Friday, December 12, 2008
Christmas Lights
Hey what do you guys think about Christmas lights? Do you think that they are energy "well spent" so to speak. Is the happiness (or mood) that they inspire greater than the amount of energy it takes to light them? That's just something I was thinking about today. I hope everyone has a really fun (and sustainable) winter break!
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2 comments:
Hi Lorena! Great question, and I wanted to make sure to comment, but also to encourage other people to continue to use this forum for such questions. Not everyone in the class will run into each other very often -- even on such a small campus -- so this could be an ideal way to carry on the "conversation" we all have with each other, and, ultimately, with the living earth around us.
Are Christmas lights an example of energy "well spent"? As with so many questions -- food, for example -- there is the personal action component and the systemic one. What I mean is we can make better choices: LED lighting (incidentally, our tree this year used this more efficient lighting), less lighting, no lighting at all. Then, there are the blazing neighborhoods and downtowns and cities you can see from space ... A range of energy questions light up the sky around us.
The important question to circle back to is being mindful of our choices, and therefore appreciating deeply what we use, why we use it, and how we use it. Raising the question, as you have here, is an important step. Whether Christmas lights or gasoline or plastic products or turkey dinner, each individual has the opportunity to become more reflective (and possibly, and hopefully, more connected) about the choices they make. This is difficult work that can tap into our ways of relating to all beings, waking to our shared desires and needs, learning to distinguish between those things with some wisdom, and to respond with gratitude. Now that's a reason to celebrate, or at least one more reason to celebrate this season.
Now, what about all those Christmas trees? ....
I was horrified this year when my mom had the audacity to ask if we wanted a Christmas tree this year.
'Of course we do!' I said, answering for everyone, 'It's Christmas!'
A few days later I thought about how I had phrased that. And it is really my mental symbol for Christmas, ever since that unfortunate night I discovered where those presents were really coming from, so I was at great pains to let it go. But realizing that I'm equating it with all the feelings, events, etc that make up Christmas makes it a lot easier to step back and say: Okay. The Tree does not contain Christmas. And this way of doing it is having negative impacts on the environment/society/whathaveyou. What's another way of doing it that might be better? Which is not to say that I didn't have a Christmas tree, or to say that my dad didn't cover the yard in lights. We did. It was awesome. But next year I may be ready to try doing things a different way. I always thought it would be fun to decorate a tree in the back yard or something.
As for lights: I think they are worth it. I could not give those up as easily as I could give up a tree because they aren't something I can isolate as a symbol. Or what they mean is more abstract than I can pull out, or something. Mmm. It's like, I know they aren't strictly necessary but they inspire a mood, like you said. It's sort of like how I know I don't really need the fantastic hula hoop I got for Christmas, but it is an active agent in making me happy rather than something I think of as a symbol for something that makes me happy, which makes it more worth keeping. The active agent thing is the key here, I think, but I've been hula hooping for a long time today and I can't think straight.
So the tree is just a symbol of something else that makes me happy, and thus fairly easy to get rid of because it is just the middleman. I can figure out a different way to characterize christmas. Whereas the hula hoop is more of an active ingredient, because I play with it to make myself happy*. I'm not really sure I made sense, or answered the question or anything. But there you have it.
*Of course, now I feel like I'm running into that UTILITY mine field. Oh well. I have nothing to say about that, since I only vaguely understand it to begin with.
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