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Blog Action Day 2009

Today is Blog Action Day 2009 for Climate Change.  With so much to do and so much to change, I’d like to make my post about sustainability, the Lifeline and positive action. I’ve been a part of the Lifeline project since May 2009 and its been lifeline changing, in many ways.  I’ve always been an activist and very aware of our collective impact on the planet’s ecosystem.  Diving in full force has made me even more aware of the scope of what’s needed in change, and how interconnected all our efforts need to be.  We affect each other in so many ways, from the choices we make in purchasing to the realities we buy into collectively.  Annie Leonard’s great short film, free to watch online (only 20 minutes long), “The Story of Stuff”, really links together how our “first world” purchasing effects “third world” quality of life, pollution levels and resource depletion.

The Lifeline is a group of 9 filmmakers, volunteering their lives for a year, to cover sustainability worldwide.  Its been hard getting started – delays in funding, team re-organization, and being on hold has caused me personally to delay taking work and giving up a full time place to live.  I’m ostensibly homeless, but in another way, I’m free of the samsara of need/want/make that has caused so much pain worldwide.  I’m willing to have faith that funding is coming, that this necessary journey will happen, because the people involved are just as committed and just as passionate.  We are seeking a different path to solutions, rather than the same old methods that have put our world in peril.

This is what it takes to change – a leap of faith, a period of patience and difficulty, and a rebirth into something new, still finding its legs and still struggling to fully stand on its own.  We need that faith in the “first world”, to give up our attachment to things and ways of being, to ignore the consumerist agenda of profit that benefits the very few.  Collective action and deciding where to put our energy, time and love is so important.  A pause, a sit back and a period of reflection is much needed.

Take time today, if you can, to spare a moment and reflect on what you can do, small and big, to change your life, and so change others’ lives with your action and intention.

Peace,
Melissa