I just keep thinking how the world is changing.
And we can’t keep wishing it was “the way it was.”
We can’t keep ignoring the signs because “we’ve always done it this way.”
We must respond to how things are NOW.
- The weather IS changing.
- The government HAS changed.
- Our food supply – and its nutrients – are different.
- Our waters are in trouble.
- Our health has changed (I mean, each person is estimated to have a SPOONFUL of plastic just in our brains).
- The world order has changed.
I cannot do what I’ve always done.
You cannot do what you’ve always done.
WE cannot do what we’ve always done.
We must NOTICE more.
We must CARE more.
We must CHOOSE differently.
We must ACT intentionally.
We must not be willfully blind humanity – our own and others’.
We must stop thinking of Nature as a resource and more as kin.
I heard something today listening to the “We Can Do Hard Things” podcast while walking my dog that made me exclaim YES!!!! out loud. Heather Cox Richardson, historian, professor, and writer of the exceptional daily newsletter “Letters to An American” said something about agency, and how we must each have a say in how decisions – from our own to our governments – affect us. THEN she said, “And what about a stream? Should a stream have a say in whether it can be polluted…”
To hear her say this on a wildly popular podcast made my heart SING. I actually DO believe that trees and rivers and plants and animals SHOULD have a voice. We SHOULD be asking these questions of relationship, reciprocity, and sovereignty. It can work to consider these relationships, these individuals, as having agency.
But the way we’re doing it now? It’s NOT working.
My invitation is to choose differently.
How?
That’s a complicated question. I typed out a whole paragraph of ideas and then realized I’d get a lot of responses of how that couldn’t work, doesn’t work, won’t work for you, doesn’t actually help the way I think it does, or where I’m wrong.
<shrug>
SO.
I invite you to think of your own ways you might choose differently to be kinder to the planet, the trees, the water, and the people.
Start small, think big (yes and thank you Michael Franti).
Warmly,
Angie