My work has kidnapped me for several weeks now. It took all my writing instruments and snatched away the keyboard that would let me blog.
But it seems writing does find its way to me. This week, the company I'm employed is celebrating Environment week. By reminding every employee to save those stray energies by turning off monitors during breaks, unused lights and everything else that consumes energy, and, conserve water --probably the most important of them all, since perhaps energy is renewable-- it was time again for the yearly contests of spreading these messages.
Here is my entry for the essay writing, which I started and finished a couple of hours ago.
“The Painting of Earth”
Once there was a painter. He was lonely and sad. While sitting under a palm tree shade beneath a background of blue beach and white clouds, he thought of painting an image of his world, a world that his mind has been thinking. A world full of life.
So he sat back on his chair in front of his canvass and an army of paint cans and brushes of different bristles and sizes. His mind began to wander how he would draw his amazing world as he stare point blank on the white sheet of cloth waiting to be brushed with the first stroke of his gentle hand.
First, he took the pencil.
He began to sketch a big circle in the center. It looked bland. So he dipped his wide brush into the blue can of paint. He started to color the circle with varying shades. A smile is drawn up to his face as he continues to fill the entire circle with blue. This will be his vast oceans and seas.
Next, he painted the area outside the circle with white and crystal blue. A beautiful sky, he mumbled, as he paints clouds across the canvass.
Soon enough, he started to draw some irregular shapes inside the circle. These shapes were of different sizes and follow no specific pattern. He scattered them enough to fill a fraction of the circle. These are the islands, he said to himself. He colored them light brown.
He realized his painting was lacking an important part. It was out of life. So he mustered all his courage and enthusiasm and started to paint the sea with dolphins and whales. He filled the beaches with starfishes and corals. He used his fine bristled paint brushes and drew as many sea creatures as his imagination could fill.
Mountains were sketched along the lands and continent. He created with them trees, small and big, with fruits of different kinds and shapes. Now, the lands are a mixture of green and brown color filled with all kinds of animals, like the elephants and zebras, birds and geese.
The best part came when he's about to draw humans to live in his painted world.
He looked into the painting and he was cheerful and happy. It came out with the exact description of the world he was thinking of. He named his painting, "Earth".
A few years after, the painter died of a heart stroke. He was poor and penniless. His only possessions were his paintings, brushes and inks. His masterpiece of Earth was placed in a museum frequented by a lot of visitors.
The museum caretakers didn’t place Earth on the best location, but in a spot where it was easily reached by anyone who wished to touch the painting. Later on, Earth has started to get scratches and dirt.
The smiling dolphins were already smudged with pencil crayons when a touring group of nursery students came. The trees looked lifeless and aged. The blue sea was dodged with marks of black and red. The birds seemed to have just disappeared. No longer was the Earth at his original form and it was a sad sight to see such a beauty transform into a mere garbage.
In reality, we can compare the world we live in with a painting. No matter how much beauty a masterpiece can be, if this wouldn’t be handled with the appropriate amount of care, the beauty and even the quality of the art will be lost.
In the face of a booming industrialization of human’s way of life, it is a great responsibility for everyone to maintain priority in caring and keeping the environment safe and livable.
If we ignore the fact, that we need to conserve water before it runs out, that we need to reduce our waste through reuse and recycle means and that we must save all available energy we could, we will be faced with a world full of garbage, undrinkable water and crises of energy. I can’t imagine if life will continue if we don’t get ourselves, together, and act to save of what is left of the environment.
