new / packaging

This post was originally published on February 22, 2024 and I’m reprising it here. It’s one of my favorites. Plus I don’t have the next episode ready yet. Whether you’ve seen this or if it’s new, I hope you enjoy it. You can listen to the original podcast (recommended) or read the text edition. Pacha Mama, Mother Nature, Planet Earth - unto you we sing and play. Cans and bottles and boxes and plastic encased display cards with the good stuff clearly seen inside but thoroughly protected - our products come well packaged. No one has touched it, pristine, virgin is the connotation I suppose. ‘New’ and ‘packaging’ are bound together in the modern day buying experience. You buy them both. Otherwise you wouldn’t really trust the product. If your Amazon order arrived loose in a bag without any packaging, you would be like - is this really the product? It doesn’t have any packaging. In the picture below the big black guy is presenting the seated white guy with an object, maybe two objects, obviously unpackaged, how rude. In one hand a conch shell and in the other hand some kind of a stick or pole with a strange round thing at the top and an equally strange protuberance at the bottom. He could be the Mayan Amazon delivery driver but there is no packaging. The picture, which is actually a Mayan hieroglyph (meaning unknown), came with the music I found on YouTube. It’s by Cacao Yoga in Vancouver (the music not the picture) and includes the amazing track that you are listening to now. Of course once a product is opened or consumed, the packaging is discarded. What once held promise and intrigue is now trash, disposable, and likely will become part of an artificial mountain called a ‘landfill’. In San Antonio there are three large municipal landfills: Covell Gardens, Tessman Road Landfill and Texas Disposal Systems Landfill, plus 4 smaller bulky waste sites where residents can dump their junk, plus several private sites that will take your stuff for a fee. Tessman Road, the largest of these landfills, has a capacity of 50 million tons. I couldn’t find out how high it is though or how deep it is. No pictures. Must be a fair sized knoll by now, they’ve been filling it in for awhile. I learned that Covell Gardens, the smallest one, processes 1,300,000 tons annually on their 480 acre garden. That’s a fair sized ranch. Pacha Mama, as referred to in the song (Mother Nature, planet Earth), is a package too and we are the contents. Discarded after the expiration date, we are buried in a landfill called a cemetery and eventually recycled. The container remains and the contents disappear. Pacha Mama has been doing this for a very long time. Everything that’s alive is built on something that has died. It seems like a significant point. We traveled far to find this placewhere weary souls find a warm embrace says the song We traveled far from outer spaceto bring you love and a warm embrace We’ll never get a handle on our waste disposal until we realize what an incredible place this is - our home planet. Supremely elegant and floating in space, no wires attached, turning on its axis and orbiting around a radiant sun - it contains a biosphere, a sphere of biological organisms, uncountable trillions of them, alive and procreating. It’s not new but it’s a package. It’s a package deal. And all our love all our loveit comes from this place And unto you we sing and playand love this place May all the bombs turn into birdsand fly away Oh Pacha Mama says the song podcast music at 34:20Thank you so much Tomoko and Koku for this Cacao Yoga set. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rohn.substack.com/subscribe