In the dream, there are rows of elephants, or rows and clusters, tied to a post like cowboys’ horses, standing in the dust, and suddenly collapsing as if they were inflated life-size models that had been punctured and just crumpled to the ground. No popping or whistling sounds of air escaping, suddenly they are just deflated and piled limp and empty in the dirt.
It’s as if the Holy has gone out of them - it’s too painful, they’re her most complex creatures, and they’re under attack and struggling. She wants them out of their misery. Spirit can’t stand it any longer and just withdraws. Later, I am sitting in the rich afternoon sun facing the view of Santa Cruz Island. I close my eyes and ask what I can do for the animals, for the elephants, for whom and for what, what can I do and how can I do it, better said, what can we do and how can we do it, what are we to do? I see images of Elephants, Chimps, Tigers, and I hear them called The Beleaguered Ones. It is important for writers to write on behalf of The Beleaguered Ones, because, since they are big and were so numerous, they hold large amounts of Spirit, of the Holy, they are huge repositories of magic, mystery, and ancient knowing. They are indispensable. We cannot do without them. According to news articles, we can’t even do without their shit:
“A drop in the number of hippos has led to a reduction in phytoplankton in African freshwaters, and has caused a decline in fish populations.” The hunting of hippopotami for their meat is responsible for a change in the composition of the water at Kampala, East Africa, and this has led to a reduction in the catch of food fish.” (AllAfrica.com)
"Hippos are extremely important in maintaining the ecological balance in rivers and lakes and nearby grasslands," says Marc Languy of WWF's Eastern Africa Regional Programme. "Hippo dung provides essential basic elements for the food chain, particularly for fish. The loss of more than 27,000 hippos in the past few decades is a double blow: fish catches have dwindled and the freshwater ecosystems are losing hundreds of tons of nutrients every day. Lake Edward supports over 20,000 people living around the Park who depend on fish for their livelihood." (World Wildlife Fund, East Africa Regional Programme Office)
I go on the internet and find a chorus of articles about hippo poaching perpetrated primarily by ex-combatants. The hippo population of the Congo was once the world's largest but now may soon be extinct. In Virunga National Park, there are now less than 1,000 hippos, though in the 1970’s there were almost 30,000.
“The poachers are believed to be veterans of Congolese bush wars and former Hutu rebels who fled to eastern Congo in 1994 after killing Tutsis in the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. They hunt because they are hungry, but also for profit — the meat, though tough, is a pricey delicacy and a three-ton hippo fetches thousands of dollars in village markets across northeastern Congo. In his poaching days in the Congo forests, Guillaume Kasereka used a rusty Russian-made rocket launcher to kill hippos for meat. These days, he says, they're too scarce and the competition too fierce — rebels and militiamen machine-gun the animals and even dynamite lakes to bring dead hippo to the surface.” (CBSNews.com)
My friend, Hassan Yusufzai, a Pakistani peacebuilder says, “Violence is a form of communication.” Violence communicates frustration, rage, desperation that cannot see other options. I picture men with machine guns, AK’s and grenades, blowing up hippos and lakes and huge tracts of rainforest and I know that Hassan is right. I read headlines about car bombs and drones and I know he is right. I think of my Liberian sons and brothers who are ex-combatants, and I know he is right. I see my neighbor spraying poison on his weeds (a few yards from my well head), and I know Hassan is right. I reach for the fly swatter and I know that Hassan is right.
Colonization, religious zealotry, and, now, resource extraction, sunder indigenous people – including ourselves – from our connection to the earth and each other. The issue, then, is the trauma of isolation that pits us against ourselves and the communities we are necessarily part of. In our anguish, we lash out at the essence of that which sustains us.
Trauma is an epidemic that stretches across generations, geographies and centuries. Even our nervous systems are traumatized by the relentless onslaught of information, of light when there should be darkness, of noise in place of quiet.
Healing is a journey from trauma to wholeness that passes through many landscapes – mountains of forgiveness and grace, valleys of personal responsibility, forests of amends. I once knew a woman named Jean who said, The opposite of enemy is personal responsibility.
