way too much waste

 

Have you ever thought about what happens with your waste once the garbage truck pulls away from your curb?  Out of sight, out of mind? The garbage statistics in this country are staggering even if we only consider residential garbage (a mere 2% of the total garbage output, which includes industrial, commercial and construction garbage).  San Francisco has striven for many years to become a zero waste city, trying to either recycle or compost most waste.

I do want to make you feel guilty in order to make you more aware.  After all, toxic landfill juice leaks into our groundwater (which we drink), and toxic landfill breath evaporates into our air (which we breathe in).

What can you do to help?  Many things.  First, recycle, recycle, recycle.  Get the biggest residential recycling can from your recycling company, and the smallest available garbage can from your garbage company (and save a few dollars a year).  Recycle all your paper products, from cereal boxes to newspapers to gift wrap.  If you get your eggs from a farm return your egg cartons to them for reuse.  If you do some home printing print on both sides of the paper.  Recycle all your plastics (the recycling company does not take bags in our area, but the local supermarkets collect them for recycling) and glass containers (I actually save a lot of my wide mouth glass jars to store home made hummus or bulk items I get from the coop).

Bring your own canvas shopping bags when you go shopping.  Start a composting bin if you have a garden and compost all produce waste (see an earlier post), coffee filters and tea leaves/bags, egg shells, stale bread (although I'd rather make bread pudding or a breakfast strata with it).  If you eat a lot of produce like we do, that should cut your kitchen garbage output by about half!

You might also consider buying clothes at second hand shops (I am always amazed what great things in superb condition I find at a fraction of the cost of new clothing), and give your used clothing (that is still in good condition) to a local shelter or bring it to the many clothing donation bins that abound.  And do buy compostable garbage bags since standard plastics can take up to 1000 years (!!!) to decompose.

Most of all, buy less stuff (stuff does not make you happy, inner peace does) and produce less garbage.  Please reread an earlier related post,

it's your choice

Whether you look at your teacup half full or half empty, whether you react to the grumpy cashier at the check-out line with compassion (she is having a bad day, who knows what happened at home), or send her angry signal right back to her with an irritated reaction - the choice is always your's.    Your reactions come from  your beliefs.  Every thought in your mind is a cause to an effect down the road. I mentioned in a recent related post that researchers found that depressed people are depressed because they have negative thoughts; they do not have negative thoughts because they are depressed.  That difference is crucial!   Why?  Because you can change your thoughts - once you are aware of them.

Untitled

Once we accept the responsibility of our thoughts, and that they create our reality, we are no longer at their mercy.  Telling your mind what to think or not to think is one of the things that meditation teaches.  If you do not rein your mind in it gallops away with whatever comes along - and that can create a reality that is out of your control and not to your liking.  Or you can dig deeper into yourself and become aware of what you are actually thinking.

Think about it.

it's happening

In a way I'm an unscientific trend tracker and I think it's happening.  The NY Times declared on its front page today that "Industry Awakens to Threat of Climate Change."   Why is this headline a good thing?  Climate change is real, climate change is happening faster than we anticipated, climate change will have huge impacts worldwide on all fronts and for each of us personally (and moreso for our children), and the faster we jointly act on reversing the causes the less painful the effects will be in the long run (although all that carbon we are spewing into the atmosphere will stay around for at least 1000 years even if we reverse its continuous increase now).

Waking up and acting is what's required NOW.  And while we as individuals can make a big difference by opting for renewable electric energy sources, switching to LED lamps, putting solar panels on our houses, insulating our houses the most most most we possibly can, opting for double and triple pane windows, buying local and working local, just to name a few actions that have impact if practiced by lots of people (the effect is cumulative) - the real difference is when this thinking finally  bleeds into the commercial-industrial sector.  And that's what's happening - finally.  Read the article.  It is encouraging, even though the commercial-industrial sector is coming at it from the perspective of the bottom line as opposed to the eco perspective.  It's a start.

Also take a look at earlier related posts  "divorce is not an option" and  "The Great Transformation."

on happiness

"Happiness comes from your perspective," says Marianne Williamson.    A recent study showed, to the astonishment of the researchers, that depressed people were depressed because they had negative thoughts, not that they had negative thoughts because they were depressed.  This goes to show that you can train yourself to think more positive thoughts in order to change your outlook on life. But your government's priorities sure help.  One country that has made happiness its national business is Bhutan.   Bhutan has created the GNH Index and studies how happy its people are and what can be made to improve the situation of those who are not.  Bhutan's search for happiness is not a recent endeavor since its 1729 legal code already stated "if the Government cannot create happiness for its [people, there is no purpose for the Government to exist."   What a country!

And Denmark was crowned the world's happiest country in the 2013 World Happiness Report (not sure why Bhutan does not appear in the report), figuring at the top with the other Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Canada.  Social support, gender equality, a culture of generosity, freedom to make life choices, good life expectancy, lack of corruption at the leadership level and a large GDP all contribute to making for a happy country.

Priorities, priorities!

inspirational Facebook?

I don't know what your impression of your Facebook stream of information is.  But I find that Facebook has become quite a forum for inspirational and spiritual postings.  As a matter of fact, at times I get more inspirational postings than status updates from friends - not sure whether that's good or bad.  Be that as it may, there may be two reasons for this. The first one may be that I have so many like minded friends that I simply see reflected back to me what I am putting out there - seeing the spirit in all of us and the rosy side of life.

The second reason might be that more people overall are actually inspired and in tune with themselves, each other and the world.  I am hoping it's the latter because then there would be real progress.

What do you think?  What is your impression?

the difference between cause and effect in healing

A headache is a cause of something deeper in your psyche, as is for example stress, low self esteem, depression or any number of symptoms we may experience on and off.  These symptoms have causes (try to analyze what happened before the onset of the headache -  too little sleep?  stress?  overwhelmed?)

