In honour of World Vegetarian Day/Month, this would be a great weekend to experiment with kicking the meat habit.

What does eating vegetarian have to do with being softer?

It’s kinder to your body – Since cholesterol comes from animal “products”, vegetarians have way lower cholesterol levels, and hence lower rates of heart disease and stroke. Vegetarians also have lower weight, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of cancer and diabetes.

It’s kinder to the Earth – 18% of greenhouse gases come from meat production, versus 13% from cars. In North America, half of all water resources, one-third of all fossil fuels, 70% of grains, and 80 percent of agricultural land are used to raise animals for food.

It’s kinder to animals – Do I need to explain this one? By going vegetarian, you can save around 100 animals a year. If you need incentive, and are ready to find out where your meat comes from, watch this very unsoft video.

It’s so yummy!

I’ve been a vegetarian for 17 years now, but I know being a full-time vegetarian it’s not for everyone. But just like cutting your electricity use or car use, cutting your meat intake by whatever percentage you can manage will help make the world a softer place.

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Want to go longer than a day? Here’s a few more resources:

Vegetarian Starter Kit (Or order a hard copy variation)

Making the transition – with recipes!

More recipes!

Here’s a way to spend 15 seconds and no money to:

• get food to those who need it
• help sick, blind or amputee children and prevent blindness and HIV infection
• help prevent breast cancer by getting mammograms for women who could otherwise not afford one
• provide books to children around the world
• protect rainforests
• feed abandoned animals

All with just the click of the mouse! Just visit The Hunger Site once a day and click once for Hunger, Breast Cancer, Literacy, Child Health, Rainforest and Animal Rescue. For each click on the site, sponsors donate money for the charity partners.

How does it add up? In 2008, the site donated:

• Over 70 million cups of food for people
• Health care services for nearly a million children around the world
• Funds to protect over 600 million square feet of rainforest
• Over 500,000 books for kids
• 7500 mammograms
• 75 million bowls of food for shelter animals

If you want to do more, you can buy a variety of products on the site, a portion of which go to further support the causes. For more information about where the money goes, see the “about this site” on each of the pages.

If you set the page as your home page on your browser, you’ll be sure to remember, and you’ll know that no matter what else happens that day, you’ll have made a small difference that adds up.

The very cool green-friendly home design site Re-nest has gathered suggestions on how to use old cassette tapes in home decor.

Designs include mirrors, lamps and a coin purse!

Then they pointed me to Interbent to figure out what to do with these pesky CDs and CD-Roms…

The time is right to bring back the handkerchief! When I was a kid, we had hankies in our pockets, and businesspeople stuck them in their suit pockets. Let’s make them fashionable again! Bruce Springsteen of course never thought they went out of style:

If you are, like me, “enjoying” seasonal allergies right now, you know how many tissues you can go through! And as a biology friend described it once, back to school is a time when everyone can get together and share the bacteria they encountered over the summer, so covering one’s mouth when sneezing is only polite.

But most tissues in North America are from clear-cut forests. (Greenpeace offers a guide to percent of recycled material in various brands.) Hankies to the rescue! Use ‘em, clean ‘em and use ‘em again.

I found these organic flannel hankies that should be a lot softer on your nose than those chlorine-filled dead trees!

Or you could go with the bandana look of course. These guys even sell some with your fave baseball team logo.

Hankies have other uses too. You could keep an extra in your pocket to:

• Use as a towel in restrooms. More trees saved!
• Sneeze into on the subway. Your fellow passengers will appreciate it.
• Offer to a stranger in need. I would swoon, swoon I tell you, if someone gallantly offered me their (clean) handkerchief.
• Wave down a taxi or a friend.
• Dab a little lavender oil onto and keep in your pocket for moments when the air around you has that “not so fresh” feeling.
• Use instead of paper napkins (Another tree saved! You’re a hero!)
• Pick up a date in certain clubs (you too know they never went out of style!)
• Keep hair and sweat out of your eyes while you’re rocking out. Clearly.

What else could you use a hankie for? Let us know.

Then get out your hankies! Sport them with pride!

Are you clearing out the closets to make space and find a new home for that collection of Hardy Boy Mysteries? Or maybe bidding on that Strawberry Shortcake Lunch Box?

Using eBay, you can use those sales or auction time to help non-profits by using their Giving Works initiative.

You can search for items that have been posted that benefit a specific charity, and/or earmark a certain percentage of your sales to be donated to a non-profit. You can also bid on fundraising auctions (currently going: Go whale watching with Hayden Panettiere or Isabel Lucas to benefit the Whaleman Foundation) They also provide a button to use your PayPal account to make a donation directly to one of the charities.

