Junk Mail Revolution!

"The average adult receives 41 lbs. of junk mail a year."

"More than 4 million tons (62 billion pieces) of junk mail are produced yearly."

"Only 20% of businesses running mail campaigns track metrics to gauge the performance of their mailers."

"Cities estimate they spend $1 billion per year to dispose of direct mail."

Every week I am stunned at the sheer volume of junk mail I receive in my tiny apartment mailbox. I am one person. There are two mailbox grids in our one complex.

Every week I see this trash can stuffed with perfectly unused junk mail. I see people open their mail boxes and go straight for the trash without a glance. This is one trash, in one apartment complex, in one city, in one state.

I am horrified by just my complex, but then I have to multiply my awareness by an unimaginable number to understand the reality. This is not just a flyer, this is a PACKET of USELESS information from stores I have never stepped foot in, and don't plan to. Multiply that packet by millions per week and you have a problem.

To top it all off, if I do find 'worthy coupons', I set them aside, they sit there, they expire, and then they go to the same recycling bin as the rest. I don't really need these coupons in the end. I can further this by mentioning Safeway. They allow online coupon-clicking. Fry's might too. It just applies the deals to your card. A LOT EASIER. The problem is that they still send me the mail with the SAME coupons attached in print. Even if you have no computer or internet access, there is always a laptop at the store to be used exclusively for customers in need (which is also nice if you forget to click before you go). In the end it seems that the junk mail just wants to show you pictures and numbers. For me, I just look for good coupons and then go. I look at the prices in the store, not from a flyer. I figure there will be deals on about 50% of the store merchandise at one time, and the deals rotate every so often. So what is the big need for WEEKLY packets of random numbers?

Sure it's nice to recycle, but wouldn't it be even better to simply conserve? This is the age of technology. I think we can do it.

I have been emotionally motivated to stop this mail for a year, and yet somehow it took me this long to finally do a 5-second Google search to find out how. Turns out it is SUPER EASY.

"Researchers at the University of California recently found that four out of five Americans favor a Do-Not-Mail law, similar to the existing Do-Not-Call telemarketing registry."

I can tell you why this hasn't happened yet. It's because people don't have their dinner interrupted by junk mail like they do with telemarketers. People only react to things hitting them in the face. Junk mail is a silent killer to us, but it is pretty 'hitting in the face' to all the thousands of animals in the forests around the world. Pretty soon we will have nothing to look at but barren wastelands, and then it will hit us in the face. If you look up areas of wildlife or random species on Wikipedia, you will find vulnerable species MUCH more often these days, and it always gives comments about destruction of habitat, or even more criminal acts. This is the same with any wildlife documentary you watch. It has become so apparent that they HAVE to include reality into these things.

Since there is no law yet, we can do it OURSELVES until it is one.

 I see people argue about politicians and government and how they are doing everything wrong. Yes they might be doing all the wrong things, but what are WE doing? What if this wasn't about the government? At the very least I can say that the government is not responsible for ALL the corruption in the world. Society is a TEAM EFFORT. We're all in this together, and if we fail, the blood is on ALL of our hands. Life REQUIRES cooperation. We can simply NOT sweep things under our rug and blame everything on other people. The government does not tell us we have to recycle by law, and yet many of us still try our best to encourage it. People would complain about freedom if they forced us to recycle and removed the option for plastic shopping bags at stores. That is the gray area of freedom. If people want freedom to remain positive, then they have to act like they are running the country because in this free country we really are as one. All of our actions amount to one society, and therefore have a strong force in what changes take place. Organic food is becoming more widely available because many of us started voting with our dollars. If a company loses its customers, it disappears within a few years. If I was running the government, I would be very strict on conservation. I would make regulations requiring everyone to live mimicking nature in many different ways. I would allow almost nothing artificial. Since we are not being ruled by me, we have to take important matters into our own hands. For example, the fate of our planet. The government will not, and more importantly, CAN NOT make that kind of improvement for us. They are too afraid to do anything drastic because they want to please everyone and there is always one half that disagrees on every idea, so nothing drastic happens. Then they wait for something drastic to happen so that they can use it to gain the upper hand in acceptance. I don't want to wait until my planet and life and future is in jeopardy. Junk mail is a HUGE start. It is something most of us can agree on, and if we don't, we don't technically have to fight against it, but it will continue to have consequences no matter what.

