Cake for thought?

Oh hey friends,

Intrepid Traveling School returns...emotional roller coaster of teenage girls continues. We just spent 8 days in the Galapagos Islands, on a boat. Our days were packed - morning and afternoon hikes on sun baked lava islands. The wildlife there has never evolved a fear of humans, as it has been in a protected state since within a hundred years of human settlement. As a result, one walks along the rocky paths stepping around sea lions, huge marine iguanas, next to hanging branches where the blue-footed booby and its mate sit and tend their eggs.

I could write to you about evolution. I could write to you about what I think it means for us as a species to have technologized past our limiting factors, or the fact that our carrying capacity was met somewhere around 300 years ago. I could compare that to the rapid evolution that I saw on the islands. But that´s a topic for another day.

I´ll write to you instead about birthday cake.

One of my students turned 17 while on the Galapagos. Because our school comes into the Galapagos with a contract from the owners of the boats reading that we are an " exclusive and important" high school from the United States, we got the royal treatment. The crew baked a massive cake - larger than an average cake in the US. Homemade, frosted by hand.

The first comments out of my students mouths were excitement about finally being able to get as big a piece as they could possibly eat. There was much posturing for the receiving of their piece, argument over the biggest pieces, and finally a blow up surrounding not getting a strawberry on top of a particular piece. Ultimately, the girls dove in for seconds before offering firsts to our crew.

I was livid. I don´t get mad often, and this incident set me over the edge. I retreated to my cabin, shaking and in tears, trying to figure out how to address my group.

I write this not to complain about my students but instead to reflect on myself, and on the culture that we generate as a group when people from the United States travel together. I find that we often take more than we need, more than we want even, for the sake of making sure that we have enough. We are threatened by scarcity, by the stress that eventually we might run out. Therefore, it is necessary to take as much as we can in this moment - to store, to horde, even to the detriment of those around us.

And I realized that this comes out of seeing our world as consumable. Wade Davis, National Geographic write and cultural anthropologist talks about how a child in the Andes is raised to see the mountains around them as apus, or mountain spirits. The divine exists within them. A child in Montana (referring to himself), on the other hand, is raised to see the mountains as a resource to be mined.

Which one is right? Both can be true. It has nothing to do with whether or not the mountains "really do" have gods in them. It is instead prescriptive of the way that we see the environment around us. And if we see our mountains as resources to be mined, then of course we live in subconscious fear of hte fact that some day they will be gone. How can we attach ourselves to a place spiritually, really, if we know that due to our very own pursuits of life it may someday be gone?

So I think about a world of scarcity, and a world of abundance. What is the fundamental basis of our existence? And if it is scarcity, is it possible to retrain ourselves in our deepest inner core that indeed there is a way of living that will in fact provide enough?

Hmmm. Cake for thought?