nature

Coming from the “more north” of Ontario, visiting my brother and his family, I am feeling mentally recharged. Not in that way you get when you are ultra-relaxed though. I am more or less recharged because I have been reinvigorated in a larger sense.

Yes, my brother gave his slide-show of An Inconvenient Truth. Yes, it was eye-opening, even though I pay attention to every utterance about the environment, and almost primarily because of listening to so many podcasts. Harry Shearer’s Le Show has a copyrighted feature called “News of The Warm” that keeps on top of the most recent info about our crumbling planet. My brother did an incredible job, and commanded a hushed room of 25 people or so.

The presentation was yet another piece to this expanding interest in the vital signs of Earth for me. It was a reminder of the article in the New York Times Magazine, Why Bother? by Michael Pollan, which made a strong impact on me, almost calling me out for having been remiss to ACT. Applying Gandhi’s Ideas to Climate Change by Peter Applebome was another article in the New York times that made grand references to the differences between thinking something and acting on something.

I am in the first category primarily. I know the correct thing to do, but I often don’t go as far as I should. I find myself waffling in the face of adversity when it comes time to choose correctly for the planet, for the dignity of others, for the dignity of myself. These two articles had superb reminders in them, telling me to get my head in the right space. Do it because it is right. Do it because it is virtuous, even when doing things because they are virtuous is dropping out of style. Why bother? For yourself. Doing for yourself, in the greater sense of self, in turn, is actually doing for all, even when on a small scale, such as picking up trash while walking on a nature trail in northern Ontario (thanks Martha). We spend so much of our day, our relationships, our lives, taking, taking, taking…but if we’ve learned anything in science class, things must balance. It’s time to give back.

Also, while on the 7-hour-drive home from the weekend trip, I listened to This American Life. The episode had a bit about Schindler’s List. A guy (a friend of the host who is involved in charity and philanthropic work) who watched this film, commented to the host (Ira Glass) that he did all the work he did, as taxing and time-consuming that it was, because he KNEW he was going to be like Schindler in the end of the film. He knew he would be asking why he didn’t sell his car, his watch, to get enough money to save more Jews. This man didn’t want to be thinking he could have done more.

I don’t want to be the regretful man who, lying on his deathbed is thinking, “I could have done more for others.” I want to do what is to be done. The nausea associated with being a failure, failing myself, no one else, is not an acceptable outcome, and I am geared to see that this life is more heavily geared toward giving.

The Zen Archery approach of intention meeting action is a wonderful way to look at the process from A) learning truth to B) living truth. And the funniest thing about these articles I mentioned is that I was gung-ho to introduce them to my brother Todd. I was thinking about it more like a useful tool, maybe a hand-out at future events or talks. But the irony of me giving a man whose entire family knows the truth and lives truth constantly was lost on me until writing this post. Todd and Martha have been beacons to me of how to live a low-impact life physically, and a high-impact life mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Hey brother, if you’re reading this, I get it! I know you know. I know you don’t need the info in those articles, but I thought it might help relay your message to people like me who need a bit of nudging from knowing to living truth.

Tweet This

{ 0 comments }

Quite a while ago I heard a podcast talking about this enormous gyre in the North Pacific Ocean that collects a hell of a lot of garbage and plastic. It is aptly named The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I read several articles to follow this up, and subsequently e-mailed Google asking them why I couldn’t zoom in on the North Pacific and see this monstrous garbage patch. Surprise! I never heard back from them. Just found a link to this great conversation about why there may or may not be any visible floating garbage.

The articles I read are from Best Life Magazine and The San Francisco Chronicle. They sadly inform on the state of The Horse Latitudes, which I think is a brilliant name for a band. The discussion basically boils down to the fact that when plastic photodegrades and becomes smaller and smaller pieces of plastic (eventually nurdles) it likes to absorb the most heinous chemicals known to man. No big deal? Actually, it’s brutal. It’s getting eaten by plankton, and just about every other freakin’ creature in the ocean. They eventually get these chemicals in their bodies, and continually pass it down the line until we begin eating our own goddamn garbage. Irony is painful.

So, everything from Bisphenol A, human biochemistry, jettisoned trash from freighters, plastic bag consumption, the evils of bottled water, and much more is linked to this story.

The details are in the articles linked above, as the experts did the work, and it is fresh for the reading.

However, I found the Holy Grail of Garbage Patch research when I found this documentary series produced by Vice Magazine. They had a guy write a short article on his journey into “The Patch” in a recent issue of Vice, and as I read it, I remember wishing for more. More images, more stories, more statistics, more hope. Lo and behold, here is this guy’s face, on a series of videos online comprising a documentary that I cannot WAIT to watch. I highly recommend this, as it is a strong young approach to the issue. Yeah, you may hear profanity here or there, but this is a more reasonable response than simply going about our daily routine creating more waste.

I feel like I can go on and on about this for too long. Not just the ocean issue, but about the waste culture I am firmly situated within. Maybe another day. In the meantime, please go check out these videos called Garbage Island by Vice.

Tweet This

{ 0 comments }

Today, after shooting baskets in my driveway for about thirty minutes, I think I had a hypoglycemic episode which sent me teetering into the house to scarf on an orange and a banana. When I was done those, I was still craving something, so I quickly brewed some coffee and grabbed for some “Dad’s Oatmeal Cookies” to dip. Being half-cognitive, I simply sat on the floor waiting for the hot water. When it was done, I sat on the floor in my bedroom, reading a book I was trying to make some progress on (Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington). I realized that the only sound was the breeze billowing in from the living room window, down the hall. The TV was off (which it almost always is when I’m home alone), the radio was silent, and my iPod was downstairs (jettisoned there from when I stormed wobbly into the house from the driveway). I sat, sweating profusely down the bridge of my nose, akin to the image of my father I have seen many times growing up. The sweat could roll down my cheeks, but it finds its way to my Lucier nose and makes its merry way to my ski-jump schnoz-tip and leaps onto my soaked t-shirt. My dad used to pour sweat down his face in the summer when digging holes or hammering planks or painting a room…and here I was, carrying on the genetic run-off style my father had perfected for as long as I could remember. While reading, I dipped the first cookie into the coffee and thought I heard the ocean. It was so off-putting and strange that I lowered the book to see where the sound was coming from. Perhaps an approaching downpour of rain, creeping up the street? On my second cookie, I realized what the noise was. The sound was the cookie sopping up the coffee, like my shirt was slurping my perspiration. It occurred to me that I am finding myself in much more hectic times than I ever wanted. I don’t mind hustle and bustle, but I always figured that I’d know enough to just stop, turn everything off, light a candle or something, and just sit. But I don’t do that. I don’t. Sitting there in enough silence to hear, to actually hear the sponging of my cookie, I was reminded of the simplest of pleasures. Simplicity. Silence. Not even meditative. In fact, when you are finally sequestered by silence by some strange alignment of the heavens, you become meditative without trying. It’d be like a bird or a squirrel or another neighbourhood animal, even a pet when the entire power grid gets knocked out for an hour or two. They must soak up that silence, that lack of constant vibration and purring like my oatmeal cookie. I know I did.

Tweet This

{ 1 comment }