garbage

A year ago, two friends of mine went to India to film a documentary about eco-travel, and the people of Ladakh called "Living Ladakh." Their lifestyle is one of profound simplicity and compassion. One of the most impressive things is that until westerners made Ladakh a destination, the people who live there had no concept of "garbage." Everything they use in their daily lives is made from the resources provided by the world around them, and when items have outlived their usefulness, they are transformed again to serve other purposes.

Yesterday I went to the drug-store and bought some acid-reducers for my sour stomach. The pills came inside a bottle which came inside a small box which was neatly secured inside another box that was big enough to have fit two bottles. When I finally got to the bottle itself, it was stuffed half full of cotton because the actual capacity of the bottle was nearly 4x the size it needed to be to hold the amount of medicine contained within it. I threw the excess packaging in the recycle bin and tried not to think about it.

But I can't help thinking about it. There is something so pure and beautiful about living a life free of wastefulness, and yet as an american consumer, I have found it is nearly impossible. In fact our lives are wasteful from their very beginings. We wear disposable diapers, and disposable bibs and drink from disposable bottles. Every birthday and Christmas, our relatives shower us with plastic toys (likely made by other children in sweatshops) incased in protective plastic bubbles and cardboard boxes and wrapped with decorative paper. As children, we pout when our mothers tell us to take out the garbage, but we don't often consider that it is possible to live a life that is free of garbage.

Yes, it is possible. However, unlike the people of Ladakh who sheer the yak when they need wool, and dig in the ground when they need clay, and use the broken pieces of things to make art, we here in the west have no relationship with the materials we use. We do not think about the tree that died to make the cardboard box, or the laborer who picked the cotton, or the wars being fought to get the petrolium to make the plastic bubble. We don't think about the energy that fueled the factory that made the packaging, or the garbage man who will carry it away to sit in a hole in the ground.

In fact, in this disposable culture, we don't just treat objects like trash. The people who make and distribute and sell the products are treated as expendable human capital. Even the people who consume the products are often disregarded. Manufacturers seem to have no qualms at all about poisoning the people they serve with preservatives and pesticides and toxins. They do what they can to keep the prices up so that only the elite can afford to pay, and when folks get together to call them out for all their exploitations, they say they are unpatriotic. Perhaps they are, but it's difficult to have pride in a country whose war veterans stand on street corners begging for change.

And what about love. How does one approach the sacred act of loving another in a disposable culture. Well, It seems these days, people throw vows around like paper air-planes, and forget them when they become inconvienient. Even the purest of sentiments are often met with brutal distrust. Families split like dry wood at the first sign of difficulty, and children are tossed out to fend for themselves before they know how.

Someone once called me white trash, and I thought.... You know, they're right. I am trash. I have been used up, thrown out, trampled on and disregarded more times than I would like to count. But now.... now I think about the people of Ladakh. In their culture, what would otherwise become garbage is seen for it's beauty and inherant value and transformed into art. I may be broken, but I'm not trash. From now on I will visualize the shattered fragments of the person that I was reforming into the beautiful mosaic of the person I am becoming and remember... nothing is disposable.