I suppose it only makes sense, living in a social cyber world, that Pinterest would help you make friends. I considered it strange when I received an email stating that my new best friend was waiting for me via the link below. I’ve gotten those emails before that say, “hey, guess what, there’s a board with a bunch of historical stuff just like your board “historic preservation”, or since you liked “make a shelf out of a pallet”, you’ll really like “build a house out of beer cans”.
I don’t get on the site very often. Usually, it’s that rare occasion that I can’t sleep. For some reason, looking at squares and rectangles filled with recipes I’ll never make and craft projects I’ll never start overwhelms me. Then I fall asleep.
Having a love/hate relationship with technology, I went with the love side and clicked the link. Technology has one true bright side: the ability to communicate with people outside of your own center of influence. A worldwide conversation about a positive, loving, meaningful future for all of earth’s inhabitants is growing. I like that.
So back to my supposed Pinterest buddy. Well okay, she had garden boards, chicken boards, canning boards, surviving nuclear fallout boards- wait, what???!!!! Ahh, a doomsday prepper. These were conspiracy theory fear mongering on crack boards. At the risk of the Google gods sending this info to Facebook so that the right side of my newsfeed will stream with ads for gas masks and zinc pills, I clicked one. I had to know. Where was she getting this information? Why?
An underground bunker sale site, of course, filled with dozens of articles on how humanity is going to destroy itself with biological, electromagnet, and nuclear war, and how we can protect ourselves from the impending fallout. Could any of these things really happen? Um, yeah, we’ve known that for seventy-five years. However, none of the above has even once been my motivation to create those matching gardening and chicken boards. The concept of looking out for number one is straight out of the egocentric way of thinking that got us in this mess in the first place. My motivation is based on more of an ecocentric concept. That as more and more people find ways to become less addicted to using up earth’s natural resources, the entire planet will benefit. Maybe we can slow down the affects of climate change, have less reason for war and more reason for tolerance. Maybe instead of putting a bunker under the ground in my back yard I can be part of a movement to prevent the next man made catastrophe.
I recently started a new community focused group on the very subject. The idea of the group is to cultivate small, simple little things we can all do to become better stewards of the earth. Recycling, reusing, sourcing local food and conscious consumerism. All those little things that save us money, make us healthier and help heal the planet. All those little things that add up to us focusing less on accumulating stuff and more on living meaningful lives. In fact, that’s what I named it- Meaningful Living. It’s a beautiful journey to find true happiness. That journey doesn’t begin in a shopping mall and doesn’t have to end in a concrete room below the surface of the soil.
“If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced that it will be by ordinary people…people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear”
Joanna Macy
And yes, I pinned that quote.
Audrey L Elder
Blogger, Writer, Sustainability Research, Activist and Citizen- Living Life Outside the Box
Meaningful Living 