A moth has become caught up, blinded by the light, right here beside me. I saw him last night, in all his snowy whiteness.

Suppose this means that I should find some moth deterrent of some sort. I’ll google it later.

Anywho, not necessarily thinking environmentally of late. But, I am looking at the meaning of life. My life.

Daniel Quinn recently penned a, er, digitally typed more like a piece on the meaning of life.

If you’ll recall Mom, I found him, just sitting there on the shelf in that bookstore, something in the title ISHMAEL intrigued me. I had always struggled with identifying myself as an environmentalist, and Quinn made sense. Still does.

…The meaning of life is to live: to breathe, to sigh, to wonder, to walk, to sleep, to pass life on to others, in life and in death. But I’ll never say it better than Shirin does in my novel The Story of B:

A child looks at the sea that rolls across the plains and calls it grass. But this is not grass. This is deer and bison and sheep and cicadas and moles and rabbits. This handful of stalks here—this is a mouse. And the mouse, the ox, the gazelle, the goat, and the beetle all burn with the fire of grass. Grass is their mother and father, and their young are grass.”

Daniel Quinn: Another Interpretation of the ‘Meaning of Life’ (part 2)

The product of not recognizing the significance of it all is the many traumatized adults out there I see and have seen/heard/witnessed. With their verbal pounding of feet and demanding you pay them some attention…nNNNOOOWWw. These bored, and directionless multitudes. The angry, the disillusioned.

Like me that day when I was, I think 6, and I’d just had my cast off my broken wrist. We were in the grocery store (Dominion, if I recall), having an all out breakdown at the denial of my needs, right in the cookie aisle {or some such location}.

So you grabbed my arm and proceeded to haul me outta that store so fast my head would spin on its shoulders. To which I responded, that clever asshole I could be, “MOMMY, THAT’s MY BROKEN ARM”. You told that story so much Mom, but I remember that day. It changed both of us I guess.

You know what? I remember it VIVIDLY.

After I said that, I thought, I swear to god Mom, I thought you were going to drag me out to the car and kill me. I saw this look in your eye. Of course, you didn’t kill me, or otherwise. Nope. Instead, you didn’t speak to me the whole way home. Not one single word. It was truly awful.

I learned from that. I had it etched into my soul that embarrassing you in public was grounds for punishment of the worst kind – complete and total silence. For you, my little scene was equal to betrayal.

I see so many adults today that just act like everything, or everyone, or the universe as a whole, whomever, owes them something. They have no sense of pride. And they have absolutely no concept of social graces, or how to be polite, friendly. More and more it seems. Everyone seems so entitled.

I have no clue what has changed. But they certainly behave like they are entitled to something more than just…“the curtains” {said with a hi-pitched British accent}

And they walk around, and they truly appreciate nothing. They think that recycling their red cups and plastics, cardboard and otherwise devoids them of any more responsibility towards this place called earth.

They purchase, they discard, they grow tired of, they move on to the next trend. Out with the old, in with the new.

RENEW, REUSE, RECYCLE

But, instead, the very ideas we have, and the way in which we actually VIEW the earth needs to be renewed. We need to take another look at what is truly important, and what’s at stake.

Anyways Mom, sorry, feeling a little preachy.

I’m by far the worst offender when it comes to recycling. I am just not quite that organized. Far better than I was, certainly. I could do a lot better.

But it’s hard when you don’t have land of your own to grow, it takes more than just opportunity and desire. It takes ingenuity and strength to drag those bags of dirt down the street all on your own.

My contribution though I suppose are words and the photos that try to capture these things that surround me.

But I’m just going to leave the moth to itself, what will be will be. But I did turn off the light.

Dawn has broken, and I can hear the birds heralding a new day. The village comes to life.

I realize that I have lately begun to surround myself with those of like mind. Or, maybe it’s fair to say that like attracts like.

We just can’t help ourselves.

Em, Mom, maybe that is the way to save all this for the future, just actually appreciate what is right there under our feet, right now.

Or be the moth, attracted to the dazzling light, believe it to be ‘the way’ and flap and fight, stamp our feet and make a big scene.

Anywho should get ready for work. Those birdy’s are getting louder.

Ciao for now,
Love,