A Door To Everything Society

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Endangered Butterflies
Are Thriving Behind Bars

In the tender, methodical work of rescuing an imperiled butterfly species, incarcerated women are finding a sense of purpose.

By: Michaela Haas, Reasons To Be Cheerful, May 7, 2026

On a cool spring morning in Washington state, the work of saving an endangered species unfolds in an unlikely place: a greenhouse just outside the perimeter of a women’s prison. Inside, trays of host plants line long tables. Tiny eggs cling to plantain leaves. Black, yellow-dotted larvae inch forward in slow motion. A small group of women tends to them with the precision of lab technicians and the patience of gardeners.

This is where the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly, once common across Pacific Northwest prairies, is being brought back from the brink. Its future depends on people like Margaret Taggart, who found something she did not expect to discover in prison: a sense of purpose. “I’ve always had a love for butterflies, for nature and plants,” she says. “But I didn’t even know butterflies are endangered. The education was eye-opening.”

Women in red shirts turn to look at someone.
“To be able to nurture something, to take care of a creature that emerges as this beautiful butterfly, that’s just so fulfilling,” says Margaret Taggart (right). Courtesy of the Sustainability in Prisons Project

Kelli Bush, who coordinates the program for the Sustainability in Prisons Project (SPP), describes captive rearing as a “last resort.” In this case, it’s a response to the fact that Taylor’s checkerspot has lost 97 percent of its native prairie-oak habitat, which has been fragmented by development, agriculture and invasive species. Without large-scale habitat restoration, the butterfly cannot sustain itself in the wild, and without the prison effort, it might already have gone extinct.

What happens inside the program is therefore both rescue and rehabilitation, an effort to restore a butterfly population while also restoring the people who care for it. [Read more…]

By

Torie Sepah M.D.,
Forensic Psychiatrist
in California Prisons

March 2025, An interview with Torie Sepah M.D., a forensic psychiatrist at several California prisons.

0:00 – What You’re Not Seeing in the Headlines
1:30 – The Most Disturbing Patient I Ever Saw
2:24 – How Did He Even Get Something to Cut With?
3:17 – A Room Designed to Prevent Suicide
4:08 – Watching Every 11 Minutes Isn’t Enough
5:02 – What Restraints Really Mean
6:03 – A Shocking Emergency That Changed Me
7:05 – The Feeling of Failing Someone

[Read more…]

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Ride to Resilience

This documentary follows a professional mountain biker and firefighter through a challenging year.

The film explores themes of trauma and mental health, alongside the camaraderie of friendship and the restorative power of nature.

It’s a raw and honest portrayal of personal growth and healing.

52,310 views
Premiered Jul 8, 2025
#MentalHealthAwareness #GoFundMe #FirefighterStories

Ride to Resilience — a raw, real, and slightly reckless documentary that follows professional mountain biker and full-time firefighter, Steve Vanderhoek, through one of the most intense years of his life.

It’s a story of trauma, PTSD, and depression, but also of friendship, forest therapy, and the quiet power of simply staying in the fight.

Steve opens up like never before — about the weight of what first responders carry, the way adrenaline can mask pain, and how riding a bike through the woods can sometimes feel like the only way to breathe again.

The film is independently produced, self-funded, and still in progress.

Over the past year, this story has grown into something far bigger than we ever imagined.

The feedback we’ve received has shown us how deeply it resonates—and how much potential it has to create real impact in our community and beyond.

Despite that, securing additional funding—especially within the mountain bike industry—has been an ongoing challenge.
[Read more…]

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BC News: Faces of B.C.’s
10-year Toxic Drug Emergency

 

More than 18,000 people have died of drug overdoses since British Columbia declared the issue a public health emergency on April 14, 2016.

The crisis has touched the lives of many more survivors, and the friends and families of victims.

Here are some of their stories.

THE CANADIAN PRESS, by Darryl Dyck, April 9th, 2026

‘HE HAD A TWINKLE IN HIS EYE’

When Michelle Jansen learned her 20-year-old son, Brandon, had died from fentanyl poisoning at the treatment facility where he went for help, she said she knew she had to make a decision “in a matter of seconds.”

She could sink into despair at losing the child she described as having a quick wit and a love of animals, or she could find a way to move forward with her two other sons.

“So I could either sink, which at the time is your preferred approach, you know? Or pick yourself up and fight and excel, and that was the decision, the latter, that I made because I knew my boys would be watching,” she said.

