I Am #AliveAndThriving Today! || #IAmAliveChallenge || Daily Off-Grid Jungle Journal Entry: Day #1138 - Comfort, Comfort Zones, and Growth - GaiaYoga Gardens, Lower Puna, Far East Big Island, Hawai'i - Monday, September 8, 2025

I live naked and barefooted, very close to Earth and Nature, in an 18-acre, off-grid, clothing-optional, food-forest intentional community (GaiaYoga Gardens), way out in the jungles of Lower Puna, far East Big Island, Hawai'i, and I have for more than 6 years now. Although there are many challenges, I love my life, and I'm immensely grateful to live where and how I do, on my own terms! I would not want to live any other way! 😁🙏💚⚡💥🔥✴️✳️❇️👣🌱✨🤙

Warm greetings all! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

I've recently had the realization that I haven't really gone outside of my comfort zone in quite a while, either in my life, or here on Hive. In my day-to-day life I've barely left the jungle for a few years now, mostly staying focused within my habitual routine daily tasks, while surmounting the numerous challenges that frequently arise. On Hive, I've mostly stayed to my regular daily, weekly, and monthly posts, without branching out to explore writing other styles or types of posts, also for quite a good while. It's comfortable, but as I tell people all the time, there is no growth in comfort. It's wonderful to enjoy, but if we remain in comfort, within our comfort zones, for too long, we stagnate.

While immense expansion, improvement, and growth are indeed found outside of our comfort zones, the sweet spot is actually right at the edge (because magic happens at the edge), where we can say, 'yes, I'm uncomfortable, but I'm OK'. The more we're able to live in that edgy place, the more of life will become comfortable to us.

I know all this very well, and yet, I still don't venture out much at all, either in Lower Puna, or in how I do things on Hive. It's quite a curious conundrum indeed. A big part of it is time. With how I've organized my various online and offline tasks with the time that I have available, there's often very little left do new things. Another part of it is that there are various things that I've come to see as not feasible or likely, so I don't put energy or effort in those areas any longer. I mostly just stay to myself, and work on my own stuff, where I do see more possibility.

I've been wanting to start publishing my plant-and-garden posts in the HiveGarden community again, which I haven't done in ages, even though I love it, and my highest-ever post payouts have come from my posts in that community. I've also been wanting to begin publishing photography posts in the VisualShots community for a fair while now too. The issues with those ideas is, again, time, and the fact that I already take quite a lot of photos every day for these daily posts, so figuring out how to take more, and to keep them separate, is a bit challenging. Also garden-wise, GaiaYoga Gardens is more like chaos gardening, where it is quite difficult to maintain an actually beautiful and functional garden here over time.

I think that all the excuses that I come up with as reasons not to do things, like going out for Sunday Funday, or writing new types of posts, are mostly just that, excuses. Now to actually do something about it.

Yesterday, Monday, I left the Flow House, after finishing up my Hive tasks, just after 2:15PM, giving my attention first to photography for these posts. Once I had that done to my satisfaction, I checked how many sections of conduit that we had left (we didn't have enough), to run an ethernet line from Power Sharing to what used to be Stefano's old lab, but is now being reconfigured as a hang-out area. Since there were not sufficient conduit sections, I measured the distance between the two points, to see how many new conduit sections needed to be bought. When I did all that I could do with that, I chopped and dumped bad/used coconuts at the upper coco bar, and I tidied the area a bit. After that, I took a quick asset-management up at the Flow House, and then I went to collect two laptops from Braja (one that she uses, and a backup), to remove the SSD drives from them to clone the presently-used SSD to the new one. That process took longer than expected, but it was successfully completed. I was in the middle of putting the SSDs back in the laptops when I had to stop (one done, one left for morning) to go attend the Monday community logistics meeting. As soon as the meeting was over, I made my way back across the property to the Flow House, to get into my evening Hive tasks, and to catch up on my notifications, a bit later than usual. I got everything done by a bit after 11:30PM, and after some asset management, and a scan of my X feed, I went to bed just before 12:15AM. I woke up quite late, about 8:30AM, having slept reasonably well, doing more asset management, going to make my superfood fire coffee in the Landing, then returning to the Flow House to write this post. It's now just before 1:15PM, so it's a great time to wrap this up, so that I may get to my other few important Hive tasks, before leaving the Flow House a little later in the afternoon, to focus first on photography for my posts, and then community/land work. I deeply appreciate y'all so very much! Until tomorrow's iteration of these posts! Always forward, onward, upward, and whaleward, ho, together we go! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

2025 Life Goals

1.) Do regular integral practices again, alone or with others.

2.) Prepare regular batches of my medicinal teas collected from the land again.

3.) Make my plant nursery, and the gardens, beautiful again.

4.) Begin learning relevant coding/programming languages to more fully contribute to the sovereignty-driven technologies where I am active, like Arch Linux, Hive, Qortal, DeSo, and Bastyon.

All photos were taken with my Motorola G Play 2024 Android Phone.

Thank you all so much who have helped me get to where I am today, and allowing me to share more of the beauty and magic from my life and my world with you, and for your continuous appreciation and support! I am truly deeply grateful! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

If you'd like to find me on other alternative platforms where I have accounts (I spend most of my time here on Hive), click on this signature image below to go to my LinkTree page.

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Signature image created by @doze, and the dividers made by @thepeakstudio, with all tweaked to their present form by me.