Thanks, read on

Thank you for reading/finding this blog.  Please visit the latest blog that serves as a continuation of this one at

http://localgypsiespot.wordpress.com

I’m done writing here.

Eye for an Eye

Roses are red, or so they say;
But I recently discovered they’re painted.

The thorns are filed, leaves are stripped off;
Protected from the prick of a finger.

And are violets blue? I thought they were purple;
In fact, I think they should be.

They say love is blind, and if this is true;
May invalidate a warning from Ghandi.

Attention Green-ies

Biodegradable cups are fooling your conscience.  The primary argument for this statement is demonstrated by the thousands of people who leave the cafe with a self-righteous glow.  They’ve got their fair-trade, organic, bird friendly, locally roasted coffee in a bio-degradable cup,  and thus, with their altruism satiated the coffee is downed and the cup thrown out.  Even I have done this due to 10% pure neglect and 90% submission to the careless habits of the majority.  Your bio-degradable cup is in fact compostable, which means that in order for it to disappear as you so think it does, it requires a cozy, warm environment surrounded by it’s friends the apple core, potato peel, egg shell and a healthy diet of oxygen.  In a landfill, your little “green” cup is suffocated by the plastic sleeve that it is shipped in, intoxicated by the emissions of the truck that brings the cups, and trapped in the empty coffee packets of Tims, Coffee Time and Country Style who pre-measure and package the proper coffee quantity in individual, one-brew packets. True, at the cafe we have a green bin where we add lots of egg shells, carrot peels and coffee grinds, so we can put it in there for you.  But really, if you’re going to finish your coffee before you leave the cafe, why not save the waste created to manufacture and ship that “green” paper cup and use a mug.  We’ll even wash it for you.

Can you live guided by your values or do you have to jump back into the barrel and be a corporate monkey?

Idealistic, altruistic, save the world-istic people often encounter a make it or break it personal question on their paths:  To cave or not to cave?

You can see your friends and family living their life according to the system and the game.  Working less than inspiring jobs that pay enough to buy the house, the car and raise the family.  “Work”, where you spend at least 1/2 of your awake life, is a means to an end.  Monday to Friday are a means for the weekend.  The work that you put your human potential and energy into isn’t really rewarding in itself, it is a means to a paycheck and the more you are able to suppress the need for meaningful work, the more you are likely to climb the corporate ladder of a meaningless organization.  Perhaps that’s a skill in of itself.  Or, perhaps it’s what you have to do for now.  To live your dream and purpose, you need to play the game for a few years to make the money.  and then the question becomes….once you’ve crossed that line from leading a purposeful, value-driven life to being a monkey in a corporate cage, can you go back?  Will you slowly soak up the foolish belief system of bureaucracy and then, be caught in that mindset when you make your leap back into the natural world of joy, creativity, freedom and empowerment?  And then there are teachers.  They seem to sit, content between these 2 worlds, where they feel they are making a difference: educating our children for tomorrow (a very questionable possibility), while driving a car, paying a mortgage and being conservatively progressive by “thinking green” or creating a study unit on “being green”.

So here’s the hard-to-swallow truth to our moral dilemmas: if you dream of living your life by your ethics, values, passions and beliefs, now’s the time to do it.  It takes practice, and you can’t practice checkers in order to be a chess champ.  Maybe the learning curve of living true to your heart and morals is similar to that of riding a bike, or learning to snowboard: incredibly steep at first with moments of failure, but once you get going, it’ll only get better and bring you to new possibilities.  I also sense that society has a huge learning curve to overcome and the only way we can learn as a society is if a few of us, tough, ambitious individuals start a trend and pave a new path.

ethically paralyzed

In the local bulk food emporium, in need of some tea, I froze.  In one hand, I held A) a box of fair trade, organic green tea bags.  In the other, B) a tin of jasmine loose leaf tea.  Here is the dilemma that paralyzes me as a consumer:

A) picture this product…

• organic and fair trade Canadian certifications
• long story of where and how the company sources their tea and their relationships with their suppliers
• tea leaves, each in their own bag with it’s own string stapled to it, packaged in paper, then tucked into the box, then the box is wrapped in cellophane
• price:  $4.99 for 20 bags

B) versus this product….

• tea leaves scooped into a tin
• not sealed
• “Imported from the republic of China” printed on the tin
• $6.99 for a whole lot of tea….likely 100+ cups.

I stood and read everything on the box and tin, desperate for my mind to somehow settle with one option, and proceeded to ask the shop owner which one he thought tasted better.  He pointed to the organic, fair trade tea because they sell faster he said. (Which makes sense since there’s only 20 cups worth of tea whereas the tin of loose tea would last months). Interesting.  So I put them both on the counter and continued to shop, with hopes that by the time I returned  one would perhaps have been bought by another customer by accident (looking back of course, this could only have been the store owner or his wife. This mall is a ghosttown during the day save for the line up of seniors at the pharmacy on Wednesdays) or maybe I’d be the winning 500th customer and would win a years supply of loose leaf, organic, fair trade green tea in a tin…and the world would start listening to themselves….and there would be one rainbow a day….and people would sing more, walk more and think more… and I would be walking with both legs.