There are different types of junk mail. We have the grocery store bundle of junk (sometimes complete with fast food ads), credit card and insurance mailers (which are dangerous and cumbersome because they print your full name and address on the papers so you have to tear them up one-by-one before disposal), and sometimes small business booklets or personally ordered catalogs (there are many that offer online catalogs).

First and foremost, I think it is important to remove the grocery ads. I know which stores I like because I go to them. I don't need to be reminded of what's out there. For me, in Phoenix Arizona, I get two kinds of packets for grocery stores. There is Buyer's Edge, and RedPlum. They are both super easy to remove.

Buyer's Edge: Call this number and simply leave your name and address on the recording prompt.
(602)444-8831.

RedPlum: Even easier. Go to this website and fill out the form and you're done!
https://www.save.com/application/redplum-postal-addremove.html
*You can also visit the website to see their coupons if you have any future cravings for junk mail.

(Buyer'sEdge + RedPlum = 12.4 + 7.6 = 20 lbs of annual junk mail avoided.)

Every 5 people that do this save 100 lbs of wasted materials per year!
*Not to mention all the trees and CO2 emissions involved in the production and process of creation.

If you have different companies and different mailers, then just Google 'how to stop [Blah Blah Deals] mail', and I am sure you will find it as fast as I did.

As for the horribly bombarding credit card and insurance offers, I tried to find a "National Do Not Mail" list from the government, and sadly they have not gotten around to that yet, but I found that they endorse this website, which is in fact the best one because it wipes them all out in one sweep. It's called OptOutPreScreen.com. Pre-Screening is the basis that the companies use to send you the credit cards, and it is useless because when Grace tried to respond to an "ALREADY QUALIFIED!" offer, she was denied and therefore wasted the credit check that they use when you respond (which hurts your credit).

Credit Card/Insurance Offers: Fill out the form and it takes ALL of them away (and their evil identity theft opportunities).
https://www.optoutprescreen.com/opt_form.cgi
*This one requires a social security number to identify you and make the process universal. You can also opt in at any time.

If you want to get rid of only specific companies, there is another website that lets you search companies by name. It is CatalogChoice.org.
https://www.catalogchoice.org/dashboard

The only other thing I have needed to eliminate for myself is the InsideCoup booklet that comes once a month. I liked it for a while because it displays small businesses, but it is getting redundant for me, so I leave that one up to you.

InsideCoup: Fill out the form or call the number. I completed the form and asked to be removed from the mailing list with my name and address in the comment box.
http://www.theinsidecoup.com/contact

Let's remind ourselves why this is important:

"In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 44% of junk mail is discarded without being opened or read, equaling four million tons of waste paper per year, with 32% recovered for recycling. Further, the Ohio Office of Compliance Assistance and Pollution Prevention (OCAPP) estimates that 250,000 homes could be heated for a single day's junk mail."

That implies that the 56% of junk mail which is opened and read is not recycled much either. The marketing supporters always say, "Oh, and we ..HOPE.. that people recycle it." That way they sleep better at night.

"The CO2 emissions from 41 pounds of advertising mail received annually by the average US consumer is about 47.6 kilograms (105 pounds) according to one study. The loss of natural habitat potential from the 41 pounds of advertising mail is estimated to be 36.6 square metres (396 square feet)."

Imagine that, 396 square feet of wildlife habitat per year to give ONE person their dose of useless junk. I don't care if they were offering me a free laptop somewhere in that pile of junk, I would rather have that 396 square feet of habitat.



As I am sure I've hinted at in my previous posts, everything we do here creates a chain effect broader than we might think. Producing junk mail requires every resource we commonly use. Trees, Fuel, Water, etc. This process all contributes to greenhouse gasses as well. You will hear people argue in the business world about how it is so important and effective with sales and that it is tree friendly because they grow tree plantations.

Here's the truth on those ideas:

I am a consumer. I personally have NEVER seen anyone use junk mail, and it does not motivate me personally to spend money either. I am one of many in this modern world who have educated reasons for why they choose certain businesses and products. They either carry the things I want/support, or the product is reliable/trusted. If it is a big purchase like electronics or appliances, I do tons of research before handing over money. We are the beginning of the 'Educated Consumers' generation. And even if I owned a business and direct mail was undeniably awesome in sales, I would still find another way because WE DON'T HAVE A CHOICE anymore. Our planet is DYING. I guarantee you the climatologists and environmental scientists are all shaking in their lab coats right now because they are terrified of what is going on outside. To spend billions of dollars to generate a handful of customers at the expense of our global health DOES NOT make sense to me with this picture. I wouldn't agree even if the planet was completely healthy. That promotes the same kind of thinking as all the evilness we deal with. Such as, "I don't care about the irresponsible acts I am committing because it won't affect my lifetime."

