You are awesome!

Thank you for this wonderful (and many other) wonderful posts. I read it in a moment of absolute snittiness, and it calmed me.
I actually meant to write last week in response to your call for bloggers but lost track of time, mostly due to rampant toddler activities (my son). I am interested in posting more plastic-free posts to my blog; however, to date, it is a blog of many hybridities.

Over the past year, I have been working to reduce the use of plastic in our household, and am working to eradicate it entirely from our lives. This has taken many forms, including refusing plastic grocery bags, spreading the word about bottled water and only using a refillable stainless steel container, shopping at farmer’s markets for most of our needs, donating various items instead of throwing them away, reusing and recycling pretty much everything, and (eventually) switching all of our plastic kitchenware to glass.

I applaud your efforts and find encouragement in your posts and energies!

Your neighbor in Piedmont,

Melissa

That couldn’t have been more timely for me to read. I sat down at my desk and began reading this post, but was interrupted by the sounds of my boss and a coworker chatting and laughing about Obama. I can’t quite explain their attitudes – ones of “I’m right and how could everyone else in the world be so stupid?”

All I could think was how, yes, I support my candidate (or my beliefs or my ideas) but I can certainly be open to others’ as well. Why (and how?) do people think that they have the one and only true/right/real answer?

Then I read the quote above and thought “exactly”. Sigh.

Most remarkable is that every life form comes from the same source – plant or animal we all share DNA and are branches from the same trunk. Richard Dawkins book The Ancestors Tale tells that story well. Whenever I am feeling cocky, I recall that the tree next to me, the grass, the ant, the flower are all my relatives.

A key to our future is to realize this and stop pretending we are uniquely separate from all other life, entitled to do as we wish with the planet and unaffected by the results of what we do. Who “deserves” to rule the planet? If we weren’t here, it would be another species that would be making the bid to do so. We have to appreciate our position and preserve/protect because THAT is what are big brains enable us to understand above all others.

So far we’ve used our position to lord it over everything else, even creating a Lord to tell us that’s ok.

When I recently got the “flu”, I reminded myself that the “bug” I was carrying was simply doing to me what we as a species do to everything else – propagate and take the territory.

We aren’t guilty any more than life itself is guilty of trying its best to expand everywhere it can. That’s how we got here. Alfalfa and sea squirts do the same, if unknowingly, it’s the nature of life that we share right along with the DNA.

But we can understand the whole picture and still behave as if we didn’t! That is our incredible contradiction – we are loaded with intelligence and the accompanying capacity to truly set ourselves free of the automatic drive of life to take over but we act as if we had no more awareness than lichen spreading on a rock.