Our place in it all and how you can impact sustainable change
My clients are my community. When I refer to my community. I don’t only refer to the people, mindsets, values and actions we all have in common, I refer to our unquestionable commonality – our humanity.
At its heart, The Urban Farmer is a movement toward a more balanced, aligned and inspired way of living life. How and what we as humans consume has had a powerful impact on the planet. I strongly feel that part of this impact is due to a collective consciousness that, unfortunately, does not believe it has a voice. I am here to say that you do! If we take the time to really look around us we’ll quickly notice that we are currently at a crisis point. Our environment is mirroring back to us loud and clear that our actions have had a massive impact on each other and the world at large. This is the evidence that our actions do have an impact, so let us become conscious of them and let our impact be one of balancing the consumer behaviour we have practiced to get us here.
One of the most striking abilities that humans have is the magnificent way in which we can imagine something and begin the process of creating it. This ability has literally brought all of the comforts and advances we have come to take for granted into being. Our advances in medicine and technology have allowed us to save millions of lives and even send man into outer space. Our agricultural practices have enabled us to feed billions of people on the planet. Our engineering skills have built bridges, oil rigs and skyscrapers. Through our innate ability to innovate and create we have been able to give fuel, food and homes to billions. We are truly masterful in our ability to harness the resources of this planet for the noble cause of the betterment for all. Somewhere though we seem to have forgotten that while we have engineered our outer environment unlike other species on planet earth, we are in fact made of the same stuff as every other species, the stuff of this planet and every other planet and star.
“Our creative abilities become self-sacrificing when the by-products of these creations are at odds with life. We would be wise to remember that the health of our bodies depends on the health of our planet and the health of our planet depends on the ecosystems that sustain the earth and us”
What arises from this interdependent relationship is a responsibility to take care of our planet so that she can continue to take care of us.
Our masterfully creative minds are a part of the whole of creation. Our health and our lives are intrinsically connected to all that is. Nothing in this Grand Design is by accident. Time and again we have seen that inherently everything is connected. We see this in trophic cascades, in mirror neurons and in the behavioural changes of mice when different kinds of mice are put together — just by mixing the bacteria of aggressive and passive mice, the passive mice become more aggressive and vice versa.
We cannot get away from the fact that no single action happens in isolation and that every action we take has an effect on the whole. Our capacity for thought and creation is vastly limited when we forget that it is also part of a much bigger picture. We must understand our connection to the whole in order to truly master our unique ability to create. Until then, the planet we find ourselves on and the other species we share the planet with will continue to mirror back to us the results of our unconscious actions. We will continue to see the degradation of the ocean, the degradation of the soil and the degradation of all organisms that rely on it for life. We must remember that we are connected to all of this. When planet earth shows signs of imbalance, it is the reflection of our imbalance. It is up to us and our unique, creative abilities to make a change. This is our responsibility.
“We have proven that our foresight has great ability, now we must use our hindsight, mixed with the absolute truth of oneness, to ensure the wellness of all”
The good news is, once this realisation happens it is no longer possible to act in a way that harms. It is a newfound consciousness, a way of life. It is a movement towards a great awakening. We as a community are learning this new way of being and The Urban Farmer is here to facilitate and support you on this journey.
Thank you. I am humbled to have this opportunity to share my thoughts with you and in ending I would like to share a quote by Alvin Toffler “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The time has come to re-learn and to re-member.