Being a Part of It All

A friend commented: Have you heard of the Waterkeepers Alliance? Wonder if any of them have made their way into your circle. Turkey Creek Community Initiatives is a member of the Alliance (at least for now).
WOW. I checked em out at http://www.waterkeeper.org/. I very much dig that they’re a national constellation of groups of trained local people with their own boat (and waders, too!) observing and documenting, through formal protocols, the condition of watersheds and waterways in their own neighborhoods, focusing on the effects of industrial pollutants. They sound like true Guradians of the Earth, Water Division. Also provides the people direct connection with Earth as well as power tools for protection of, and advocacy for, healthy living waters.

For myself, it’s essential now that I focus on my own daily practice: the solid realization that I am myself an industrial polluter- an Ajax chlorine BLEACH user, a solvent and detergent user, a corporate water user, and that I have a choice about that, as well as deeply felt knowing that I can do this- keeps me focused on personally exploring daily practice independent of the hegemony of Babylon. I find that employment or participation within the nonprofit world, the corporate world- especially working with issues I care about deeply- keeps me thinking/being/engaging/obsessing in and with the Babyloney of struggle. Struggle with meetings, papers, memos, budgets, deadlines, filings, phones, bureaucrats and bureaucratic wrangling, all the while desperate to keep “making” enough little money to keep giving to the big polluters/sweatshop runners/agribusiness captains/bankers/looters to keep them supplying the soaps and balms and fashions and “entertainments” I’ve come to depend on….. Well.

I’ve been thinking lately that all of our widely varying practices- social, political, cultural, personal, thinking, religious practices- are essentially human attempts to live consonant with our human needs, in this case our need to do right by our own lights, the light being reflections of the same Sun through widely varying lenses.

Guardians of the Earth like Waterkeepers and TCCI are trained, willing & able to engage directly with the Man in his own language. Formal organization is essential to that process.
And through my current lens, informal organization is essential: focusing on practice within my geographic community, who or whatever that is, is opening in me exploration and direct, immediate engagement with LIFE.