…I read something once…really, it’s not gonna get much more precise than that…this guy from I think a Middle Eastern country was puzzled by Mother’s Day, saying what? Only one day a year to honor your mother?!…and he kinda had a point…which brings me to Earth Day….

Oh, mercy mercy me, oh, things ain’t what they used to be, oh no,
Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas, fish full of mercury…
Marvin Gaye

…this time last year, the Caribbean was acting kinda funny…not its usual placid self…raging, unceasing winds, waves that wiped out whole sections of beach in the short time I was there, battered sea walls, caused a concrete deck to collapse down the beach, leaving these giant tree-pole-thatched-umbrella things lying in the sand….

…one morning, the sea puked up mounds of seaweed, detritus, and lots and lots of plastic trash all up and down the beach…unpleasant, certainly…the tropical paradise turned garbage dump…there’s gotta be a metaphor there, somewhere…

…I just wanna say one word to you…just one word…are you listening? Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it…
Mr. McGuire, The Graduate

…forty-three years into that future, there’s an island of plastic trash the size of Texas floating somewhere in the north Pacific…countless gallons of a substance wars are fought over crafted into a near infinite variety of colorful, disposable items…making me wonder just how many plans were executed, how much human effort went into creating this incredible mass of worthless and increasingly toxic crap…
 
….then, maybe one root of our ecological crisis is that we in the developed world don’t see our waste enough…we put it in plastic bags, put the bags in plastic cans, take the cans out to the street, and it’s gone…we think we’re green or eco-conscious because we dispose of our massive quantities of factory-synthesized products and seemingly limitless non-recyclable and generally completely unnecessary product packaging responsibly….who among us, in our unspeakably wasteful modern lifestyles, isn’t just asking to get barfed on by the ocean?…

…of course, if I wanted to be a totally pretentious yoga dude…which, of course, I don’t…I could also use this as a metaphor for those mindwaves Patanjali talks about stilling in the Yoga Sutras…in some translations, at least….first, ya gotta let ‘em rage…let ‘em spit up whatever trash is in there…bring it out to be seen….in the end, hiding your trash never works…it always winds up spread out all over the beach when ya least expect it…

*…this post contains approximately 90% post-consumer recycled content, from the blue crate on the curb in front of the home and corporate headquarters of Yoga for Cynics…*