to walk one's talk.
It's my birthday too
and, mainly, I am giving myself sleep this year.
I am exhausted from months spent tossing and turning in tension and fear.
It's a common refrain - all about money and resources, or a lack thereof.
I thought that going without, that consuming and having less, could bee a viable option,
but it's not. Not in the city center, and perhaps not in the country either. "Just Bee-ing" is only one half of the solution. Yes, we do need to demand that this is enough, that what we have now already is perfect, so "Thank you, but no more" to the cheap plastic products made in China, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Mexico or wherever, that basically end up in the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Dump.
Last week, I applied for a gig at a nature-based daycare right here in the backyard of a Leucadian suburban hOMe where a pig sauntered in and out, a row of raised garden beds sat pillaged by said pot-belly, and three chicks grew under a warm heat-lamp in the garage. The business owner needed to create a means to sustain her family so that she could raise her two boys at home. She also prepares locally-sourced vegan meals for the daily dozen children of the twenty-three families that she serves weekly.
Today, one of my best friends of fifteen+ years sent me a happy birthday email. She lives in upstate New York on acres of land with her wonderful husband where she provided sixteen families with Community Supported Agriculture boxes just this past season - all by herself! Meanwhile, her husband also worked hard to spearhead their town's weekly Farmer's Market. Mind you, she does all this while working full time in a region that has a winter season - meaning there is no year-round planting to bee done or benefited from.
Nostalgically poking through Facebook, I looked at the profile of a man whom I enjoyed a brief love affair with at the end of my undergraduate school career. He is an electronic musician who has spent the past decade creating musical instruments from recycled materials and found objects. He has been an Artist in Residence at a Bay Area garbage dump, taught inner city youth how to build their own bicycles from "scraps," has traveled extensively performing his unique sounds on rebuilt electronic equipment and more.
These are just a few solutions for embodying balance in one's everyday life. As Daniel Quinn, a man whose novel Ishmael profoundly drove home the predicament of this 21st century, eloquently spelled out in his follow-up book, Beyond Civilization, the answers for what comes next lay in how we choose to respond to what is beyond our unsustainable ways of taking with our community and home based solutions. And, me, well, what lay ahead in this year is my EMBODYING all of this. I don't have much aside from CREATIVITY, TALENT, BRILLIANCE, GREAT HEALTH and a DANCING SPIRIT - oh wait! Actually, this means that
I HAVE IT ALL. And, YOU DO TOO!
Well, then, let's join hands and hearts in digging into the Earth's Soil and Re-Creating a Soul-Full Existence on Our Shared hOMe of Planet Earth.
