Yesterday, I was privileged to contribute my post to Laudato Si blog that is full of great green tips and explores the Christian calling to care for our common home.
Here is an extract to the blog post. Link to the full text below.
A long time ago, inspired by a blogger from Australia, Sash Milne, I started a Nothing New Project, i.e. I tried not to buy anything new for a year, to decrease waste and increase living. While back then I felt quite virtuous about living that way, there was nothing too virtuous about the way I live now, as if back then I stretched myself too far and snapped like a bandana that children get for the Remembrance Day in the UK. When you do a project like that, that forces you to reduce your buying and question every moment when you open your wallet and reach for a coin not out of poverty but out of restraint, you either learn to love yourself as you are, without the gadgets and extra consumption and you learn to live differently or you feel somewhat destabilized because you locked yourself out of participation in the prevailing culture, i.e. the culture of consumerism. Oh, and one more thing, you can also develop the maturity to make yourself accountable for the trail of waste that falls behind you but, in all honesty, this wasn’t the learning outcome that I have satisfactorily reached and consolidated. To consistently swim against the current, you have to decide to consistently swim against the current and that is hard.
What the Nothing New project showed me is that I by and large go through life inattentively, to the shouts of waste that brutally lurk in the shadows of my life or blatantly ‘shine’ on display in my house – as if the psyche couldn’t quite handle the tension between wanting more and needing less. I go through life with an ecological heart that is neither pure nor faithful to the principles of ecological teaching, but I still have hope for myself and the humanity – that we will make progress. Read more..
Postcards Without Stamps 
Dear Alicja, your eco-observations reflect the inner concerns of many thoughtful or reluctant consumers. ‘The tension between wanting more and needing less’ is a lovely way of expressing this major problem in the twenty-first century.
It was not a problem for most people until, perhaps, the latter part of the twentieth century. Why not? In Europe for much of the last century we had long-lasting war-time rations and restrictions, together with poverty, when ‘consumer choice’ was not yet an expression or concept.
Since the 1970s we’ve had a proliferation of advertising and cheap imported goods. All very tempting, and requiring self-restraint. It wasn’t even a matter of adequate income following the introduction of the credit card. ‘I’ve nothing to wear’ – but the wardrobe is bulging! Women in particular know this feeling. I think of my recently-rediscovered French exchange friend of 60 years ago. She sought refuge from the student and religious turmoil of the late 1960s / early 1970s by entering the monastic life in Brittany. She’s been in her traditional Catholic Community of Benedictine Sisters for 50 years, in full contentment. And she doesn’t have to decide what to wear each day. Carry on with your creative thoughts and art. Bacioni, E
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