Allopathy, as the Western healing system is called, treats the effect, the symptom your body puts out to signal that something is not right.  It does not heal the cause! A  medication is a chemical that alters your body chemistry by sheer force (and with more or less harmful side effects) without changing the cause of headache or depression or whatever.  In the same way surgery removes the effect by force without addressing the cause.   This type of treatment does not always work predictably (which is worth a whole other discussion).

Energy and alternative healing modalities, such as reiki, acupuncture, homeopathy and so forth gently realign your internal energy stream by removing blockages.  Once realigned you can feel what it is like not to have the symptom - ahhhhh.  These methods are gentle and have no harmful side effects.  However, even they still do not heal you on a soul level unless you shift the beliefs or thoughts that created your imbalance in the first place.  So, here too, the symptom may reappear in its former or another form.

The ultimate healing mechanism is an awareness on a consciousness level of what created the symptom, and then dissolving or shifting that belief.  While this is a simplified outline of the healing process, and there are also other causes of illnesses, it has been estimated that 85% are due to emotional issues.  You may also want to reread earlier posts on this: "healing is shifting," and "pill or self-heal."

warming winter foods

This time of year we naturally tend towards hearty soups and stews.  The French have their cassoulet, the Chinese eat their snake soup in the winter.  As Paul Pitchford says in his seminal Healing with Whole Foods, "cold and darkness drive one to seek inner warmth."

But besides the thermal warmth of a hot stew, according to Chinese medicine certain foods have actual warming properties and accelerate your sluggish energy when the temperatures are cold (such as snake soup, but no recipe for that here, although we ate it when we lived in Hong Kong many years ago).  Paul Pitchford talks about the benefits of salty and bitter foods in the winter, and my acupuncturist reminded me that this is the time of year for bone broths and warming spices like ginger, cinnamon, and cloves.

Save the bones or bony back when you make chicken or get some beef bones, and simply put them in a big pot of water with some carrots, celery and onions and simmer for a long time, even over night.  Right now I have a whole bunch of chicken necks cooking on the stove to make a soup base (found two bags in the freezer from my last chicken order from the farm).  Or better yet, for a richer broth roast the carcass or bones in the oven with some vegetables before cooking.

These broths are delicious as is, or make a great base for all kinds of heart warming and hearty soups. And why not invite a few friends over to share your soup and shake off the winter doldrums?

piranhas and the eco-mind

It is interesting and eye-opening how "the truth" can be so deeply in the eyes of the beholder.  We see what we believe, and we don't see what we don't believe.  We have been thinking along the (somewhat) misinterpreted Darwinian lines of nature's potential ferociousness and cruelty in the name of the survival of the fittest.  But scientists are beginning to dismantle this paradigm. Sunday's NY Times article took wildly exaggerated reports about the supposedly blood thirsty piranhas apart and reduced them to nothing much.  Growing up I remember hearing stories about entire cows supposedly being stripped to the bones in minutes by a huge swarm of these fish.  But I also acknowledge reading later about indigenous people wading and swimming fearlessly in piranha inhabited waters.

A short video on Suzanne Simard's work on the wood-wide-web and the mycorhizzal (mushroom) network recently made the rounds on Facebook.  Dr. Simard is involved in research about mother trees (huge old trees in the woods) and their social network, where plant seedlings grow up around the mother tree, and mushroom networks reach far underground, living in symbiotically nourishing relationships with the trees for their mutual benefit.

Nature is becoming friendlier by the minute as our outlook on the environment is shifting and we are becoming more eco-minded.

let the universe do some work for you

There is a difference between pushing, pushing, pushing, possibly against a wall, and putting intent out there and letting the universe do the rest. Our son, who will go for his road test later this month, had been looking for a well-priced used car (stick shift being a must) since the fall.  At every for-sale-vehicle by the roadside we stopped - price too high, no stick, bad condition.  Local dealerships were too high priced, no appropriate ads in the papers.  He became frustrated, but I kept saying that there was no rush since he didn't even have his license yet, and once the time came closer we could make a more concerted effort at finding him a car.

Well, through a comedy of unexpected circumstances we ended up going to his great-uncle's for Christmas, and lo and behold - we pulled up and found a car for sale in his driveway.  Our son jumped out in excitement, looked at the car and the sign in disbelief, announced it was a stick shift and cost exactly what he had intended to spend.

Voilà or That Was Easy!

Also look back to an earlier post on the Taoist principle of wu wei.

new year's resolutions

The Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky came to two major philosophical-spiritual realizations during his ten years in prison, as reported in the NY Times a few days ago.  One of them is very relevant on this New Year's Day when many of us make resolutions. Khodorkovsky said "I think the Russian problem is not just the president as a person,..., the problem is that our citizens...don't understand that their fate, they have to be responsible for it themselves.  They are happy to delegate it..."  This is a life changing realization for everyone who wakes up to this enormous and beautiful responsibility, because that is what it is.  We can't wait for Prince Charming to show up at the doorstep with a million dollars.  We have to show intent, move ourselves in the direction of where we want to go, and actually do it.  It is work, it takes courage jumping over your own shadow, it means taking risks, and it may be uncomfortable at times.  But it is rewarding and it works!

No diet pill or new fangled miracle diet will take your pounds off for you if you are not willing to pull through with it.  Complaining about the government and not voting or taking action in your own small way is delegating "we the people" to some abstract politician or entity, as Khodorkovsky pointed out.

With every New Year's resolution you need a solid action plan that comes from the heart; think business plan for whatever you are striving to achieve, whether it is losing weight, making more money, moving to a warmer climate, leading a more balanced life, or whatever else. Let's toast to intent and courage, because they are what make things happen!