Service in Parks - or anywhere you go

We have found ourselves with an abundance of service projects everywhere we go. We love to look back down a beach, to gaze across a park or campground, or, look at the flowers of a roadside and enjoy a view without trash and plastics. There is something different about being in places where you can make a public difference; something about finding a space that is of a human scale which can be seen as approachable, conquerable, measurable. We have found these spaces in parks and beaches: essentially in the places which we decide ‘ought‘ to be clean.

While traveling, I myself stress that I would prefer not to let my own moral code define the interactions I have. (This has come in handy lately in lands where even wealthy, educated, business owners have not given a thought to tossing plastic bags and bottles out their windows onto the precious landscapes all around us.) In fact, though I am blogging about public clean-ups as service projects - one of there best qualities is that they are an invisible good. When done correctly, no one should have to know that we have done a service project at all. Leaving a place cleaner makes it more enjoyable without seeking recognition or reward.

So, I find service cleaning beaches, trails, parks, campsites, and roadways. And, while I wish that in many parts of the world people were more than jut beginning to get a grasp on the non-disposability of plastic (meaning: it does not go away); I do not take on this service with negativity or discontent. Instead, I mostly enjoy therapeutic and fast rewards of the calming exercise and my immediate betterment of the space. I love the feeling of improving a space which I was already enjoying..

As any passionate dishwasher, car washer, grass cutter, or vacuum maven will tell you, there is a meditative value in organizing and cleaning our environment. While it may not all be our mess, stewarding its utility and preservation is a kindness we do for both ourselves and others.

What I call the greatness of service in cleaning public places is the silence and invisibility of the act. While it would cause some discomfort to pick up trash (coming from my own society, the USA, where cleaning of public parks and roadways is often the purveyance of non-violent incarcerated offenders). It is my hope that people who see someone cleaning pubic places will choose one of two principle actions for their own life: (1) to not litter; and, (2) to leave our public (and private) places cleaner than we find them. If you question your ability to clean up a public mess, start smaller, clean a remote trail, clean a community garden, or the public ways of residence of someone you know infirm. Enjoy that small satisfaction; then let that small success motivate you towards other, more public places.

My theory behind why public places should be clean is a simple one: If the lands and special places which we all enjoy together are kept to a high standard, we will all expect the same in our own home lands.

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'Step-by-Step' the story of a giving tree

This is the story of a Giving Tree. It lives on a beach and everyday at high tide the tides come up and give it a bath. When the tide is high, its low trunk is a step to keep you dry. When the tides are low but the high sun burns the skin and the hot sand burn feet on the sand the tree provides shade and keeps you cool. Birds sit in the tree in the cool evening breezes and sing to lovers who watch sunsets beneath the branches. The tree has held many swings. Tire swings. Swings made of drift wood and washed up rope.

One day the tree was surrounded by trash that swept up onto the beach in a storm. There were many nets which had stuck together in the terrible surf. There were also toothbrushes, empty bags, and plenty of empty cans of soda (lots of straws too which lost their bottles in the surf). Most of all there were shoes. Lots of shoes. Mostly flip-flops and sandals people may have lost on the beach in the waves. There were also fishing lures, Styrofoam, and fishing floats which must have come a long, long way because they said 'Made in Japan' on their sides.

One day a nice couple arrived from the other side of the world. They had been best friends in high school. When they grew older they they married and separated. Sadly, they had recently lost the husband and wife. Luckily they met again, fell in love, and decided to get married. They were very happy people and treated each other like each day was their honeymoon. They had come to the island before the trash came back and spent every evening watching sunsets beneath this giving tree.

They picked up shoes for two days and other trash. They kept the shoes in one pile and the interesting trash they thought people could reuse in another. With empty bags collected off the beach they separated all the bottles and cans to be recycled. They put the other trash in all the left over bags.

That night, as the sunset, they counted the number of shoes they had found between Monkee and Big Easy beach. They had collected over 250 and not one matched. What would they possibly do with all these shoes without their pairs?

The next day they made jokes with the people who passed as they separated the best shoes from the most broken and torn up shoes. "Are you missing a shoe?" they asked.

But they remembered an old man they had met on an Island near Iryan Jaya, too far from anywhere in between Australia and Indonesia in the far, far Pacific. The old man collected trash and hung it on the beach as art. They had been very moved to see such amazing uses of washed up trash. The old man had told them he hung bottles and shoes in tree to keep away bad spirits and carry his message of the need to clean the oceans all over the world. He told the happy couple that the shoes had found them and brought them to his island to learn what they could do to save the oceans. They could not be here, he said, if they were not wanting to work on his special mission, because the bottles in the trees would keep any bad spirits away.

When this couple remembered the old man, they knew what they could do with their collections of trash. Over the next two days they spent half their time collecting more shoes and the rest of their time using the piles of fishing lines and pieces of of net to tie their shoes to the trunk of their giving tree.

The next day they returned and found that the waves of high tide had undone much of their work and a string of maybe 80 shoes was drifting off from the tree back into the sea. Quickly they regathered the the shoes and tied them more firmly to the tree. The tied up floats to test how high the tides came up. When the water came up the next morning the floats got seaweed on them and they were able to test where the needed to tie the shoes with more knots.

People stopped by as the couple worked on their tree. In the evening, the trunk and the main branches were completely covered in sandals and flip-flops. There were floats attached that bobbed like mobiles in the wind. They looked up and down the beach, Not a piece of trash could be seen in either direction.

"Step-by-Step", the woman said to her loving partner who held her as they watched the sunset under their giving tree, "Step-by step, together we can clean all the oceans in the world and make the beaches all beautiful again!"

"That's it." Her husband responded. They had a name for their giving tree.

The next day they found a piece of driftwood that must have washed up years before in the mangroves behind the giving tree. The wrote "Step-by-Step" on it and tied it with some rope and hung it on the giving tree.

This is a picture of the happy couple who traveled around the world to sit under a tree they loved and watch beautiful sunsets. But they found a storm had thrown trash on there beach including lots of shoes, especially sandals and flip-flops.

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