Healing Our Society

I sometimes wonder if we realize what we are doing to our bodies an our minds any more. I just heard recently about a 90+ year old man in Tennessee who refuses to take pharmaceuticals and has taught himself about herbs instead. It makes so much more sense to me that we can use what is all around us naturally instead of putting processed chemical concoctions into our bodies. So much of that knowledge of the plants has been lost through growth and technology. It used to be that the medicine man, or the shaman, or the village healer held a special place in the tribe, but now days, it's the celebrity or the athlete who is held in the spotlight.

I hope to see a shift in our culture someday back to the time in life when we didn't have  everyone around us trying to make a buck. I think we were all put on this earth to help each other and support each other, not try to take things from each other. It seems to me that societies that have less money seem to be happier all around. I think it's because they're not so caught up in the idea that the amount of money they have somehow determines their worth as a person. I think we put far too much value on little pieces of paper in our society, money, college degrees, their just pieces of paper that we give an arbitrary meaning to.

I know so many smart talented people that don't have a piece of paper that tells the rest of the world that they're smart, so they work in bars or restaurants, or some other hourly job that let's them barely scrape by. I see this and I think about how much these people have to offer to the world, but because they don't have that piece of paper, that will go unnoticed by most of the world.

We don't have to have prestigious jobs or nice cars or big houses to be good people. There is beauty in simplicity that this world seems to have forgotten. It's funny to see the reaction people have when I tell them that my family has one car. There is this look of shock and disbelief hat two people can survive in this world with one vehicle. But for us, we don't need another car, would it be nice to have, sure, but it's not a need. does it take additional planning and a little forethought on our parts, of course, but we make it work.

We assign these arbitrary statuses to things instead of actions. a car is a status symbol, not a compassionate heart. It's time to start rewarding compassion again and stop letting things dictate our lives.