What If?

What would happen if each person in North America decided to make a change? A small change. 

What would happen if we all decided to take a short walk each day? If we simply focused on quieting the inner dialogue. If we took time to connect.

What would happen if, upon returning from this stroll, we all picked up one piece of garbage? Just one piece.

Image via Flickr - Lynn

What would happen?

Our bodies would change. Our souls would change. Our earth would change.

And in a single year, 192, 983, 014, 620 pieces of garbage would be saved from making their way into streams, rivers, oceans, and animal's stomachs.

Why don't you try it?

Take Your Feelings Off Auto-Pilot

Most of us go through life with our feelings on auto-pilot. What do I mean?

"Many people don't know about the power of good feelings, and so their feelings are reactions or responses to what happens to them. They have put their feelings on automatic pilot, instead of deliberately taking charge of them. When something good happens, they feel good. When something bad happens, they feel bad. They don't realize that their feelings are the cause of what is happening to them. As they react with negative feelings to something that has happened, they give out more negative feelings, and they receive back more negative circumstances. They become trapped in a cycle by their own feelings. Their life goes around and around in circles not getting anywhere, like a hamster on a wheel, because they don't realize that to change their life, they must change their feeling frequency!"

Rhonda Byrne - Author of The Secret and The Power 

Image via Ruemag

Garbage Warrior - Sustainable Housing That Will Change the World

"Imagine a home that heats itself, that provides its own water, and grows its own food. Imagine that it needs no expensive technology, that it recycles its own waste, that it has its own power source.

And now imagine that it can be built anywhere, by anyone, out of the things society throws away. Thirty years ago, architect Michael Reynolds imagined just such a home – then set out to build it."

An earthship in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Michael's designs are changing the lives of victims or natural disasters. 

Garbage Warrior is a must see for anyone interested in humanity, the environment, or just plain incredible ideas. Architect Michael Reynolds has been building sustainable housing from 'garbage' for over 30 years. He creates beautiful homes that are self-sufficient: they produce their own food, catch their own water, and even heat themselves. How? You'll have to watch the documentary to find out, but among his methods are building south-facing structures to fully utilize the sun's power, water catchment systems that negate the need for wells, and greenhouses that grown an abundance of delicious homegrown nutrition.

The full value that these "earthships", as they are called, can provide the world is astounding. The documentary shows Michael traveling to third-world countries to implement these building techniques; in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, for instance, much of South-East Asia was devastated. Michael and his crew travel to these destroyed areas to show those affected how to rebuild their own housing out of trash that, this time, can stand up to earthquakes and tsunamis.

Watch the full length documentary below. Enjoy, and let this be a reminder to keep thinking outside of the box!

You're Great

(I love the merge of linear and abstract thinking, and think both put together will lead to happier individuals, and as a byproduct: a changed world)

The more in alignment with yourself you make everything in your life, the happier you will be. By this I mean - follow your passions, any and all of them. Work with them to create a living, a lifestyle, your truest self.

Do what makes you come alive, what makes you feel you have purpose, what you are truly happy doing.

& Believe you are good enough to experience that feeling 24/7.

“If you don’t know what your passion is, realize that one reason for your existence on earth is to find it”  

 -Oprah Winfrey, Queen of the World

A Realistic Plan on How to Change the World and a Step by Step Lesson on How to Do It

I am going to give you all a realistic plan on how to change the world and also a step by step lesson on how to do it. (And a step by step lesson on how YOU as an individual person can actually change the planet) And Im going to do it in less than 300 words:

We have to decentralize. Huge task, right? It can TOTALLY be done. And it actually can be done quite simply, and fairly quickly. We just need all hands on board to do it. This is where the individual comes in, and this is where we see that one person is actually the only thing that will save us.

What happens is a community decides they want to be more self-reliant and sustainable, and so collectively they act. These communities can range in groups from a dozen to millions. Individuals come together to make dozens, who come together to make hundreds, who come together to make thousands and so on.
These people decide to stop relying on items that come from wasteful, and foreign industries. They start living sustainably, and therefore become largely self-reliant. The community produces their own food, their own clothes and shelter, and oftentimes their own energy (renewable- solar, wind, etc). Therefore, most of of their livelihood comes from a local source, and now, for the most part, they ARE in fact living in a decentralized manner. Maybe some still would consider them to be centralized, but their central power becomes the planet and not a corporation.

And then, this happens, over and over again, all over the world, until there are no more unsustainable communities.

The root of my little theory on how it is totally possible and almost EASY to change the world inherently relies on the idea of collective action. Collective action is when individual people are motived by at least one common value, and then come together as a group to act on it.

So if individuals don’t act, this plan will fail. Individuals need to realize how important they are. And individuals need to feel that one person can make a difference.