Mindfulness

          One of the most impactful parts of this trip has been the degree of mindfulness discussed by the different speakers and then projected into our lives.  I always believed myself to be a very present, aware, and mindful individual, but experiences this week have made me increasingly so.  Awareness and present-ness are especially important in times of tension and turmoil like the state of our country and planet today, but, unfortunately, that very tension and turmoil and the pace at which we live lend towards increasingly less-aware lifestyles.  In order to navigate these periods of time, we must be able to live with the degree of present-ness demonstrated in the image brought up multiple times, in which one walks through life along a narrow path, careful not to disturb any neighboring communities no matter how small.  This is an image of the awareness of the existence of surrounding lives and the inherent value in each one of them as well as the active role has in the relationship with them.  It is not only a mindfulness of others a but mindfulness of self and the extent of our impacts.  In the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, we very rarely take the necessary moments to not only acknowledge our own active existence but to learn and modify the extent of the ways in which we exist. 

Even though almost everything we have talked about has carried some degree of mindfulness thematically, we have definitely spent the most time on mindful consumption of resources in terms of food, water, and land.  While we were only ever indirectly asked to analyze our own consumption, the discussions of the Tohono O’odham consumption as well as Ajo consumption through the Sonoran Desert Alliance, which are both incredibly mindful in terms of connection to the land, the plant, one’s own body, and surrounding and far away humanity, left us increasingly aware of our own situations.  This reflects not only the passage of these values generationally within the O’odham community but the passage of awareness of O’odham values to those outside of the community as well, extending to the point at which individuals come to analyze their own existence and ways of life.