Where the Personal Meets the Environmental
This is a personal blogging project that discusses the intersection between our personal spiritual lives and the state of the environment.
New blogs will be posted every Friday.
About the author:
Rebecca Beaton is an environmental educator, speaker, writer, and lifer. This blog is written with the intention to share what she is learning every day on her spiritual journey, which is not separate from her deep passion for the environment. Rebecca works towards fulfilling the vision of a truly sustainable world — one that incorporates every aspect of sustainability: environment, economy, community, culture, politics, and spirituality. For more information about Rebecca, you can check out her personal website at www.rebeccabeaton.ca
About the blog:
Change has to start from within. The personal is the spiritual is the environmental is the political. Everything that happens at the personal scale is magnified at the political, economic, and environmental scale.
I’ve blogged before about the need for Visioning, and how whatever we resist will persist. This is true for both the personal and the political – no matter what our cause. I’ve also blogged more recently about Time and how creating more of this will not only improve our own lives, but help the environment as well.
To take another example, I want to look at the answer to a very important question. What drives most environmental destruction?
Money.
What drives the desire for money?
The things that money can buy.
In other words, we don’t want money per se, but we want the things that money can bring. On the surface we might think that these things we want are power and friends and beautiful houses and tropical vacations… but take it one level deeper and…
Don’t we all want the same thing in the end?
Love. Acceptance. A sense of purpose.
Are these not at the root of every being’s intention for belonging to a religion? A cult? A club?
If this is the end to be met, then there are plenty of other, more successful, means to get there. The belief that ‘money can buy happiness’ has become outdated.
We are constantly learning from past mistakes, and evolving. It’s time to move forward. We live in a time of ‘systems thinking’, where nothing can be looked at in isolation, and everything is interconnected. How we live our inner lives and whether or not we seek true fulfillment and an authentic existence, does affect the planet; through our actions, our choices, and our words.
This concept will be the focus of blogs on this site. All blogs are intended to be reflections on my own experimentations with living and how these things relate to building a sustainable future, which I hope will also be helpful to YOU on your own journey. I intend to make it full of lots of practical ideas for action as well… so stay tuned!
Becca
