What a World, What a World!

I know I’m not the only one who saw the film Wicked this winter. And though the line, “what a world, what a world” is technically from The Wizard of Oz, it’s hard to separate the two. But for my purposes, here, I would be saying it in a more positive tone of voice, one filled with awe and wonder about all of the beauty and interconnectedness in this world.

Sometimes when I think about sustainability, my eyes fill with tears. This has always been such a good indicator for me that something is important. Maybe your body does this as well.

I asked my boyfriend David for advice on what to write about this month. I just gave him a bunch of ideas for his newsletter so I wondered if it could work in the other direction. We went to a couple of gatherings on New Year’s Day, and he overheard me talking to someone new about what I do. I wish I could remember exactly how she phrased it but she asked me what kind of training I had for my job. It was a very interesting question to me because I had just been to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and had been talking to several people about the term “outsider art” and other ways it’s been described. Naïve is one of those. Basically it’s just art made by artists who are not classically trained, didn’t go to art school, didn't take drawing, painting or sculpture classes.

So, effectively, I am a naïve zero waste consultant. I’m quite comfortable with that. I don’t have a science background, and I don’t have an engineering degree. What I do have is a clear picture of the world that I want to live in and the drive to invite and support others who want to join me in creating that world.

It can sometimes be discouraging, but I wanted to share this tip that I learned from Jane McGonigal and her Urgent Optimists community: if you’re feeling discouraged google (or use the search engine of your choice) “solutions to…” whatever you’re concerned about. More often than not someone is already working on it.

Because Christmas just happened, I’ve been seeing so much about the recycling of broken Christmas lights. Though I think it’s great that the resources in these will be recovered, I wish that there were more talk of repairing them. 

I have a neighbor, Tom, who is in his 80s. One day we were talking about repair and he told me he had experience repairing lamps. That led me to asking him if he’d ever repaired a string of Christmas lights. The year before, our landlord had added some new bushes at our apartment building. One small evergreen was begging for decoration and had an outdoor outlet right by it. So, I wrapped it in a string of white lights. Unfortunately, right before I was going to undecorate it, a squirrel chewed through the cord. Tom said that he could fix it, but instead of having him do that, I asked him if he would teach me how to do it and it was remarkably easy. You need a wire stripper and a kit from the hardware store to cover up the repair. The repair involves more troubleshooting if a burnt-out bulb is causing the problem. I vaguely recalled that Martha Stewart had directions for repairing holiday lights and though I didn’t find that article, I found many videos on YouTube. I never knew that you could change a fuse on a string of lights until I watched one of them.

I can imagine that some people would say, “I don’t have time to fix a string of lights” and I understand that. In the world that I want to live in, you would. Or you’d value possessions enough to pay someone else to fix them and only after that, would you recycle them.

I recently converted to Judaism. Most people who I’ve told thought I already was Jewish. I just made it official. In Judaism,  there is this concept called tikkun olam. It means repair the world. One of the things I love about Judaism is that interpretation is encouraged. If you were to look up tikkun olam, you would see how its meaning has been reinterpreted through the ages. And, though nowhere will you see it written that tikkun olam means to try to repair your string of Christmas lights, I believe that it is a godly thing to do.