Mother's Nature Journal: Jane's Message of Hope

In the world, in person, you have the opportunity to hear or see the lessons that aren't captured in a photograph or an article because they lie outside another's expectation of what will be important.  I have found that the most powerful learning moments of my life have been unbelievably subtle and quick. If I had not been "all-in" with my senses I would have missed some of the most important nuggets of wisdom to be gleaned.  Last October I had one of those treasured moments.  It glinted in the noon day sun near the end of the "Roots and Shoots Celebration of Service" event that we were attending in San Francisco.

It had been a truly peak experience.  Jane Goodall not only took the time to meet and listen to each and every one of us as we presented our service projects but she then spent forty five minutes delivering an inspiring talk.  It was a windfall of nourishment for my exhausted mother/mentor heart.

The quicksilver learning moment happened when Dr. Goodall came down from the stage after delivering her inspiring "Jane's Message of Hope."  Members of her organizations were in the wings, her son and grandson were in her audience along with a field full of children and their teachers.  She was leaving the stage alone and already lunch boxes were being zipped up, children's voices were unhushed and their bodies had been set free.  I sat firmly, eyes forward, processing everything that I had just heard.  Like many women, Jane Goodall has been a "shero" of mine since I was a little girl.  Her words, both to me personally and to the Roots and Shoots audience, were charged with agency.  Jane Goodall is spending her eighth decade of life, a life of enviable focus and purpose, in non-retirement empowering the next generations to embrace, with hope, the overwhelmingly and super-heroic task of saving the earth.  She didn't use those words.  Her podium moments (from what I've witnessed) don't reverberate with the charisma of a self-help speaker nor are they charged with the sharpness of an  expertise that has been jaded by exhaustion.  Her podium moments are a deep and grounded pool of personal, processed story that, in my experience, have a truly transformative effect on the listener.  As I sat staring at the now empty stage I was taking in the fact that I had just had my first real life experience of "being graced" by someone's presence.

And that is when I saw it.  Holding the handrail of the stage staircase as she exited alone she stopped half way down and paused.  A long pause.  A pause long enough for me to recognize the experience: She was taking in an awesome vista.  From how she stood, and more tellingly the soft and open expression on her face, we were kin to an epic sunset, a stunning desert in bloom, or an expanse of rainforest canopy.  We were worth taking in, savoring, and she recognized it.  And I was watching a master observer execute her craft:  the art of looking - and really seeing - what one is looking at.

Having a child that struggles with distractibility, as well as being raised a girl child in a culture that is more comfortable looking at women than really seeing them, I have special antennae for noticing people that actually SEE, observe, and wonder about what is right in front of them (a phone on selfie setting excluded).  Such seeing is a capability that I fear current cultural trends (in particular self-focused social media) are pushing towards endangered status.

Since October I've come back to her moment on the stairs countless times.  What was she seeing?  Our future, her audience, in rapt attention ready to be activated into agents of change?  Or, are we already a field of narcissists who have become too rooted in our own self-absorption to make a move.

She told us that day that what she sees on the horizon is hope.  It is grounded in her years of observing nature, in particular, its regenerative quality.  She marveled about how she has seen nature recover back to a point of flourishing if given the chance.

Since Jane Goodall's talk we've found Project Drawdown - a practical place to put that hope into action.  We've signed up for the Drawdown EcoChallenge that begins tomorrow and runs through Earth Day later this month.  For Team Warthog School we're celebrating Jane Goodall's eight-fourth birthday by taking a stand - one I first discovered in David Orr's essay "Hope in Hard Times":

     "I once put a poster on my office door that showed a large owl bearing down on its prey, talons outstretched, eyes full of malevolence.  At the bottom center, with its back to the viewer, a tiny mouse stood at rigid attention, right arm raised, with its middle digit fully extended: on the brink of eternity, no philosophy, no art, no words, no resignation, no apparent fear, no solutions, no squiriming, just defiance. People would stop, look at it, and always laugh - not out of hard-heartedness, I think, but because they saw something of themselves in that mouse.  We laugh at Peter Sellers similarly: Who cannot see themselves in the loony pretensions of Chief Inspector Clouseau, or Wily Fox, for that matter?  In our situation, this is gallows humor that admits the end is nigh but offers not solution, no finest final hour, just a certain style of exit.
     There is another kind of humor, however, that goes deeper and offers a more hopeful stategy in the face of dire possibilities.  Joseph Meeker describes this as "the comedy of survival".  Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl called it "a tragic optimism".  True comedy is not so much about jokes and laughter but rather about the recognition and acceptance of our limitations and foibles, right down to our reptilian brainstem.  It is, in Frankl's words, "Saying yes to life in spite of everything," including those limitations.  We are a spindly legged upstart species, a precocious and horribly immature primate family full of remarkable abilities and grandiose pretensions, with a bloody and destructive past."  

Today, standing on those spindly legs we are choosing the position of tragic optimism rather than gallows humor.  I am committed to teaching our children how to really see what they are looking at and to not shrink away from what they observe but rather to have the courage to say yes to life in spite of it all.  The sense of renewed hope that Jane Goodall shared with us last October was an invaluable gift.  I am hoping, that our commitment to act this April will serve as both a birthday and a thank you gift to her. 

Happy Birthday Dr. Goodall and thank you.

We would love for you to join us by either joining our team or by creating your own to inspire and challenge us through the month long eco-challenge.