Mindful Agency

✨ A radically different understanding of healing | Amy Scott Rooker’s My Mother Is a Dragonfly shows us the doorway back to ourselves 💛

In a world that mistakes performance for strength and achievement for worth, Amy Scott Rooker is telling a different kind of truth. Rather than offering more self-improvement strategies, she's questioning the premise those strategies are built on. She asks the question many of us are afraid to ask: What if the life we've been working so hard to build isn’t actually the one we came here to live?

After surviving trauma and living in silence for decades, her debut memoir traces what happens when the structures built to hold everything together begin to fall apart—and what becomes possible in their place. Through grief, psychedelics, and a profound unraveling of identity, Rooker begins questioning everything she built her life around.

Read the Life & Style feature and discover why healing isn't about fixing something broken, but remembering who we were before the world taught us to forget.

🌿 What If the Way You Lived Actually Healed the Earth Around You?

That is not a hypothetical. That is exactly what is being built at Canopy Venao in Playa Venao, Panama.

Founded by Caroline Howell and philanthropist Omani Carson, Canopy Venao is redefining what a community can be. More than 40,000 native trees planted. A biological corridor being restored to protect the critically endangered Azuero spider monkey. Agroforestry systems growing avocado, guava, and seasonal food right on site. And a neighborhood, Cocobolo, already complete and proving the model works.

This is not greenwashing. This is regenerative living built from the ground up, where the land gets healthier the more people show up to it.

In a world where most developments take from the earth, Canopy Venao is asking a different question entirely: what if where you live could give back?

👉 Read the full feature on Canopy Venao at usatoday.com and explore the vision at canopyvenao.com.