Local-lujah!

We never saw The Shopocalypse in its stealthy approach. We couldn’t imagine shopping ourselves to death. How can a super mall be a bad thing? It is prosperity and the golden future, isn’t it? Yes, children, we thought that Destiny Mall and Paradise Mall and The Mall of America were the Kingdom of God crossed with real estate. Consumerism snuck up on us and we became more consumer than citizen. Did you see that coming?

So much in life rises from slowly building momentum, rather than, say, a headless man flying through your picture window in a tabloid splash. But we have an opportunity for some collective common sense this Christmas. Call it the shopping season, Black Friday or Buy Nothing Day… there is a chance for the average consumer to give a radically different kind of gift.

This “recovery” they are peddling -- the comeback of western economies is up there on charts and graphics. The suits speak to us with portions of sentences erased by financial jargon. But the recovery - in reality? - it is a lie. And we know it. Our common sense is beginning to feel the larger wave rising beneath us, the unreported momentum. We are looking back at that “jobless recovery” and watching it talk to us through the media, the shop windows, credit card hacks at airports, logos emblazoned on litter that rolls over our feet. The shouting of that economy is jacked-up for fast Christmas gratification, but we feel the slow things better now.

At Christmas-time – we see the corporations go to work. All advertising wants us to demote the things we already have, so that our presents must be purchased, and as broke as we are – purchased on credit. But that kind of celebration the natural world disagrees with. And we’ve been noticing the vehemence of this disagreement. The earth’s evolutionary pace of change has critical-massed with opportunistic diseases and melting ice-caps and the unbearable silence of extinction. This is the form the earth’s free speech now takes. What is life on earth saying to us?

Stop and focus, let your senses dilate. Find the thing you already have that may be under-used, over-looked, hiding in plain sight. Cast a new eye on your old street. Create your gift HERE. Don’t drill it and pipe it thousands of miles. Don’t sweatshop it and keep a fleet of ships and trucks. Don’t wrap cheap stuff in plastic and idle yourself in that traffic jam from Christmas Hell.

This Christmas if we give deeply we will shop local. A sustainable economy comes from noticing what you do with your hands, your eyes, your legs, your off-hand thoughts, your growing skills. Don’t drive to your gifts this year -- only buy things you can walk or bike to. Consume less, and sense what is near…

It is a Holy Day when we listen to the 120 mile-an-hour whisper in the earth’s wind. This year all gifts should be simultaneously to a loved one and to the earth. The earth is the beautiful stuff of which your loved one is made, after all, and you are made of the earth, too. This year, if we give good gifts, then we are the earth loving the earth – now that is a very Holy Day. Amen?