective consciousness” is a task for us all. To live in consideration of the bigger picture that we are interconnected, and each of our choices matter, as everything changes.
World Team Now has focused on demonstrating solutions, but we have been a small handful of people that planted the seeds around the world: a possible “vision” for the future that might have more in balance with nature. Our public electric vehicle chargers in California, and solar net meters in New York, were a small start. But the vision has been for a literal “World Team,” and the winning of the human race is to truly realize the potential of our species as human “beings”.
Organizing and acting for things we experience as “wrong” prescribes a judgment, that something is “right” when it is meant to merely raise awareness or move us to choose our truth for action or stillness. The patterns in movement, of humanity, are changing along with the climate. We propose to rise even above what we “own” whether that be a possession, our own creed, which has carried us through this life journey. We are being asked to remember or envision what indeed is the inspiration for a deep breath.
World Team Now’s stand is to demonstrate solutions that are nature-based, and we are quite enthusiastic about what has grown during this public health pandemic in relation to what we have organic encounters with now; the Ocean (an educational curriculum emerged) and more campaigns on the blue, the green and the biodiversity in between with dolphins; turtles, mangroves, and islands. Emerging is even a greater perspective of the journey’s story about what happened with people around the world when we tried to actually “tell-a-vision” — for a World Team.
We are enthusiastic about our SOS-IS partnership, even though it is at the beginning of coming together. Our goals are beyond the construct of time, but ideally in the now we can act for future generations.
This week has many events to consider organized around the UN General Assembly. A kickoff event on Sunday, September 20th is the New York People Climate Movement’s March for Climate Justice Through Racial Justice. World Team Now fundamentality agrees with the group’s statement and letter, call for justice, but has concerns related to naming-names and prescribing actions related to specific people in political power, and the time frame of these actions with consideration of the collective state of most people.
Statue of Liberty & Lighthouse Ponce Inlet Fl Photos by Suzanne Maxx
To shine the light of awareness now, we can only prescribe to be conscious of our choice, and be grateful. We cannot endorse, prescribe action, what to do, or how this moment will “benefit the public” yet. We can share some awareness of what had motivated us in the past, now, and for the future we want. This information is meant to just be shared, again we do not endorse the prescribed approaches or judgments to force law enforcement. Here is what we understand to being organized for the public in New York City locally and virtually:
United Nations 75th Anniversary September 21 2020 including a virtual concert at 8 AM EDT to Celebrate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations and the International Day of Peace titled “Shaping Peace Together” September 21, 8 AM EDT and later at 10 AM an observance (online) of the International Day of Peace
SDG Media Zone, 17-29 September 2020 Science, Solutions, and Solidarity to Transform our World. Check out the SDG Media Zone program and Watch SDG Media Zone at http://webtv.un.org
World Team Now, a public beneficiary nonprofit, had to try to decide what is best for the public at large. Given where we are now geopolitically, this seems to be an impossible choice. That just reminds us that we are all in process of realizing what “I’m possible” means.
We encourage conscious choice. We have been challenged to know what could truly be of public benefit to you all now, and confess we don’t know. In the past, it has worked to act on a local level, and now it will take each of us within ourselves to just shine that special something only you can give.
Globally it does start with where we are now. These above are not legal actions please note that if you choose to go. The march falls on High Holy Days for many people, but it is your choice.
It’s the United Nations 75th Anniversary, and we do support the concept of having Global Goals aka Sustainable Development Goals! But the “by when” and “how we will realize the SDGs” is up to us all. We support the idea of the government’s private sector, corporations, civil society, and each of us coming together for something new.
The question of belief, ideology, and what is justice, comes back to “Just” Us,” each of us.
While our goal is to unite: the divisions can only be bridged through each person’s own truth. While there is a “March” tomorrow we had agreed to support in theory, but it is your choice to engage or not. We can just share the information of what is happening and do not endorse the prescribed approach to go up against the law, or law enforcement. The consideration as New Yorkers to choose to engage or not, given the public safety, and lack of legal permitting, and prescribed measures, has to be one’s own. Your choice is your gift; the “present” of this moment’s possibility.
Where the theory or the ideology lives into the future world we want, how it meets the present with action with respect of the law is the challenge now— both the crises and the opportunity. In the effort to share the information we realize that freedom, equality, and conscious breath matters. May we each trust in the love that breathes through us, and realize we are in the midst of a painful birthing of a new paradigm and way to be with one another and in the world.
The respect for nature grows with each breath on the World Team journey. I continue to learn from dolphins, even when self-isolating in this large home, on this small island off of Tarpon Springs, Florida, USA.
My writer’s retreat was meant to go into the early months of 2020. This retreat, now hermitage, or imposed self-isolation, began when I couldn’t return to Fiji. I wasn’t able to make the flight from California to Fiji because of my lung’s ability to heal— to take a deep breath from the smoke of fires in CA 2019.
