Wallpaper of Quaking Aspen, Mount Moran, Grand Tetons, Wyoming
“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” ― Howard Zinn
The A – Z Challenge – Day Twelve
LOVE THE EARTH
Today, I am thinking about two little boys.
They just turned four and they are full of delight, joy, and curiosity. The world is a marvelous place to them – filled with unexpected and hilarious surprises – sort of like the prizes they find in cracker jack boxes.
They love the evergreens that surround their house. They love their their parents and they love each other with an intensity that is usual, I suppose, for twins. They love their grandmother. They love their stuffed lion, elephant, cow, sheep and giraffe, the inanimate friends that crowd their beds and watch them as they sleep. They love Dr. Suess. They love drawing pictures and learning to blow bubbles in the swimming pool.
These precious boys deserve a better world than the one we’re leaving them.
They deserve clean air and rivers silver with sunlight.
All children growing up today deserve something better than this.
Have we no shame? No sense of moral responsibility? How can we possibly pass this mess onto their small shoulders?
After all, it is our mess.
***
DEATH & REBIRTH
This year Earth Day and Easter coincide.
There is an astrological aspect that is forming in the heavens this week that promises to initiate huge, societal changes, long overdue. If you aren’t feeling its heavy footprints, you simply aren’t paying attention.
Everything will be demolished and rebuilt from scratch. Society will be turned inside out and sent through the wash cycle.
Why?
Because we’ve built a world that reveres only money and treats the environment like a sewer. We love profit but we hate people.
It’s sick.
We wait to fix systemic problems until after the roof caves in, the mountain top slides onto homes, or the bridge falls into the river, dumping cars into the swiftly moving current.
We drill for oil, use millions of gallons of life-sustaining water to do so, and produce only finite amounts of shale gas as a result. The kicker is that the waste from that process is so toxic, everything within miles of pools holding it, dies.
We call this progress.
I call it crazy.
It is insane to burn your only home to the ground because someone offered you money to do so.
I ask you, where do you plan to live once you are holding the keys to a pile of ash? Where will you go when the last fish has been caught, the last great tree cut?
Will you eat your money?
The Earth is Our Mother
We will wither without our mother, our home.
***
This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. ~ Walt Whitman
***
Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
~ Ancient American Indian Proverb
Dismiss whatever insults your soul.
For the sake of those beautiful boys, we must solve this.
Their bright faces tell me they’ve got gifts to bestow.
Will we leave them a world that can support life?
What we do over the next few months and years, serves as our answer.
© 2014 Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved
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