Being a caring human being as you live your life one small step at a time takes time, energy, focus and more.
We have come from a slave society, in which pushing your work, responsibility and clean-up onto others who worked for free or close to free, was how work got done. Many of us, whose ancestry does not trace back to that master/slave relationship have adopted and adapted what it has produced in this world. We want to have without taking on the responsibility. We want others to do our dirty work. Many, if not most, of our inventions or what we call our moving forward in a better way, are based on pushing the clean-up of our lives onto others. We have become accustomed to making a mess as we enjoy and live our lives and leave what we consider the dregs for others to take care of – to clean-up behind our enjoyment – even our work product.
One way we can make up for that history in an improving rather than dying world is to be careful with our garbage disposal.
We are trying to look carefully at what we throw out to make sure it is actually garbage and not the result of trashing what could be reused because we are too lazy to do otherwise. Not so easy, but quite profitable for all of us.
We are trying to move items from garbage disposal to reuse. Sometimes we are just amazed at what we didn’t realize we should keep for some good use rather than just tossing into the garbage and sometimes missing the garbage bag.
COFFEE GROUNDS is one items we discovered should not be in the garbage nor put down the disposal.
Imagine our delight to discover coffee grounds are good for the garden – the plants and foods we are trying to cultivate in our backyard. Or that coffee groundd are good to keep and bring to someone else so their garden can be enhanced.
When cleaning up after breakfast or at other times when you have made coffee – try this means of disposal – simply take your coffee grounds and throw them into your garden on whatever plants or trees or bushes you want to feed. Add a bit of water to the coffee pot to make sure all the grounds are out of the pot and into the soil. If your coffee grounds are from organically grown coffee – so much the better.
We found a great coffee at Trader Joe’s. Their Organic Arabica coffee. What we don’t like is the only form in which we can purchase it is in already ground coffee beans. We have become accustomed to grinding our coffee beans just before we make what we hope will be a fantastic cup of coffee – and it is usually outstanding. (Sorry, sometimes we just have to brag). So, we buy a bit of Trader Joe’s Arabica ground coffee, but until they provide that organically grown Arabica coffee in packages of whole beans, we will stick to the coffee beans we normally use until that changes.
We love adding water to the coffee pot as we are washing dishes and then pouring the coffee into the glass container we use to keep the used coffee grounds until we can get into the garden to pour out those leftovers. A habit we cultivated because some of our master/slave ways of being are still strong. When we first discovered this ability to move used coffee grounds from trash to recover we couldn’t wait to get into the garden and throw out the used coffee grounds with every pot of coffee we made. That didn’t last long. Our need to spend less energy in whatever we try to do took over – and into the kitchen came the glass container.
We feel as though we are doing something really special by converting what was trash into food for the earth so it will produce more beautiful plants for our eyes and nose and nutritionally better food to nourish our bodies while not clogging up everything by creating trash and garbage for others to have to handle.
Dropping the leftover ways of being master over slaves (and yes, we still have that mentality); dropping the destruction of the earth in which we are all participants – could that be called being responsible human beings? Improving humanity by trying, one small step at a time, to eliminate our participation in laziness, evil, greed, destruction, etc just because we can!
