Mother's Nature Journal: Loving the earth and it's children.

Our Earth Day was solemn.  E.P.'s stomach was unbearable.  The sky mirrored the mood as we circled round our well worn wooden table.  It just wasn't a day for feeling or making magic.  When I accepted that and realized that what I was feeling was grief - it was a great relief.
I had focused our attention this past week on "Earth day is coming up this Saturday!" but noticed as the week wore on that nothing felt naturally celebratory about it all.  Instead it felt heavy like a memorial.

It felt like hopelessness.

It felt like a day we needed to review and renew our commitment to The Warthog School mission statement.

At the heart of our homeschool is dedication to protecting and supporting our children's most precious birthright: their innate love of life - biophilia.  Remembering that my job is to help my children stay in love, everyday, with their natural environment (which includes themselves!) made me realize that the heaviness of this Earth Day was because I was focusing on our collective human failures.  The global. The political.  These days, these perspectives, leave me feeling powerless.  Hunkering down at home with my children this past Saturday I vowed to begin again where I know I can act in a way that will have a lasting positive impact.

When I think about love I think of poetry.  I think about when I first fell in love with the sound and feeling of words being pounded out on my old black Royal.  I put at the centerpiece of our Earth Day observation, one of my favorite poems:

For the Children

Gary Snyder

The rising hills, the slopes, 
of statistics

lie before us.

The steep climb

of everything, going up, 
up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that, 
they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace 
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests 
one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together 

learn the flowers 

go light 

After reading it, after time in our sit spot watching ducks feed, by day's end I felt that I had put to rest, for now, my feelings of hopelessness.  I remembered with a smile what David W. Orr wrote about consciously adopting an attitude that will best help us confront our impending fate - whatever it may be.  I felt the fight come back into me.  A fight fueled by love.

Love of children.

Love of life.

I'm going to get our children to those valleys and pastures, we can still make it.