ecoyear

I'll fess up here to two of my non-sustainable habits.  One is my longstanding love of magazines (I used to read Seventeen, then Glamour; I still read Shape, Sunset, Martha Stewart's Living and Body and Soul, and have recently added Interweave Knits' magazine).  Most recently, I have had a hard time with them because of the ridiculous ads and the lame articles exhorting us to "sort of greener" consuming. This is made worse by the fact that I'll read anything I can get my hands on at the gym, from O to Runner's World, Parents, etc.. 

My other ecologically unfriendly habit is the indoor gym. Lately, I have been successful at getting a lot of aerobic exercise by walking uphill on a treadmill, only because I can read as I do it, and can count on the daycare at the gym for days when I have kids with me.

However, today the contradictions were so mind blowing I had a vision of myself as a robot on Star Trek (remember those? Well, maybe not - they often seemed to have a malevolent robot which could be made to self destruct by getting it caught up in a paradox - the poor thing would repeat "does. not. compute. does. not. compute." then smoke would spew out and sparks would fly, and the Federation would be safe once more).  

Well here I was walking uphill on a treadmill to work off some unwanted calories while the T.V. gave details of not one, but two shooting sprees killing dozens of people, and I was reading an article focusing on products which make your hair look shiny, and shoes that make your legs look longer. Then the T.V. panned to a press conference showing President Obama talking about earmarks in the federal budget, including several hundred of thousands of dollars to study ways of making pig farming less smelly.

Suddenly it was abundantly clear to me that the world was so permanently messed up that I was wasting my time trying to do anything positive. Worse, I felt I myself could not continue to function with so much craziness around me. Suddenly giving up seemed like the only possible option.

Luckily, I then went home with my gamboling 4 year old, and had my coffee, and read a poem by Mary Oliver sent by a friend ("Wild Geese") and remembered my favorite short piece by Annie Dillard, "Living Like Weasels".  

It turns out I can't, won't, really don't have a desire to give up making the world a better place. So...

Do read the whole piece, if you can, but if not, this is the bare bones version:

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton--once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.