Jamie Brame

As I said in an earlier post, this was a different kind of challenge for me, doing it on my own. Luckily, I set aside a time for doing my meditations, I kept up with the time I took for showers (most were actually between three and four minutes!), and took the extra time for planning my meals to make sure that I ate at least one meatless meal every day. Since I know no one on the team, I started out with a sense of doing this solo; as the time went on, I began to look at different posts and see how others were doing, and that little exercise helped me along more than I realized. Thanks to everyone on the team for just being here. I realize that our paths will cross in the ways that we continue after today to work to love our home, this wonderful and wonder-filled world which we are so much a part. I hope and pray that the work we do will bear fruit for many years - maybe even centuries - to come!

This ecochallenge is a little more difficult because I am doing it alone, as opposed to the first time I did it a couple of years ago with a group from church. I don't know anyone and am having to push myself. That's good, though: we don't always have our support groups around us when we are doing these things, which is one of the reasons that I chose to do it without a group (the other reason is that I didn't know anyone who was doing it this year!). Still, I am moving through and learning as I go, which is the main point. People need to realize how small things add up, and looking at the impact we are all making tells me that there is hope alive in the world and good people still doing good things - not that I doubted it, but proof is always helpful!

There are days when I find being grateful to look  like any other day of being grateful, but I know myself to be an overall grateful person. I think it's just that when I sit down and limit myself to three things that I find it hard to focus, hard to say, "These are the three things for which I am grateful," when what I want to say is, "I feel grateful for my life and for the lives of those around me." It sounds a little hollow to say that, but it's very, very true. I am a grateful person and a positive and hopeful person in spite of all the evil that is done to the earth and to human beings and animals. I read somewhere past week of someone planting bulbs in their flower garden because "whoever gets elected President in a few weeks, these bulbs won't care: they will still come out in the spring and bloom into beautiful flowers. So, this is my sign of hope." Mine, too, to repeat the story. And go home and plant a tree from the acorns that have sprouted into little oaks in my garden!