Gratitude Blooming Podcast
Inspired by nature, art and gratitude, the Gratitude Blooming co-hosts Belinda Liu and Omar Brownson bring fresh and diverse perspectives to well-being. For us, heartfulness is the new mindfulness. Gratitude Blooming was inspired by the artist Arlene Kim Suda and her 100 Days of Blooming Love art project. Hear from culture keepers, creators, healers, leaders and so many others who share their emergent practices to build the beautiful world our hearts know is possible. Please rate, review and subscribe. New conversations each week. We want to hear what you're grateful for. Learn more at www.gratitudeblooming.com
Gratitude Blooming Podcast
Unearthing Timeless Insights Through a Zen Perspective
Embark on a reflective journey with us, as we begin to weave together the wisdom of over 100 episodes, creating a tapestry of insights that transcend time. Imagine uncovering forgotten treasures and gaining new perspectives through the essence of sound, a medium as eternal as the themes we explore. This special installment brings a spotlight to our collaboration with Zen master Norma Wong, who extends her profound influence beyond a mere interview to ongoing projects like 'Kinship with Water'. Revel in the transformative idea of honoring water as a wise elder, capable of teaching us about nourishment, love, and kinship. Norma's voice guides us through the theme of remembrance, urging us to contemplate living practices that shape our journey and nurture the essence of gratitude blooming within us.
Join Belinda and Omar as they meander through a conversation that is both a nostalgic look back and an innovative step forward. Through the artful blend of past and present, discover how embracing what came before can illuminate the path ahead. This episode is a unique blend of nostalgia and innovation, filled with poignant moments, thoughtful pauses, and deep dives into the nature-infused lessons that keep our creative fires burning. Tune in for an experience that promises not just to revisit the past but to evolve with it, as we share key insights and stories from our ongoing journey with the extraordinary Norma Wong.
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Hello Belinda.
Speaker 2:Hey Omar.
Speaker 1:I love this new mashup series that we are creating, where we're mixing up the interviews from the second season of our podcast with some of the first season, just sort of reflections directly from the cards.
Speaker 2:So much of our modern life is all about new, new, new and stimulation, more and more content, different content, and I love that we're actually pausing to reflect on all of the wisdom that we've harvested from season one, two and three and really like thinking about, well, what is the distillation of this wisdom and this medicine for the gratitude blooming plants and the virtues and the themes?
Speaker 1:I mean, we've now hosted over 100 episodes, you know, which is an amazing milestone. But you also sort of reflected in a conversation or just the spirit of Brian, who was our original producer, and you know what did he? You know, the energy was like keep going, you know, and I feel like what is that?
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting. I know that we've been. You know season three was all about emergence. That we've been. You know season three was all about emergence. And emergence is beautiful.
Speaker 2:But without any kind of containment on it it can sometimes feel like amorphous, like like the element of air, almost like you can't touch it, you can't feel it, but you know you need it to live. And I remember having some tough conversations with you and Arlene about, you know, where's the podcast going, how can we keep it alive? And, and you know, of course, exploring all different possibilities, like you know, compost, letting things, the field lay fallow. You know these are all lessons and memes from nature. And you know, there was this one day where I really remembered Brian just always, when we would get like discouraged or feel like, you know, this is too much. He would just come back to, well, what can you do to just keep it going, you know. And then this idea came of well, why don't we like actually spiral back to all of these stories and all of this medicine we've harvested and really like distill it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, these mashups really enable us to both go forward and backwards at the same time, to revisit and remember all those sort of morsels that were so tasty then and then sort of like, how do we sort of add some new flavors with everything that we've learned over the last two plus years that we've been doing this? And you know, and as Brian always would tell us, like, sound is eternal, right, and so maybe in some ways that's also what's been beautiful about this mashup series and practice is that, because sound is eternal, we can revisit, right, and we can go back and sort of see what works for us and what have we forgotten, and you know, what do we need to remember, and then what have we learned and we can add into sort of the spice mix. And this first one that we're doing is Remembrance with Zen master Norma Wong, and this theme, and Norma in particular, has been just an incredible collaboration, because not only did we have her on as a guest, she had invited me into a collaboration where I wrote a poetry book reflecting on her practices around the art of waging peace, and then more recently, she invited me to co-host a series called Kinship with Water, and it really sort of centered around this initial question what if we collectively loved and respected water as our wise elder? We collectively loved and respected water as our wise elder and as the wisest of storytellers and the oldest of storytellers and the keeper of our collective memory. How does it teach us to nourish, how does it teach us to love and how can we be more like water? And so it's really special that we're mashing up this series and the continued collaboration I think that's the other sort of piece to this is that these are living practices.
