Into the Future...

The girls of the Future

Here they are - the girls of the future! These are our four grand- daughters. Every time we think of them it reminds us how important it is to quit dwelling on the mistakes of the past, which have gotten us in to the situations we face now, and put our energy into creating the future that will sustain these growing youth and their future families as well.

Our family tries to live consciously. That is, we try to be aware of the effect our actions will have on the world around us. There are so many levels to that, we are always discovering new ones. And while I suspect we will never quite think of everything, you can never feel bad about doing the best you can. And you always aspire to do better, always learning more about the connections between your actions and the environment.

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. - John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

We just had the 3 older girls here for just over a week, and it was a good exercise in teaching them some basic green/conscious living principles.
It was a challenge for them, but they quickly mastered our crazy recycling system: burnable (newspaper for starting fires), compostable, recyclable (5 categories!), and what we call "Total Garbage". Remembering to turn out the lights when you leave the area was harder, and hardest still was remembering that chickens do not get meat scraps or orange or banana peels. The dogs get the meat treats and the garden compost and worm pile get the other. We use cloth napkins, and everyone has their special ceramic or glass cup to drink from that gets washed once a day or when needed. They help me hang their clean wet clothes on our "solar and wind- powered clothesline"!

They love to gather the eggs from the hens and help us in the garden, not bad for a bunch of city girls. We try to teach them where their food comes from and about birds and bugs and which wild plants are poisonous and which are edible and why not to pick ALL the wildflowers in any one spot.

We cook with them, everything from bread to pizza to energy bars, all from scratch. We do not eat anything that comes pre-made in a package. We drink cider that they helped us press from apples last fall. We walk.
And we can tell from their response that this is not all normal fare for them and that they love to see the connection between things - those little "Aha!" moments where the dots connect and they see how one thing in life acts with another.

To see these connections, the effect one action has on other things, that knowledge is the first step toward living a conscious life that will sustain us into the future.

"We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past."
- Miguel de Unamuno, writer and philosopher (1864-1936)