April
22, 2020
Today’s
observation – Never could we have organized such a significant 50th
for Earth Day as we have stumbled into today! The skies around major cities are
clearer and cleaner than they have been in decades. People have slowed down consumption
and are traveling less (especially by plane). Wildlife has been able to
recharge populations and vitality, returning to pathways and life cycles without
our disturbance. On-campus, students,
built two large garden boxes and pushed vegetable seeds into dirt-filled egg
carton cells. (learning how Americans grow food at home) Our hands in the dirt,
our project was like a spring tonic. I asked them how they celebrated Earth Day
in their countries. One from Morocco shrugged, “we don’t.” Another from Vietnam coyly shared that they turned
off lights when no one was in a room. I
suppose practicing conservation is a beginning prayer, inviting in more and
more reasons to appreciate our spaceship planet. I remain amazed at the ever-unfolding
bounty of blessings that we are just beginning to scratch the surface about really
understanding. Muir once wrote, “When we
try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched up to everything else in
the universe.” Science walks up to that mirror endlessly. The quality of life
might have improved by living smaller. Still, In this quarantine isolation
period, we have begun to suffer from a deficiency of community we relinquished
for the common good. Muir’s idea resonates as we come to realize how much the interruptions
of our favorite connections feel like a loss or even amputation; the ghost limbs
ache. And salamanders have demonstrated, limbs grow back. What remains are the touchstone memories
bringing us back to what matters, we are building them now. Rebecca Solnit had an essay in the NY
Times this week, “Every disaster shakes loose the old order…many disasters
unfold like a revolution.” Let a post Covid revolution be colored with the
memories of clean skies and a slower pace of life, of sea turtles having a
robust nesting season, of how birdsong sang louder in cities as the roar of
traffic dissipated. Let us smile in a
recall of how many kids were able to have Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/Becky Thatcher
moments, playing outside on a school day just before noon. Let us hold onto images
of empty shelves where flour was displayed and yeast because people began
baking bread. Let us reminisce on our
ingenuity for sheltering in place at the state park. This 50th anniversary
was the Earth Day when coincidence and happenstance helped us get closer to
being Earthlings, to feeling more connected, in countless subtle and not so
subtle ways, with everything else on the planet. I pray that when the bustle
and noise return, as the air fills again into the aerial ocean of gray and brown,
that we will feel the absence of nature, and that the feeling will turn into a
tug.
Today’s
image – My patron saint for Earth Day 2020 –hooded merganser. I have long
admired these ducks from a distance with the help of binoculars. I took a seat
by the river, as much to feel the air on my skin as to watch the stout currents
rush downstream. In an eddy before me, this male merganser glided in, skidding
to a stop on the water. The crow-sized, thin beaked diver gave the impression that
he’d dropped in to chat with a pair of Canada geese in the same eddy. I was
only a few meters away, and soon he appeared as curious about my pup and me as
I was of him. Mergansers excel at travel
in water and air; his anatomy is not suited for walking or waddling on land. He launches into flight by running across the
water’s surface. Oh, I am adept at land walking and moving in water, but no
real talent for flying unless I board a noisy gas hawk. Imagining what message
he could pass along to me, I also consider mine to him. His obvious advice is to
keep swimming, keep diving, with high praise for a fluid life. I would tell him that we all spacewalkers,
and the land is just more substantial water.
There are reports of a man walking on water; he counters that it happens
everywhere! Water striders, lizards,
mergansers, snakes. I can walk on water
in January and February. If this duck
were an omen, what would that mean? A visit from a wild duck tells me it’s time
to connect with family. John Muir put
him up to that.
Today’s
idea - We attract, are attractive, and even magnetic. I sit here in a moment that is an expression
of my line of choices, woven into my family’s choices, which is weft to my country’s
choices, all fluid and rooted in the universal becoming. In one hand, I hold serendipity
and sacrifice, in the other, genius and folly. I think I attract what I need, even if I don't know I need it. Happy Earth
Day!
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