A Definition Towards Sustainability

I've been privileged with the sight of irresponsibility.

My eyes are not hourglasses capable of watching death and inevitable end, though my mind seemingly inescapable, imagines such.

My eyes are balances which view the flows of energy, increasingly away from the source. My eyes see the surface of source, the face of the only god capable of holding us in its palm, the soil, the sun, the moon, the redirection of energy by surface, the clarification of this by optical nerves dependent on the redirection.

I see the breakdown of paths that once formed concentric circles, moving out from and returning to the center of the garden. I see the laying of asphalt, the creation of a road that goes everywhere and thus nowhere in particular.

I fight losing battles in this necessary war to find new ways to old ideals, to make their beauty and purpose apparent to other's eyes, to my own.

My health suffers as the soil is eroded by marauding colonial machines, as the end is distanced from the source. My health suffers as and with your own. My health belongs to you, and with it the responsibility your life offers, just as your health and potentiality are my own.

Can we responsibly stop the wounding and begin the healing? Can we retrace some old paths and blaze some new ones, bury the road? Can we see to it that our energies are returned to the source?

Am I, are we doomed to fragmentation, a broken and senseless unhealthy state? Will you see me, see yourself, in the struggle to make obsolete irresponsibility and waste?

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Moving towards sustainability is an action we are all capable of. Even though the individual actions are small, these efforts are swelling. They have to, because they directly address what has gone wrong, the energy pathways moving away from the source. We live in a finite system, the Earth. With the utilization of the sun's rays entering, and the return radiation of that heat into space, we work within the closed system. That's our model.

Our culture's systems are open, not leaking but pouring off the energy as our waste. Working towards sustainability is nothing more than undoing the transformation of all this energy into waste, a transformation that lies near the heart of what has gone wrong. Watch the energy brought together, the sun and wind, the soil and water, the birds and bees, and it becomes hard to see crusty leftovers in a pan, bellpepper seeds and stems, and even thine own feces as waste. Stop seeing these things as waste, stop processing them as waste, and you have undone the transformation. Feed your food scraps to the worms, something that is easy for even us apartment dwellers to do. Soak your cooking pan in water, scrub the pan (no soap), and dump the leavings onto your worms as they need them. That makes worm tea, a tasty fertilizing drink for your plants.

Plants, and by extension the soil, are in dire need of our responsive care. If you create more tea or casting than needed for your own housefern or flowers, then adopt a tree or hedge growing near you. Feed the soil that is being stripped by lawnmowers and leafblowers. Toss your coffee grounds directly on the ground. Something will be nourished by them.

That's how easy it is to begin. As we begin to close the systems that sustain us, we find ourselves paying a lot more attention to life, to our health, and to the place. In short, the things that have been lost, we begin to see them staring us in the face. We notice other systems that are open and leaky. We feel an urge to experiment, to find ways of closing the system. While a special responsibility to close the circles resides with those granted the opportunity and knowledge, we all have the responsibility to do what we can.

This is a blessing for those that know, for the sick and weakened, start with the dirt.