Thank Mother Earth every day

This Sunday is Mother’s Day. It would be a wonderful time to thank Mother Earth for the gifts of clean air, clean water, food and shelter she provides us. April 22 was International Mother Earth Day. Rather than debate which is the real Mother’s Day for Earth, why not make a pinky promise to be thankful to Mother Earth every day and do something  each day to help restore her to health. If she’s not healthy, we won’t be for long. Can you spell COVID? How about Climate Disruption? Floods, droughts, dust storms and plagues have been increasing and we have done little to effectively respond. Instead, some of US elect those who waste time and resources debating the conditions under which we should pay our bills. Only deadbeat trash acts that way. I wonder what their mothers think of them. The rest of society calls such behavior extortion.

Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

It seems to be getting more difficult to find common ground these days. But we know that family support helps individuals survive, even thrive, just as community support helps families and individuals. I remember growing up with the idea that reciprocity meant something like “an eye for an eye;” or, “give as good as you get.” Rarely did I think of the Golden Rule except in the variant “Do unto others before they do unto you.” I did not learn any of that from my mother.

From a different woman, much later in my life, I learned a different perspective on reciprocity:

“Most people don’t really see plants or understand plants or what they give us,” Kimmerer explains, “so my act of reciprocity is, having been shown plants as gifts, as intelligences other than our own, as these amazing, creative beings – good lord, they can photosynthesise, that still blows my mind! – I want to help them become visible to people. People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift.”

Even more recently, I’ve almost finished reading Finding the Mother Tree, about “how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies – and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.” 

The longer humans are around, the more we learn that there are natural models from which we could learn how to get along better and live better lives, if only we finally get smart enough to listen to our mothers and say “Thanks, Mom.” 

Mother Earth: Her Whales 

Gary Snyder - 1930-

An owl winks in the shadows
A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard
Young male sparrow stretches up his neck,
                   big head, watching—

The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.
Turn it sweet. That we may eat.
Grow our meat.

Brazil says “sovereign use of Natural Resources”
Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.
The living actual people of the jungle
        sold and tortured—
And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called “Brazil”
        can speak for them?

        The whales turn and glisten, plunge
                and sound and rise again,
        Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
        Flowing like breathing planets
              in the sparkling whorls of
                     living light—

And Japan quibbles for words on
        what kinds of whales they can kill?
A once-great Buddhist nation
        dribbles methyl mercury
        like gonorrhea
                      in the sea.

Pere David's Deer, the Elaphure,
Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River
Two thousand years ago—and lost its home to rice—
The forests of Lo-yang were logged and all the silt &
Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 AD—
Wild Geese hatched out in Siberia
        head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang,
        what we call “China”
On flyways they have used a million years.
Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars,
                   the monkeys,
                      like the snows of yesteryear
Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground
Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.
IS man most precious of all things?
—then let us love him, and his brothers, all those
Fading living beings—

North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders
        who wage war around the world.
May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk
Rise! and pull away their giving
        from the robot nations.

Solidarity. The People.
Standing Tree People!
Flying Bird People!
Swimming Sea People!
Four-legged, two-legged people!

How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist
Government     two-world     Capitalist-Imperialist
Third-world     Communist      paper-shuffling male
             non-farmer     jet-set     bureaucrats
Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?

(Ah Margaret Mead . . . do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)

The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth
To last a little longer
                    like vultures flapping
Belching, gurgling,
                    near a dying doe.
“In yonder field a slain knight lies—
We'll fly to him and eat his eyes
                    with a down
         derry derry derry down down.”

             An Owl winks in the shadow
             A lizard lifts on tiptoe
                         breathing hard
             The whales turn and glisten
                         plunge and
             Sound, and rise again
             Flowing like breathing planets

             In the sparkling whorls

             Of living light.

                      Stockholm: Summer Solstice 40072

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