I have also worked long enough to know that companies prize word-of-mouth above all forms of advertising because it is the most powerful. On every infomercial they pride themselves with 'ACTUAL CUSTOMER!' testimonials. Recommendations rule the sales industry. Reputation. That is what makes people buy things in the end. Our 'Educated Consumers' generation is leaning towards those types of things rather than package-label promises. One example of this approach is Yelp.com. It is the best. It is where we all go to review places and shed the truth on businesses, restaurants, landmarks, vacation spots, and anything else we can think of. People are thorough on that website, and I value it highly. Reviews are one of the most powerful tools we have as civilians. Companies will bend over backwards when you speak the truth publicly. Kind of like how the independent news website DrudgeReport.com is turning the government upside-down causing them to admit that they bribe the media and that they are upset at DrudgeReport for exposing REAL truths.

On to the next point.

To tell me that printing 100 billion pieces of junk mail a year just for it to be thrown away, is somehow tree-friendly, is downright insane. Somehow this stuff is so important to be produced that it literally encompasses nearly HALF of all mail distributed in this country. The US Postal Service is NOT a green company. I will tell you that right now because they LOVE junk mail. It is HALF of their JOB. Therefore it is HALF of their INCOME to DELIVER ADS! They are literally promoting direct mail options to businesses as we speak! They are as money-driven as they come. Never trust a business person claiming that they are doing something good or righteous. It is ALL about money. They are not going out there cutting down rainforests in a checkerboard format and replanting the trees they cut down with little happy ribbons tied around the saplings with love. They are OBLITERATING ANY FOREST they can get their greasy hands on, and creating tree plantations in a completely different country, leaving the wreckage of thousands of species there to suffer, and creating a new patch of trees that has NO history and NO established ecosystem. They do this to get around the environmental activist complaints. They do this to 'meet regulations'. Regulations are usually basic, flimsy, and not very reliable. Just look at the food we are eating. Just look at the drugs we are pumping. Do you trust any FDA, USDA, food inspector, or safety inspector? I sincerely hope not. The people cutting down trees and planting sprouts (which take hundreds of years to even grow to the same extent of the massive trees they cut down), are just trying to create a pseudo-source for their statistic, so that they can also cut down anyone trying to raise opposition to what they are doing. It is called manipulation, and people do that a lot with political issues as we all know. I saw one marketing blog writer speak up about the ill-effects of direct mail, and promoted using online advertising, and he was torn to pieces in the comments. These people use false excuses and clever lies to mask the truth of what they are doing.

Plants and Trees turn CO2 into Oxygen.

A single tree can absorb CO2 at a rate of 48 lb. per year.

Trees store Carbon, which makes up roughly half the weight of dry wood. That keeps it from being in places that it shouldn't be overabundant like the atmosphere.

Imagine if we planted trees on top of EVERY building, as a requirement. That would help offset some of the city air pollution, help with natural cooling during summer, make buildings prettier, and help with CO2 emissions. If people like parking under trees to make their cars preserved and cooler, then why not live under trees? We could also have fruit trees in nooks and crannies throughout the city. Even urban gardens, and that would bring all kinds of extra public produce IN the city.

These organisms are the hope for the planet right now. To think of our damage to the air being reversible is amazingly uplifting. The fact that brings me back to Earth though is that the air quality is only one of our problems. Even in the realm of air, there are other pollutants like industrial particular-matter pollution. The other most important thing that is being destroyed is water. We can filter it all we want, but we can't filter it all for the animals. We rely on animals more than some people realize, and water is the foundation of all life. Everything poured out onto the ground leads to the ocean or gets trapped somewhere in-between. This is why trash is also of equal importance because we have been using the ocean as our trash. Big ships go out to sea and drop tons of waste into the ocean to dispose of it. I will reserve these topics for now, but I thought they were relevant to think about in correlation. Most things are connected, so it is hard to only talk about one topic. That's why actions are important, they always always have a chain effect.

We should be living on this planet as if we are thousands of years back through a time machine trying not to ruin anything by stepping on a bug or harming anything that might change the course of the future.

