A Bean in a Cup

So whether you are ready or not you enter school at age 5 (or if you're like my prodigiously clever husband, age 4) and are swept up in the bricks and mortar, meeting another 20 (if you are lucky) little learners just like you.  Really - exactly like you - same age and roughly same background.  If we walk out the door on any given day will the first 5 people we interact with be this homogeneous?  At 5 you begin to learn the prescribed curriculum and, since most teachers manage to be creative and nurturing despite this, one day you will be given a cup and a bean.  You will play (briefly) in dirt and water and nestle this little miracle in its misty-moisty nook.  The next day, and hopefully the next, you will arrive and pass the plastic chairs and the trees, unrecognizable now as blocks and shelves and counting beads, and rush to the window to see if the sun and soil have coaxed the life forth from that tiny seed.  One day you will be rewarded!  As the green shoot gains momentum and leaves, you wrap and decorate the cup and make a Mother's Day card from grainy construction paper and tired magic marker and you carefully chauffeur it home.  Once you proudly present it to Mom it may eventually be transplanted to a garden but chances are it will be finished off by summer, forgotten by the promise of fireflies and popsicles and trips to the pool.

But what if we didn't forget the bean in the cup?  What if we did transplant all of them into our earth? What if we took that little bit of natural from a world of man-made and brought it (and ourselves) back to its own kind - the outdoor surroundings that embrace it.  What if, in our world today, each of us (not just kids but everyone) sought out the little bits of natural in an increasingly artificial world and sought to immerse ourselves in them and foster growth from the inside out? Could we reunite the shrinking islands of mother nature like the bean with it's earth?  Could we root ourselves in whole food, oxygen-producing environments, equipped with the gently-used and informed with the truth?  We have a very convenient world today.  We have such ease as we never have.  We also have increasing depression, chemicals, environmental concerns and a dangerous monoculture. We have tried faster, bigger, shiny and dependent. Are we uplifted? Strong? Restored? Self-sufficient? Let's get back to the bean in the cup and take up where we left off.