Being Earthy

Dear Mother Earth:

Happy Earth Day! Yes, I'm a day late but I've spent the last two days cleaning up after Easter.  Surely you won't begrudge me a good Easter since the pagans used this time to celebrate you and our return to warm weather.

Yeah.  About the warm weather......What's up with all this extended winter in the north and the drought everywhere else?  You haven't had nearly enough rain so far into this spring and I worry about you.

Everybody here nestled in your bosom has a responsibility for taking care of you but some of us are in denial, some can't afford to be "green" (that's a term somebody dreamed up to indicate being good stewards of you) and some just plain old don't give a damn.  I have to admit that I am sometimes lazy in my actions to stop robbing you of resources that I can't give back to you.  I'm part lazy and part poor.

I would love to get solar electricity at our house but right now it cost a lot of money and I don't have the thirty years it will take to get a "return on my investment."  That's another term humans invented that means we're very needy and greedy.  But when you're 66 years old a 25 year warranty has a whole different meaning. When it comes time to replace something that has worn out after 25 years I will be either too old or too dead to worry about it much.

I'm sorry for my selfishness.  Oops.

I did go sleep outside the last three or four nights and it was heavenly.  I love the feeling of the moist air against my skin.  You can't get that inside the house.  I'm trying to learn bird calls.  There's a cool app on my phone and so far I've been able to pick out about three birds.  But you have sent so many birds to our neck of the woods it will take a while to learn them all.

I'm planning to go to the Earth Day celebration at Fair Park this coming weekend.  I've always had fun there.  My friend Harvey Lacy won't be there with his Ubuntu house but I'm hoping the people giving away free trees will be there. We got a pecan a couple of years ago and it's in good shape out there in the pasture.  Just walking around the park in your splendid weather will be fun, especially if I can get my daughters to go with me.

See you at Fair Park on Saturday, Mama Earth!

Love,
Jane

And, just to give my readers enough words to make their efforts worth it, I will leave you with Chief Seattle's words.  He said it better that I could.  Here are the words or you could listen to a variation of the speech here on youtube.

Chief Seattle’s Testimony  (1854)

                      Excerpt from the Conclusion

            This we know.  The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.  This we know.  All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.  All things are connected.

Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.  Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself….

Men come and go, like the waves of the sea.  Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny.  We may be brothers after all; we shall see.  One thing we know, which the white man may one day discover—our God is the same God.  You may think that you own Him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot.  He is the God of man and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white.  This earth is precious to Him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator…

Care for it as we have cared for it.  Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you take it.  And with all your strength, with all your mind, with all your heart, preserve it for your children and love it…as God loves us all.  One thing we know.  Our God is the same God.  This earth is precious to Him.  Even the white man cannot be exempt from the common destiny.  We may be brothers after all.  We shall see.