Brandon Jansen’s death at a drug treatment facility in Powell River, B.C., on March 7, 2016, came about five weeks before B.C. declared the public health emergency.

“He was very charismatic,” his mother said. “He had a twinkle in his eye. He was a communicator. He would come into a room. He wouldn’t necessarily know anyone and he would smile and be warm and congenial. At the treatment centres, all the feedback I got was he would take people under his wing.”

Michelle Jansen became a voice for those who had lost someone in the crisis, launching a foundation in her son’s name and speaking out against what she saw as government inaction.

A decade later, the frustration can still be heard in her voice.

“People are dying. If we had a gunman running around, killing five or six people a day on average, you better believe that the government’s going to put the money behind it to make sure that that stops, that we’re going to get that gunman,” she said.

But after years of fundraising, Jansen said the family decided to pause the foundation, adding that it was difficult to relive the situation.

“It’s only getting worse. It’s getting worse and nobody’s listening,” she said. [Read more…]

By

Being Compassion, Humility,
for the Sex-trafficked Victims

 

I remember what it felt like to be a victim. I wanted to be heard.

The ones who are coming to the forefront explaining the abuse from Jeffrey Epstein want the same, and accountability.

That is how I felt after years and years of feeling as if I was forgotten in my situation . . .

Here is Haley Robson:

While watching Haley explain what it was like to be in her situation, instead of feeling her anger and fear, to be able now to be the compassion and feel humility—just listen—is a part of our mastery of the human condition.

The compassion and humility of the higher realms, explained to us by the Buddha and by Lao Tzu, along with the definitions from the Council of Love, from the Divine Mother’s Guidebook, How Things Work in the Higher Realms, remind us Who We Truly Are.

Compassion:

The ability to Love and serve without judgement.

To be able to fully understand and heart-feel another’s situation without entering or assuming that cloak.

The understanding that another has a chosen path and we can only offer assistance and Love.

We cannot complete another’s path for that would be theft. Tenderness.

The colours of compassion are deep red (of our root chakra, our foundation, deep forest green (our heart chakra) and the magenta/amethyst (of our mastery).

Humility:

Twin of piety.

Ability to be truly grateful for the many blessings bestowed upon each and All.

Knowledge that alone we are rather incompetent but united with One we are All.

Necessary for all works and sharing of service.

Its colour is red (of the root and the pubic chakras, our foundational self-Love and self-worth).

Lao Tzu, in his teachings, explained in essence, not to ignore what is happening around us, and how we can do this is with compassion, to be able to fully understand and heart-feel another’s situation without entering or assuming that cloak:

You cannot have humility without compassion, and it is essential because part of what humility is, is not only not putting yourself above, or just as importantly below others, it is putting yourself with others.

He went on to say this—to help us balance our feelings for the perpetrator:

First, you give gratitude that you have not walked that path, and yes, to understand that the axe murderer or the bomber or those who commit what you know are the most heinous acts, they arrived with the purity of grace in their souls, and it did not die. It did not become lost.

Was it ignored or covered? Yes, but you see, the danger when you judge somebody else, you are judging yourself.

So, you say,

“Well, that person is a murderer, and look what they have done, and they are horrible, and they need to be punished.”

What you have immediately done is move out of the balance, the stick is tilting one way, and then what you are doing is you are setting yourself up so that you have to be ‘holier than thou’ and that you cannot dare misstep because then you have to put yourself in the same categories as those you have judged, and that is very painful.

Because we are under the veil here, we have forgotten our many past lives. All of us have played the good, the bad, and the ugly for the experience, and to master compassion and humility. We are all responsible for what has happened on Earth.

Thysia recounts what happened to her as a model in Paris with agent, Jean-Luc Brunnelle . . . the importance of sharing and healing, and not allowing the guilt, the shame to stifle us . . .

Thysia mentions Diane Sawyer’s 1988 60 Minutes episode, American Girls in Paris:

Now it is time to stop this behaviour with awareness.

And to listen, to allow the survivors to balance themselves—to practice our compassion, we cannot complete another’s path for them for that would be theft, the understanding that another has a chosen path and we can only offer assistance and Love, and our humility, alone we are rather incompetent but united with One we are All.

We are all here to create our Nova Earth, not to forget what has been horrific, because we never want to repeat this.

available on Amazon

[Read more…]