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."
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