Earth Week

Saturday was Earth Day and I missed celebrating it because of a tiny little virus that caused me to catch a common cold. But I’m finally feeling almost back to normal and wanted to continue the Earth Day celebration. So I decided to think of this week as

Earth Week

The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. I was in high school then and I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember that Earth Day. It makes me sad to think how we could have changed the world if we had started really caring for the earth back then instead of creating the mess that we are now facing. (I include myself in the “we” since I didn’t really wake up to the magnitude of the problem until far too late myself.)

On Earth Day

We walk on the back road
through ponderosa forest
laughing and singing for hours,
and the sky comes down
in tiny white balls
shaped like flowers
that land in our hands
and melt into our gloves.
We don’t get to hold anything
for long—not the snow,
not this fabulous day
with its freedom,
its braiding streams, its mud.
We don’t even get to hold
each other, not forever,
though we try—
but for these hours,
surrounded by trickle and trill,
I feel how surely we are held
by the scent of spring,
by the shadows, by the deer,
by the jay’s bright squawk,
by the sun breaking through.

   — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When I consider the plant kingdom and how it uses light and air to manufacture food to grow and reproduce, I learn to appreciate the brilliance and wonder of life on earth. The more we study forests and other plant life the more we discover that trees and plants communicate, cooperate, help one another, and respond intelligently to the environment around them.

Sanctuary

Suppose it’s easy to slip
into another’s green skin,
bury yourself in leaves

and wait for a breaking,
a breaking open, a breaking
out. I have, before, been

tricked into believing
I could be both an I
and the world. The great eye

of the world is both gaze
and gloss. To be swallowed
by being seen. A dream.

To be made whole
by being not a witness,
but witnessed.

   — Ada Limón

This long slow spring with leaps forward to summer and backwards towards winter has been a lesson in patience and trust for me. Though this is not the kind of spring I would have wished for, it is the spring we have. And ever so slowly or perhaps all of a sudden we will leap headlong into summer. Meanwhile I dream of breaking open and breaking out into a green world filled with beauty.

Earth Week is a good time to simply bow and thank the earth for all she has done. It is a time to consider the wonder of life, to choose beauty, kindness, and consideration towards all life and to listen to what the earth is telling us.

May you walk in beauty.

Note: photos made through my bedroom window, looking out at the pond and trees this morning.