Name one small change you have made or could make to your life that would be of great benefit to the world if everyone did the same EcoTrain Question of the Week
We like to call Mountain Jewel a Center for Earth Connection.
I've delved into this a bit- to describe what it means, but haven't really written a post on its full intention.
Let us start with a quote from Arne Naess, the founder of the Deep Ecology movement,
The Ecological Movement asks for a deep identification of people with all life.
This is pretty simple, humans have a great disconnect with the natural world. To many humans the earth is just a backdrop to human life.
Plants: The Green Backdrop to Human Life
People exploit what they do not care for. It is much easier to disrespect something if we aren't connected to it or if we don't know it.
Humans are currently suffering under (and causing all of life on the planet) to suffer under the disease and repercussions of disconnection (also a lot of greed thrown in there too.)
I remember when I got into a University class on Wild Edibles. It changed my life. I had started farming at this point and getting into permaculture, but my fluency with the natural world was still very elementary.
In the class, we studied from the book, Botany in a Day, and I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to get to know plant families.
After this class, I started seeing food everywhere! Plants were not just a green backdrop on the stage of human life, but friends!
This is the small change that has happened in my life that I would love to pass on to others. Get to know 1 plant. Then another. That is how it starts. Pretty soon you start seeing friends everywhere.
Now, no matter where I am in North America, when I take a walk around outside, I see familiar plant faces!
This is at the heart of our homestead being a Center for Earth Connection.
It is destined to be a place where people can come (retreat to) to get in close contact with the natural world. A place humans can re-member their part in a much larger whole, one that is not contingent upon them for furtherance (the earth would get along just fine without us). It is worth noting how human-centered our cultures have gotten. We have forgotten that we are a part of all of life and that we are not above everything else.
I believe we are hungry as humans for this connection.
The earth is our home and getting so wrapped up in HUMAN culture, we have forsaken our healthy and respectful relationship with the earth.
It astounds me, in fact, that you can truly exist on this planet without really ever leaving the human bubble. Every person who has grown up in a city can attest to this. What nature? Nature is something you go to - it is something you must seek out. I believe this is the cause of many of the high anxiety and depression rates that we see.
So, again, my proposal is this. Start small. Identify one plant that you walk by every day. Get to know its family. The mint family, characteristics pictured below, is a great one to start with as mint is easy to grow and found all over the world both cultivated and in the wild. It is hard to throw a stone and not hit a mint plant at our homestead- and much of it are plants we haven't even planted. It's not the traditional "mint" smell or taste necessarily, but they are certainly a part of the family.
I will never forget this one time I had eaten a psychedelic and went into my garden. It was beneath a full moon and I was blown away by how beautiful the plants were. How vibrant and alive and so so kind and giving!
As I bent my head down to take in the smell of my sage plant and as I started nibbling the leaves right off the plant with my teeth, I heard with my inner sense that the plant was delighting in my enjoyment of it!
It was then that I realized that this life---death---life---death cycle we are a part of is all of us taking one another in. The plants give their bodies for us so that we can have life and health. They are so kind! They, in large part, make up our bodies. It's really pretty amazing.
I think if more people had contact with plants, they'd realize that human life isn't the only or best thing happening on this earth and we'd all be a lot better off if more and more people have this realization.
All it takes is getting to know 1 plant in the sea of green.
After plants, the sky is the limit. Humans can start to see themselves in communion with all of life and not above it.
Banner by @radicalunicorn
This post was written by a passenger of the #EcoTrain for the Question of the Week. We invite you to write on this question with us and use the tag ecotrain as your first tag.