electronic disembodiment, community, & environmental health/activisim

One of my questions is, how important are our physical bodies, and if they are important, then how important are the environments which sustain and nourish our physical bodies?

This is all so electronically wired, weird, and it is nice to see my "friends" faces. Like wow!, I am even a popular contributer now, and all that popularity from one post. I can easily see the draw for all the electronic community to be a part of something greater than oneself, and to be connected! Cool!

Kinda makes me wonder if we really need bodies anymore. Environmentally it would considerably lessen our impact if we was all just lil electronic blips. We would consume less resources from this little blue ball whirtling through space. And perhaps we are just little energy blips, and what is this place anyway? In the meantime we all need food, shelter, education, community, and creative expression.

There are lots of different ways to move through our world. Here is a kinda messy, not necessarily direct ramble of my thoughts and feelings, which may or may not make any sense, and then again may be the finest verbiage strangled together in all eterfinity.

I watch my son having relationships with friends all over, and connecting electronically, and I wonder what the future holds for his generation? Do we even need physical bodies anymore? I watch most of us driving everywhere for work, play, community, and having our lives spread out over large distances. We are consuming this earth, without being conscious of it. Technology abounding and aiding everywhere. Tied into the hive on cell phones and email. Externalized rules and human laws taking the place of the laws of nature, at least for a little while.

Children are growing up without a connection to nature, the laws of nature, or the direct consequences of their actions relating to nature. Often they get driven everywhere, and have little alone time, without electronic input.We are told to fear strangers, others, and anything outside of "normal." We learn more from television than from nature. We do not see the mining, or the extracting of the earths resources out our windows as we go merrily shopping along.

There is adab in nature, and there is adab among humans, and they are pretty different things at this point, which does not seem like such a good thing. We can get so far off in creative and mental realms that we lose sight of natures laws, which are coming back to wallop us. Are we separate from nature, and can we transcend it?

If the physical environments are important, would we be better served to get involved? Do we go out and put our bodies on the line? Do we sit actively at home working on the energetic, and/or wait until the stars line up to act? Are they different? Do we wait for someone else to do something about it for us, and just sit back watching television? We have these clunky wonderful frail physical bodies, which are of this earth. What happened to chopping wood and carrying water, and is that just an old fashioned and outdated way?

Are we all children of god, worthy of our own individual and separate empires, as long as we visualize it properly? At the other extreme should we just can it because we are using up space that someone else could use or live perhaps very frugally in a cave somewhere, aware of every bug we step on and every stray thought? Is this earth as some say, here for us to use up and have dominion over? Is any of it really "here" or "real"? We are living in a time of material everything, and great disparity between the haves and the have not's.

This dualism stuff is a little confusering.

Many of us are deeply concerned, fearful, even despairing over the health of the natural world. How do we become empowered, and effect change?

Perhaps it is all just energy and form, and to this one it just feels plain wrong to destroy the natural environs, especially in a wasteful, planed obsolescence way. There is also not much use in being angry about it.

How do we change policy, rules, bureaucracy, to be more in alignment with natural reality? How do we live with integrity and build consensus, especially with others (individuals and nations) who may have entirely different viewpoints? Is there a difference between the external world and the internal world, and where do they meet? Do we all live in a different world?

Life is magic. Gratitude, kindness, forgiveness, and love seem to be the glue of all of it. And it is all an adventure.

Sierra Salin