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 Drawing a Circle in the Sand - Teaching Awareness to A Consumer Society, continued

by Sheri Dixon

   Ice cream? Who said anything about ice cream?

   I’m talking about the garbage truck, silly.

   That phantasmal chariot that swallows our trash like a giant metal pelican and carries it off. *Poof* It’s gone. If a child is precocious enough to ask, “Mommy, where is the garbage truck taking our stinky putrefied wastes?” the answer will be “To the dump, honey”, and that will be the end of it.

   Our food comes from the store and our wastes go to the dump.

The Circle of Life has been replaced with the Tunnel Vision of Consumerism.

    We need to take our precious children and challenge them. If they stop asking ‘why?’, we are lost. “Why?” must be answered, and then “Before that?” and “Then what?” need to be addressed as well.

    “We get our food from the store” must be followed with “But BEFORE that it comes from the factory and BEFORE that it was grown and harvested on the farm using compost in the soil to help it grow."  If any link in that chain includes anything that we are ashamed of or don’t want our children knowing (or ingesting) we must change it, either by demanding that changes are made, or by growing our own.

    “Our trash goes to the dump” must be followed with “And AFTER that, it goes into landfill which takes up huge amounts of land area and pollutes the earth, air, and water. We must make sure that our additions to the landfill are minimum by recycling what we can, composting what we can, reusing what we can, and then and only then, throwing the rest away in biodegradable bags, not those quilted plastic nightmares that are advertised to be able to stop a runaway train.

    Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, compost to compost, everything goes around and around in a circle as old as the earth itself.

    Traveling in a straight line is exciting in a brash, blazing-a-trail kind of way. Taming of the wilderness (natural or corporate) and all that. The future is unknown, and there is no past before your tiny self appearing on the scene. If you are a proper consumer, you are also teaching your children to grow up blazing their own trails. Taking what you need where you find it and discarding after use is unsustainable, irresponsible, and ultimately discouraging. Because no matter how hard we try to hide it behind and underneath chemically processed hair, Botoxed faces, and designer-clad bodies that have been liposuctioned into submission, encased in our autos thundering down the highway with our cell phones attached to our ears, there is still a core of organic matter right in the center of our souls, that little core needs roots, and roots need compost, dang-it.

   The Circle of Life requires a lot more thought and care to travel than a straight line, because it’s a CIRCLE and you will be back around this way again. Judicious pruning and mulching must replace slash and burn. Attention is required to preserve the knowledge and cornerstones of the past both for use today, and for our children’s use in the future.

    The child who finds an egg, sees that egg hatch into a chick, feeds that chick till it grows and lays eggs of it’s own has learned a valuable lesson.

    Planting seeds together, watering, weeding, playing in the dirt in general, harvesting and eating something you planted together will make an impression that will last long after the last cucumber is pickled.

    Helping at milking time early in the morning has its payoff later in the day with homemade chocolate ice cream.

    It’s our duty as homesteaders to not only keep our own family and farm in order, but to teach others how to do the same, because our ‘family’ is everyone and our ‘farm’ is this whole planet.

    Quietly, gently, patiently, one perfect free-range egg, one soft, juicy, taste bud-tingling tomato, and one fresh cranked bowl of ice cream at a time, we can, and will, ease this generation out of the long dark Tunnel of Consumerism and back into the grandmotherly hug that is the Circle of Life.

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