When we divorced, my ex-husband made terrible threats and I believed him capable of following through, though, thankfully, he did not. Since those harrowing days, we have gone in and out of détente, in and out of court, and in and out of touch. Because I didn’t understand conflict, I married an angry man. Because I found it difficult to forgive, I became fascinated with stories of people who could. What I had done, and hadn’t done, for my children was what I needed help carrying: The husband I chose, the grandmother in whose footsteps I had unwittingly walked... To stop that freight train of generations that pushed my ex-husband and me together and forced us apart, to make peace with all that, became as irresistible as a dare. Being around communities seeking to make peace after war has helped me put my own dilemmas into perspective and taught me to see possibility rather than impasse.
I had a friend in Santa Barbara who was a profound peacemaker. Forgiveness was a lifelong quest for her. She had divorced her husband when she found out he had molested their daughters. More than twenty years after the divorce she told me, “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t wish him harm.” She paused and gathered herself. “It’s taken me years to get that far. I have to let that be enough, because I doubt I’ll be able to forgive him in this lifetime.” We go as far as we can.
Why is it, then, that sometimes those who have lost so much more, lost everything, are able to make the leap into real forgiveness? Is there an inverse proportionality here between heartbreak and generosity, between suffering and the ability to transcend it, a chemical reaction that happens unpredictably and unexpectedly sometimes? And, if so, how to render the stories so that their medicine is distilled but not oversimplified, or, worse yet, so that we don’t mistakenly assume that extreme suffering is required – or is it? – or that suffering alone prepares us for feats of transcendence? Like the wildflowers in the California chaparral, are our human hearts fire-climax seeds, too? It’s possible, and it’s terrifying and dangerous to think so.
Liberian peacebuilder Samuel Gbaydee Doe once told me: “Those who have perfected violence are saying, ‘I’m hurt’… and that is why we need to deliberately move into the field and lavish love on those incapable of loving.” May we be worthy of that challenge, whether giving or receiving. Like forgiveness, like love, grace is a big word. There are those that can naturally sense its coordinates and lock in, while the rest of us remain struggling. It requires that everything be given to those who seem to least deserve it, whether they reach out their hands to accept it or not. But, by accepting it, they begin to earn it, and to be able to offer it to someone else. Grace requires dedication to possibilities not visible to the naked eye, only to the naked heart.
Showing posts with label Healing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Healing. Show all posts
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Sunday, May 25, 2014
AKOI
I have a son who is a veteran. His name is Akoi. He’s not my ‘born son’ as they say in Liberia, but I am supporting him and 5 of his brothers – well, they’re not his born brothers, either, but they call each other brothers, and they have lived like brothers since the civil war there. I am one of their many mothers. They call me Ma Cyndie and I like it.
It was March, 3, 2003. Akoi says that the morning of the attack, he was in the communication room. He says he didn’t feel like fighting that day, but they were under attack and he had to go try to radio for help, since he was in charge of communications. He had learned from his first commander, Sea Never Dry, to be a communicator. When they brought ammunition to the base headquarters, Akoi would unpack it, take inventory and make a record of everything. His commander decided to train him as a communicator. In one week, he learned all the code numbers and code words, and had his own radio. His fighting name was Boy Blue.
The day of the attack, government troops surrounded them and attacked at 5 in the morning. His commander that day was Chief Combat. After the communication room was hit, he ordered Akoi and a few others to run for the car to go rescue those that were trapped. When they got into the artillery car, a heavy weapons car, a rocket propelled grenade sliced through the top of Akoi’s head, splitting it open like a pumpkin. He dropped to the floor of the car and everyone thought he was dead. They brought him back to the base and laid him out on the floor. Someone took a photo: Boy Blue is lying on his back on a blue plastic tarp, with several teenage boys kneeling beside him. A short distance away, there is something that looks like a small dish with a pile of glistening raw meat. It is the top of his skull and half his brain. His commander puts the piece of skull with the brains back on Akoi’s head and ties it on with a piece of string. They put him in a car and drive to Guinea. If he dies on the highway, they will bury him by the side of the road. He spends two days in a border town in a coma. On the third day he awakens to find himself lying in the middle of a hospital room with fifteen other patients. When he opens his eyes, he asks why he is there. The boy lying next to him says, “You are wounded.” Boy Blue can’t move his body. He can only cry.
