Thanks, Aaron. I’m actually packing up for a family vacation (I am granma, best role I ever had) to Sicily, so won’t be marching. I’ll be swimming in the Mediterranean, instead!
But it occurred to me I can send out some words I wrote awhile ago… not even poetry, my preferred arrangement. Here it is:
Essay about dependence
There’s Independence Day, it’s big in our country. Dependence Day, not so much, in fact, not at all! We do not celebrate dependence. We talk of community, speak glowingly of having a circle of family and friends and what does that mean but dependence upon each other?
We depend on wider circles as well – I depend upon my writing buddies to show up each Monday so we can write together, and read for each other, and hear the different voices around our table – each of us with a different viewpoint, all of us joining in a chorus of silent nodding and smiling and silent clapping of recognition of what the other sees – even at times open-eyed amazement at what that different voice just showed us, in an individual way, of our common humanity. We are separate but we are one. We are writing family.
We are also part of larger families: neighborhoods, cities, states, countries and hemispheres. We live in the old world or the new, we live north of the equator and experience the opposite weather from those who live south of the equator. Or we are Folks-who-live-on-islands in the wide Pacific Ocean. We are Folks who may soon be moving to high ground. For we are all part of the tribe that will be dispossessed, whether we believe in global warming or pretend not to. We are dependent on the weather, like the rest of all creation. Birds already know this: they have already begun to move north in the United States. The trees they depend upon need colder weather, and the trees began their moves a while ago, getting sick, dropping leaves, not making seeds, drying up and becoming tinder for fires.
The old fashioned way of looking at the Earth was that it was there for exploration and exploitation, that each part of it delivered us our independence. Now we acknowledge, those of us whose hearts know how to read this Earth, that we and she are dependent upon each other. To tell the truth, we should declare a day each year of Global Interdependence. Both we and our earth live in a tight inter-dependence upon being in just the right place in relation to our sun. Perhaps I had better start a petition to send to the United Nations.
Thanks, Aaron. I’m actually packing up for a family vacation (I am granma, best role I ever had) to Sicily, so won’t be marching. I’ll be swimming in the Mediterranean, instead!
But it occurred to me I can send out some words I wrote awhile ago… not even poetry, my preferred arrangement. Here it is:
Essay about dependence
There’s Independence Day, it’s big in our country. Dependence Day, not so much, in fact, not at all! We do not celebrate dependence. We talk of community, speak glowingly of having a circle of family and friends and what does that mean but dependence upon each other?
We depend on wider circles as well – I depend upon my writing buddies to show up each Monday so we can write together, and read for each other, and hear the different voices around our table – each of us with a different viewpoint, all of us joining in a chorus of silent nodding and smiling and silent clapping of recognition of what the other sees – even at times open-eyed amazement at what that different voice just showed us, in an individual way, of our common humanity. We are separate but we are one. We are writing family.
We are also part of larger families: neighborhoods, cities, states, countries and hemispheres. We live in the old world or the new, we live north of the equator and experience the opposite weather from those who live south of the equator. Or we are Folks-who-live-on-islands in the wide Pacific Ocean. We are Folks who may soon be moving to high ground. For we are all part of the tribe that will be dispossessed, whether we believe in global warming or pretend not to. We are dependent on the weather, like the rest of all creation. Birds already know this: they have already begun to move north in the United States. The trees they depend upon need colder weather, and the trees began their moves a while ago, getting sick, dropping leaves, not making seeds, drying up and becoming tinder for fires.
The old fashioned way of looking at the Earth was that it was there for exploration and exploitation, that each part of it delivered us our independence. Now we acknowledge, those of us whose hearts know how to read this Earth, that we and she are dependent upon each other. To tell the truth, we should declare a day each year of Global Interdependence. Both we and our earth live in a tight inter-dependence upon being in just the right place in relation to our sun. Perhaps I had better start a petition to send to the United Nations.
Wow so beautiful and necessary. I am so glad you shared that.