Picking Up Litter
One spiritual task I perform every weekend is to walk up and down my block and pick up litter. 
Discarded cigarette packs, Arizona Ice Tea and beer bottles, Vitamin Water empties, junk food wrappers, styrofoam clam containers, candy wrappers, nickel and dime bags, ripped out school notes and assignments, half-eaten apples, broken Bic lighters, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, gum wrappers – I collect it all.
Most of the trash is from high school kids–boys and girls–black, Hispanic, and white, that are too lazy to put it in the trash can by their school. They just drop it when they finish it. Most of the crumbled up cigarette packs are from one Newport smoker.
I pick up trash to keep my block clean. The dirtier it is, the more people feel free to throw stuff on the ground. When the ground is litter-free, at least some people think twice before dropping an empty cup.
A few months after I started picking up, I noticed that some other people were taking care of the street, too. My next-door neighbor has started picking up trash, and so has a woman down at the end of our street.
Picking up litter is a small but tangible way to respect the land and neighborhood, and keep it a beautiful place.