They drive him back into Liberia, to the town of Voinjama and take him to what’s left of the hospital. Someone goes looking for Akoi’s mother. They know where she is hiding in the bush. They tell her that her son is badly wounded and bring her to see him. She tells him, “I don’t think, Akoi, that I will ever see you again.” People tell her, “Don’t cry. Depend on God. God will help. When they brought him here he was not talking, not opening his eyes to see people, and now he can see and say, ‘Oh, my Mother.’” The soldiers send for another car to take him back to Guinea, to the capital, Conakry. His mother begs to go with him because she knows she is the only one who can care for him properly. She says, “If he dies, I will be able to see where he’s buried.” But they tell her, “No. This car is only for critically wounded soldiers”. He is 14 and he’s been fighting for 2 years, ever since he was kidnapped from his village by the people trying to save him now.
She wants to cook for him. She insists on cooking for him, knowing that it will be his last meal. They wait for her to cook the meal. She returns to the hospital with his favorite dish. She wakes him up and holds him in her arms to feed him, but he is unable to eat, so she sits by his bed and weeps. They weep together as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
They put him in the car and drive nonstop for 21 hours. When they arrive at the hospital in Conakry, a French doctor unwraps the bandages from Akoi’s head, and weeps. The wound is festering and has begun to smell. Akoi undergoes more than a dozen surgeries. After a time he can sit up, but he is paralyzed on one side and confined to a wheelchair. Someone took another photo. A small teenage boy in white diapers stares without expression at the camera. He cannot bathe, dress or feed himself. He watches television with the other patients, and wishes he were dead. He forces himself to learn to walk with a stick, saying, “God will make a way for me.” The war ends in June, 2003, two months after he is wounded. On July 27, he is discharged from the hospital. They give him a plastic bag with two shirts, two pairs of trousers, and the doctor’s name and address on a piece of paper that got lost on the way home.
When he returns to Voinjama, his mother is overjoyed. She has been taken by LURD rebels, his sisters have been taken by government troops and are in a refugee camp. His mother begins to search for food in the bush, a little to eat, a little to sell. The heat and the strain cause the top of her skull to separate, a serious and usually fatal illness. She survives but has a nervous breakdown and never fully recovers. Her face is permanently contorted and her speech is slurred. Akoi says, “After that, her mind is so disturbed, not settled.”
During the disarmament, the U.N. gives Akoi $150, half of the total payment he will receive for turning in his gun. He gives his mother $50 for medical treatment, sends $75 to his sisters in the camp and uses the last $25 to go see them and beg them to come take their mother to the camp in hopes she can receive medical attention there. The sisters and the mother stay in the camp until repatriation. In 2004 the UN gives him money and he goes back to school, but in 2006 the program ends. Because he is paralyzed on one side, he cannot do any physical work to support himself so he bands together with 15 other disabled ‘veterans’. They sleep on the street and spend their days smoking marijuana and drinking.
Back home in the village, before he was taken, Akoi lived with his mother, two sisters, a brother and grandfather, his mother’s father, who died when Akoi turned 12, the year before he was kidnapped.
Akoi’s grandfather was a zo, a medicine man. His name was Kemah. In Liberia, zos are highly trained specialists with advanced degrees of expertise, analogous to Western post-doctoral degrees or medical specializations. For example, there are Bone Setters, Snake Zos (who have a special relationship with poisonous snakes and can cure snake bites), and Mortuary Zos whose job it is to properly prepare and bury the dead. If a person dies far from home or from the place they are to be buried, it is the job of the Mortuary Zo to walk the dead home and into their grave, it being common knowledge that with the right guidance, the dead will easily get up and walk to wherever they need to go. (A friend who is now in her 30’s, remembers her grandfather’s death very clearly, when she was a young child of about three. He would come once a month to visit her grandmother and spend the night. My friend and others in the family could tell he was there by the overpowering stench, and she remembers seeing footprints walking across the woven ceiling mat.)
Then there is the story of the Swedish NGO that equipped several villages with a forge and metal-smithing tools, with the intention of helping people make and repair farm implements. The donated equipment rusted, unused. What the Swedes didn’t know was that only Surgical Zos are allowed to do metal smithing and that even farm implements had to be ritually made by the rightful people. Akoi says that his grandfather was a big zo, one who helped with babies and who could counteract witchcraft.
