EcoBliss: What Will You Give Up?

The sky during one of our weekend walks.

Listening to: A little bit of Sufi music.

Bliss: The gray cat sniffing the air through the window to my right. The rustling of leaves down the sidewalk and street. The trees turning reds and bronzes and oranges. The warm air. The sound of water through the trees as the weather turns toward rain.

Over a couple of evenings, a bit here, a bit there, I've re-watched the film Gandhi. I watch this movie every two or three years, and it always feels like more than just "watching a movie." It feels like an experience, and each time, it teaches me something.

Lately, one of the things I've been pondering, is the place of religion in our advanced, technological, science-oriented, over-intellectualized culture. There have been so many books published that claim hyperbolic theses, like "religion is the cause of everything bad in the world." As if all the bad ever could be pinned one, single cause. Talk about a lack of logical argument. "Nevers" and "always." Aren't we taught in high school to avoid those?

In my gut, though, I know that religion is not the cause of everything bad but rather a weapon used by certain people to bolster their own agendas.

Religion can be, should be a weapon of peace and justice. And so I watched Gandhi to remember that at one point in time very recently, religion was used in just this way. That it was elevated to its highest and best philosophical and experiential heights.

Christ gave us the goals and Mahatma Gandhi the tactics.
--Martin Luther King

What I've been thinking about specifically is religion in relation to the earth, which I have written about before (here and here and here).

After getting the flier in the mail mocking Kathy Dahlkemper for her idea that maybe, just maybe, more people biking to work would help the looming energy crisis, we got a new flier a few days ago mocking her for suggesting that maybe, just maybe, a little personal sacrifice would be necessary.

Sacrifice: an act of giving up something valued for something perceived as more important.

Now the politician mocking Kathy Dahlkemper is a member of a political party, who, in other times and in other ways, likes to bring up this concept of sacrifice.

We should make sacrifices for our country by sending boys off to die for just one example.

But dare to bring up the idea that we might have to curtail our greed and our gluttony so that future generations might have a healthy planet to live on and all of a sudden you are a commie, a socialist, someone trying to steal my freedom damn it!

As I write this, I am sitting in a very comfortable house. I just ate a (relatively) pricey organic banana and will go downstairs in a few minutes to make myself another imported Italian espresso.

My life is good. Very good.

And I think that most people reading this -- sitting at a computer in a fairly comfortable setting if I had to guess -- also have pretty good lives.

And in our comfort, we become complacent and we grow increasingly afraid of losing our comfort. We protect our comfort at all costs.

We put in security systems.

We tie our money up in accounts that grow instead of sharing it with others because one never knows when one will need it.

We isolate ourselves from the problems of even our small towns and cities by not looking.

We walk quickly past the homeless, telling ourselves that they want money for alcohol.

We convince ourselves that recycling is a good enough contribution and that everything will be okay.

If you've read this blog for more than two minutes, you know I'm not a doom and gloom girl. I do not believe the world is coming to any kind of end. I believe that we have serious problems and I believe that we can solve them.

But we might have to sacrifice a bit. We might have to actually do something a tiny bit uncomfortable. A tiny bit...inconvenient.

This is not India pre-independence. There's a good chance you won't be asked to risk your life.

But there are other risks that you should be asking of yourself. How often do you risk any tiny bit of your prosperity? How often do you risk your heart?

What are you willing to do? Is sacrifice a word that you can get comfortable with?