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Friends,
Earth Day is a week from today. Next Wednesday, April 22nd will be the 57th annual Earth Day. The inaugural Earth Day was on April 22, 1970. Senator Gaylord Nelson is considered the founder of Earth Day. His idea was to promote environmental awareness. While I don’t have concrete memories of the first Earth Day, I do have memories of the “permanent” smog that hung over LA in the 1970s. I remember fishing in the very polluted river that was across the street from the apartment we lived in when I was 8. My friends and I would stand on a large concrete sewer pipe that spewed everything from rainwater runoff to brightly colored water. We would catch river eels. Once one of my friends fell in the water. We thought for sure that he would die from the pollution, even at age 8 I knew this water was not safe. Thankfully, he survived.
Today, there is rarely smog over LA and the river that runs through downtown Westbrook, ME is much clearer than it was when I was a child. The cleaner air and rivers are due in large part to the efforts of people who became “Earth aware” through annual Earth Day celebrations.
The work is not finished, but the commitment to care for Creation continues to grow. Here are three poems about the Earth our relationship to it.
An excerpt from "Remember" by Joy Harjo
"Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems."
"Sleeping in the Forest" by Mary Oliver
"I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better."
"Earth Day" by Jane Yolen
"I am the Earth
And the Earth is me.
Each blade of grass,
Each honey tree,
Each bit of mud,
And stick and stone
Is blood and muscle,
Skin and bone.
And just as I
Need every bit
Of me to make
My body fit,
So Earth needs
Grass and stone and tree
And things that grow here
Naturally.
That’s why we
Celebrate this day.
That’s why across
The world we say:
As long as life,
As dear, as free,
I am the Earth
And the Earth is me. "
Peace,
Rev. Tim
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