Akoi’s grandfather was 98 when he died shortly before Akoi was taken into the war. That means that his grandfather was born at approximately the turn of the century, at around 1800, and grew up before Liberia had been colonized by returning slaves from America. He would have been a young man, about Akoi’s age now, when the first ships came to Liberia bearing Black Christians who arrived in the sweltering equatorial heat in corsets and long woolen dresses, top hats and tails, bibles in hand.
Akoi’s grandfather was a storyteller. Before dying he instructed the family that he wanted Akoi to sleep in his bedroom so that his spirit would be with him. That’s how Akoi came to have his own room until the war came. Akoi takes a photograph of a man in a hammock because it reminds him of his grandfather, who spent his last years, old and frail, lying in a hammock in his bedroom in the cool interior of their earthen house. Whenever he passed through his grandfather’s room, the old man would say, “Akoi, bring me something to eat, bring me something to drink.” Akoi brought him food, and lay next to him in the hammock, swinging and rocking, as his grandfather peeled off stories and set them adrift in the moist afternoon. He explained how elephants used to come when the children were very small, disturbing the village by eating the crops on their farm, and how, after they had eaten, they would run away from the farm again back into the forest.
Spider used to act greedy. It was a time people were having a feast. Spider promised the people in one village that his troop would sing for them at their feast. And he told people in the other village the same thing. He said he would stay between them. Then the spider tied a rope around his waist, and said that when the food was ready they should pull the rope and haul him to the village. Both villages started pulling on the rope at the same time. That’s why spider has such a small waist, so tiny.
After his father left them, when Akoi was ten, he made the farm that fed the whole family. He climbed coco palms to harvest coconuts. “I was small,” he says, “but I tried my possible best. I was very hard-headed. Too hard-headed.”
There is a rumpled flap of skin where the ‘hard-headed’ top of his skull used to be. Akoi says that at the time of his injury, if you held your open hand over the top of his head you could feel his breath on your palm. He says now that when he looks in the mirror and wonders why his life was spared, he thinks, “If God left me there it must be for a purpose. It is not like God loves us more than others who have died; it is the method of God to bring us together to love each other.”
It was March, 3, 2003. Akoi says that the morning of the attack, he was in the communication room. He says he didn’t feel like fighting that day, but they were under attack and he had to go try to radio for help, since he was in charge of communications. He had learned from his first commander, Sea Never Dry, to be a communicator. When they brought ammunition to the base headquarters, Akoi would unpack it, take inventory and make a record of everything. His commander decided to train him as a communicator. In one week, he learned all the code numbers and code words, and had his own radio. His fighting name was Boy Blue.
The day of the attack, government troops surrounded them and attacked at 5 in the morning. His commander that day was Chief Combat. After the communication room was hit, he ordered Akoi and a few others to run for the car to go rescue those that were trapped. When they got into the artillery car, a heavy weapons car, a rocket propelled grenade sliced through the top of Akoi’s head, splitting it open like a pumpkin. He dropped to the floor of the car and everyone thought he was dead. They brought him back to the base and laid him out on the floor. Someone took a photo: Boy Blue is lying on his back on a blue plastic tarp, with several teenage boys kneeling beside him. A short distance away, there is something that looks like a small dish with a pile of glistening raw meat. It is the top of his skull and half his brain. His commander puts the piece of skull with the brains back on Akoi’s head and ties it on with a piece of string. They put him in a car and drive to Guinea. If he dies on the highway, they will bury him by the side of the road. He spends two days in a border town in a coma. On the third day he awakens to find himself lying in the middle of a hospital room with fifteen other patients. When he opens his eyes, he asks why he is there. The boy lying next to him says, “You are wounded.” Boy Blue can’t move his body. He can only cry.
