Changing for the sake of the planet may require falling off of it. It may require a break from that grounded feeling. People may wonder what happened to you or if all is ok.  All is fine with me now, even though at some points I thought I had ruined my life.

I haven’t written in awhile because I have been busy changing.  It has been a drawn-out process; one where I messed my life up in order to put it back together. What accelerated my change was an artwork and I write today to present it as an exercise.

In December 2007, I was asked to participate in an art exhibit called “Heating up,” a show about global warming at the Evanston Art Center north of Chicago. I was given an entire room to work with and created an installation of a once flooded room and filled it with my journals, journals from my future. The Installation was called “Found” and the discovered journals were tattered and once waterlogged, make most of the pages illegible.  I worked on these journals for 8 months, writing about how my life would be and how the world was to be. I considered global warming (and climate change) but didn’t sugar-coat things, nor did I go down the gloom and doom road.  I plunged into this fantasy with my New England work ethic and absorbed the future challenges of life with bravado. I inserted myself into a distant world and discovered a place that I actually could be.  Yes, it was a world where the polar bears were sadly no longer, yet a world filled with ingenuity and resiliency. So, the most urgent question became why wait?  Why was I keeping the life I could live as some future occurrence?  Had I learned to cherish the present and live in the moment too successfully? Why not speed up that process and begin to create that life now?

In this imaginary future I was not the person I expected to be, but did discover that this new person was quite content. I found a direction that led me closer to a natural disposition when I projected myself realistically into the future.  I gained a secure footing to break free and truly look beyond the things cast upon me; to ignore what isn’t working and replace it with an image of what will. The mind is a powerful tool.

I write to encourage you to loosen your footing for a brief moment in life.  Go ahead and stick your head in the clouds, dream on and imagine a different world.  So many people are letting go, so you are not alone.  We are accepting what isn’t and putting days of global silliness behind us. We all have great stories to tell as we redefine convenience, conscientious and comfort.

I look forward to writing more. : )