Beyond Despair: Are There Soul-utions?

During a recent Coffee and Conversation for a gaggle of gals at my Church of Last Resort, one of the mutually agreed upon topics was what to do to care for the earth and stop giving in to the debilitating paralysis of overwhelm and guilt that there's scarcely any one thing a lone person can do to make a difference.

Another group discussed Caregiver Burn Out, and how to take care of ourselves. The other tackled How Not to Despair In Despairing Times (for Liberals).

There were seven in our group. After sharing our sadness, rage, feeling frozen, and impotent to turn the tide of the lemming-like leap humans collectively seem to be making over the nearest cliff, we came up with some Soul-utions. 

In NO particular order, these suggestions were offered.

~Form a support group to help each other do things that stop adding to the problems of pollution, plastic inundation, over-consumption, and greed. Support also can help assuage guilt of not being able to do more, so we CAN keep moving forward without slitting our wrists!

~Know (or believe) that what we do at home is FELT throughout California, which MAY lead the nation in how to lower the fever Mother Earth is now experiencing. The analogy was shared about the beating of a butterfly's wings in Outer Mongolia being felt in the winds of the Sahara.

~Create small projects to do with others... like encouraging  coffee shops to stop giving out plastic straws. Encourage folks to bring their own re-usable mug to coffee shops, etc.

~Go into schools to help kids learn to sort trash. Empower them to know their actions make a difference. Give them hope: They're not alone, we're all in this crusade to reclaim our earth together. One of the women in our group teaches at an intermediate school. She says the many waste bin options for sorting lunchroom discards are willfully ignored by students who are so burdened by the weight of impending doom, they feel there's no hope. They are also angry to the point of acting out, or, worse, acting out their anger internally in the form of depression and even suicide! Yikes! These children are our future! Please, let us join with them and offer hope through action! The teacher is going to check with her administrator to see if we might bring a team of helper/sorter/listeners for several days to just be with and hopefully empower and instill hope in the children.

~Take a fact sheet and two or three friends to see the manager of our local grocery store. Hand over a hand-out with phone numbers and ideas for more ecological approaches to packaging instead of one time use plastic. Entreat them to lobby for their customers who want not the plastic. Send the ideas to headquarters. Tell the Corporate Officers we won't be buying their plastic tubs of salad, and sandwiches anymore and why.

~Take our left-over glass bottles and jars to the bulk bins, where available, to bring home our groceries in multi-use containers instead of relying on plastic one-time-use boxes, bags, and bottles. This works for things like shampoos, conditioners, lotions, potions, nuts, flours, seeds, powders, candies, cereals, grains, and dried fruits. We can even take a glass container to the butcher counter and have it filled with our choice from the meat case. Many stores now take a tare weight of our container, we fill it, then they re-weigh it and put a price sticker on it for the cashier to read in barcode form! So cool!

~Eat less animal protein. Eat more plant protein.

~Pick up trash on walks, especially plastics so they don't go into the ocean and kill marine life and birds.

~Look for new ecological MYCELIUM PACKAGING! Coming to a store near you soon! (we hope!) There's a Zero Waste grocery store in North Oakland on Telegraph that is full of ideas about shopping without wasting anything!
https://zerowastecalifornia.org/bulk-grocery-stores/ 

~Know the facts about the three biggest contributors to global warming according to environmental guru Jerry Rifkin: 
     1.  Buildings are the biggest contaminators of the environment: manufacturing of building materials, waste on demolition, etc. 
     2.  Second is meat consumption. 
     3.  Third is transportation. 

~Every drop in the bucket of a pro-earth action goes into the whole to become quarts, gallons, rivers and seas.  We cannot afford to feel helpless and hopeless. Keep on doing whatever we can to make up for being selfish,  unenlightened, ungrateful children of Mother Earth!

~Start small. Let's do what we can where we're planted. 

~Fires... are fearsome. Winds are fierce. Drought dries and shrivels all that once grew green. 

~Plastics & convenience are seductive. How do we wake up? Stay Woke?

~California MAY lead the country out of the dark ages where we suffer under the Trumpeting Bovine who's deregulating car manufacturers so we can guzzle even MORE gas.

~Global stability is a grass roots endeavor. OUR leaders are modeling and supporting greed. We who can, must take things into our own hands and persevere. Doing so cuts the victim stance in the bud. We are empowered people... or to use Holly Near's words: "We are a peaceful angry people and we are marching, marching for our lives..."

~One of our church members is Irish. She said the violence during the Troubles in Ireland was taken-on at the grass roots level. Those who led the peaceful demonstrations became leaders of the politicians, not the other way round. 

~Vote for environmentally woke candidates who will fight greed and overgrowth.

~Volunteering to register voters in swing states is a possible action for some.

~In The Hundredth Monkey by Ken Keyes,  Vision Books, 1981, the author describes something that happened on an archipelago of islands off the coast of Japan in 1952. Scientists provided Macaca Fuscata Monkeys sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkeys liked the taste but not the gritty sand. An eighteen month old female named Imo discovered the potatoes were easier to eat when she washed them in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and taught their mothers too. The cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists. Between 1952 and 1958, all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable. Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.  At some point there was a critical mass number of monkeys performing this action on the one island.  A curious thing happened! Without being shown how, the potato-washing behavior jumped to the monkeys on all the other islands in the archipelago, instantaneously! When that (imaginary number) hundredth monkey picked up the behavior, the mind field was strong enough to jump to the minds of other monkeys on other islands. When we Californians have a critical mass number of humans performing good things in honor of, and to save Mother Earth, the behavior may jump to other states. The story of the Hundredth Monkey is timely. Let's review how powerful our minds are in terms of influencing other's minds. We can call ourselves Environ-Mentalists! And Eartha Kids!!!

~We cannot control what Earth does. She may blow her stack through volcanoes, tremble under us, send us winds, furious tornados, hurricanes, monsoons, and droughts. We cannot invest in the outcomes of our actions, but only do what seems right and good and hope for the best. 

~Greed and overgrowth are not the way Nature does it. These human traits are not replicated in nature. There are natural boundaries in the natural world. Eventually, balance is restored when things get out of hand. 

~ Read What's the Matter With Kansas? How the Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank.

~Elie Weisel attests: No one cried in Auschwitz. They played music, buried their violins to save the music, found community essential. Meaning was more important than bread. Getting bread for the children gave life meaning.  What gives our lives meaning? What can we do to keep hope alive?

~Grandmothers are motivated to hand down a better planet than it seems we've got left. Greening Grannies and Vigil Aunties, UNITE!!!

~There are good waste management procedures in some places. Do more of that!

~Is the action, product, or support I'm about to do/buy/give good for the children's children's children to the Seventh Generation? If not, to the best of my ability, could I NOT DO THAT? BUY THAT? SUPPORT THAT?

~Drops in the bucket become POURING not just drops. Between Greed and Climate Deniers there's a lack of respect for life. All is connected. Escalating climate change is due to greed.

~Pull on one thread. See where it leads.