A new year, a New Chance to Celebrate Diversity

Happy New Year!

Tomorrow, I am looking forward to speaking to some High School students in Richmond, California, about community and environmental activism. Embracing the entire community and all of nature is a first step toward sustaining and supporting life. We don't know what we need to learn from whom, even to know ourselves, so we need to be open minded and tolerant of every person, regardless of how different from us they appear to be. Likewise, the environmental web is intricate and complicated. If we kill off some fungus somewhere, it may lead to completely unpredicted consequences some place else. I personally dislike the term activism as it has been used in specific political ways, as if it belongs to one group.

We all are active all the time, in both the community and the environment. The question is how conscious are we of our actions and how they affect others. The more we have our eyes open as we act and live, the more we will automatically improve community and all of life around us.

Let's begin with eye-opening exercises. Learn how to see better while expanding our mind: study signing and Deaf Culture and your vision will improve. You will begin to see how much you cannot see.

Or, learn from another group: how to hear better from the blind, argue better from the French, tell stories better form an oral tradition. Please write me and tell me what you discover - help me expand my horizons. And have a great start to the new decade. susan from www.susanschaller.com