They drive him back into Liberia, to the town of Voinjama and take him to what’s left of the hospital. Someone goes looking for Akoi’s mother. They know where she is hiding in the bush. They tell her that her son is badly wounded and bring her to see him. She tells him, “I don’t think, Akoi, that I will ever see you again.” People tell her, “Don’t cry. Depend on God. God will help. When they brought him here he was not talking, not opening his eyes to see people, and now he can see and say, ‘Oh, my Mother.’” The soldiers send for another car to take him back to Guinea, to the capital, Conakry. His mother begs to go with him because she knows she is the only one who can care for him properly. She says, “If he dies, I will be able to see where he’s buried.” But they tell her, “No. This car is only for critically wounded soldiers”. He is 14 and he’s been fighting for 2 years, ever since he was kidnapped from his village by the people trying to save him now.
She wants to cook for him. She insists on cooking for him, knowing that it will be his last meal. They wait for her to cook the meal. She returns to the hospital with his favorite dish. She wakes him up and holds him in her arms to feed him, but he is unable to eat, so she sits by his bed and weeps. They weep together as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
They put him in the car and drive nonstop for 21 hours. When they arrive at the hospital in Conakry, a French doctor unwraps the bandages from Akoi’s head, and weeps. The wound is festering and has begun to smell. Akoi undergoes more than a dozen surgeries. After a time he can sit up, but he is paralyzed on one side and confined to a wheelchair. Someone took another photo. A small teenage boy in white diapers stares without expression at the camera. He cannot bathe, dress or feed himself. He watches television with the other patients, and wishes he were dead. He forces himself to learn to walk with a stick, saying, “God will make a way for me.” The war ends in June, 2003, two months after he is wounded. On July 27, he is discharged from the hospital. They give him a plastic bag with two shirts, two pairs of trousers, and the doctor’s name and address on a piece of paper that got lost on the way home.
When he returns to Voinjama, his mother is overjoyed. She has been taken by LURD rebels, his sisters have been taken by government troops and are in a refugee camp. His mother begins to search for food in the bush, a little to eat, a little to sell. The heat and the strain cause the top of her skull to separate, a serious and usually fatal illness. She survives but has a nervous breakdown and never fully recovers. Her face is permanently contorted and her speech is slurred. Akoi says, “After that, her mind is so disturbed, not settled.”
During the disarmament, the U.N. gives Akoi $150, half of the total payment he will receive for turning in his gun. He gives his mother $50 for medical treatment, sends $75 to his sisters in the camp and uses the last $25 to go see them and beg them to come take their mother to the camp in hopes she can receive medical attention there. The sisters and the mother stay in the camp until repatriation. In 2004 the UN gives him money and he goes back to school, but in 2006 the program ends. Because he is paralyzed on one side, he cannot do any physical work to support himself so he bands together with 15 other disabled ‘veterans’. They sleep on the street and spend their days smoking marijuana and drinking.
Back home in the village, before he was taken, Akoi lived with his mother, two sisters, a brother and grandfather, his mother’s father, who died when Akoi turned 12, the year before he was kidnapped.
Akoi’s grandfather was a zo, a medicine man. His name was Kemah. In Liberia, zos are highly trained specialists with advanced degrees of expertise, analogous to Western post-doctoral degrees or medical specializations. For example, there are Bone Setters, Snake Zos (who have a special relationship with poisonous snakes and can cure snake bites), and Mortuary Zos whose job it is to properly prepare and bury the dead. If a person dies far from home or from the place they are to be buried, it is the job of the Mortuary Zo to walk the dead home and into their grave, it being common knowledge that with the right guidance, the dead will easily get up and walk to wherever they need to go. (A friend who is now in her 30’s, remembers her grandfather’s death very clearly, when she was a young child of about three. He would come once a month to visit her grandmother and spend the night. My friend and others in the family could tell he was there by the overpowering stench, and she remembers seeing footprints walking across the woven ceiling mat.)
Then there is the story of the Swedish NGO that equipped several villages with a forge and metal-smithing tools, with the intention of helping people make and repair farm implements. The donated equipment rusted, unused. What the Swedes didn’t know was that only Surgical Zos are allowed to do metal smithing and that even farm implements had to be ritually made by the rightful people. Akoi says that his grandfather was a big zo, one who helped with babies and who could counteract witchcraft.
