Let Us Honor Mother Earth Everyday, In Every Way

Earth Day is truly a delightful holiday... perhaps the most Holy, even. It comes well into Spring, where the life reemerging is abundant and lively. Yet collectively, we often ignore this day in comparison to religious holy days. I would like to acknowledge the vast disconnect our species has embraced from Planet Earth. She is our shared mother, yet we ignore, disrespect, and exploit her, as if she abused us as children, and now we wish to punish her for the rest of our days.

I'm not going to get into why this has become the default today, but just think about how often you honestly stop to consider how much she has provided for your own individual life. What is holding you back from treating the Earth as the sacred life source from which you come?

If you've never considered this before, hello and welcome! You are an Earthling, just like every single other life form who exists here. This planet provides the resources for every single one of our lives to be able to occur. It is sacred ground that we all are privileged to be a part of, and therefore we each are sacred, too. So in light of embracing our own Holy-ness as Beings Of the Earth, the biggest thing we can do to honor Mother Earth is to first honor ourselves!

I don't want us to get bogged down by the mistakes or ignorances of the past, personally or collectively. Recognition is a wonderful thing, and insightful as to how not to be! Committing to just being better is really the goal here, but I want to go through some of the ways we might be dishonoring our own selves.

Let me first note, consumerism in our society has literally been created as a trap to keep us addicted to and willful toward convenience and comfort. The blame for these tactics should be directed at the people in power of the governing and corporate agencies. However, the only way out of this trap is to take responsibility for our own behavior, and then choose to continuously love ourselves more than we did yesterday.

The following are some of my ideas about how we are sold convenience at the cost of poisoning ourselves. All of these items and behaviors affect our footprint on the planet, and it is my earnest belief that we rethink all of this, for the sake of our own vitality.

Food. We are so far removed from where our food comes. People used to have to hunt and gather every day, and now we just go into mega-stores, buy boxes of color-tainted mush and call it food, and pretend like it's normal for most people to be chronically ill. The way humans produce food is tainted, often with pesticides irresponsibly sprayed on crops, drugged up and scared animals living in horrendous conditions, and unethical labor practices for products shipped across the entire globe.

What we're told is healthy changes every half decade, and humans are used as eternal guinea pigs for the intersections of the food, chemical, and medical industries. One example of this is the amount of sugar, and now sugar alternatives, placed unnecessarily in unimaginable food products. They've done such a good job of getting people addicted to it, and not encouraging personal investigations into ingredients and nutritional content, that the average person doesn't even know that they're consuming it. We give sugar to children as a reward (bribe), and they unconsciously learn to turn to it to cope with life, in good times and bad.

There will be more about this incredibly broad issue down the road, but the food you consume –the literal fuel your body lives off of, that determines how you function on a daily basis– is one of the most important facets of your life. Do you really know what it is you are dumping into each and every one of your trillions of cells, and the processes taken to get from somewhere amongst Earth's surface, all the way into your face?

Alcohol. Some people certainly have the ability to enjoy themselves while regulating their consumption in this category, but there are too many people who rely on alcohol to numb their life away, which only multiplies their issues later on. Alcohol inhibits your physiological functions, with lingering effects, and the impacts of your inebriated choices can sometimes be beyond repair. Yet our culture heavily encourages this consumption. It is advertised on all mediums, and portrayed unrealistically in entertainment, giving people a false obligation to partake in a behavior that weakens your immune system and may cause amnesia, to say the least.

There is an argument to be made for using alcohol as part of a ritual for ceremonial occasions, as our ancestors have done for centuries, but my point is that we have abused this tool as a means to cope with life itself, when really all it does is suppress progress and delay healing. Mother Nature has provided us with the resources to create these substances, and on a wide scale, we've turned it into an excuse to ignore our shit, rather than gracefully taking the medicine from it to improve our lives.

Drugs. Let me start with saying, I believe many drugs can do miracles for people in chronic pain who need assistance getting out of their intolerable state. And I also believe that there is certainly a time and place to use drugs “for fun!” But again, the dishonoring I witness is when people rely on these substances chronically and don't see their own power without them. This goes for pharmaceuticals and recreational usage. Human bodies are designed to heal. There are likely some circumstances where modern medicine is required, but the amount of chronic illness that plagues our species, physically and mentally, is out of control, and the increasing availability of drugs has made the situation worse, not better.

It can't just be the population boom that has made the amount of cases of deranged and weak individuals continuously skyrocket. It must also be correlated with the willingness of people to pop pill after pill for each and every symptom, not ever fully recovering because the root cause was never resolved to begin with. I believe that starting from the beginning, determining the “why” of your illness, visible or otherwise, is the true path to relieving yourself from the burden of being a customer of Big Pharma, or your drug dealer, for the rest of your life. Your body was made to recover, from the slightest cut, to even dissolving malignant tumors. Miracles do happen! And they're more likely when their outcome is supported and encouraged, instead of denied, or abandoning even the potential.

