By Phil Berwick
Photo: Visitors writing in The Dog Logue
Those who pick up and open a Healthy Planet Magazine are two categories of humans; Folks olden in body, and young in spirit, or young ones in body and olden in spirit. The Healthy Planet Magazine was founded on a passion to help people make our earth a better place by its original founder / publisher and continues with the same purpose by the new publisher, once a schoolteacher, who chose helping save a paper, and planet, and encouraging healthy outlooks on life a richer option than retirement. Reams of news sources, whether legacy biased narrative news, or social media, or horizons of billboards are all the more in our spaces and faces. This organic magazine awaits certain seekers, beckoning to go deeper, on old-fashioned newsstands. Not all that long ago we didn’t have phones on our person but quarters in our pockets for a pay phone. And instead of ‘social media’ there was socializing with others, talking about the dog, the cat, discussing politics or the parakeet. I recently read that on average we look at our phones twice a minute. I used to collect my land line voice mail twice a day.
I’m done being programmed. Mark Zuckerberg projected early on that Facebook would be the first thing people look at when they wake and the last thing before they sleep. I confess I was so duped and doped. I’ve become more face to face with someone else now, my Creator, and it’s not artificial intelligence. When we moved from Desoto to Ferguson, I realized the new neighborhood we were in held empty nesters. Neighbors were less connected to neighbors than we had been down in the country, with walls of woods between our homes. The kids in our new Ferguson neighborhood had grown up playing ball together on a field of dreams, but the parents had not.
So I made a ‘Dog Logue’ in a corner of Jeske Sculpture Park. It’s a rustic wooden table with a journal-diary, containing a LOGUE, so people can write their thoughts, notes about the park, their dog or cat, or parakeet. Sometimes there is a poem, or a prayer. I’ve gone through three ‘Dog Logues’, rustic sanded tree slab tables, worn out by the weather and many more waterlogged logues-diary-journals, kept in coated cigar boxes under the ‘log’.
Phil Berwick is owner of Living Tree Care and Founder of non-profit FreedomCry.Life
E-mail livingtree@earthlink.net / Livingtreecare.com / Livingtreeinternational.org