I have a few posts about living through the Heart and not the Ego. Unfortunately this is not one of my favorite subjects because it is vague and opaque, and of interest to only a few people. Many people are naturally turned off by alternative ideas about a different and possibly better way of living that does not follow how they live now. It goes against their lifetime of experience. It goes against the grain of their lifetime.

However I will eventually go down that avenue. We need to raise our awareness and responsibilities to each other and the soil we live on. Living through your heart keeps life choices simple. Choices made when living through your heart are arrived at with respect and responsibility. Decisions made through the Heart are made for all living things on this earth and the Earth itself.

Many people find new ideas or ways of thinking silly, non existent, something only for crackpots, or evil. I was one of those people. I spent over half my life thinking these types of people were dropped on their heads at birth or had some other problem that made them abnormal. I too thought their ideas were between over reacting to silly and did not apply to my life. What is wrong with these people anyway!

There was nothing wrong with the way everyone lived when I was a young boy. The Earth was ours to do with what we wanted, and the Earth would be okay. Sunday School Teachers and my regular School Teachers told me this was so. Dangerous chemicals being sprayed with abandon would break down quickly into harmless states. Garbage and other waste would decompose back into rich earth. Air was cleaned and refreshed and made wholesome by thunder and lightning storms.

My Teacher told us about something called Acid Rain. A few years after that I was told about DDT. It was okay because it was happening somewhere else, not where I lived. They fogged streets in the area and the kids would play in the fog. It was harmless fun, and no parent thought it was really harmful. After all it was a mosquito killer called DDT. What could be wrong with an insecticide that killed mosquitoes?

Teachers told us we should not drink water from the lakes we swam in and local creeks we played in. That water in these places was now a sewage path full of poop and pee, and other household wastes from houses built next to the lakes, creeks and wetlands. We were told the foam in the water was not “Sea Foam” as we kids believed, but detergent from cleaners and laundry products.

Teachers said water in the creeks and streams where I lived in Minnesota were not the clean or healthy water it looked like to us. None of us kids believed that line either. We thought or decided Teachers were exaggerating, making it worse than it really was. We kids were sure Teacher’s did not want us to have any fun. Teacher’s thought it was dangerous swimming in lakes without lifeguards and this was their way of keeping us safe.

Where I lived in rural Minnesota everything was peachy keen. Those problems happened somewhere else. “Sea Foam” had been present in the water since I could remember (all of five to ten years of memories), and I was told it was Sea Foam by Adults, so that must be what it was. I never saw anyone use the bathroom in the water either from those houses.

A year later our Teachers started telling us not to eat snow any more. Because of Nuclear Weapons testing, and Air Pollution, whatever that was, snow and rain was no longer safe for us kids to eat. We did not believe that story either. When I was a kid eating snow was a rite of being outside in the winter, as was catching rain in our mouth in the summer

I believed my teachers were telling tall tales until I stepped on a large turd in waist deep water while swimming at the lake one sunny July day. Scraping someone’s crap off my foot, I realized the lake really was nothing more than a huge septic tank. My Teachers were right. I no longer wanted to eat fish from that lake or most other lakes and streams with houses around them.

Most adults who thought we could live that way forever were very wrong. Those few Teachers and other people like them had the ability to see beyond their lifetime what the world would be like if we did not change how we lived. They were dreamers with vision. These few people correctly imagined our future if we did not change how we were living.