Summer Rayne Oakes
Summer Rayne Oakes is an environmental scientist and an entrepreneur whose work focuses on health, wellness and sustainability. She keeps over 1,000 live houseplants spanning over 500 species in her Brooklyn apartment.
In her book How to Make a Plant Love You, Summer Rayne takes us on a journey to show us how the environment we set significantly impacts the life and lives around us. Her book ties together all the known benefits of taking care of plants (lower blood pressure, lower stress, cleaner air) with a bigger, less obvious benefit: taking care of plants makes you a more life-giving person.
This shift in mindset is what servant leadership is all about. If we can learn to ask what a plant needs from us, and not what we need from a plant, we will also learn how to ask that same question of people. And if we can all learn to make that shift, it’s amazing how alive our spaces, our communities, and our lives can be.
-Summer Rayne Oakes
Wabi sabi is a Japanese design concept. It means beauty in that which is temporary or imperfect. Things that come off of an assembly line, for example, are perfect, but things made by hand, like the glaze on a Japanese ceramic bowl, are imperfect. It is their imperfections that give them their beauty.