A few days ago I went for a run on a track through the nearby rainforest. The track is one of my favourite places to run near my home. When I run through this grand forest a strong sense of endowment arises in me. I recognise that I am being offered a gift. A gift of life, a gift of welcome to this majestic earth.We are certainly blessed to be offered this gift of the world. Without this gift we would not even exist.
About 10 minutes into my run I trod on a tree root the wrong way and rolled my ankle. I stopped for a while, massaged my ankle and took a few steps and then back to a jogging gait again. But it wasn’t quite right, so inevitably I rolled it a second time. This time there was no chance of continuing running on it. I decided to turn and walk back to where I had begun.
That point on the track had the road passing nearby, so I walked out to the road, where the surface was more even and began to walk back to the start.
I had about 500 – 600 metres to walk. Limping along I was enjoying the walk as the road passed through the same rainforest I had just been running through.
I little way up the road I saw a throw-away cup from a major fast food company on the side of the road. I stopped and picked it up, intending to take it back with me to dispose of more appropriately.
A few steps later I found a plastic wrapper. I picked this up also. By the time I’d walked the 500 metres or so I had an armload of trash. And this on a road that wound through the forest, no human habitation anywhere around.
This experience got me thinking about how we wantonly trash our gift.
Like a petulant child that unwraps his/her Christmas present and finds it not to their liking, and so throws it away or smashes it with a toy hammer, we too trash our gift.
We trash our gift by:
- smashing to pieces the forests,
- spewing toxic and other gases into the atmosphere,
- spilling waste into waterways,
- using the oceans as dumping grounds for tonnes and tonnes of plastic,
- digging and tunnelling into Mother Earth to rip out minerals,
- destroying the habitats of thousands upon thousands of species, condemning them to extinction.
I realised that my rolled ankle had been a gift – a gift that allowed me to see how much we trash our gift of the planet.
Isn’t it time we grew up, and stopped acting like a petulant child with our gift.
No comments:
Post a Comment
This blogsite is dedicated to positive dialoque and a respectful learning environment. Therefore, I retain the right to remove comments that are: profane, personal attacks, hateful, spam, offensive, irrelevant (off-topic) or detract in other ways from these principles.