Since 2003, the program has raised $127 million! I only wish eBay would promote the service even more. I’ll be dropping them an email…

Even if you’re not a student, there’s something about the end of summer that sparks the desire to stock up on pens and papers! (and crayons and Snoopy lunch boxes…)

But wanting to be lighter and greener, we’re all looking for places to shop that have made a commitment to greener items and production. Here’s a few I’ve discovered:

First and foremost, is The Green Office. In addition to offering all kinds of green office supplies, they also provide lots of tips for greening practices for your office, carbon offsetting your business, and finding other green businesses.

And for some cool specialty items:

• Labels – made from 100% recycled materials, using green energy, on recyclable adhesive stickers, delivered via carbon-offset.
• Eco-Envelopes – two-sided envelopes for business reply correspondence. 100% recyclable.
• Wood-free pencils, and Staple-less Stapler!
• Banana Paper notebooks!
• Lamps made from old ink cartridges!
• Business Cards
• Printing Services
• Printer Ink

What other green office products or stores have you come across?

(Continued from Part I)

Whoa. “Work Softer.” What would that look like? And what if I don’t want to be working at everything all the time? How about just Being? Be Softer. Enjoy a Softer Life. Yes please. Yum.

Almost immediately though, I felt guilty. (Ah Guilt, the charming companion to The Badger*). Who was I to live a softer life? Life is hard. “Everyone knows that.” And if I decided to have a softer life, what about all the people in the world who truly do have hard lives? And what about the planet? Wouldn’t having a soft life mean being totally reckless and greedy and disregarding environmental impact? That’s not what I meant, that’s not what I was after. Could I create a concept of Being Softer that went beyond myself?

I hope so. That’s my experiment here. To find a way to be Softer with myself (gentler), Softer to others (kinder), and Softer on the planet (greener). In short, doing my part to create a softer world, where everyone can experience a softer life.

Interested? Let’s try it together. See what happens. See if, as the coked-up inner Badger warns us, the world crumbles, nothing gets done, we’re taken advantage of, and we end up on the street. Or, as I believe, we end up way less stressed out — calmer, happier, healthier, more peaceful, more content, having more fun, more in touch with the world and universe — and able to pass along all those poz vibes to others.

I’ll be offering techniques, thoughts (my own and others’), resources, suggestions, experiments to try, and opportunities to share your own experiences and findings. I look forward to playing and seeking softness with you!

* Martha Beck calls this our prehistoric “Lizard Brain” sending out constant messages of fear. Julia Cameron calls it our Inner Critic. Some religions call it Illusion.

One day, not so long ago, I was burned out from working on a movie, and trying to recover by lying down on a couch to read some mindless fiction. But I kept hearing this voice saying, “What are you doing on the couch? You should be looking for your next gig! You should be revising your resume, you should be out networking, you should be cleaning the house, you should be figuring out how to make more money…” Perhaps you’ve heard this voice? It’s not very restful.

I was talking to a friend about how frustrated I was that my energy was sapped, when I needed to get going on future projects and ambitions and achievements, and she asked gently, “Is this working for you?”

I stopped, mind officially blown. What kind of question was that? I was On My Way, on a Career Path, heading to Success, checking off a list of Achievements.

I breathed for a moment. And thought. Or rather checked in with my gut instinct, which is much more likely to bring me the truth.

No, I realized, “This” was not working for me. “This” being a lifestyle of multi-tasking, hyper productivity, constantly striving to be Better, to do More, to have More, to achieve More. In fact, “this” was exhausting the heck out of me, draining me mentally, physically and emotionally. I was not, in short, having fun.

But what else was there? I wondered.

I asked myself, “What is the opposite of Work Harder?” Certainly not “Work Smarter,” which is just another form of pressure: figuring out what “smart” is and deciding whether what I’m doing now is “smarter” than what I was doing before. No, being “smarter” or “more productive” is still a voice in my head constantly badgering: asking, yelling, judging whether I’m being Smart Enough, Fast Enough, Tough Enough or Productive Enough.

So that left the true opposite of Harder: “Softer.”

On to Part II

I’m so glad you made it to this new site!

Some things we’ll be talking about here:

• Tips for being Gentle with yourself
• Ideas for being Kinder to people you know, and even those you don’t
• Ways to Live Lightly on the Earth
• Very cool people who are helping make the world a softer place.
• New ways of approaching work, play, health, life…
• How creativity and living softer are inter-linked.
• Challenges to living softer in today’s world
• Fun things to try
• Tips for stress management and stress relief
• Tips for simplifying your life and decisions
• Your thoughts, ideas, inspiration!

Please join me in the experiment, and join in the conversation!