Water Planet
Things I Don’t Understand
Looking at the dwindling health of the planet has me scratching my head in confusion. During my sea turtle volunteer work, in the colorful dawn hour, questions come to me as I pick up trash left behind or washed up. I’ve compiled a short list of things I don’t understand. Perhaps you have some you can add.
1. People who depend on the Gulf of Mexico as a resource for their livelihood in the way of commercial seafood fisheries and use the Gulf as a dump. Last week I found all manner of debris washed up….yellow bags of salty brine, thick gloves, bailers, large floating buoys. Why would the people depending on the water dump their wastes into the sea?
2. Parents who sit on the beach with their kids and leave cigarette butts, beer bottles, metal caps and trash on the beach. What are they teaching their precious children? Cigarette butts are made of the same material as plastic bags…they don’t decompose. Bottles are made of sand…they won’t decompose but may break and cut said children. Metal caps will decompose after rusting and perhaps cutting children. Styrofoam plates, plastic bottles and other trash…takes decades or longer to be ground into smaller pieces that are ingested by sea life which we, in turn, ingest and therefore have toxic chemicals added to our already challenged DNA resulting in genetic changes and ill health.
3. People who toss hundreds of feet of monofilament line overboard. This has the potential to harm countless marine species…think about it. Guesstimates are about 500 years for it to decompose.
4. Why politicos and city hierarchies put money before care of the beaches…the same beaches that attract all of those tourists and tourists dollars. I don’t need to say anything more on this one. I just don’t ‘get it.’
5. Why is the health of the many ecosystems put dead last on most priority lists when it is the complete basis for health and life for humans? I don’t understand why this is so difficult to understand. It’s factual.
So while I’m out there looking for mama sea turtle tracks and picking up garbage that fills bags every time I go, these questions come to mind. I’ve yet to find a real answer and I’m left with many things I don’t understand.
I Stopped Trying to Save the World Today
Solstice. Sunrise. Sunset. Moon. Stars. Inky blackness in a space vacuum pierced by pinpoints of light.
Cosmic glue. Love. Source. Spirit. Animation of matter through particles of light.
Heart and mind open, light sparkles through eyes and aura.
Light, mist of Love manifested in physical. Light and love, same expression of the Mystery, the Unnamable.
Defining It lessens It and contorts It into our image.
Light came from Dreamland with me this day–a flower opening, a single ray of light from the sun…smile of a friend after a belly laugh slurped from the same straw.
Today I stopped trying to save the world. Now there is only laughter and beauty. Outrageous laughter. Delicious beauty.
Stopped pushing, began allowing. Profound peace is at home within me. And now….everything is possible.
Bloom Where You Are Planted
A tiny sunflower is blooming in a large container where a gardenia calls home. It found its way there via a bird or squirrel who either mistakenly dropped it or has a love for gardening and flowers.
As I sit on the back porch, in my hammock swing, I look at the struggling sunflower and can’t help but think of the saying, ‘Bloom where you are planted.’
My friend has chosen to work in Iraq and I chose to move back to the Gulf Coast. Both of us felt a call to our chosen destination without knowing how our talents would be used or how we would make a difference; yet, each of us is finding ways to bring positive energy to where we are planted.
Like the little sunflower, all of us might be lucky enough to escape the equivalent of a trip through the digestive system of a bird or squirrel (with any luck at all) and find fertile soil in which to live, move and have our being. In reality, the world is our garden. Anywhere we find ourselves gives the opportunity to serve and shine a little light.
With proper nourishment and support we all might grow into our potential…and bless the world.
Loving the Earth
Loving the Earth: Creating a Conscious Relationship with Our Planet
A slight breezed carried my SUP board downriver as I stopped paddling to watch a pair of bald eagles drag their talons along the surface of the water. Nearby great egrets crowned cypress trees, their white plumage dazzling against the background of blue sky. A mullet splashed in the mud-tinted water of the Magnolia River and brought my attention back from sky to earth. As my gaze turned downward a brown pelican folded her wings, as if in prayer, and dropped from the sky close to my board. All around life expressed in a beautiful ballet of balance with this lone patron admiring the dance. Bliss seemed shared by all but perhaps it might be better named communion.
One never knows what will be the call that brings us to our heart’s work. While I loved nature since childhood, I never felt the commitment…the calling…to dedicate my life’s work to it until the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. It felt as if everything in life stopped so I could focus entirely on the Gulf Coast and the amazing life in our coastal ecosystems. During the first days of oil washing ashore I remember thinking the end of the world had arrived. How could this happen?
It’s easier to believe everything is okay than to pay attention to what’s really happening. I shared my book containing oil spill images with a cousin the other day that lives in Pensacola and she was shocked to see the reality I documented. There are people who live in Gulf Shores who still believe it wasn’t bad…that there wasn’t oil mixed with dispersant and it wasn’t fizzing in tidal pools of tiny fish gasping to their last breath. I know because I saw it first hand and stood on the beach weeping for every life I saw pass.
The most difficult thing I have ever experienced was witnessing the spill and its effects on innocent life which included small children playing in oily waters…so polluted that the benzene burned my eyes and throat. Video and photographs in my library document everything I saw but they can never share the true experience of grief beyond anything I’ve known.
A friend and mentor reminded me, during the first year of the spill, that there was a reason I was being called to witness the horror even though I might not understand why. Over four years have passed and I am more convinced that the only way to heal our broken planet is to heal our relationship with It and to heal our relationship with each other. That means healing our own lives.
The only solution I have found is to practice love…love as compassion…love as respect…love in the purest form of opening to surrender, to service.
Love for the planet requires opening the self. When we risk the deep opening of human heart to planetary heart we know the elation of unspeakable joy, of the heart’s expanding in answer to beauty. We also know the experience of grief and heartbreak when places, wildlife and humans we love are destroyed or profoundly injured.
Celebrating the beauty of the Magnolia River and other places of natural beauty relieves the grief that comes from being aware of the trials our planet is experiencing. There is resilience in nature and my hope is we will practice better stewardship before a non-reversible tipping point is reached.
As I remain engaged with nature’s rhythms through simple, daily observation and intention, I am drawn more deeply into partnership with the Earth. If we collectively open our hearts to loving this sacred planet, we can create a bond with each other that will transform darkness and create positive, lasting change.