Grass roots have to grow somewhere

I know what you're thinking... not another blog, another random somebody who thinks the world cares about their self-indulgent ramblings on everything from what they had for lunch to the price of tea in China... Oh, the misguided hubris! Not my opinion, of course, but that's a criticism I've heard, more than once, and from people who have good sense about a lot of other things. And I worry about disturbing statistics that suggest that while we're more plugged-in and "virtually" connected to community than ever, we are also as isolated and lonely as we've been at any other point in history. Should I be sitting here, pitching digital woo to people who, though I might like and share many things in common with, will never actually meet face to face when I could be using that time to get out and have real, honest-to-god encounters with people in my local, physical community? Point taken, but what else is a writer to do? If we have the drive to write, to reach out with our words, we might as well do that where it might do some good. Rather than just scribbling in some rumpled notebook that will never be seen (unless I become famous enough for it to be worth some mercenary soul's while to dig up and publish), why not put my thoughts out there where they have the potential to positively impact the world? And a blogger is a blogger, no matter how small (apologies to Dr. Seuss)... I've read blog posts by otherwise insignificant folks that have shimmered with life, that have made me stop, think, and re-evaluate. I've gotten good ideas from blogs, things that motivated me to get out and try something different. That's part of the awesome power of the interwebs - pessimistically, they may be breeding anomie at a stultifying pace, but they also allow for unprecedented, and unprecedentedly personal, penetration of ideas. You never know who you're going to touch. Worth it? Why not? If my words, or the words of any other blogger, can get just one person to go out into their neighborhood and start a community garden, to visit a farmer's market, to ditch those plastic grocery bags in favor of reuseables, or even just to drop that bottle in a recycling bin instead of a trash can, then maybe we're not so uselessly narcissistic after all.So that's my goal here... to write about my experiences in the hopes that they might inspire; that maybe my words will be part of some digital critical mass for a simpler, greener, more sensible way of living on the Earth. Along the way, I might talk about spirituality or my family or some other thing that's on my mind, as I don't think we can really separate those things from our desire to live better lives. It's like trying to lose weight - it can't be an isolated effort that doesn't seep over into your whole lifestyle, that doesn't infiltrate and inform you in your entirety. We have a lot of hard work to do to turn this crazy mess around that we've got going on on our home planet. And we're all kind of feeling our way through it - we're only just now starting to get together a collective road map of how this all might work. One plant at a time. One bottle at a time. One post at a time. Time to get my fingers dirty.