Please don't even get me started on the ridiculously pointless uses of paper in the medical world.

Reusing Ziploc Bags

      We all know how annoying it can be to try to reuse a Ziploc bag once it has residual peanut butter, jelly, crumbs, and other various sauces and oils seemingly stuck along the inside. We all remember how cleaning the inside of a baggie is like trying to recover a lost favorite earring that fell down the drain. It's strenuous work for such a "disposable" item. Well, this post is aimed to show a simple tip that may make life easier. I am always trying to think outside the box to make simple tasks easier, and this time I realized I had to think inside the bag, and even inside-out! Turns out it's as effortless as washing your hands.

Here is the simple trick for this pestering problem!

*Optional* Pre-rinse by filling the bag with water as needed and dumping it out. You can also let the baggie soak instead of pouring it out, but it shouldn't be hard to remove anything in these steps.

1. Turn the baggie inside-out.

2. Wear the baggie like a glove. Point your thumb and your pinkie-finger outward to hold the corners in a locked position for easier cleaning. *Kind of like making the pretend phone when you were little.

3. Now wash your hands as if there was no baggie surrounding one hand. You can put the soap on the bagged hand or your free hand, it doesn't matter. *Make sure to maintain the pretend phone position while washing to get the corners sufficiently.

4. Rinse as you would if you were washing your hands.

5. I personally like to shake the dripping baggie at this point because it gets it about 90% dry instantly.

*See how instantly near-dry that gets just from shaking?

6. That's it! Let fully dry if desired and then flip inside-out again to reuse!

Hopefully this helps anyone who was in my position, a person who is REALLY unmotivated to clean messy Ziploc bags, but at the same time REALLY motivated to not throw them away.

*Remember* Disposable items are not our friends unless we reuse them anyway and give them hope!! :)

Rinse, Smash, and Recycle!

The last blog post that I wrote, I was overwhelmed by thoughts of what to cover for my first actual post. Since the last post started off the blog with responsibility, I am going to further that notion by talking about recycling!

Grace and I started recycling years ago, and we have never looked back! In fact, when we do, we are horrified by thoughts of how much trash we must have thrown away in our lifetimes! *Shudder* Since we have gained some experience in the field, on the front-lines of the garbage battle, we can now recycle our knowledge by passing it on to you, our determined soul reclaiming readers!

For this post, I think I need to first build the setting of our current lifestyle; it will help the portrait I am about to paint.

We live in a small studio apartment on the third floor of our building, at least 300 ft away from the nearest recycling receptacle. (Our complex doesn't even have one, so we go to the business office complex across the parking lot and sneak around a bit in our pajamas. Recycling ninjas? Maybe.) In our small studio apartment, we have an even SMALLER kitchen! It is about the length of an arm and a leg. You can see it here:

If you look in the corner, blocking the fridge door opening space, there is a BIG box! That, dear readers, is our recycling container.

 You're asking me why it's so big. Well I return your question with another! Why do they make trash cans bigger than recycling bins?! One of the FIRST things Grace and I have learned since recycling, is that us humans throw away more recyclable material than non-recyclables! Who would expect such a reality? If you are indeed a citizen of current reality, you will find that most of our spending and food money is exchanged for packaged goods inside of transportable packaging, shipped in bulk packages wrapped in plastic. That creates a lot of packaging and containers! You could say we live in a Containerism society! That means we, as the consumers, have a RESPONSIBILITY! The main word of this blog-post! The box is that big because that is how much recycling needs to be done on a weekly basis for the two of us.

When we use something that doesn't belong to us, are we not taught to put it back where it belongs? You could say our role of cultivating this planet causes us to borrow things from the Earth in a "Fair-Trade" exchange, like the stamps you see on organic coffee bean packages. That means when we buy products from the store, we are also summoning a company to create materials for the packaging using the Earth's materials to ship the package by semi-truck to the store where a low-waged worker cuts it open and stocks it for us, and then we drive our cars to the store to get that product, just to rip up all the packaging and discard it. *Screeching halt!!* That packaging should NOT be discarded unless soiled beyond rinsing repair! Remember, we have a "Fair-Trade" exchange with the Earth! We have to "put that thing back where it came from or so help me!" as Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc said when he borrowed a human child. That is essentially the idea of recycling, it is an attempt to pay our respects to the Earth for the bounties we harvest from it. In our case being consumers, we borrow heaps of material that serve one purpose. Isn't it sad that we have to create so many objects over and over again because they only serve one purpose? If only there was a way to have dispensers at stores for all the products available, and we would be forced to bring our own bags and containers, similar to how we are forced to bring our wallet and ID. Then we could reuse until we snooze!

