Dying for trash

Seeing is the first step.

As we drove through the trash, it continuously smoked and there were cows that only ate trash.  The teenage girls were dis-attached, as if the windows were television screens.  But when the door opens and you smell it then the show ends and you actually see it.

Impact = Feeling

That was the first note I made in my little red notebook that rode around that trip with me.  I knew that the impact was heavy and even devastating, but how do you change that impact into action and not let it die as a flame up of feelings?

We walked around the dump for a little while, the rolling hills of trash dotted with people picking through it and the cows.  The dump is the other side of consumption.

We met the kids.  They smiled, laughed, drew pictures for us.  One drew a picture for me, I remember sitting there with my arm around him watching him draw and he gave me the picture as a gift.  I still have it.  As of right now I couldn't tell you whats on the picture even though I've looked at it a dozen times, it has green marker.  I'm not sure what the drawings are but I know the dark smudge of dirty residue left on the page on the bottom right where he had rested his body.  That residue from the dump, getting on a plane, flying back thousands of miles, driving on highways stuffed with expensive cars, sitting in my house, my house, under my roof.  That smudge now lives in perpetuity between sixty eight and seventy two degrees.

A woman who escaped the dump said every day she hoped to find a treasure in the trash, something so big it would solve all of her problems and she could leave and live in luxury.  She was born in the trash, they think it's five generations now but they don't keep great records at the dump.  Generations move quickly when you have kids at twelve and die at thirty.

The week I got back I went to a corporate meeting on the top floor with catering.  There were seventy five of us, filling up our lives meeting with each other so we could call it work.  The speaker talked about how he went on a normal sales call and ended up closing a deal that he pulled six figures from, a single deal!  For years in my life I had been hoping to find that treasure in the trash.  I did it in a suite and silk tie over expensive lunches and afternoon drinks.  Some of us still die at thirty because it's stressful, I only got an ulcer.

That woman escaped, and lives in a luxury she did not even know existed, freedom from the dump.  Sometimes release is the only thing we really need to allow us to receive.

Impact = feelings, but how do we turn those feelings into actions that mean something.  Harness the power to come back.  I've left much of the treasure hunting behind but one thing I have not left behind is the impact of that day and the promise to be back.