Earth Day

In the mailbox this Saturday with a strong, disruptive, Northerly wind.

Nobel Prize poet Louise Glück was born on this day in 1943 New York City.

It is also the 299th anniversary of the birth of Immanuel Kant. The philospher was born on this day in 1724 Königsberg, Prussia. Kant is considered a central figure, even among contemporary philsophers. Among his many significant contributions, the “Categorical Imperative”: namely, that we should judge our actions by whether or not we would want everyone else to act the same way, remains applicable – perhaps even moreso – in these times of ecological crises.

There is power in our lament: to speak the truth that all is not well … grief, spoken aloud, is the counter to denial. Our lives are held, connected, one to the other … we are bound up in a beautiful, multicolored, homespun fabric, both an ecological truth and a theological truth, reflecting the world as it was and continues to be made—a relational world, a connected world, an interdependent world.

The land’s mourning speaks simultaneously of a vision of the world as it ought to be—that beautiful fabric—and the truth of the world as it is: too much injustice and too little love fraying the threads that hold us all. The land feels those fraying threads. The land grieves those fraying threads. The land mourns.

Mourning together, in true solidarity, we name the truth of what’s wrong. And in so doing, we begin to make it right. – Fr. Richard Rohr, in Meditations (edited).

from Awakening by Robert Bly

From the long past
Into the long present
A bird, forgotten in these troubles, warbling,
As the great wheel turns around, grinding
The living in water.
Washing, continual washing, in water now stained
With blossoms and rotting logs,
Cries, half-muffled, from beneath the earth, the living awakened
at last like the dead. – Robert Bly

from Afterward

Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks.
And the sun says yes.
And the desert answers
your voice is sand scattered in wind.

– Louise Glück