 

 That is essentially the idea of recycling, it is an attempt to pay our respects to the Earth for the bounties we harvest from it. 

 So back to the big box creating an eye-sore and an arm-sore (since it limits our fridge and cupboard opening ability) in our kitchen. We fill it up with all things recyclable in Arizona (every state has different laws for eligible items, Google yours!). At the end of this post I have included a poster from Phoenix.gov that shows the basic groups of eligible items for Arizonans. Our box fills up once a week, and we are a mere family of TWO (and a half since Grace is pregnant). That's a lot of stuff for two consumers!! It gets pretty heavy for emptied out junk carried down three flights of stairs and across the complex! Why do I go through so much hassle to recycle? If you have that question in your mind, you might as well stamp your Soul Sprout into the ground with your boot. I say this only because this is our DUTY as humans. It is just about the least we can do in our human duty. It is as much of our duty as the other kind of duty we deal with every day in the bathroom! It is not a choice, a privileged person's hobby, or a fantasy. It is understanding reality, our role as human beings, and our RESPONSIBILITY as human beings. It is NEVER the job of someone else to deal with YOUR garbage. If that were true, we would have litter boxes that are taken out by a new breed of janitors! Our mothers and fathers taught us to pick up after ourselves when we were children. So let's all start acting like children already! I will end that point by saying that there should be no need for janitors at Disneyland. Imagine that.

Now that we've got that settled, check this out:

See that ducky bin? That is our TRASH CAN. It is also filled and taken out on a weekly basis by pure coincidence. Guess what it is full of each time? Organic matter and tissues. Even when we use tissues, we rip them in half because they always make them in unnecessarily huge dimensions. We use NO paper towels, and NO napkins. We wash our hands when dirty, and use the little stripey Halloween towel you see on the oven handle. When there is a spill or a mess, we use A SPONGE. NO NO NO paper towels and napkins! If you want them so bad, keep the ones you get at restaurants because they always hand you five million! We've got a drawer full of them off-screen to the left! Also, notice how we started buying water in the bulky dispenser thingies. The ONLY reason we don't use the big blue 5 gallon tanks is because it is not spring water, and if you know of one, TELL ME!

Now here's the awesome thing about our little system setup shindig. The little ducky bin is small, literally a bathroom trash can. That means we only have to use plastic grocery bags as trash can liners, saving money and plastic for doing so. The bags are thinner than the store-bought types, and if we need more strength or drippy proof, we double the bag, or however many we need, but I have never needed more than two. We also never have any issues ridding ourselves of a smelly decomposing garbage bag, as they are easy to throw out. No need to wait til it fills up and have to wallow in artificial-vanilla-bag-mixed-with-rotting-waste scented agony! Even though we found a purpose for grocery bags, we still have tons leftover:

  

All those babies are going back to the store and getting slam dunked into the bins for recycling grocery bags. We need to get more canvas bags too. We've thought of keeping them in the trunk or backseat so that we don't even have to think about it.

Now that you know the methods of Grace and I, we encourage you to find your own ways of making recycling easier for you. Just remember to disassemble everything you put in there, rinse it out so it is as clean as it gets without soap, or use soap if you want, and break down boxes and smash any other non-glass container so that you can fit tons of stuff in one go! If Grace and I didn't break things down, that box would be going out daily instead of weekly! If you have no recycling options around you or near your living quarters, look around for the closest place, or make a petition to your complex like we are going to. There are very few trials of recycling that Grace and I have not overcome, and that leaves little room for slack when we see people complain about their efforts. We understand, trust us, but we take little slack! We have maintained doing this for an entire year at this apartment, and even longer before then! We used to drive all the way to Encanto Park to use their tiny bins where we would fill two each time! Check out how far we went every week JUST to recycle!!

