Consanguinity: People and World

This is Ella, my beautiful niece. She loves cake, parmesan cheese, and vegetables. She can use sign language better than me, and has some seriously amazing dance moves, but even more than that she has shown me what life is all about. She has taught me what unconditional love is. I never knew I could love someone so much.

I joke with my sister that she is my therapy, but in all seriousness Ella does show me that no matter how bad life gets there is always something to smile about. For me, Ella is the thing that always makes me smile.

She has made me change how I look at the world and how I live in the world.

I mentioned in an earlier blog that how we treat the world is symbolic to how we treat each other. I take this seriously (and maybe a little too far!)

This bugger is Alfonzo. He lives in my bathroom, he moved in about a week ago. Normally I just take creatures back to their habitat. I live by the belief that the bugs that come inside just got confused and it is not their fault. So I take them and put them back into their habitat. I mean, think about it, if bugs were human size would we want them to step on us? I don't think so. 

So no, my bathroom is not full of bugs, but Alfonzo lives near my ceiling. He decided to come down tonight to get his picture taken for the blog. If he is still hanging out tomorrow morning, I'll take him outside.

I realize how crazy I may seem, but we live in a symbiotic world. But how human beings are living presently does not represent this symbiotic relationship.

We live in a time where people are anthropocentric. Just because we may process at higher levels then our non-human counterparts does not mean we can dominate over them. 

This idea of domination is venomous to society. I don't want my niece growing up in a culture that teaches the idea that people must dominate the environment, our non-human counterparts, and our peers. 

Human kind was placed on this world to live in this world to nurture and care for it but instead we are exploiting our world and fighting over resources. I could go on a tangent about scarcity, but I will save that for another day. For now I will say the idea of scarcity has created the need to dominate, because for some strange reason we believe there is not enough to go around. 

Sometimes I feel like I am perpetually stuck in work mode and teaching the idea of sharing and caring, If we live in relation with people we do not need to worry about having enough. If people are whole and living for others than we should be able to care for each other when times get rough. Instead of all being potential hoarders we could relax a little and look at the bigger picture. 

We could stop and appreciate nature instead of exploiting it.

We could appreciate the spider's ability to control insect population, instead of feeling the need to kill them because we fear how the spider could negatively affect us, maybe we could see past ourselves and live for the world. 

I realize it seems like a stretch to start this blog entry talking about my amazing niece and ending with spiders but what I am trying to say in a nutshell is this:

There are generations of people that are going to come after this, the damage we do now with our anthropocentric ideologies are going to negatively effect our future kin. There are things bigger than ourselves that we must living for. 

I was lucky enough to have Ella show me that and I hope everyone at sometime can have that awakening moment and realize how important cultivating a relationship to the world and the people in it is.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, no one thinks of changing themselves. - Leo Tolstoy