December

"You mix your metaphors, and a seed becomes a lantern glowing, or a flashlight, or a firefly hatching". Rebecca Solnit (2025). No Straight Road Takes You There. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) December 2025.

December

While creating another set of plants for a colleague at work, I was thinking about how true beauty is CO₂ negative and how sustainability is an easy practice if one uses, reuses, transforms, and shares what one has.

For the container, I reused the bottom part of a household disinfectant, giving it a second life instead of discarding it and buying a new container made from fossil fuels (i.e., plastic). Then, I looked around my small garden for available candidate plants that could thrive in that container and, hopefully, cooperate to lead a good life under the new conditions. After finding the trio, I placed them in their new container using my simple gardening tools powered by human energy. The soil was in short supply (as worms in the vermicompost regulate their work according to the heat). Used about 3 liters of commercial potting soil, which comes with an undisclosed carbon footprint. 

Creating with what is available around us is not only a good sustainability practice but also a way of multiplying beauty that goes on living and capturing carbon dioxide. Hence, real beauty is CO₂ negative.

Photo of a different and beautiful Nature creation. Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) December, 2025.

Real luxury is carbon negative

Sustainability in practice. Bouquet with plants grown locally. No artificial fertilizers or pesticides. Collected manually, near creative assembling point. Made with love and care. Hand delivered by the creator in nearby location, reached in less than 30 minutes by foot. Including complimentary smile and a good day hug. To dispose end of life bouquet, compost, cut in small pieces to use as mulch or use the dry plants as materials to do tapestries ;)

Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) November, 2025.

January

“(…) my story bleeds through from my cover into the real world, a message from a parallel universe revealed through graphic design and visual creativity. My cover is the shadow on Plato’s cave wall, a hint of the truth and imagination hidden within. When you look at me, I am designed to make you want to open the lid and let my stories escape through your gaze, diving through your eyes into your mind, where they can live and breed anew. I’m only a book. Hold me.” Robert Klanten, Mathias Hubnel and Andrew Losowsky (2013). Fully Booked. Photo of tapestry on the making (belonging to «404 Humanity not found» serie), by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC). January, 2025.

The real thing

"there’s a particular kind of disappointment when you begin to admire a bouquet or a blossom at a distance and find out closer up that it’s fake. The disappointment arises in part from having been deceived, but also from encountering an object that is static, that will never die because it never lived, that didn’t form itself out of the earth, and that as a texture coarser, dryer, less inviting to the touch than a mortal flower.” (Solnit, 2020, Orwell’s roses). That's what I think about chatGPT, artificial things, and fakes. When everything is automated, human interaction is precious. More than ever, the natural, the handmade, the imperfect, becomes the real luxury. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC). November, 2024.

June

"There is a connection between the brain and the hand that supports an embodied cognition, a knowing. Handicrafts in particular, which require dexterity and patience and a respect for the material, help make connections for us." Susan Magsamen & Ivy Ross (2023). Your Brain on Art: how the arts transform us.

Photo of mini tapestry (10 x 15 cm) by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) June 30, 2024.

May

"The most beautiful thing of all... is whatever you love best." Irene Vallejo (2022). Papyrus: the invention of books in the ancient world. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 2024.

unselfing

"Observing something beautiful" is "an occasion for unselfing" and it "may well hold the key to our collective survival. Because it means that our role here on earth is not simply to maximize the advantage in our lives (...). It's to maximize (protect, regenerate) all life. We are here not just to make sure we as individuals survive, but to make sure that life survives. (...) We must attempt, with great urgency, to imagine a world that does not require Shadow Lands, that is not predicated on sacrificial people and sacrificial ecologies and sacrificial continents. More than imagine it, we must begin, at once, to build it." Naomi Klein (2023). Doppelganger. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

January

"You are beautiful not because you are better than others, but because there is only you who can smile like that." Haemin Sunim (2017). The things you can see only when you slow down. Photo by Monica Pinheiro free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

December

"As we notice more and more in the present moment, we come to a deeper realization that a silent observer is within us. In the primordial stillness, the silent observer witnesses everything inside and outside."  Haemin Sunim (2017). The things you can see only when you slow down. Photo by Monica Pinheiro free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

November

"Long distance dispersal may be rare, but in a world where enough attempts occur, only one attempt needs to succeed. What is remarkable is how many appear to have been successful." Thomas Halliday (2022). Otherlands: A World in the Making. Photo by Monica Pinheiro free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

 

June

"Craft makes us human, and in doing so, it can provide deep satisfactions that are hard to replicate in other (dare I say) less hands-on activities." Cal Newport (2020). Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Photo by Monica Pinheiro (PT20220621). License CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

May

Photo taken May 2, 2022, by Monica Pinheiro. You are free to use it if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

January

"[A]ll this was an ongoing labor of love. The sustainability of nature (...) never just falls into place; it must be brought out through that human work that also brings out our humanity." Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2017). The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in capitalist Ruins. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

December

"Don't let the beauty of life escape you." Let Nature be "the temple that is. Marvel at the fact that any of this exists - that you exist." Ryan Holiday (2019). Stillness is the Key. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

December

"Make what you can of what you have been given. Live what can be lived. That's what excellence is." Ryan Holiday (2019) Stillness is the Key. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

August

 

"(...) what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom (...) at no stage (...) within my control." Kazuo Ishiguro (2021), Klara and the Sun. Faber. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

May

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

January

 Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

December

“(…) she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfilment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself. (…) she was alive, when she had so nearly been dead.” Matt Haig (2020). The Midnight Library. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).