How surreal it is like the world, the collective consciousness, that is the WE, US, have joined together in having to go within, stay home, reprioritize, renew our life’s patterns and systems, and for many of us, take a deeper breath. A breath to review and renew what is important.
Yes, I was incredibly challenged to breathe, for what seemed like an eternity, but was only about 30-40 hrs. All I focused on was conscious breathing and each moment striving to take a deeper breath. I used every breathing technique I knew from over the years of taking on my pulmonary function and respiratory system, which had been in the past impaired. I tried to recall what I learned from Nei Kung to Conscious Breathwork. Each new breath, birthed an infinite light within, unattached to a presence in form, as I let go on the exhale.
The “Stay Home” mantra, began to challenge me coming into week four. I remember in being human we are each unique, we each sometimes respond differently to the same thing based on our immune systems. But we do have our breath in common, and this home, as mentioned in World Team’s Universal Declaration.
After all of the years of swimming with the dolphins in the wild in Malibu, Hawaii, Fiji, even New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island the dolphins continue to teach and enlighten. One dolphin actually came to me, during this recovery time, when I couldn’t go into the water. I had just begun to go outside to walk on the private property out on to the dock that extends from the home yard to the water for a “self-isolated” communion with nature.
Swimming with dolphins in the wild in different parts of the world for decades the name, “The Dolphin Lady” became an alias. I feel most at home floating in the ocean, and often when I float the dolphins come, as if “called”.
Can you image the heartfelt joy I experienced during #StayHome with me, coming into this Holiday tide when a single dolphin (perhaps pregnant and about to give birth), swam underneath the dock as I walked above? I notice the dolphin’s breathing— the importance of the breath has a deeper meaning now, amidst this COVID19 Public Health Crisis, not only for me personally but perhaps for us all?
A learning and deep observation from the grace of bio-mimicry medicine offered out for all to consider from the dolphin’s breathing.
We can learn a lot from dolphins. Dolphins stay underwater, and just when one wonders where they will rise— surprise! The dolphin breaks the surface from the depths, breaching up to move in new ways.
Did you know dolphins breathing is conscious? For a dolphin, every single breath is an active choice. Breathing is not automatic for dolphins, unlike humans. In other words, dolphins can’t go into deep unconscious sleep and still breathe as far as we know. Dolphins float and reach a meditative state where they are not totally unconscious. Dolphins use one half of the brain to rest, remaining semiconscious. This cat-napping state is often referred to as “logging” as the dolphin will float horizontally or vertically like a log. A dolphin’s conscious breath heals and reminds us all how to consciously breathe deeper!
Nei Kung is the single most important element I do now related to breath. Tai Chi offers this fundamental principle with exercises unlike any other form of movement from my experience, as it is conscious. The importance of weights for the bones and muscular skeleton, Nei Kung is fundamental to understanding the energy of the body(Chi) with breath, (as is singing)! And how the Chi can be used for self-healing, which may be the highest form of self-defense, immunity!
Breath and conscious breathing are key for us all now, understanding the importance of each breath can be a matter of life or death. Coming to learn to move our brain to higher frequencies of consciousness through meditation and prayer. Or even floating may allow us also to turn part of our brain off and realize a higher consciousness through our breath. Realizing the healing power of nature with respect may also be a matter of life or death for human beings, and our world as we live in this common home. Will we give nature time to breathe to recover from humanity’s priorities?
I wish we could just “Pass Over” and skip the global #Pandemic #COVID19 #CycloneHarold #Catagory5 aka #TCHarold #LocustsEastAfrica #GlobalCacophony #EconomicCollaspse #GeoPoliticalConflict #TradeWars #5GControversy #ConspiracyTheories and fast forward to collective systems’ transformation to the part where we all rise together? What is the role of the UN, the SDGs the global goals? And US, the people around the world?
The present realities require us all to give our all— to collectively embrace the elephant in the room, related to what many call the #ClimateCrisis, but really it is a collective inquiry— how does humanity live in balance with nature, including our own human nature for the future we want, together with systems ready for transformation?
These times of crisis can bring us true communion with nature, and our global diversity of humanity may indeed come together, perhaps a deeper realization of Pentecost this year?. Will we have the arch of illumination, to awakening to that light of Buddha to birth with the spring flowers of Hana Matsuri Blossoming, birthing with Buddha’s Birthday celebrated by the sprinkling of water celebrating or the Takayama Spring Festival, in nature this year?
It’s a lifetime of learning in observing dolphins, their capacity to love, to breathe and to teach. May we each prioritize both personal and collective transformation until we can live in a better balance with nature and when it is time, ALL RISE!