100 monkeys

knee deep in coffee cups

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

Most days I take a walk through a ravine near my house. I go there with the intention of breathing deeply, letting my shoulders drop a little while I focus on the birds, the sometime deer or fox. More and more often, however, I find myself focussing instead on the ever increasing amount of debris along the way. Always a puzzling sight. Makes me wonder what sort of person, having decided to spend some time in the beauty and peace of nature, then decides to bung their garbage at it.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I’ve come to anticipate it; I keep my coat pockets stuffed with bags, hardly notice the birds some days.

And before anyone shrugs and says Ah, kids! What can you do? it’s not kids that are responsible for the majority of it. Most of the traffic is adults, lots of dog-walkers especially, and most of the debris these days, I’ve noticed, is take-out coffee cups.

Not that I’m saying anything.

Except this:

1) What is wrong with you People Who Can’t Take a Walk Without Coffee and Then Decide You Can’t Be Bothered Hanging on to the GD Empty Cup Until You Get to a Bin/Car/Home?

and,

2) Tim Horton’s, Coffee Time, Second Cup, Starbucks (for starters): here’s an idea—how about spending a few cents on an anti-littering campaign or two? Not that the disgusting habits of the population are your fault, but much of the dreck all over our streets, peering at us from ditches, advertising the next sale—does have your name on it.

Surely you feel at least some responsibility to clean it up…

As must our governments.  Surely.

Maybe they’d all welcome letters chock full of ideas? Here’s one: maybe run a nationwide contest for ideas.

Whatever. The point is we can’t just keep throwing this stuff around. And no, it’s not a small thing in the face of larger problems. It’s about respect: for the earth, animals, neighbours, strangers. And that’s not insignificant because if we can’t respect what’s in our own tiny space, no wonder we have larger problems elsewhere.

So, short of putting garbage bins on every corner (though not a bad idea), we need to get creative in changing the way we think.

One of the best anti-litter campaigns I’ve heard of hails from Texas where it seemed impossible to get the locals to stop littering until they were persuaded that it was not themselves, but the no-good, low-down, tourists and other out-of-state varmints (I may or may not be paraphrasing), that were the problem. The move not only convinced many locals to stop littering (not wanting to be put on the same level as tourists) but also increased a sense of ownership and pride in their surroundings. And it’s still going strong.

Doesn’t it just warm the heart to see the power of marketing—the power of anything—put to good use?  There is hope.

message in a bottle — received

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

Oh, this is fun…

It seems Karen Shenfeld, Writer in Residence over at Open Book Toronto this month, has been conducting a blogosphere experiment in which I’m one of the lab rats. (And I’m completely flattered and delighted with my role!)

Here’s the background: Last week sometime I wrote a post about Karen’s film, Il Giardino. A few days later it came to her attention and she left a comment saying how surprised she was.

She was surprised??

I was gob smacked that so quickly (or even at all) she’d see the post, much less respond. Well, I wrote back, we had a virtual chuckle over the wonders of the wild, wacky world of blogs and that was—I thought—that.

Then, a few days ago (though I just opened my emails today), I received a Google Alert taking me to Open Book Toronto where I discovered that Karen (a poet as well as a filmmaker) was the Open Book writer in residence for December and had written a post about the Il Giardino ‘encounter’.

And she’d done it as a kind of experiment.

In her words:

“Sending something off into cyberspace is, I have realized, a little like putting a message in a bottle and casting it into the sea. We know that the odds are that the cork will leak and the bottle will fill with water and sink down to the sandy depths, forever lost. But we hope secretly that, against all odds, it will float and drift to a far, far shore, where it will be picked up by a passing stranger who will find our message and be forever transformed.

“When I wrote to Matilda, I didn’t let her know that I, myself, was writing a blog this month, and that I had decided to blog about her blog. Should I tell her, or just wait to see if she scoops the bottle from the water and discovers it by herself?”

Well, I’ve scooped the bottle! (And, for the record, it would have been sooner had I opened my emails.) I feel like bells should be going off, confetti flying, people appearing from the closet with champagne, a trophy maybe, a small tiara…

As Karen says, I think we all hope that our messages, whatever they are, are being received and heard—what’s communication if not a way of connecting with others by (bravely) sharing something of who we are, some tiny unique thing we have to offer…  

Aside from its (mind-bending) ability to practically embrace the whole earth in a single moment, cyberspace also has a kind of zen influence, allowing us to stand back and ‘see’ just how amorphous communication has become, maybe always was, how really we’re all so connected in these indirect, invisible, ways.

Unsettling as all that connection may seem at times,  it’s nice to remember that a lot of good—and very entertaining!—things can come of it…

(So, to continue the experiment, I’m sending the bottle back out—while keeping my eye on the OBT author blog  to see if it makes land…)

not just another bookstore

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

The Toronto Women’s Bookstore is in danger of closing.  If that happens, the whole city loses. Not just women, not just the people who buy books or attend workshops and readings or are served by the TWB outreach programs. We all lose. In Toronto, outside Toronto, across the country. Because every institution, every facility and service, wherever it happens to be, creates a ripple effect—positive or negative—on both the immediate community and society in general. 

If the TWB closes we don’t just lose another book store, we lose one of society’s positive ripples and risk making (yet more) room for the less valuable, the innocuous, the downright toxic…

It’s up to us which way things go.

If, one by one, we let these tiny positive influences on our society disappear in favour of giant homogenized nothings that cajole us by slick marketing to fill our lives with indigestible dreck that only dulls our minds with the addiction of wanting more, we’ll have—if not what we need—certainly what we deserve.

And their pockets will be full.  Because that, of course, is their bottom—their only—line. 

The choices we make, where we choose to spend our money is what determines what stays and what goes. It’s we that build our neighbourhoods, cities and societies.

This isn’t just about a bookstore, it’s about creating the kind of world we want to live in and the power of individuals to influence that world. The TWB is simply the latest canary in the coal mine.

HOW TO HELP.