Strip Mining, Environmental Abuse and what you're doing to your Self

Take all the connotations that come with the term "strip mining" (and if none come to you, let me offer mine: caustic, unsustainable, polluting, careless, reckless, ruthless, inelegant, crude, unrestrained, etc...) Anyway, take all the connotations that I just asked you to adopt and consider the way we EXPLOIT ourSELVES - which is, after all, a resource in it's own right.

It's easy to go at yourself, your future and your potential in a way that is far too ruthless, far too "linear". After all, a strip mine is too straight a line between A and B. A - we need resources, B - they're in the ground so let's rip everything and anything to shreds that stands in the way. In comes the heavy machinery, the earth is cleaved open with no regard for the havoc it wreaks in the mean time. Bare, scarred landscapes of waste. Ecosystems destroyed. Rivers poisoned. The system of local life itself spent beyond a tipping point. The resources weren't extracted, they were bludgeoned into availability.

There are sustainable and unsustainable practices of extracting your personality resources. Some of us need to pull back from the very edge of who we are and live in a more sustainable zone. Have you cleaved open new pools of energy to be ripped from your core? Are you replacing resources at a rate greater than what your obligations drain? Are you bleeding unwanted side effects to tint everything a shade darker? Are you more fully alive today than last year - and will that trend continue? What are your sources of joy? Or is there only obligation, duty, deficit, running to fall behind and the relentless pursuit of "more". If it doesn't work for the systems of life around a strip mine, why would it work for the system of life around you?