Thinking back on our 3 years of blogging, from Ruarri’s First Post and all his amazing storytelling on wine as the elixir of life and a unifier of the world, to Jake’s wizard tech guides, to Brad’s millennial generation expose, to Meg’s wine-your-diet, to my rants on sustainability and spirituality, to all the other amazing content from our various contributors, we’ve created a dynamic vortex of ideas. What’s been greatest of all is having people find these ideas, some from 2 or 3 years ago and still give us feedback. With our first harvest experience this past fall in Italia, we brought all these ideas to life by finally connecting to the source and creating some amazing elixirs. And it’s not just the liquid that represents our ideas, but the sustainable environments from which it is produced. Thus, we find it natural to take our ideas, and our environments, and put them in a bottle…  a bottle of GrapeThinking.

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I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past year, and its vibration is now a part of my consciousness. The key to not only my success in life, but the sustainability and success of our planet is quite simply women. They bring balance, they bring harmony, they bring resourcefulness and renewability… yet most importantly they bring love.

I’ve been working with an amazing company here in Philadelphia called SEER Interactive and it hit me last week in our company wide meeting sitting around the whole office together with 11 women and 3 men. It was one of the best meetings I’ve ever been a part of. Not only was it relaxed, humorous, and productive, more so than most meetings I’ve attended, but I left with an overwhelming sense of peace… something I’ve never felt before in endless male dominated board, class, and conference rooms.

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Beacons of Hope

In 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected president of my country, I remember an age of jubilation that was infused into children, adults and people from overseas alike. Backpackers would come to our country with Mandela t-shirts, and when we traveled abroad and told people we were South African we were somehow associated with a little bit of that Mandela magic and people were that little bit more welcoming. With Mandela in power, the dominant feeling was that no matter what happened – things were going to be okay.

In the past 8 years that formative optimism of the Mandela years had left me, and I found myself in the midst of a new generation of cynicism kicked off by the Clinton impeachment, followed by the stealing of the election in Gore v. Bush, and the subsequent anomalies of extraordinary rendition, water-boarding and the abomination that is Sarah Palin. When Gore released his movie, Inconvenient Truth, only then did the world realise what could have been – if only America had fought a little harder in 2000.

When I woke up on Wednesday the 6^th of November, after 18 months of watching this election, I realised the enormity of what has happened. As I showered a feeling of relief washed over me and I knew that the page has been turned. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

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