It causes me emotional duress just throwing away our little ducky bin baggies. To know that every single item in there that is not organic will take an unknown amount of years to decompose, and it will poison the environment with all the man-made additives and colors and harmful ingredients. That is a sad truth, and I regretfully throw away each bag. I do not stop thinking about the trash I throw away. I know that it is all still there, EVERYTHING I have thrown away in my ENTIRE LIFE still exists somewhere. Don't let the familiar logos on packaging fool you into forgetting how EACH TIME you buy a bag of chips, it is indeed a NEW bag, ANOTHER item of near-permanent trash as soon as you finish the last chip. Earth didn't always exist this way. We didn't always have trash that decomposed abnormally slow. That is just ONE of the reasons why Grace and I wish to be on a homestead, going back to the way things are MEANT to be as much as possible. People act like this is the way it HAS to be for society to work on this scale of population. Those particular folks could not be more wrong. Things can ALWAYS be improved, and the second someone tells me "that's just the way it is", is the second that their Soul is buried in a landfill that will be more difficult to reclaim than if it were just damaged soil. I will tell them the way things are. We are never sure of tomorrow, we have no idea what it will bring. The way things are right now are leading to some sort of collapse somewhere down the line, and I would like to become self-sustainable and prepared for any such occasion, so that I can survive and teach others how to survive the way we are meant to survive. In real reality, which is inseparable from Nature. Since I am still a part of society and my goals remain goals at this point, I will continue to do my best to remove at least ONE footprint, MY footprint, off of the hurting Soul Sprouts of the world. I encourage you, our readers, to reclaim your soil, and follow Grace and I in our endeavors together.

 Here is the promised poster of recycling categories:

Anything plastic is most likely recyclable as long as it is rinsed clean! Even little pieces, like the vacuum sealers under lids! Just remember with plastic that if it has more than one type of plastic, which caps of all kinds tend to be, they need to be separated. It's a learning process. Grace and I keep lots of glass jars for tumblers and for more efficient storage than Tupperware, just remember to remove the lids of EVERY container or bottle and recycle it separately. The general guideline is to break down and single out everything as much as possible. If the lid is metal, recycle it. Almost anything metal can be recycled including cans. Any aluminum soda cans. Any clean paper materials (no grease nor grime). If it is mostly clean, like a pizza box, tear off the good parts. No gift bags unfortunately (unless clearly recyclable paper which is usually matte, not shiny), but hopefully we all have a re-gift pile of bags stored away. Only wrapping paper that is NOT lined with shininess can be recycled, so go buy some recycled/recyclable wrapping paper and gift bags and ditch the glossy stuff! You can also cut up gift bags and wrapping paper for scrap-booking and mixed media. Get creative, it's one of the best things you can do in life as long as it's in positive ways.

RECYCLE YOUR JUNK MAIL!!!  Each week Grace and I watch in horror as over a pound of junk mail is thrown away just on the ONE side of our complex. People don't even LOOK at it! Why do they send it still to this day?!?! I need to find out how to refuse it from the senders. I think it's a lot of work though, but I will make a post about it when I find out.

The last thing I will say is that we must always be mindful of the facility workers at the recycling plant who sort through the conveyer belts looking for things that should not be there. They MUST remove capped items, and anything that has food left on it, and anything that is not recyclable. If you are in doubt, ask someone, ask me, ask Google!

Thank you for reading such a long post, I hope it doesn't come across as a cliche recycling poster like the one I drew on and posted. Let us know what you think in the comments! If you have any suggestions to add, add them to the comments too and let us know!

So Much Time and so Little to Do!

     I have been pondering what to post first on this space, and I have SO many thoughts and posts that I want to share that I am currently at war inside my head with intimidation and deciding!

     I think a great place to start is to talk about responsibility. It is easy in our society to start to feel like your only responsibility is your immediate life situation like family and your job putting caps on toothpaste tubes, but we as humans must always look at the bigger picture, it is in our nature. At least it was when we were kids right? I'm sure grandma told you that you asked too many questions. If you are that person capping fluoride paste, you have quite a situation on your hands. You are contributing to the way we see our standard of living. Are you happy or fulfilled to be in a claustrophobia-inducing box ensuring that a poisonous chemical continues to be sold as a necessary concoction for healthy teeth, while subliminally voting that we should package everything in existence and ship it places that are exclusively hundreds of miles away? Your brain may feel like the so called "junk DNA" everyone loves to talk about because your boss is drilling a simple objective into your head as if it is the key to all life's problems. "Clock-wise!" After a while, you may even start to lose interest in your favorite things, and who doesn't like favorite things? Even if you don't lose your passion, how are you going to paint your masterpieces when your wrist is sore from so much turning and your eyes are about to explode from reading the motto on every toothpaste tube for 10 hours a day 5 days a week? Maybe dentists really did recommend this product. Maybe your dreams have started to parrot your experiences at 'work' in very peculiar ways. This may sound extreme, but if we look around at what is going on in our lives, isn't it pretty extreme?