Akoi’s grandfather was 98 when he died shortly before Akoi was taken into the war. That means that his grandfather was born at approximately the turn of the century, at around 1800, and grew up before Liberia had been colonized by returning slaves from America. He would have been a young man, about Akoi’s age now, when the first ships came to Liberia bearing Black Christians who arrived in the sweltering equatorial heat in corsets and long woolen dresses, top hats and tails, bibles in hand.
Akoi’s grandfather was a storyteller. Before dying he instructed the family that he wanted Akoi to sleep in his bedroom so that his spirit would be with him. That’s how Akoi came to have his own room until the war came. Akoi takes a photograph of a man in a hammock because it reminds him of his grandfather, who spent his last years, old and frail, lying in a hammock in his bedroom in the cool interior of their earthen house. Whenever he passed through his grandfather’s room, the old man would say, “Akoi, bring me something to eat, bring me something to drink.” Akoi brought him food, and lay next to him in the hammock, swinging and rocking, as his grandfather peeled off stories and set them adrift in the moist afternoon. He explained how elephants used to come when the children were very small, disturbing the village by eating the crops on their farm, and how, after they had eaten, they would run away from the farm again back into the forest.
Spider used to act greedy. It was a time people were having a feast. Spider promised the people in one village that his troop would sing for them at their feast. And he told people in the other village the same thing. He said he would stay between them. Then the spider tied a rope around his waist, and said that when the food was ready they should pull the rope and haul him to the village. Both villages started pulling on the rope at the same time. That’s why spider has such a small waist, so tiny.
After his father left them, when Akoi was ten, he made the farm that fed the whole family. He climbed coco palms to harvest coconuts. “I was small,” he says, “but I tried my possible best. I was very hard-headed. Too hard-headed.”
There is a rumpled flap of skin where the ‘hard-headed’ top of his skull used to be. Akoi says that at the time of his injury, if you held your open hand over the top of his head you could feel his breath on your palm. He says now that when he looks in the mirror and wonders why his life was spared, he thinks, “If God left me there it must be for a purpose. It is not like God loves us more than others who have died; it is the method of God to bring us together to love each other.”
Sunday, May 18, 2014
RESTORATION
“Until
the lions have their own historians,
the
history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
-
Chinua Achebe
Corporations are the hunters glorifying themselves today. Modernity requires that we sever our connection to the natural world and pledge allegiance to the things that money can buy. We are told that the impoverishment of the soul that overcomes us can be healed by consuming the things that corporations make for us, including ‘buying’ the stories they tell us about Nature’s latest diminishment or the inevitability of the wars that profit them.
In recent years there has been a lot of talk about ecological ‘hot spots’ – pristine, endangered areas that conservationists seek to protect. The strategy is to identify places that are close to 90% degraded, then seek to protect the beleaguered remaining 10%. The assumption seems to be that this is all we can hope to achieve, that we’ll be lucky to attain even this meager success.
But when we’re talking about saving (as if it were up to us) the natural world, is it even correct to ‘strategize’? The definition of the word strategy derives from military activity: Strategy (Greek "στρατηγία"—stratēgia: from stratēg (ós) military commander, general (strat ( ós ) army + -ēgos noun derivative of ágein to lead); meaning, A high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty (Source: wikipedia). Secondary definitions refer to strategy in the context of business or games.
Do we really want to depend on a military approach to healing our relationship with the natural world? Saving small percentages of the whole does not necessarily save or even protect what remains. Even the most passionate and well-educated researchers do not know the environmental ‘tipping point’ that will cause Gaia’s demise, nor do we understand the deeper function of such things as oil, uranium, gold, diamonds, copper, and other buried substances that surely are not random or inconsequential and so must have a larger purpose, though we have not bothered to wonder what it is. Decisions and actions arising from short-term thinking do not consider long-range consequences nor do they perceive long-range possibilities. And none of us knows what resplendent restoration is possible if we set our hearts on it.
Now more than ever is the time for a wildly expansive, un-practical vision of a natural world fully restored, within an epochal, perhaps millennial time frame. Infinitely better to spend our creative energy initiating the first 500 years of an unabashedly passionate vision of full, unimpeded and uncompromised global ecological and cultural restoration and to offer ourselves to an inclusive global dialogue that will create a global vision of restoration to inform and sustain us through multiple generations of effort.
If we ