Everything is meaningful for a warrior. The sounds have holes in them and so does everything around you. Ordinarily a man does not have the speed to catch the holes, and thus he goes through life without protection. The worms, the birds, the trees, all of them can tell us unimaginable things if only one could have the speed to grasp their message. ~ Don Juan, A Separate Reality

Do warriors get pissed off? A lot of people tend to think that they don’t or that they shouldn’t because they are to have achieved such a state of clarity or detachment that everything just rolls off of them like the water off a duck’s back. To not experience the full range of emotions, including anger, would prevent warriors from being truly authentic and in the moment.

My current state of being includes being pissed off. Extremely pissed off. Sitting with this emotion for the past few days had me wondering if I was becoming indulgent or self-important. Was I becoming less of a warrior due to my anger and irritation? Trying to maintain fluidity to move through this current state of being has been futile and has led to sudden, impassioned outbursts. I found this quote from The Power of Silence and it has placated me a bit, “Warriors have an ulterior purpose for their acts which has nothing to do with personal gain. The average man acts only if there is a chance for profit. Warriors act not for profit, but for the spirit.”

I tend to be an activist when it comes to the well-being of the planet. My dilemma results from of the great amount of lip service everyone seems all too anxious to give and their inability to take responsibility and action to affect change. The buzzwords are annoying, “going-green, eco-tourism, carbon footprint, recycle” and for the most part only serve to allow people to incorporate politically correct terminology into their conversations as they continue to justify their over consumptive life-styles. If you buy items packaged in plastic but recycle them you are not helping. Only 3-5% of all plastic is recycled. If you are staying in eco-tourism resorts halfway around the globe you are not helping. You are still using jet fuels that pollute the air to stay in jungle friendly resorts that had to chop down part of the jungle in order to be built. Building huge houses with bamboo and other “green” materials is paradoxical.

I just returned from Mexico, a place that I have been visiting for over 25 years. Over the course of the past 25 years I have witnessed the influx of Americans invade this sleepy ocean-side village in Sonora. At first they sought curanderos, beaches, cheap sea food and beer and good times. This once small, Spanish speaking village with about 3 motels and 5 restaurants went from a self-sufficient, sustainable people to a resort mecca in no time. Pristine beaches have been built up with resort after resort and condos and houses and golf courses. The Americans were buying beach front property up and building Mc-Mansions on it. More and more restaurants and businesses and bars kept going up. Americans argued that they were improving the economy and giving these “poor” people an income and a “civilized” life-style. More and more Mexicans from other areas and even South Americans moved there to earn an Americanized living standard complete with cell phones, new grocery stores which incidentally have put the small privately owned markets out of business and are now driving SUV’s. Casino’s, tour buses, you get the picture.

I drove down there last week for the first time in a while. It was heartbreaking. Our economic collapse has left this area and its people in a tragic state of their own economic collapse. Hotels, condos, business centers and homes remain half completed, with no one left to build them since there is no money available to complete construction. Mc-mansion after mc-mansion has a for-sale sign in front of it. Thousands of Mexicans are out of work. Stores are closing down. The miles of unnecessary resorts on the once pristine beach stand incomplete and the finished ones are empty. It’s become an overcrowded American ghost town. These Mexicans were rich before the onslaught of American must-haves infiltrated. Rich in food, culture, family. Now, they live in crime and poverty trying to survive in the very place where their abundance, simplicity and fullness of life were guaranteed not all that long ago.

The once thriving cactus, hundreds of acres of them, are gone. The important rhizosphere that holds the top layer of earth together has been bulldozed to literal death and with nothing to hold the sand in place the once lush desert is turning into a dry Sahara type sand dune that spreads for miles. The critical estuaries were destroyed and are now marinas, some have been completely filled in with sand to become the foundation for yet more resorts and locals can no longer go clamming and fishing on the beach for their dinner like they used to because of the amount of sewage and unregulated pollutants going into the sea.

Someone had the audacity to tell me, “I happen to believe that mother earth is perfectly capable of dealing with the small amount of pollution that this one said trip is causing, and I think she is more than happy to deal with it if it means the enlightenment of some of her precious beings.” The “one said trip” is a spiritual retreat to the Amazon to ingest Ayahuasca for almost $4,000 per person. Multiply that by several flights per day into a delicate and fragile jungle and the same destruction that I witnessed in the small sleepy village in Mexico will be occurring there too. It already is.

This planet, our beautiful mother earth is in dire straits right now. The planet herself is strong. Her beings on the other hand are not. It pisses me off that most people are not taking action to improve the situations at hand. My love is the earth and for the survival of the her for as long as she will live; the preservation of the amazing plethora of plants, trees, animals, fish, mammals, oceans, rivers, jungles, deserts and cultures.

Salvationism or any belief system that relies on the deliverance of humanity into paradise or “the kingdom of heaven” has me bewildered. As though someone somewhere is going to save us, going to beam down from the heavens some beautiful rays of light complete with angels and trumpets or fly in on some alien spacecraft to clean-up the entire mess. Or rely on a government, religious order, divine being, someone or anyone to do it for us so we don’t have to do it ourselves. Get real people, wake up, remove the rose colored glasses, smell the coffee and take responsibility, take action!

A warrior’s love is the world. He embraces this enormous earth. The earth knows that he loves it and it bestows on him its care. That’s why his life is filled to the brim and his state, wherever he’ll be, will be plentiful. He roams on the paths of his love and, wherever he is, he is complete. ~ Tales of Power