     My soon-to-be wife calls herself a sign interpreter. I value that and cherish it deep down inside of me. That means she tries to find the meaning in everything that she sees and thinks in her mind. This is healthy behavior because there is a lesson in any situation, any object, any possible thing you might find or encounter. It always brings me back to the title of a very good student resource book we had for English101 called "Everything's An Argument". You can write essays about anything and everything around you when you are willing to read into things. Little cigarette butts are on the ground next to the optimistic trash cans and ash trays everywhere you go. An advertisement is using some form of pathos, ethos, and/or logos to win your wallet. You're holding a cup of coffee in a '20% post-consumer fiber' cup. Everything has a story, and these stories need to be found, remembered, and recited, ALL THE TIME. It even feels good to do so. It brings back auras from childhood of playing detective and feeling like you can solve anything without college and double-blind studies. That's because most of what we need to know actually doesn't need to be taught from people who have framed documents on their walls. We are all story-tellers at heart. We learn more from thinking and processing than anything else. We all love to talk about deep matters, find hidden meanings, and share our garnered wisdom. Wisdom does not have an age, I have learned that from Grace, my fiance.

     Now let's look back to my introduction from the perspective of a sign interpreter. We are all sign interpreters, even if we have become distant from our spiritual core. Not many people have succeeded in removing that core from their soul, and if they tell you they have, they are probably lying. I honestly don't even know why someone would want to lose their spirit, but anyway.. It's the start of our workday, and we've turned a few hundred caps of toothpaste by now, break is an hour away, and we somehow know this without seeing a clock because we are used to this job after a year has drained away. With our mind freed from thinking about how nice 15 minutes of freedom will be, our soul starts creeping up from the depths of our soul soil. A few flashbacks occur from our upbringing, and we start asking questions. "Isn't it weird how I went through 12 years of schooling, academics, history, art, music, all to prepare myself to twist a small piece of plastic as fast as I can without messing anything up? Is employee-of-the-month the only thing to hope to achieve, even though all the names of the people on the plaque no longer work here? At least I am providing for my family. I know, I will bring a picture of my wife and child with me every day, that will keep me going. Oh, and the weekend! I can't believe I almost forgot that I have weekends of complete FREEDOM! I guess it's not so bad after all."

     After the weekend passes, we come back on Monday hoping that our smile will shine brighter than the metallic print on the sparkly fluoride tubes. Again, we are motivated for the first hour, but the seed of our soul soil crawls up to the surface looking for the sun, and hopefully we remember that the fluorescent lights are not sunlight. "Wait, what happened to my weekend of complete FREEDOM?" We start to realize we spent the entire time sleeping and resting because we knew if we did anything else that we would drown in a sea of acidic black coffee glaciated with sugar the next week. "Where did my loved ones go?" We try to imagine their faces, but the smell of plastic and sounds of a conveyer belt muffles our daydream. Our soul seed has sprouted. "What if, there is something better than this? What if I dare to believe that I am contributing to an erroneous corrupted cause and neglecting my real dreams? What if I am losing touch with my inner being? What happened to my loved ones?!" Our soul sprout is longing for sunlight, and we get antsy as we continue the clock-wise motions. Suddenly, pleasing someone who doesn't care if we got stranded on an island after a horrific plane crash tomorrow doesn't sound fulfilling anymore. The pain in our wrist starts to ache. We want to tell the world that they are buying poison. We want to find our family and run outside looking for wild animals in the trees and breathe fresh air. We want to write poetry about the pretty tail-feathers we saw and the mysterious cat who befriended us in the shade. We want to remember what it is like to sweat in more than one area of our bodies from using more than two limbs at once. We want to protect our wives and husbands and children and find a way to LOVE the things that we do rather than provide from a distance and watch movies of other people's faces doing things we wish we were doing when we finally get time together. We wonder why work has to be separate from personal life. A few toothpaste tubes go by without caps, and we don't care. In fact, we are happy. For the first time in a long time, our smile isn't attempting to recreate a whitened teeth smile advertisement. We are grinning now more beautifully than any peroxide-stained teeth could. We are smiling from our soul. The situation begins to feel very extreme, and we adapt. We walk out without even noticing the small white ridged cap in our fingers, and the sunlight feels like rain.

