Shut Up and Not Write...

Was catching up on the blogroll of friends this morning before work and caught one on another channel that hurt a little at first, with some healing to follow. I try to see all sides when I read these things, and thinking on it this morning was a somewhat challenging, but in the end I sorted it out.

For some time this morning I thought that I might close out my Green website, because people are probably sick and tired of hearing about carbon footprints and ecology and global warming. And then I stepped onto the platform to wait for BART at the Coliseum, way up high like a bridge, the purple rain-clouds pressed up against the glass of the atmosphere like a group of school-children, and I knew I couldn't do that. I thought about closing up shop on this blog for the remainder of the year, no links, everyone locked out, and just writing for myself, and then looked again to the mountain and clouds across from me and couldn't do that, either.

I could write here of a million environmentalists who live outside of San Francisco and how some of them have children, but that's just defensive. I ask myself, "What can I learn about myself from this?" And the lessons:

• I was raised environmental by a woman who wouldn't let me swim in my grandfather's pond because he used chemicals to clean it, a woman who had compost heaps, a woman who used old tires to plant tomatoes and other vines in, a woman who had free-range chickens. My brother will beat the shit out of the culprit who leaves the rat's nest of discarded fishing line on the beach for the birds and seals to get caught in.
• I need to be more like my mother and less like my brother in my passion of what's green. My brother wants you to see the floundering pelican in the line and suffer for your carelessness. My mother just wanted to journey alone to live green and didn't care if anyone else did or not.
• Hence, I vow to work to write Paved Paradise as a journey of my organic, and not as a diatribe to everyone else to burn their books and buy a Kindle. I am nowhere close to sainthood, ecologically. I fill pages with ink so that I don't do something psychotic--all those dead trees. I take three transit agencies to work daily, which is God-awful on the environment, albeit still better than a car. I often put containers in the wrong receptacle, out of laziness or ignorance.
• Just because I don't have children and want them doesn't mean that I need to weild that desire to anyone as a weapon. Love in the wrong use. Leave the kids out of it, Jo.

Do I ever feel like I write too much? Absolutely. But if I write too much readers can skip those parts. ;)

Amusing aside to me, because I can now chew on this too:

• I've been from the Midwest, which is seen by some coastal people on both sides of the continent as "backwards" and "primitive"
• I've been from San Francisco, which is seen by some people not living in San Francisco as "Birkenstock-bedecked" and caring more about the environment than people
• I'm reading a book right now about a sometimes misconceived environment...Afghanistan.
• Notice in the first two bullet-points I utilized the word "some." The blanket statement didn't work for me to make. My mother couldn't make them either. Not every plant can handle compost--never put it on pineapple starts. It'll rot the top that's trying to germinate.

No judgments. I imagine we're all pretty angry these days at something or more than one thing. I just wanted to state that I am working very hard not to jump up and down and lecture.

In the course of that, this post probably looks like a lecture.

Peace to you, dear reader. Sleep well.