Mr. Kraft does life

It’s coming together.

We see a plethora of skin care ointments, medical products, and even surgeries, all to try to ‘fix’ ‘problems’ we see and experience with our bodies.  Dry scalp?  Put this toxic chemical on your head and it will solve the issue.  Having a cold?  Take these pills and the symptoms go away.  Overweight?  Let’s cut the fat out, literally.  But what about the root causes of the issue?  Could my diet or my stressful lifestyle be causing skin issues?  What about letting my body heal and build immunity instead of hiding the symptoms and weakening the body?  Why not eat properly and exercise, instead of taking diet pills and having weight loss surgery?  Even make-up and cosmetics are lies, attempting to convince ourselves and others that we are something other than what we truly are.

We are seeing massive population declines in fish.  So, let’s start breeding them in artificially engineered environments.  Who would ever think to change our diets or eating habits?

I’m not feeling so good about life these days.  Well, it’s all society’s fault.  Or, I don’t have enough of what I want – that’s the problem.  No, it’s because you offended me.  Any way you have it, the problem has nothing to do with me.  The problems I’m experiencing are spawned from sources outside of myself.  Right?

All of this is nothing but playing with shadows.  We are attempting to change what we see to be more like what we wish them to be, rather than to accept them for what they are.  It is much easier to do this than to ask what the roots of our problems are.  It’s not nearly as easy to examine my behavior than it is to place blame on something or someone, or to put a band-aid on a problem we experience.  Our entire culture is based on external solutions because we truly perceive our problems to come from outside of ourselves.

“Affirming Faith in Mind” –  a Buddhist piece that I have found to be tremendously powerful – has a stanza that highlights this so clearly:

Delusion spawns dualities–
these dreams are merely flow’rs of air–
why work so hard at grasping them?

At the cinema, would any mature individual start an argument with a character on the screen?  Of course not.  Even a child quickly learns that she can not push and shove a shadow, expecting it to move, no matter how hard she tries.  No matter how much energy she exerts, it is obvious that the shadow does not change.  She would have to find and move the body who’s figure is creating the shadow, to change the shape she sees on the grass.  The images on the screen, just like the shadows, are apparitions.  They are insubstantial and transient.  They are projections.  Much like the experiences we have in life.  Why would we try to change the images and the effects of what we see without looking at the causes first?

Check it out:

http://www.tristramstuart.co.uk/

_S

We’ve seen a lot about how much our culture uses one-time use products.  It’s every day.  It’s unconscious.  It’s all-pervading.

We’re creating all of this ‘waste’.  What is ‘waste’, anyhow?  Why would anyone every produce something that is not going to be useful, completely?  As we have seen, nature does not create a single thing that isn’t completely useful, down to the last molecule.  All of the acorns, every leaf, and even each animal is recycled and their respective nutrients are cycled back into new life.

It turns out there is a way that you, too, can help play an active role in this process of recycling, and it’s free.  Nature does all the work for you, and you don’t even have to pay anyone to take away this stuff that you once thought of as ‘waste’.  We can stop calling anything organic, or simply anything from the earth in its natural form, ‘waste’.  That’s because we can compost that food, and also all of your garden scraps, into new life, instead of paying someone to come, pick it up, and use more energy to put it into a sealed landfill, never to be used again.

So what is ‘compost’ anyhow?  Composting is the “process whereby organic matter, including food waste, paper and yard waste, decompose naturally, resulting in a product rich in minerals and ideal for gardening and farming as a soil conditioner, mulch, resurfacing material or landfill cover.” [Source]  Basically, many things we presently throw away in landfills are valuable and nutrient-rich, and by simply putting them in a pile, we could take their nutrients and recycle them into new food growth for the future. A very large percentage of the garbage produced in the US each year is organic matter.

Each time organic matter is thrown into the “garbage”, we are littering.  We are wasting.  The waste is taking place on so many levels.  If you’ve got an apple core, an orange peel, a banana peel, or what have you, please, compost it.  You can of course include leaves from your yard, grass clippings, branches and all other plant matter, in your compost.

There is no excuse to not compost organic matter.  Let’s also dispel the use of the word “waste” in context to organic materials.  By putting organic matter in the garbage to be taken to a landfill, we surely would be creating waste.  It is waste, because we are wasting this valuable resource, by discontinuing the cycle that it is a part of, and not allowing it to return to the soil, to decompose, and reconstitute all of the microorganisms and energy within it, to the earth.  We are wasting because we are creating more “waste” for the municipality to have to pick up, transport, process, and then put into a landfill – these all take precious, finite energy to do.  Composting, on the other hand, is free, requires minimal human input, and can be done nearly anywhere.  Composting creates free, organic fertilizer, a valuable resource, which can be used to grow food, plants, trees, and more.

Municipalities and even nations are catching on to this.  Toronto and San Francisco are just two successful examples of cities that have instituted city-wide composting.  In Toronto, for example, a total of 388,188 metric tonnes of residential waste was diverted from landfill during 2008.

If you can’t find any help online, just get in touch with me and I can try to help you learn how to start composting.

Please, stop littering – don’t waste your organic materials – compost.

_S

Richard Heinberg breaks it all down.  A lot of people don’t seem to know why I feel so passionately about energy and the environment.  In this video, Heinberg describes what is happening with our current energy situation, including oil, coal, natural gas, and many alternatives, to boot. This might help to explain some of my motivation to start participating in value-added activities, amongst other things.