| LIFE COACHING |  | | Earth Week, Resilience and Optimism! | | Bruce Elkin | | |
| | Welcome to "SIMPLY SUSTAINABLE SUCCESS" - April 21, 2009:
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Helping You Create What Matters MOST in Life and Work --
With Whatever Life Throws At You!
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"As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.
As long as the Earth can flower and produce nurturing fruit, I can,
because I'm the Earth. I won't give up until the Earth gives up."
—Alice Walker
Hi All,
It's Earth Week. And Wednesday is Earth Day.
What will you do to celebrate the Earth — and the systems of life on which all of your health, wealth, and well being depend?
We all celebrate the Earth in our own ways. Some will walk in Earthwalks. Some will attend teach-ins. Some will host small groups of friends and neighbours to watch "The Inconvenient Truth" and chat about how to apply its lessons to their own lives and work.
Some will cross-country ski or hike or bike into the wilderness and resonate to its magnificent wildness. Others will plant or harvest their gardens, getting the very essence of the Earth under their fingernails.
One school I know of is taking all the grade 3 to 7 students to the "Earth" movie -- and walking there and back. Good for them!
All of these ideas are wonderful, and I urge you to consider them.
As well, I urge you to take some time and reflect on your own relationship to the Earth and the systems of life on which you depend -- globally, and locally.
So many talk about an environmental crisis, but it's really a human crisis. We caused it, and, if enough of us change our ways soon enough, we might be able to prevent the crisis from getting out of control.
It's not really the Earth we have to be concerned with, it is how WE relate to and use the Earth's bountiful (but not unlimited) services. The Earth will take care of itself. The Earth is resilient and will bounce back from whatever we throw at it.
But we — civilization, humanity, people — may not survive what we do to the Earth. Our children's children and their children may not survive what we do to the Earth. That's why it is so important and so powerful for each and every one of us to ponder our relationship to the Earth.
How?
Think about the basics of life on which you depend. Heat. Light. Water. Food. Waste disposal. Transportation. Where do those things come from? Where does the energy come from and how do we access it? How do living things help us make a life?
By the way, have you thanked a green plant today?
Without them, we wouldn't be. They capture energy from sunlight, which we can't use directly, and transform it into the energy that you're using to read this newsletter right now. In many ways, we're all glowing balls of sunlight energy, dependent on green plants.
We also dependent on the water cycle, healthy forests, the top 12 inches of soil that contains trillions of life forms, working to break down wastes and create the placenta of life, the source of healthy living things.
Oh, yes, don't worry about the Earth this Earth day. Think more about your own relationship to the Earth, and how you can live in greater harmony with the basic life eco-systems on which you, and all that you hold dear, depend.
Here's a little poem by one of my favourite poets that might help your Earth Week reflections take on an optimistic slant:
Optimism
by Jane Hirshfield
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and
over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the
light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs--
all this resinous, unretractable earth.
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"The trouble with simple living is that,
though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn't simple."
— Doris Janzen Longacre
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"To cherish what remains of the earth and to foster its renewal
is our only legitimate hope of survival."
—Wendell Berry
>ARTICLES TO HELP YOU PONDER YOUR RELATIONSHIPS TO LIFE AND THE EARTH
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These two articles can help you ask yourself some hard questions about the kind and quality of life you truly want to create, and compare that life to the life you're now living. The gap between where you are and where you'd love to be is a very powerful source of "creative" tension that you can use to take actions to close that gap. Bringing reality into harmony with your deep and authentic desires is one of the most powerful sources of fulfillment and satisfaction we have.
• "What Is The Good Life?" http://hubpages.com/hub/What-Is-the-Good-Life
• Abundance? Or Sufficience? http://hubpages.com/hub/Abundance--Or-Sufficience
Perhaps, this Earth Week these articles could be shared amongst friends and be the basis of a profound discussion. Why not try it?
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>This Weeks Quotes:
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"Live simply, so others may simply live."
—Gandhi
"Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things."
—Elise Boulding
"We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling."
—Diane Ackerman
'While Peak Oil and Climate Change are understandably profoundly challenging, also inherent within them is the potential for an economic, cultural, and social renaissance the likes of which we have never seen. We will see a flourishing of local businesses, local skills and solutions, and a flowering of ingenuity and creativity. It is a Transition in which we will inevitably grow, and in which our evolution is a precondition for progress. Emerging at the other end, we will not be the same as we were: we will have become more humble, more connected to the natural world, fitter, leaner, more skilled, and ultimately, wiser.
-- Rob Hopkins, The Transition Town Handbook
"The world is not to be put in order, the world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order."
—Henry Miller
"You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy."
—Eric Hoffer
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How is your relationship with the Earth? Take a little time this week to reflect on this -- and then act on what you come up with. If not you, who? If not now, when?
Have a wonderful Earth Week! Let the Earth's creativity and resilience fill you!
Bruce | | | Full Article... | | |
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