A consumer frame of mind disempowers us. It puts us in a passive position of accepting whatever the “market” produces.

Development of a positive attitude is often stated as a key life skill for success.

Upon reading the words “positive attitude” I felt the urge to punch something.

As Elemental Activists we seek the win-win-win perspective. This is where our actions benefit ourselves, other people and the planet. Our work is to grow from our win-lose perspective to a win-win-win perspective. We must learn to compromise and enjoy it! Any truly successful communal activity requires compromise and living on this planet together is a communal activity.

As Elemental Activists, we want to be outside. Our goal is to connect with nature so intimately we remember we are nature. When we remember we are nature, we realize that nature's well-being is our well-being.

When we feel tied in knots, it's because we are worried: worried about what's happening, what's going to happen and what we should do about it. We want to exercise our personal power to make some future event okay. This never works.

When we are open and silent, bliss overtakes. It creeps up from the center of the universe and finds its way into every cell of our being. For this to happen, we must let it happen. We must have the courage to be open. When we feel this bliss, it is love becoming us. We feel well.

To be fully alive is to be powerful. When we open to the sensation and substance of the world we become responsive. We feel. When our influences are healthy and life-supporting, we feel well. 

So let's look at the feelings that might have lead to the creation of the gun:

I am afraid.
I am angry.
I am hungry.
I am bored.

When our mind searches for ways to fulfill these needs does it find a gun as the only solution?

When we expand our worldview we see that we are part of an ongoing cycle. It is like an origami project where we are folding and refolding the same piece of paper with every action we make. We can create haphazardly and end-up with the art piece we have now or we can create consciously with care and skill and create something beautiful.

It takes great courage to pursue this path because what we feel is often contrary to what we think. Going in a new direction can be frightening because we do not know what lies ahead. 

Elemental Activist is here to support each and every one of us in getting back in sync with the bigger picture and having our doing reflect a healthy state of being. When we engage in this quiet work it makes us powerful activists.

Hi. My name is Sonja Williams and I started Elemental Activist as a way to reach out to other people who want to do their part to change the world and don't know exactly how to be of service.

We talked about what influences us and turned our focus toward nature. They wrote for a while on something in nature which influences them and afterward made a drawing inspired by what they wrote.

What is this love of strange spongy creatures who blossom into flowers when we are not looking? I brought my boy on this mystery, both of us reflective in the rocky waters of a promising minus tide.

And then there, right across my path, loped a huge coyote. He was so big, at first, I thought he was a wolf. Then I remembered wolves don't live in Point Reyes. He looked thirsty; we were into a long drought. He was walking, head down, in the direction of the point. There was that fresh water pond where the tule elk go.

A short way down the Tomales Point Trail, I stopped dead in my tracks. I could not believe what I was seeing. It was a long-tailed weasel! He poked his tawny head from a hole in the middle of the trail.

It's hard to imagine living here. The weather sweeps in and out uninhibited by this little sliver of land. The terrain is grass, grass and more grass. It's isolated by water on three sides. The people who lived here had each other and a lot of cows for company. I'm sure the solitude suited some, but others must have gone mad.

This brilliant spectacle was all the more poignant for its transiency. Heavy gray clouds began to darken the space.

What we have now is unfathomably beautiful. Each creature is a thread in the web of life. Each creature is perfectly adapted to its particular set of circumstances. No other creature could fill the Northern elephant seal's exact niche.

As we stood to go, I felt weightless. I had dissolved into the landscape. All that remained of me was an organic connection to the ways and means of sun, waves, wind and sky.