Speaker 1:It's not like we had these guests on as a one-time thing and then it's sort of done. It's like no, all of these practices are living for us and with us.
Speaker 2:So we're going to now share a clip from that interview with Norma, just with some key insights and stories from her on this theme of remembrance.
Speaker 3:There is this urgency that's calling to us at this moment, but let it be clear that it's only calling to people for whom that is so, which is to say that we shouldn't go around trying to convince people that it's an urgent moment, no-transcript, and that it would be foolish for us to attempt to either scratch the ground until we found the seeds, or cast seeds on ground that is not yet fertile. So the wondrous aspects of California poppies is that they are in the most unexpected places and they choose to do their thing wherever they happen to be. They are protected my understanding under California law, protected, my understanding under California law and they're protected for the purposes of allowing them to continue to just do their thing and offer, therefore, their beauty for anyone and everyone. If they exercised choice, if they exercised choice to not bloom in a particular year, they would be missed, and the difference between poppies and humans are vast. Poppies and humans are vast, but the characteristics that we want to pay attention to is that we actually can exercise more choice than poppies. So the question becomes will we choose to bloom at this moment or will we stay in the ground? And I would say that it's the time within the space of human time is not vast and luxurious in terms of us making that choice.
Speaker 3:I also have the sense that this is not the first time in human history where that has been the case.
Speaker 3:We are, all of the same, ancient peoples the DNA information tells that to be so and as we became different peoples and we traveled across the land masses that no longer exist, and built boats to travel across oceans, and we're part of that first migration where we became many peoples, we had to have been making choices at that time to do that, and we had to have been doing that on a collective basis, because if we did it as individuals, we literally would have no humans today, because we would not have survived as peoples, as a species we would not have survived. It would have to have been a huge collective endeavor. That may have been the first collective moment, I don't know, but throughout history there have been these moments and we are in one of those now. So we are in that paradox, which is to say that the becoming requires us to open up the spaciousness in order for us to stretch what time-space looks like, to do the really big leaping that is required.
Speaker 1:I've been listening to this song and there's this one line about if we don't remember, then why are we living, right Like? Or were we ever alive? And so part of to me, memory is about this living practice and remembering sort of why we do these things like, why these things matter, like, why do we create space for each other? Why do we care about gratitude, right Like, because when we forget these things, we take them for granted, and when we take them for granted, we're really sort of missing out on life. And then, when life gets difficult and then we're like, hey, why, what's going on? It's because we've forgotten. You know, we've forgotten all the miracles, all the amazing things, all the small things that have happened in order for us to be sort of in the places that we are now.
Speaker 2:The story that Arlene had initially and what inspired her to even connect the poppy plant with this theme of remembrance, which is, you know, for her it was around this idea of Memorial Day and honoring those who have passed. And for me this topic is really resonant right now in that we recently created a new sculpture on our land called the Oak of Remembrance, and it literally came from one of our guests who had a really profound experience while he was on sabbatical remembering his mother who had passed, and he wanted to have something on the land for others to kind of go into this practice of remembrance. And I love this quote from Arlene around her story where she says I found it powerful that a flower like the poppy can hold so much symbolism for beauty, fragility and the interconnectedness of human life. The poppy is beautiful and strong and everlasting in its ability to make us remember and relate to our own humanity, the fleeting nature of our own lives and the connection we inevitably have with others through distance and time. So we hope that this mashup of remembrance inspires you to remember what is most important and who is most important in your life.
Speaker 2:For those of you that want to like, look at all of the history of our podcast. You can literally go to our website, gratitudebloomingcom. Now, scroll to the bottom and you'll see all of the history of our podcast. You can literally go to our website, gratitudebloomingcom now scroll to the bottom and you'll see all of the themes numerically ordered, and you can literally click on it, get the music, get the episodes and just kind of make it your own as well. So we hope this inspires you to kind of mash it up in your own life.
Speaker 1:And if there's other things that you'd like us to revisit or topics that you would like us to sort of explore further, please email us at hello at gratitudebloomingcom. Again, hello at gratitudebloomingcom. We love hearing from you, we love your stories and we want to continue telling them.
Speaker 2:Cheers, cheers.
Speaker 1:Cheers.
