Let’s Pour our Hearts and Care into the Earth instead of our Garbage
I’m a resident of Mono, Ontario who happens to enjoy running every morning either in the forest following the park trails or along the road. For months I’ve been witnessing the garage tossed carelessly at random by drivers and users of the Third Line EHS, in the form of beer and pop cans, hard liquor bottles, remains of junk food wrappings, coffee cups and the list goes on and on…
Patiently I’ve been waiting for Earth Day (knowing, full well that Earth day actually is every single day) to do a full clean up. So, when April 22 arrived, I was excited to fulfill my goal. By the time, I returned from work and started my walk up and down the stretch of only a few kilometers from Hockley Rd. to just past the entrance of the park on the Third Line EHS, I noticed to my pleasant surprise that a good Samaritan neighbor had already done the job for all of us! I looked around and spotted still a few pieces of garbage beyond the ditch, I guess from those drivers that put the extra effort to throw the garbage as far into the woods and away from their own cars as possible. So, I decided I would still go ahead with my task at hand and try my best to continue the job my neighbor had started. The ending result was yet another full bag of garbage of the same: alcohol cans and bottles, old food wrappings, toilet paper and other disgusting items I will refrain from mentioning. At this point, I’m also wondering who cares so little or feels so disconnected from the Earth to be willing to litter and pollute our land in such way? It occurred to me that such reckless behavior could overlap with those who also speed up and down the road… but yet again, who knows?
I must say, that after yesterday’s full clean up I was so happy to see the road pristine and clean that I woke up this morning eager to embrace my litter-free run; yet sadly and disappointingly enough, as soon as I started my run up the road, I was shocked to see the equivalent of yet another full bag of garbage which had been obviously tossed overnight! I decided not to be discouraged but rather to use this energy to empower me and to continue to do my very best to be part of the solution of what seems like a never-ending problem and I decided to share my personal experience and post this for anyone who wants to join me in helping protect our homeland. I also made a commitment that from now on I will simply carry a garbage bag along with me and keep collecting daily or weekly the garbage that keeps getting tossed along the road.
The bottom line is that we cannot protect or care for anything we do not feel connected, have a link or a bond to. For instance, most of us, would never consider tossing our left-over garbage from our food or drinks right on our own living-room floor because we are connected to our homes by a sense of possession and ownership: the mindset being: if I identify with something as “mine;” then I will care for it. Yet, tossing our garbage around our precious outdoors is OK by some of us; only because unfortunately, we may have never internalized Nature as being part of us. Thus, failing to identify with the Earth as ‘our home’ prevents us from protecting, respecting, caring for and loving it in the first place.
As a co-resident of Mono and co-dweller of our Mother Nature I decided to ask anyone, wherever you happen to live who is willing to read this, to respond to our common responsibility, duty and obligation as citizens of this community and of the entire world to help in keeping our sacred land clean of garbage by choosing to honor, celebrate, respect and protect our precious natural environment and surroundings; and by doing so setting the example for others who are not yet doing it, to hopefully choose to do so.
This is an open invitation to empower each of us to live up to our maximum potential to preserve our homeland by opting to vote ‘green’ not in just in our ballots or on Earth day, but with every single one of our actions, with each of our choices and with each dollar we spend. Doing so in a conscious and mindful manner, with full awareness of how each one of these personal choices will have a rippling effect on our future and the future of our children for generations to come.
I have young children who need you to help me co-create a cleaner and healthier community. As their mother, as an educator and as a facilitator of their upbringing I’ve been trying my best to sow those essential seeds of compassion from an early age to provide them with the awareness, true love and care; so hopefully guided by example they will choose to love nature rather than harm it, they will choose to reduce their consumption to begin with and opt to recycle in order to minimize their environmental footprint.
In the end, we can’t control those who choose to litter or the reasons for their choice of action; but we what we can each do, is to commit to: “being the change we want to see in the world.”
We each can vote and speak with our daily actions. Let’s all opt to choose wisely so that our planet has a chance to live and we can have a chance to flourish and breathe for generations to come!
It’s my hope that each of us rises to this call of duty and walks the talk, by becoming willing and active participants of this journey to do all that’s humanely possible to defend, preserve, protect, love and care for our Mother Earth!
Thank you!
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