My Four Principles: Recycling Is My Karma Yoga

This is not a religious blog by any means. But my recycling career choice has an origin story. 

When my mother, Janeth Ingenthron (1942-2025) was pursuing a Ph.D degree at University of Arkansas in World Literature, during my teenage years, she would finish an assigned reading and then knock on my bedroom door and throw it on my bed, and tell me briefly about why it was important.

Tao Tse Ching.

Plato's Republic. 

Steppenwolf, Siddhartha...

Bhagavad Gita...

Some combination of smoking pot and feeling guilty about it and being surrounded by Ozark Mountain Pentacostal relatives grew inside me... And I also read my pocket Gideon's Bible New Testament, and talked to Mom about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John... same story but different perspectives and lessons.

In a nutshell, cutting to the chase, I decided that becoming a hermit monk philosopher would keep my conscience nice and shiny, but that generations who would look back on us, the way I was looking back on these historical philophers, would care about what we consumed and polluted, and what we left for them.

That's why Recycling became my choice. It was a religious, philosophical choice. If I live on this planet, I will consume finite resources, and the best way short of asceticism was to justify my existence by saving waste. Recycling was my karma yoga.

I just reunited with the pocket Gideon's Bible while cleaning my late mother's house last week. The parable of the mustard seed - whether it was taken by crows (avarice), neglected by sun and water (non-practice, non-prayer), or gave fruit - twenty-fold, sixty-fold, one-hundred-fold, was up to us. The mustard seed was the inspiration, the prayer, the holy ghost. 

So let's just say I'm not evangelical. Religious, in my way, but not trying to convince others to be so. I suggested the Great Books to my kids, but it's up to them. I can toss them on the bed like my Mom did for me, but she never insisted or cautioned me about hell.  (She did explain heaven and hell when I was little, but said a loving God wouldn't actually send people He loved to hell, so it was pretty much empty, except for like this guy Hitler).

Here's my 63 year old philosophy.

1. I pray for faith to improve myself constantly.

2. I acknowledge infinity, and accept humility of my non-importance in that picture.

3. I will commit to Service, to humanity and the environment, history and planet.

4. I am responsible for the page my time existing represents, which is forever on the shelf.

Number four is kind of my "relativity theory of time", where I believe every moment in time exists at once, like pages in a book on a shelf. We read a book a sentence or word or moment at a time because we are not infinitely intelligent. The whole book - every moment in time - is there, we just cannot experience it all at once, at least up until our life "flashes before our eyes".

I experienced the life flashing before my eyes when nearly killed - 48 hours in a coma - being thrown from a horse the summer between 5th and 6th grade.

We were lucky to be read to, and to read. If the "Great Books" are lost to "great tweets" or "great tictoks", good luck finding people like me in the future. I'm not a guru, but have rounded a lot of bases with my life.