blog action day: the environment

today is blog action day, an event coordinated by the people here: http://blogactionday.org/

on this day, some fifteen thousand bloggers have committed to provide writing or images with a focus on the environment.

i took this photograph last year. it’s a day lily petal up very close. its mother plant lives in my garden in a bed of river pebbles.

i like to think that in my use of the term environment (which is not entirely limited to describing the earth, air, land, and water i live in, on, beside, and around. which i care for, damage, use, love, forget about, immerse myself in, celebrate, teach about, photograph, protect myself from, play with, rearrange and so on), i like to think that everything i write about is connected to it, describes it, celebrates it and so on because the environment for me is everything from the bacteria in my intestines to the cats-eye nebula. and everything in-between and everything else that i don’t even know to know about.

i should mention here that when i first responded to this opportunity, i wrote a lengthy diatribe on the environment. on political, social, fiscal, economic, and social responsibility. you have likely already read such things and so i blew it off. you have better things to do than read my bogus rant i am sure. instead, i sat back and let the red edge of anti-them bravado leave my thinking and allowed my own knowing of what is right and good to enter my conscious mind.

and so.

in my own life i know that a small act of kindness, or goodness, or quality is indistinguishable from a large act of quality. acts of quality are not bound by the terms of quantity and so are immeasurable. therefore what might appear to be a small act and what might be described as a large act are in fact indistinguishable.

and so i engage in small acts of change which incrementally amount to something. some of those acts are practical and measurable. some of those acts are simply necessary. some of them are kites, flown high on unseen currents and carried along
without my direct influence, connected to me by a slender thread from sky to earth. intuitively, those are the ones that are causing real change. i’ll never know in the way that a dragonfly beating its wings by the edge of a little stream will never know that it has contributed to the onset of a cyclone in the south china sea.

finally;

a robert fripp aphorism which i have taped to my desk;

The way we describe our world shows how we think of our world.
How we think of our world directs how we interpret our world.
How we interpret our world governs how we participate in it.
How we participate in the world shapes the world.

in my life i try to bring some small measure of goodness into the world through my work, my play, and my being. it is about offering possibilities to the people around me that they can then embrace as their own, discard as superfluous, tickle and refine and then call them their own, whatever works for them. this blog is one small part of my work as a person to offer possibilities. our work in caring for this world in detail and in its entirety is contained in the moment, in the care full act, in the love we give.