Smoking. This is an obvious one, and it's wonderful to witness the rapid decline in cigarette smokers. My brief opinion about vaping: there's no way it is a healthy habit. People who switch seem healthier because they don't cough or smell bad, but they are more frequently fiending, due to the increased access to habituation. But it's too soon to determine any damages, other than the electronic waste now littered all over. And many people who still continue to smoke, despite all the well-documented evidence not to, think that the planet is their personal ashtray.

I know addictions are a bitch to rid yourself of. Everything listed to this point are things I've endured the quitting of, at least in some fashion. And through that, I've felt the magic of simply feeling so much better, in my physical body, as well as brain function. Your Earthly vessel can recover from the damage you've put it through, and the rewards are promised once you commit. Perhaps the quickest ones to recognize from smoking are your ability to breathe and smell; you get to go to another level. Fresh air and fragrant flowers are just some of the immense beauties of this planet, and you are worthy of enjoying them!

Medicine. The dishonoring I see in the realm of medicine is the corporate attachment, meaning pharmaceuticals and insurance companies. Rather than determining the cause of one's illness, there seems to be a blatant disregard of individuals' nutrition, stress, and mobility. If medicine was centered around the wholeness of a person, rather than focusing on what prescriptions to write people, or what diagnosis to label them with, we could actually see improvements in our health care systems. When even the wealthy countries struggle to keep their citizens healthy, you know it is a systemic issue, likely caused by deceit and corruption, because there is so much money involved!

Nature has so many of the answers, yet we are constantly ignoring the ways of the Earth, and instead paying big companies. The more you look into it, the more disgrace you find in these institutions. Health is not their goal, yet they've done a great job at convincing us of their backwards approach. Just take a moment to think about it, and then take the rest of your life to get to know your body. The longer you do this, the better you will become and being able to determine what is best for you. Your body knows! You just have to be willing to practice listening to its indications.

Chemicals. They're everywhere. They're unavoidable. But you don't need to allow them into every aspect of your life! Many people are convinced that we need harsh chemicals because germs are bad, or something like that. There are more micro-organisms than there will ever be of us. The vastness of these unseeable life forms goes way over my head, but we need to stop demonizing everything we don't see or like or understand. The reality is, we all come from, and are part of, the web of life here on Earth. Chemicals used to kill do just that: kill. Whether or not it harms the user initially, there is a ripple of effects, and it's never just the one target that gets destroyed. We cannot decimate our way to “clean and healthy.” All of life wants to live, and it is all determined to do so. No matter what we kill, there will always be something else. And all the chemicals have to go somewhere, whether it be the air, the landfill, the soil, waterways... There is no solution where anything simply disappears, so there will always be repercussions for poisoning.

I'm not saying to never use chemicals. But you can use vinegar rather than bleach for almost anything, and there are more and more products that you can make yourself or purchase that are made of plant matter instead or weapons of war. And we must learn to appreciate the life that loves to spring up around us, such as dandelions. “Weeds” serve a purpose in the soil, and we've been trained to disregard all that in the name of aesthetics, again, just to sell products, because we have become so disconnected from the Earth itself. If we were in tune, we would not be able to justify putting poison on some plants and thinking it won't affect the ones we like, or the pollinators who operate the fertilization of our entire food & floral supply.

I suppose it's hard to recognize poisons as disharmonious if that is all you know, so I invite you to just take a look at products individually, and ask yourself if you understand what they are and what they do. I intend to learn more about this subject in order to be able to share the information with others, so stay tuned. My past use of certain manufactured substances has led to a multitude of visceral cognitions saying, “No, I don't like this, and I don't feel comfortable using it around my body...” And often, I don't even know how to dispose of it responsibly, which only makes its usage even harder to justify. Therefore, I've come to the conclusion that abstaining is better than partaking, and my connection with the Divine, so far, has been validating this summation.

Sedentary lifestyle. Human beings are animals. It doesn't matter how you feel about it; we are too similar to other creatures to deny this reality. Our bodies are made to move. So sitting around all day, just moving from box to box to box, will start to wear on your vitality. The saying, “If you don't use it, you lose it!” is ridiculously true when it comes to your motor functions. We used to have to scavenge all day, maneuver around obstacles, carry heavy shit, and build our own shelters and fires, all just to survive! And these days, some people are under the impression that life isn't supposed to be hard, as if we (except “the rich”, of course) are entitled to “basic necessities.” I vehemently disagree, and think that such ideology is a modern plague weakening our society. Never before in our collective lineage have societies been built out of thin air. Everything we consume comes from someone else making it happen. There are definitely people who need help, and we should do what we can out of the goodness of our hearts. But there are no free handouts. Someone, or more likely, a whole chain of individuals, has to put in effort in order for a recipient to receive goods or services. This is always how humans have gotten on.

Hard work makes life easier, otherwise everything you encounter could be a challenge! Sitting at a computer all day, then driving like a maniac to get home and sit on your couch and eating packaged food is not living. Being surrounded by boxes – walled in, constantly looking at screens – distorts your mind, and your body, if you don't use it. We are meant to bend and walk and swim, and look up into sprawling trees to watch the birds and squirrels, and find berries and mushrooms, and catch other animals in order to feed our families.

