Better to feel numb and complacent than to feel a passion you can’t do anything about.
The world around is dying but as long as I have my inexpensive chairs made in China made from the carbon imprint of airplanes, boats, cars , chemicals, non bio-degradable plastic and polluted rivers. It cost 5 times less than the chair from the local store, that by the way, is now out of business. But if I bought that non existant local chair for 5 times more, I have to work that much more at a job I hate to support the planet.
Which is worse ?
It feels like we are a serpent biting its own tail, a machine that once started can never be stopped. To dismount the entire system would call for a dire disaster. Or a drastic wake up call. And thus perhaps the wake up call is allowing the planet to begin to die, where food becomes scarce, poor quality, and expensive, where people work costantly to pay for bad food and small houses, where drinking water costs a small fortune, where we become bigger slaves than we already are.
When the whole world goes on strike against eachother, because in reality we can only blame ourseselves for thinking about just looking out for ourselves for so long. We can curse the precursors, the selfish in the beginning who made us all become selfish for fear of lack.
But in the end we can only curse ourselves.
So what to do ?
Go plant seaweed because the reefs are dying.
Save the oceans now as the temperature still goes up unless they stop tilling.
They’ll stop tilling when we start demanding quality food.
We will start demanding quality food when we begin to see our wallet suffer from hospital bills.
We will begin to see more money when we stop giving it to people who use it to supply products that hurt the planet.
We will begin to see more money when we begin to repair our sensation of inner lack that must be filled by objects.
We will stop feeling the sensation of inner lack when we stop looking at all we don’t have and begin appreciating what we do have.
We will begin appreciating what we do have when we begin to have real relationships, real exchanges, real quality time spent in nature, planting, building, growing, in family, in community, in prayer, in worship, in gratitude, in respect and in working together.
Reviving the spirit of gift, of roles, of a biodiverse community of people, animals and nature living together.
When we aren’t dependent on money for food and shelter. We won’t have to chase after someone else to produce our food, to make our furniture, sell us our phones, offer us jobs in the city, where we fill our houses and minds with distractions to numb the part that has died.
Perhaps we must get to the point of massive urgency to drop all our norms, what we have been accustomed to, to truly understand the value of food, water, sun, rain, shelter, people, animals, trees, bugs, etc…
When the privileged get things taken away one by one only then do we recognise the hole that is left when it is no longer there, and when we get the point of feeling the pain of a howling hole, we will act… but hopefully we can awaken to the urgency before the reconstruction is too massive to take on…
Carly
