Kristina's Monthly Note: April

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This Easter was Mark's first egg hunt. Watching him toddle around the grass, baffled by the concept, mostly just excited to hold something colorful — that part was magic.
 
But I noticed how kids were tearing open plastic egg shells, grabbing the candy, and dropping the shells right where they stood. Dozens of perfectly reusable eggs scattered across the lawn. And I get it - they're kids, it's candy, it's exciting. But it got me thinking.
 
I grew up in Soviet times, when everything got a second, third, and tenth life. My grandmother was the master of this. She washed every plastic bag. Knit socks from old sweaters. Could look at a broken thing and see three new things inside it. She never heard the word "sustainability." She just lived it.
 
What she really gave me wasn't frugality — it was imagination. She could see a second life in everything. A scrap of fabric became a rug. An old sweater became socks. That's the purest form of engineering — looking at what's already in front of you and seeing what it could become. Funny enough, that's exactly how Etalon started. Our first prototype used a shower ring to hold the straps together. My grandmother would have approved.
 
I want that for my kids. Not the scarcity - the seeing. Trust me, a two-year-old will find five uses for a plastic egg shell before you've finished your coffee. A metal cookie tin is a drum. Old broken sunglasses are a pince-nez. An Amazon box becomes a car garage. It's us rigid-thinking adults who decide what counts as a toy and what doesn't. Kids don't know the difference yet — and that's their superpower.
 
On repair:
 
A few weeks ago, my son and I found a cracked ceramic bunny in our neighbor's Easter decorations. We went to Walgreens, got glue, and fixed it. Our neighbor said don't worry about it. But I wanted my son to see something simple: we leave things a little better than we found them.
 
There's a Japanese philosophy called kintsugi — repairing broken pottery with gold, making the cracks part of the beauty. My grandmother never heard the word, but she lived it daily. She didn't see damage — she saw potential.
 
And it applies to more than objects. We live in a culture that's quick to replace — things, yes, but also relationships, friendships, collaborations. The moment something cracks, the reflex is to move on. Kintsugi says the opposite: the repair is what makes it beautiful. The crack is where the story lives.
 
On stuff owning us back:
 
A friend once told her niece and nephew at a big-box store: "Imagine everything here will be in the dump one day." I haven't been able to unthink it.
 
But it's not just the planet that pays — it's us. Everything we own ends up owning us. We store it, organize it, maintain it, feel guilty about it. Our closets are full. Our mental capacity is full. We spend weekends managing stuff instead of living life.
 
I learned this when I was pregnant. I was completely overwhelmed by everything I was "supposed" to buy — the registries, the blogs, the targeted ads. Then my doctor looked at me and said: "You can put your baby in a drawer. He will be fine." She was right. He needed milk, a place to sleep, and a dry diaper. The rest was for my anxiety.
 
On empty space:
 
I live in Marin now — rolling hills, redwoods, the ocean close enough to smell. The first thing I see every morning is a tree. After years in the city where my life felt sterile and compartmentalized, being close to nature dissolved something in me. You start to feel you're not separate from any of it. You're part of it.
 
Being closer to nature opened me up to spiritual lessons. When you wake up to a tree, when your kid hands you a leaf like it’s treasure, you start to feel that you’re not separate from any of it. You’re part of it. The trees are yours, the water is yours, the air your kid breathes is yours - it’s all ours to care for. That feeling of belonging to something larger is what every spiritual tradition has been pointing to all along.
 
Every practice I’ve encountered says the same thing in different words: the goal is not to fill the mind but to empty it. Meditation, prayer, silence, fasting - they all strip away, they remove the noise so you can hear what’s been there all along. The Buddhists call it beginner’s mind - that state of openness before you’ve decided what everything is and what it’s for. My grandmother had that, and she looked at a broken thing and didn’t see “trash” - she saw possibility. That’s an empty mind at work.
 
We’re so afraid of emptiness. Empty shelves, empty weekends, empty hands, empty quiet. We rush to fill them because somewhere along the way, we confused fullness with meaning. We fill our homes with things, our calendars with obligations, our minds with noise - and then wonder why we can’t hear ourselves. Why we feel so far from our own center. Why the simplest question - what do I actually need? - feels impossible to answer.
 
Happy Sustainability Month. Repair what's cracked. Reimagine what's finished. Save the eggshells for next year. And if something breaks — you know where the gold goes. 💛
 
With all my support,
Kristina

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