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