Environmental Blindness

Last week, I spent a couple of hours doing a beach clean with 50+ other local volunteers.

It did my heart good to see so many people putting love into the beach. It was my first Welsh beach clean – super chuffed that the litter picker was a dragon.

Also last week, when it was a bit sunnier than it is now, I saw a young family get settled on the beach around empty drink cans and food packets. It wasn’t their rubbish so they left it there and their toddlers made sandcastles around it.

To me, picking up other people’s rubbish is an act of devotion. I do it all the time.

It’s easy to get in the frame of mind that ‘I didn’t put it there so why should I pick it up?’. Like the young family at the beach who would rather relax around litter than take a two-minute journey to the bin.

It made me wonder if the general population is becoming numb to problems with our environment. That they just don’t see the plastic bottles, the fast-food wrappers strewn across pavements, the tossed away cigarette butts….. What’s one more thing? Nor do they notice the bizarre weather patterns. Have we become blind?

Energetically, the world is hurting. It’s our collective pain, not just current but also ancestral, that’s the root cause of environmental disasters and global warming. Deep, deep pain and disconnection with one’s spirit and roots.All that is wrong in the world is a mirror to what is wrong on the inside.

And rather than healing, most are locked into an illusion that the world’s problems are not theirs. That plastic bag? Not mine, not my problem. Landslide in India? Well, I don’t live there.

Yet, it is all my problem. It is all my cause. It is all my pain.It can be overwhelming. So much so that it’s easier to remain asleep and numb, turning a blind eye because seeing the global problems would mean having to tap into an energetic abyss of hurt. Remain in limbo, watch the world burn (or drown or blow away) with a sense of detachment.

The beginning of healing is noticing that sweet wrapper or plastic bottle and binning it on behalf of someone else. Doing it because on some level you realise it is your problem. You take ownership. And that simple, selfless act can be the start of rekindling a connection with Mother Earth, with one’s roots and one’s spirit.