The systems in place have created more addictions with television, social media, digital games, and so on. And all of these things also have incredible benefits to our current era! But again, it's the over-use that has taken us away from Mother Nature and her miraculous wisdom, creating a false dependency on deceptive dopamine hits, when really all we are craving is to dip our toes in a cold stream before summiting near a waterfall, and to see an osprey fly overhead. The Earth is always calling to us, but are we willing to oblige?

Plastic. One of mankind's most useful innovations, but to a fault. Plastic products lasting forever are great when it comes to incredibly lengthy usages, but we've exceeded the need for this material beyond comprehension. I can't even believe that it's allowed for any single usage! But I don't make the rules. I just want people to wake up to the amount of plastic they consume. This is easier if you try to recycle it, because you can see it piling up in your bin. But most people, still, cannot be bothered with rinsing out plastic containers, so they just end up in the trash. Obviously there are a lot of flaws in the recycling industry, but if more people cared, we could continuously improve it over time, and truly reduce our waste, reuse what we can, and then recycle as much else into other items as possible. But the first step is to reduce. If producers couldn't sell products in plastic packaging any longer, because consumers demanded a less wasteful product, then producers would have to innovate new solutions.

We are the market! It is our duty to use our purchasing power to speak up for the wild Earth that provides us with all of our resources. To continue on as-is is a dishonoring of the planet, because we know how bad the pollution is, simply from plastic alone, after it has already been created. Yet the rage and subsequent solutions for this is drowned out by climate fanatics. I don't see how we can change the climate (ever...that's outside of our power, but especially) when we can't even convince people to stop polluting the Earth under our own feet. And within our bodies! Humans are impacted by consuming from plastic products, especially when heat is involved, such as from a microwave, or a water bottle sitting out in the sun. Hormone-disrupting chemicals used to construct plastics leech out of the plastic and into the things we are ingesting, therefore getting directly into our bodies, as well as the microscopic fragments of the material itself. It is time we thank plastics for all the convenience they have given us, and then choose to go forward without them, unless it is by accumulating and recycling the plastics that already exist.

Avoiding Self Love. This is one that we all have been guilty of at some time or another. For some of us, this may be all we know. I used to be in this boat: finding any reason to sell myself short, doubt myself, not live up to my own standards, not look joyously in the mirror, mistreat my body, talk down on myself. The list could go on for so long!

A common, perhaps camouflaged, version of this dishonoring I have frequently witnessed is when young people - by young, I mean in their late teens, twenties, or thirties - complain about their body hurting, and then proceed to blame it on “being old.” These comments always shake me, because it feels like a willingness to just give up; an excuse to surrender to the deterioration of your body for the rest of your life, rather than finding ways to heal so you no longer have to endure such pain. Often times this dialogue is a joke, however, it is a degradation to the self, because it eliminates a critical thought: you are likely to live almost twice as long as you already have. It eliminates love and respect for the power of your body, by ignoring the signs it is giving you through your pain. And this mentality encourages negative self talk, which perpetuates looping limiting beliefs that simply are not true. Our bodies change over time, but if we embrace these changes by listening to the signals from the infinite wisdom within, we would no longer doubt the capabilities of these meat suits we are living in.

Clearly the concept of loving ourselves isn't something very common within the messaging of our society, otherwise so many people would not be struggling with it. In public school, we aren't taught emotional intelligence and self-care, nor were most of our parents, so in general, this is something one has to seek out on their own in order to become skilled at it, if they even feel the pull to do so. And that is where I wish to sound the alarm! We all are born whole, free, and worthy of love, yet so many things skew this truth along our way, which leads us to no longer believe it. But we each have the power within ourselves to relearn to turn inward to find the love and joy that we desperately desire. From there, we can repair the open wounds we have been living with, and begin to experience the inverse snowball effect of climbing out of the holes we have dug ourselves into in order to shelter-in-place from the external forces that scare us.

We all are worthy of love and joy simply because we are alive, here and now on this eternally generous, nurturing planet. Once you open yourself up to this concept, you begin to recognize the abundance all around, attract miracles into your own existence, and break free from the limiting beliefs that you have been held back by for so long. But it all starts from within. No one is coming to save you, except maybe yourself! And to me, this is the holiest gospel: YOU have to be your own source of energy. Consequently, in order for our ways of life on this planet to become harmonious, we also have to heal our own environments. Nothing is more empowering than this realization.

If you look at each one of these concepts, there is a trail of deception attached, and that is really how I began to view them as harmful and dishonoring to humanity and the planet. I simply want people to realize that there are always options when it comes to your health, internally, externally, and beyond. What we've been sold is usually not for our long-term benefit, but for rapid and artificial gratification. And the more you look into this facade, the easier it all is to see, and therefore the more healing we all have to pursue.

Mother Earth is asking us to remember her. She is screaming to us to pay attention! I would like to encourage a commitment to continuously find more ways to remember the importance of our planet, which provides literally everything to us. And the very first step requires digging into our own personal behaviors, and augmenting them to be in alignment with the vitality we desire. It is truly an exciting time to be alive, just by the amount of positive change we could all witness on this planet...if we so choose!