When I was a little girl I loved being outside. The smells, the sounds, the beauty and adventure of it all (arroyos included). I can’t tell you how many pictures I have of my 3 year old self playing in the garden! I’m not sure when the moment happened, but at some point it became my habit to sit on the couch instead of sitting in the grass. I don’t think my tipping point was the day I fell out of the tree and wound up with a branch sticking out of my cheek (true story). Nor was it the day I found a Black Widow and captured her in a baby food jar because she was just SO beautiful (my dad was SO not excited)!
I’m also not sure when the smell that lingers on clothes hung out to dry shifted from being a good thing to being something I didn’t like anymore. But it happened, and now I wonder why, at 34 years of age, I don’t just string up a line and see how it goes.
When did I go from being the little girl who loved the garden to the young lady who didn’t? My mom always grew the most phenomenal tomatoes in the garden and then, every fall, turned those tomatoes into the best spaghetti sauce, ever (which she then froze so we’d have it for meals and meals to come). So why did I never ask her questions about the growth of those tomatoes, or the ingredients of that sauce? If I look back, I was just not interested. I guess I thought I had better things to do growing up than to get a recipe or some tips for growing your own tomatoes. Silly me.
Reflection is an interesting thing. Stay with me here…
So, now I’m grown (well, sort of) and trying to do better by myself, my family and my planet. I’m growing my own food, buying locally and organically, reducing, reusing and recycling. I’m learning how to preserve/dehydrate/freeze (now THAT’S a learning curve), sew, take care of chickens and pay attention to the seasons/weather. I’m eating out less and cooking in more, buying only (energy efficient) appliances when the old ones are dead and am taking shorter showers (I have a timer. For real). I’m focusing my attention on my intention. Yay me!
Well, being up at 3:00 this morning (I don’t have an answer for you on that account either), I started playing online (of course…what else do you do at 3AM???), reading blogs, checking my facebook, clicking on links when I came across 8 small ways to make a big difference in our world. I thought, “Hey, minus the whole bike thing, I’m doing pretty good!” Then, I took the footprint quiz @ earthday.org thinking, “I almost never fly anywhere, my (almost 20 year old car) gets about 24 miles to the gallon, we buy/eat locally (most of the time) and out of our garden when we can (we’re still on the learning curve of this one, too), it can’t be all that bad, can it?”
Apparently it can. According to this little quiz, it would take 3.3 planets to support my lifestyle. 3.3!? Really?! Well, shit. That’s a lot of planets for one persons’ convenience! And here I thought I was doing pretty good. Well, I guess I thought I was doing better than THAT!
The main points in my destruction of this planet are:
~I eat too much meat
~I don’t take public transportation
~I use electricity
Well, to be honest, I don’t see these things changing anytime soon. At least not on a huge scale. I like meat (organically raised, local meat). It makes me happy. Not all the time, but a couple of times a week for sure. I like my car and I have control issues. When I’m not carpooling with tool Lady, I like to be in control of where I’m going, when, how fast and with who. I like electricity, too. While I have romantic notions of living like Laura Ingalls Wilder (getting up with the sun, busting ass all day, and going to sleep with the sun), I like all my modern conveniences, too. This includes lights, TV and my thermostat (our fireplace, as it stands today, has the potential to burn the whole house down which would suck more than my carbon footprint at this point). I also don’t have the cash to purchase and install solar panels. If I did have the cash, I think I’d fix the fireplace first.
So, what does this all mean? It means growth is an evolution. It doesn’t happen overnight (or at 3 o’clock in the morning). I am re-learning a lot of habits, a lot of accepted “truths” about myself and my relationship with nature. I am remembering how nice the sun felt on my skin (you know, before my grown up self became afraid of the cancer in those rays), how warm the dirt was on my hands, how tasty those tomatoes were and how wonderful grass felt in between my toes. I am trying to be nice to myself through this process because sometimes growth is like laying an egg…it hurts like hell and you might squawk like a freak, but in the end you’ve either given birth to another life or contributed to a nice omelette. Regardless, you’re a part something bigger than yourself and there’s a magic in that.
Happy Earth Week to those of you reading this! Thank you for all you do (whatever you do) to contribute to the bigger picture of it all! If you’d like to share your thoughts/ideas/triumphs/stumbles along the way, I’d love to hear it all! Cheers!
