Reap. Sow.
Written by Helga
Saturday, 26 December 2009 12:34
The seeds were planted a long time ago. Summer of 1982, in Hamburg Germany. I was 12 years old and spending the summer there visiting my Oma and Opa. I remember walking into town with them. Seeing a car pull off to the side of the road, watching a man drop old batteries into a metal container and driving off. I asked my grandparents what was he doing; they explained that he was throwing the batteries away in a special container so that they may be thrown away properly. I thought to myself, “what a hassle! Just throw them in the trash at home!” and promptly forgot about the incident.
Until college. Texas Tech University, Lubbock Texas. Working at a fudge & coffee store in the mall, autumn 1990. I was 20. We had a key location at a four corners intersection where you could get food, sit and rest, socialize. We were a walk up store, not one you could enter into, with a coffee bar at one end where you could have a sit and a joe. Busy Saturday afternoon, lots of people eating fudge and drinking the then newly novel (in that small town, anyways!) cappuccinos at our counter. A woman orders a soft drink and the owner/manager hands it to her in a Styrofoam cup. The woman then launches into a whole clearly pre-thought out spiel about how bad Styrofoam is, choking up landfills with non-biodegradable waste. She is angry and pious. The owner, a thoughtful woman, listened. (A lot of people were listening, wanting to see where this was going) Though the owner didn’t know what to say, she was just trying to run her business. The woman who ordered the drink handed it back and said she didn’t want it. I saw what was going on, this was her way of making an impact, now we would have to eat the loss of the drink and the cup. To me, that woman trying to make her point had just put that cup into the landfill herself. We got on with our business. I forgot about the whole thing pretty quickly.
Maybe 1993. Hanging out with my friends, a good bunch of us that just hung out together. We were always at Bryan and Dave’s rented house, it was the most comfortable place to be. I forget who it was but someone brought up recycling. I don’t know why. Maybe there was an initiative on campus. But I remember thinking to myself, “what a pain in the ass, recycling! Like we don’t have enough to do already! Just throw it away and be done with it!” That was what I had thought. I remember it clearly. I didn’t want to add something else to my life, there was enough stuff in life you had to do without adding that to it. This whole recycling thing was starting to be like a pesky mosquito that kept buzzing around my ears, it won’t go away.
It took me many years later to figure it out. That throwing something ‘away” really just meant throwing it ‘away from me‘. And since we are all throwing it away from me that means it has to go somewhere, near someone else. At some point that could be you. Or me.
What’s the impact there? This is huge.
This is a blog about my journey. From naive, dismissive, and ignorant, refusing to engage in any of this nonsense called recycling, being green, making a difference. To trying to see how little waste me and my family can produce. To wanting to learn more about organic food. Living naturally. Healing naturally. Passing this on to my kids. I am just beginning. And this blog is more than just about all that.
Wanna come with? Let’s go…
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Reap. Sow. The seeds were planted long ago, pointing me in a green direction http://bit.ly/9305yA
(luv it!) RT @LiveGreenMom Reap. Sow. The seeds were planted long ago, pointing me in a green direction http://bit.ly/9305yA
Beautifully written my friend – you are so insightful and I love sharing this green journey with ya!!
Thanks Miss Smiley Green Mom!
RT @livegreenmom: Reap. Sow. The seeds were planted long ago, pointing me in a green direction http://bit.ly/9305yA
[...] perhaps you’ve come to the point where I was a few years ago. You want to ‘green’ the family & your lifestyle, but you don’t know where to [...]
[...] When I was 12, in 1982, I spent the summer in Hamburg, Germany with my grandparents, my Oma and Opa. My grandparents brought their own shopping bags to the [...]