When You Learn to Take Responsibility-Daily Meditation July 25, 2023

Today’s quotation:

When you learn to take responsibility for yourselves, you will start taking responsibility for the planet.  Your abandonment of responsibility is destroying the planet.  You assume that you own the earth. And ownership confers upon you the right to do as you like.  You do not own this beautiful planet.  You are simply a guest here.-Leonard Jacobson.

Today’s Meditation:

It’s extremely painful to watch what’s happening to this planet that we call home.  Floating plastic in the oceans that covers thousands of square miles, climate change caused by the ways that we release carbon into the atmosphere, animals that die because of the packaging that we carelessly throw away–we act as if we own this place, that it’s all ours, and that we can do anything that we want to it.  But it’s not, and we can’t.

On the day I die, I want to say that I did everything I could on a personal level to take care of this planet that’s so good to me and sustains my life without asking for anything back from me other than a bit of responsibility.  And actually, the planet doesn’t even request that responsibility–it simply gives me all that I need to survive without asking for anything.  My conscience tells me that I need to contribute to the sustainability of the planet and all that lives on it, and I hope that I live up to the demands that my conscience makes on me.

We have to make decisions every day about just about everything.  It seems that those decisions should include those that have us take care of this planet so that it can continue caring for us, especially our children.  The legacy we’re putting together today should be one that we’re proud of–especially when it concerns leaving a livable planet for our children to enjoy.  I can do my part by using less disposable plastic, using my car less, using less water, creating less pollution, wasting less food, planting trees when possible, picking up trash (even if it isn’t mine), and so on.

I need to be responsible in how I treat this planet and not worry about what others are doing- the only thing I have any control over is what I do.  I want to be a person who contributes to the well-being of this planet partly because it’s simply the right thing to do and partly because I want our children to have a world that will support them and nurture them when they grow up.  As things are going, that’s not the planet we’re making.

Questions to consider:

Name three things you can do today to help the planet remain or become healthy.

Why do we each have a responsibility to help maintain a healthy planet?  What happens to our relationship with the earth if we fail to do so?

Why do we tend to see the earth only for what it offers us and for ways to profit from it?

For further thought:

A relationship with the earth based only on its use for economic enrichment is bound to result in its degradation and the devaluation of human life.  This is a perversion which, if not soon corrected, will become a fatal disease of technological societies.-Rene Dubos

If you missed our last Daily Meditation, it is here.