September's New Beginnings / Wall-E

Whew! It's hard to believe it's already mid-way through September! Zebra Remedies has had so much going on! And to step it up, we are now moving to the village of Chunox, in Corozal District, Belize. Little Zebra and I will be blessed to be living on an established fruit farm, and I personally cannot WAIT to wake up every morning and go pick fresh fruit for the day. Today's post is a reflection of the movie Wall-E. If you haven't seen it, Little Zebra (my 11 yr old son, EJ aka "Little Z") and I both recommend it.

Little Zebra and I watched Wall-E again, as we keep a limited video selection and try to keep movies that are focused on real issues, even if they are hypothetical, or cartoon in nature.  I like doing this in particular as a class lesson of sorts.  Every time we watch it, we have new eyes to see it with - new information we possess in the here and now that we didn't have the last time we watched, and so new observations and questions arise.  When it's just us, I encourage talking throughout the movie - we talk about what we are seeing.  We often pause and discuss, or occasionally mention an observation out loud.  I love to hear him literally thinking, pondering and contemplating.  This is what I mean by "life schooling" or "world schooling".  I mean we quite literally live life as if every moment is a lesson.

Last night, EJ asked me if I thought after the people returned to Earth, if they ever made giant Wall-E's to clean up Earth with them.  It was a great question.

What the creators of the movie have done is left it open ended.  They aren't claiming to know what the answer is - because the problem of our man-made waste is so profound and the solution seems so inaccessible - when at every turn we realize what terrible harm we will create regardless of what we choose with what we currently know.  

But that isn't always going to be the case, and in fact, the evolution of this crisis has been emerging for some time.  The people have invented, discovered, and experimented their way through many of these problems, and we've seen knowledge like that of plastic eating mushrooms, roads built with plastic bottles and tires, and floating wind farms that can run whole countries and flow with the waves, that can at least begin to organize and reuse the products we have made that have literally no where to go, but everywhere.  In time, if we keep supporting, empowering, inspiring, educating, and creating a platform for other's to rise to the occasion, more ideas will emerge!  More Discoveries will be made!  More experiments will lead to situations that will shape the future.  

We have the worlds largest messy room.  We have too much stuff.  It has to be gone through in a process,  It is going to be uncomfortable.  The plan may change over and over again depending on the day and the need, but we are very capable of some very basic actions.

We, as societies, can stop producing/selling/buying/discarding any item/packaging that isn't going to break down into the Earth within a short time period.

We, as societies, can look at waste - what we call "trash", and see it as building materials to create new, useful items; from drinking glasses to hurricane-proof housing.  

I don't believe there is only one answer.  I believe we are pretty much stuck with this on our planet or somehow taking up significant space in our existence, for at least a great while longer, and perhaps forever.  

Perhaps we do not need to be fighting the flow but rather going with it.  The earth is evolving around this creation.  And we really have absolutely no idea what is in store.  However, we do know that, in the here and now, we could make breathing easier by cleaning up airways/not polluting them any further.  We know that the other life we live with could be helped by us not dumping chemicals on our lawns, farms and skies.  We know our waters would benefit from having that end as well, and from being cleaned up.  We know this to the greatest of our ability today; in the here and now.  

And so while we are here, we ask you to rise with us, in creating an ever-more balanced here-and-now.  Doing so with the understanding that balance changes, and is not a finite point, but rather a zone of balance.

We don't pretend to know all the answers.  We do believe that if we support each others ideas, efforts, passions and creativity; more solutions will find us and the evolution of our challenge will continue.

Join us in the Effort to Create Balance.  Join us in Intention.  "Volunteering" really just means taking action in your life. We CAN make a change!

How are YOU using "trash" as a building material? Please post about it in our Forum, the Zebra TribeChat