Are you one of those mothers who is quite good at meeting other people’s needs, and abysmal at meeting your own?  Or, you meet your own just enough to meet all the other demands in your life, but not enough to actually feel resilient and strong and deeply content?  Last week we spoke about self image, which is a precursor to self esteem or the lack thereof.  We correlated imagery of our form with self value and worth.  

Feelings of worthlessness can be powerful, and overwhelm the ability to be efficacious in working toward meaningful change.  But here is another reason why tending our self esteem matters hugely to our planet protection efforts.  Community esteem, at its strongest, is born from many individuals who possess self worth- and is required to competently tend local resources.  Our Clean Sweep is a case in point.  The force of a huge contingency of local Illinois Valley stewards has been coordinated and rallied to clean up Kerby Mainline.  It will require the force of all of us to maintain it.  That means nurturing our community pride and belief in ourselves as a people, along with valuing where we live.  I call that community esteem.  It is the other side of the coin that is self esteem.  When we care about ourselves and feel our own value, we are much better at mobilizing as a group and creating the invisible moral spine that is community pride.

We get from self esteem to community esteem when we have a healthy lens for ascribing value.  Ascribing value in a world that loudly and noisily does this for us, by attaching worth to physical objects or physical states that require consumption and spending makes that hard. It is easy for us to lose sight of what real worth even is.

That’s why we must always look up at the sky.  The Sky Gaze, as I call it, helps recalibrate value.  The Sky Gaze as initiation for our day/path is powerful!

Pre-dawn Stars sparkle brighter than diamonds.  Sunrises outdo man made fluorescent fonts every time.  Cloud symphonies touch our souls the way marshmallows never could.  Sweet snow falling to our tongues is way better than ice cream.  The sky gaze is free to everyone, and reminds us what is of real value.  Remarkably, those things are all shared by all of us. They were ours at birth.  The sky, the earth, our water, despite the force that has been inflicted by men who exploit them and falsely claim ownership over them, are for everyone.  They are also ours to protect.

We can do that!  We can protect these things if we work together.  That’s why we need community esteem, which is also a great equal and opposite energy and balance for self esteem.  

I know one way to feel that readily…by dancing with each other every week!  It’s amazing how that remarkable thing called ‘each other’ strengthens our efforts.  In these precarious times, we need community esteem more than ever.  So how are you fostering yours?