Origin Story?

Sometimes, it's like the first decades of my life were lived in a fog, some state of dreaming. Why did I do the things I did? Why did I do them mindlessly, without questioning myself and those around me? How did I come to this place now? How can this passion exist without some known genesis? How was that fog cleared? How did I Wake Up?

It's hard to write about, because I don't know where to pinpoint the beginning, and shouldn't all origin stories have a beginning?

But that's not accurate; there was no exact moment. It was just a series of small steps after small steps until I realized, as if I'd been possessed by another person, that I was sprinting toward this goal - careening headlong down a path that I don't consciously remember choosing. Oh, sure, I'd choose it now, but this is now. I was not the person then, any "then," that I am now. Mostly, it's like slowly waking from sleep. Eyes are bleary, breathing is still slow, you're still half-covered in dreams. And then - bam - you're awake.

My dad took me on the camping trips with his boy scouts, when I was still young enough to attend without drawing too much attention to my girlhood. As early as I can remember, there were spending nights in sleeping bags in tents, hiking in various forests and mountains, dipping feet into clear and cold mountain water.

My dad would pick up garbage as we'd walk down the side of the road. Even then, as a small child, I'd wonder how it would get there in the first place. We traveled across the states. We moved to Africa for my parents' ministry. The planet became vast and expansive, and my young eyes took it all in, too juvenile to appreciate the treasures laid out before me.

The environmentalism came in stages after that. I am not proud to report that I went through several (what I will call) phases before settling back into woodsy environmentalism and realizing that my childhood self knew intrinsically what was up and that I should have listened to her all along. (Hindsight, amirite?)

In college came the waves - donating much of what I owned, only to go on various buying binges and repeating the processes over and over again. In college, came the awareness of organic food and what's recyclable and what's not, and how widely that varied county to county, city to city. I'd pluck plastic and aluminum out of trashcans, plant them in their proper homes. Now, I am ashamed to confess that I participated in "wishful recycling" - otherwise placing things in the recycling stream, hoping that I was doing the right thing rather than knowing so.

Post college came minimalism and environmentalism, again in varying degrees - slow step, slow step. Pause. Step again.

There came a time in my mid-twenties, when I was living alone, and was perhaps for the first time held solely accountable for the impact I had as a consumer, when I realized that there had to be a change in me. "I'll go zero waste one day," I thought, "but not yet, not today. I'm not ready to give up [this] and [that], because [insert various excuses]."

It was the day I learned that the city I lived in would no longer be accepting glass that the shift occurred. "If not today," I asked myself, "when?"

Momentarily, I'd fallen into despair. It felt like we were not standing still; we were moving backwards. "Can't recycle glass?" I lamented. "What are we to do?"

Um, not use it at all? And so that day, a sort of resolution was formed inside of me, but it wasn't spontaneous, not exactly. It was more like the awakening of something that had always lain dormant and had been waiting for the catalyst, the call to arms, the signal to Wake Up.

What was an interest became a passion became a conviction, a moral code by which I now live my life. What was a spark became a fire, a raging thing that burns brightly. There is no point bemoaning past actions, mistakes I made in my ignorance; there is only now; there is only the future that comes after this now.

No, I can't tell you exactly where this journey began, but I suppose it doesn't matter, because I have no intention of backtracking, of ever returning to that beginning.