Well, to make a long story short.  I bought them both, sacrificing money to determine the actual winning product by what actually matters with a product = quality and function.

Can you guess which one tastes and brews better??  I’ll post the taste test results a little later just for fun to see if anyone wants to guess…

ps. I work at a cafe and thus would usually just bring my tin and fill it up at the cafe, however, I blew out my knee snowboarding (sustainability conversation to come) so can’t stand to work….  thus I am prowling any shops within crutch-walking distance for tea.

Unsustainability: more than climate change

Unsustainability is an underlying systemic condition of societal design that has surfaced through the current challenges faced by society (ie. climate change, species extinction, HIV, poverty, etc).  Long-term, preventative, at the source solutions are required, as opposed to reactive actions so commonly taken when a symptom of our condition surfaces.  It takes a shift in ways of thinking, working and lots of patience.  This shift is a change that the world will experience as both individuals and as larger systems, and in all cases, a sensation of discomfort with the unknown will tempt the thinker(s) to submit to the short-term gratification of reactivity.  We must support eachother in learning to accept an unknown future and to find comfort and faith in the current activity when it is part of a strategic plan to lead us towards a sustainable future.

Eavesdropping

The contrast of conversations that occur in a cafe teaches me to appreciate the  global community that gathers around a cup of coffee.  I’m sitting on the internet looking at eco-communities that might be interested in adopting me, while our resident self-prescribed spiritual medium tells the girl across from me that her miscarried child was a boy.  Then as I cue into the conversation in the booth behind me, I hear a transaction being made for pot lighting in a ladies home with a security feature included as a free bonus!  The girl who now knows her lost child is still resting in her spirit sounds as pleased as the lady who just secured the esthetic lighting for her kitchen.  And I believe it.

Open at 7am

Our café is a gathering place.  It is a place where the conversation flows across the room from barista to customer to baker and engages new minds openly.  The music plays softly and there are moments when everyone quietly tends to their own place of energy.  If there is any sense of community in Mimico, it sips lattes here.

I reach at 6:40am and unlock the door, dropping the paper in the paper bin as I greet the baker.  I likely yawn and blow my nose before making the cash drawer “bbrrrnng” to count the daily float.  Depending on the state of the baker, I check to see how we’re doing on brewing coffee.
1)    Baker present – check.
2)    “House” coffee brewing – check.
3)    “Bold” coffee brewing – check.
4)    “Decaf” brewing – wow.  Good thing. Often our first customer takes an XL Decaf.  Different strokes guys, different strokes.
5)    Anything else done and we’re flying here.
6)    To my amazement, the page on the daily bird calendar is changed, as it has been every day since I worked here.  I like to suspect that we’ve got a calendar elf who waits until we turn off the lights at night to pop out and tear the page off of the calendar.  I wait for the day that I get to see the previous day’s page on the calendar.  Or the elf.

By the time I unlock the door and switch the open sign, I’m waking up and happy to see the first person up at 7am needing a coffee. A friend of mine finds that a curious phenomenon, that we force ourselves from our sleep to get a coffee that will hopefully make it feel like we’ve slept longer.  Why don’t we just sleep enough?
(insert explanation/excuse/complaint here ______.)

I then turn my attention to the espresso bar. It’s a funny, very honored and respected piece of equipment here at the café.  The moment you can handle the portafilter with a confident grip and execute a series of motions with flow and poise you have reached a hushed status behind the counter.  You become a “Barista”, and can “take bar”. I only say this based on the indications that I get from newer staff when they watch us “on bar” with a certain reverence and awe.  Is it human nature that the Barista then feels, deep down inside, a sense of pride accompanied by a secret resentment when that new staff “learns bar” and sees that it’s actually quite a simple, linear task?  Onwards and upwards as usual, one of us will re-establish a sense of superiority by attending a Barista competition one day.

I “calibrate” the espresso bar, a fancy verb for pouring a few shots and dumping them to wake up the machine.
The muffins are out, and as humans do, the baker fusses about their colour, shape or how they took so long to bake.  Something must be wrong.  It doesn’t make sense that they are different every time.  We can’t accept that.  I savour the muffins’ resistance to being “perfectly the same” every time.  They make me smile every morning with their different shapes, colours and heights.
The breakfast cookies are there too and for some reason they get less fret about being a bit different, perhaps because they don’t show it as much as the muffins.  The breakfast cookies are already an out-of-the-box (not literally) idea, so it’s almost more accepted that they just look different.  They are different.  Funny, I imagine many people can relate to either a muffin or a breakfast cookie.

I feel like the muffins.  In general, I look like a pretty standard, template tall, white, blonde, medium build and the moment I play with my clothing style or do my hair differently everyone notices.  On the other hand, I know there are breakfast cookies out there who just dress and look so unique and differently everyday that no one takes particular notice.

I turn to greet the second customer with her regular XL Decaf.

just another blog

while the devil on my shoulder reminds me hourly that this is yet one of millions of blogs online, I am beginning it in hopes to soothe my writer’s soul.