Follow Natural Peaceful Paths through Every Living Day in this shared journey down natural paths of ease and calm.It’s a common observation that people often look like their pets. The frequent truth of that is partially due to our instinctive draw to those who are already like us, human or not. It’s also partially due to some form of entrainment, where living in parallel begins to synch everything from attitudes to dietary habits. People begin to look like their spouses too, after awhile, for the same reasons. We begin to act like those we surround ourselves with, too, and the ways of our pets and spouses reflect how we treat them. It all reflects how we treat ourselves.
So do people also begin to look like their planet, and vice versa? Recently I found myself wondering this while pondering the ragged nature of my current haircut. You always see what you’re thinking of, so I noticed others wandering by with differing hairstyles—I use the term “style” loosely—and turned my eyes away to look at the mountains instead, thinking this would provide respite from the topic. But it didn’t. That mountain has a mullet, I realized. You know the haircut I mean: “business in the front, party in the back.” One of humanity’s dimmer ideas, right there with the Chevy Vega and potato chips in a can. Anyway, in the mountain’s case, logging has reduced it to a similar state of bad fashion. “Logging in the front, forest in the back.” I frowned and looked further across the landscape, realizing that the patchwork of cuts has reduced the entire mountain range to peaks of lopsided mullets. It’s going to take awhile to grow out. I’ll spare you the painful pictures.
We do indeed begin to look like our planet, and our planet begins to look like us. We don’t own it anymore than we own our pets, or than our spouses own us. But our interdependence makes it inevitable that we begin to resemble each other in a grand way. If we reduce our planet to an unhealthy pile of rubble, our resulting lives become unhealthy and it translates to our bodies and the look in our eyes. If we let ourselves go, it’s impossible to have the energy to properly care for our surroundings. In order to find tranquility, we have to preserve health and beauty. We have to cultivate it from within as well as around us. And on that note, I’m going to start by getting a haircut.
It’s funny Eric; when I was a kid, my father called a certain mountain on the horizon The Haircut because it seemed to change every year as they logged different sides of it. Now, I run my hands through my hair, more selective thinning than a clear cut. Have a Wildly Graceful weekend!