One world

Two weekends ago Steve and I were reading magazines on a lazy Saturday morning.  I flipped through back issues of Better Homes and Gardens while Steve perused the latest issue of Sierra Club.

“If we don’t do something this year to reverse global warming, it’ll be too late,” he lamented.  “The deforestation of the mountains out west just to make grazing land for cattle and the burning of the Amazon just to make farmland…those two areas alone supply quite a bit of the world’s oxygen.”

As I sat and listened to him read about the upcoming Earth Day events, I thought of a song I taught my first graders more than twenty years ago.  Every April during our morning meeting, I’d play “Conviction of the Heart”.  It only took a few days before the kids knew most of the words.  By the end of the month, their collective voices overpowered Kenny Loggins. 

An hour later a text arrived from one of my kids who’s now almost thirty.  We stay in touch and sometimes meet at the park for a long hike to catch up.  I’m texting you while vacuuming the house because I started singing “Conviction of the Heart”, Dustin wrote.  I was instantly brought back to memories of sitting on the carpet and singing along with the class.  You’ve taught me a lot of great life lessons about loving myself and others while being conscious about the environment around us.  

If I’ve learned anything after all this time, it’s that there are no coincidences.   We are all one with the earth, with the sky…one with everything in life.

Now, two weeks later, our world has been united in crisis.  For the first time in our lifetimes, we are all deeply affected by a virus that knows no limits on sex, age, race, or social status.   Right now the unknown has enveloped us all and the uncertainty of what the future will bring has already shown us what we are made of worldwide…physically, emotionally, and spiritually.   For many of us, we could feel something coming – a global warming crisis, a financial meltdown, a breakdown of our society through division.

Right after Christmas I felt an indescribable heaviness. It reminded me of the sorrow that overwhelmed me two days before 911.  Something was imminent and it wasn’t personal to me.  Call it psycho-spirituality, call it woman’s intuition, call it whatever you want, but I knew in my soul that we were on the verge of a crisis.  Any mother can tell you that premonition is a reality.   With no children of my own, I often feel for Mother Earth the way many of you feel for your sons and daughters.   For the past ten years, more often than not, my heart has been breaking.

In mid-February I was hiking at the park and looked up through the forest into the sky.  As I shared a photo on social media, I wrote, “Looking up through bare trees mid-winter reminds me of x-rays of lungs. Mother Nature is a wonder....the lungs of the earth give us every breath we take.”   For decades I’ve been fascinated by the fact that the sun we see in northwest Ohio is the same sun shining over Australia and Europe and South America.  The moon shines on Toledo as well as Cairo and Mumbai and Lenningrad.  The air I breathe in Wildwood Park has its origins in someplace I can’t fathom. 

In the wake of this global crisis, division of our one world, thinking we are separated by geography or theology or biology, will no longer allow us to survive.   

I wake up every morning holding our world in prayer.  I’ve been a school teacher, so I know what it’s like for parents to have to home-school for the time being.  I ran a small business for twenty years, so I know what it feels like to struggle financially in the face of a downward spiraling economy.  I lived in Big Sur, California during the Basin Ridge Fires of 2008, so I know what it feels like to be isolated during a month-long quarantine.  I spent three days in an ICU bed struggling with sepsis and pneumonia, so I know what it feels like to have my body turn against me - to the point of not being able to breathe.    So when I pray, I hold a space in my heart full of empathy, full of hope, full of acceptance of this moment in our history that none of us could imagine.

Dustin and I had to postpone our walk at Wildwood today, but I know that he will take care of himself and his loved ones …just as we all are.  Until we are on the other side of this moment in time, may you all experience kindness in the midst of the unknown.  May you have all that you need.  May you know I hold you close in my prayers.

May you be blessed with peace and hope and conviction of the heart.   

 

Click here to listen to "Conviction of the Heart" by Kenny Loggins