As we neared the end of our final exam in Secular and Sacred, our teacher reminded us to keep our intellectual hats on even after we left the class room. He urged us to keep looking for connections and to remain opened minded. I suppose I should say the same to you as well. Keep your Mindful Hats on well after your car pulls away from campus. Even if you don’t notice it, we are so lucky to live in a state where sustainability is important and there are all these grass root movements and organizations that are willing to fight the good fight for a better planet, better life, and better wallet. Not every state is like Vermont. I encourage everyone to take that extra moment to think before you throw or consume. And I challenge everyone to look beyond recycling and simple reduction as environmentalism. People don’t like to accept the negative or wasteful things they do, but we cannot pretend we live in a world anymore where we can leave a mess and hope someone cleans up after us. Sorry, but we are the cleaners right now!

Now I don’t mean you have to go out and join Green Peace or denounce everything non-organic or local (although it wouldn’t hurt to incorporate more local and more organic in your life), but I think we need to be more active. Practically every area in your life can be taken in a more sustainable direction. If you love food look at the environmental impacts it creates in your state and work toward making changes. If you love exercising see if you can run to work once a week to cut down on gas. Surround yourself with people who are interested in the same things you are so you can further your pursuits; I know it can feel awfully lonely to be around be people don’t care the way you do. Play with ideas while you’re home and then come back here to implement them. We are a small school, so there is a better chance you can make changes and that those changes will be felt by nearly everyone. They call us the lazy generation, but let’s prove them wrong! Let’s give a damn.

This summer I will continue to post periodically, so check out the blog every now and then for updates. You’ll probably find a lot of them are related to the community garden that will hopefully be all a bustle this summer. Have a great, great, vacation, make lots of money, make only a few bad decisions, and KEEP BEING MINDFUL!