     At home, we return a confused look from our loved ones with the same true smile, and they act like they have seen a ghost. It's not that we were a ghost, but we had been a ghost for over a year. Now we start to rebuild our lives. How do we do that? Well, it all starts with the soil.

     From here on out, we begin to nourish our soul, and we do everything we can to rebuild the soil it grows from. We start writing down our favorite things with our loved ones so that we can remember what they were, and we actually DO them! We paint, we sing, we play, we laugh, we kiss, we go outside, we trace back our steps as humans and find ourselves surrounded by nature. We find nature, as if it were lost, and realize that it has to do with everything that we do. We rediscover that we eat from nature, not from Styrofoam. We learn that clothes don't come from factories like they told us when we were kids, and we marvel at how the materials for everything we use actually come from plants and rocks and water and fire. We start to look at things in a different perspective. We have reconnected with our soul soil, and that opens us up to the soil of the world we live on. We start to see the consequences of our 'insignificant' position at the toothpaste factory, and all the harm it has caused. We overcome the way people have made us feel, as if we can't create changes ourselves unless we are a manager or government official, and we understand how every action we make has an immense impact on our surroundings, our fellow humans, our lives, and most importantly, our souls. We realize that being a healthy person isn't about social status and income, and find that it is a lot like taking care of a plant. Giving it good clean water and plenty of sunlight makes it grow. Neglecting it and allowing pollutants and predators to consume it risk death. We start to see dead souls walking around us, and also some who have already reclaimed their soul soil, and wonder why we didn't notice them before. We find responsibility for our environment, our fellow species, and gain an ultimate passion to set things right by maintaining a fair dependence on the world.

     We realize we can't walk the streets without breathing in car exhaust. It gets in our lungs, and we think about how that is killing us slowly, and how many other unseen practices in our past lives were killing us slowly. We want to tell people what they are doing to themselves and their planet like we were. We find an unending thrill in surrounding ourselves in plants in animals, and wonder why everyone has their head turned down toward streets and cell phones while the sunset paints the sky a new masterpiece each day. We remember the exhilaration of being able to see a full 360 degree horizon of wilderness instead of a blocked view of decaying buildings. We find images in clouds like we did when we were young, and we don't wear umbrellas anymore when it rains. We are overwhelmed in every one of our five senses, and can't fathom going back to how things were. We keep the ridged white cap as a memento of our choice.

     "Why can't humans go back to having dominion over the land in its true meaning? A leadership formed from grace. A fellowship with the ground they walk upon, the creatures that walk among them. Why would anyone want to take more than what is necessary? Why do we need currency? Why can't we all work together in fields of sun and fruit and grain and simply help each other survive? How did we end up in this situation of deceit to ourselves, each other, and our environment? This type of living has not improved my quality of life. Who is happy here? Who dares to believe in something truly different? We are simple gardeners and shepherds, why are these people acting like kings? I must do something about this."

Sunrise

Soul Soil Reclamation is a new blog that Grace and I imagined, and it is finally beginning to sprout! In truth it materialized itself out of our ambitions, without much need of preconceived initiative.

This blog is about maintaining our true role as humans. To provide dominion over the land, work with it, and produce beauty from our labor. This blog is aimed to take back our rightful place in the ecosystem, rekindle our responsibilities, and reclaim the soil of our souls.

An interesting note:
The downfall of many civilizations in history was rooted in the erosion, or destruction, of their soil.

A relevant quote by Geoff Lawton, who is a great teacher of Permaculture: "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."

And you can't have a beautiful garden without rich, breathable, moist, organic soil!

The very beginning of man on this Earth was surrounded in a lush garden.

To maintain the soil, take care of the plants and animals, that is our number one role. Everything we do traces back to that simple idea, which proves to be more complex than anything we can imagine!

That is why we must also maintain the soil of our soul, as it is the place from which all aspects of our life grow. To keep the relationship of our soul to the soil of this Earth is to keep the integrity of our spirits and to preserve the most beautiful virtue of life, which is growth.

Grace and I are very passionate about improving the ways we live: in society, as humans, as lovers, and many other applications. We want to share any ideas we can hope to offer to anyone who wants to listen and grow in the same ways as us.

Thank you for stopping by! We hope you enjoy our posts and our blog!
 
-Tyler