This week was a crazy one. With all the hustle and bustle homework we had and little assignments where we learn something big, this was a crucial one. We started this week with our meditation practice. Personally, I love that we get the opportunity to not only explore meditation together, but also that we are highly encouraged to do so on our own. This week Professor Armstrong requested that we meditate daily for 10 minutes and use this post to reflect on that experience.

               As I stated in my last bog, meditation has truly helped me to slow my mind, re-center myself and my priorities, and take a moment to just escape reality. It is so refreshing and uplifting. I have discovered that sitting in my living room on my couch, with the lights off and soft music in the background is what works best for me, though I did find myself a little fidgety trying to keep my composure for 10 minutes. I realize I need to practice with patience and stilling my and and body for longer periods of time. However, I did love the Object Focus practice we did in class with the flower. We had to look at the flower like it was the first time ever seeing it and I think that inspired a whole new appreciation of how beautiful it really is. It made me feel more connected to nature, rather than the electronic cell phone I usually have my eyes fixed on.

               Pertaining to our reading and discussion this week on poverty, I feel we all had a difficult time understanding and depicting this specific article, but we did our best and we were still able to take from this lesson and learn a little bit about the main points of it. I was on the “No” side of the argument over whether or not poverty is the cause of environmental degradation. I read several policies proposing ideas on how to reduce  poverty in order to increase environmental sustainability. Some of them I agreed with and some of them I did not. I did like how the author mentioned having companies pay the poor or discount bills like water to reward water conservation. This would be used as an incentive and an educational insight to the poor about how important conservation and sustainability really is. I feel that the poverty is not as much the problem as education, or lack of education is. It would seem there is a link between how much money you have and how educated you are. Those below the poverty line may not be as well educated as those above it. So, even though compensating the poor would be extremely beneficial in financial aid, I believe the main goal should be to keep them educated and aware of the Earth’s state and what our sustainability efforts are would be beneficial to us ALL.

               In class, when we discussed this article I realized just how wicked the problem of poverty is. We struggled defining the problem and providing actions to solve or change it. We struggled altering the problem and I think my biggest take away this week is understanding how complicated wicked problems are.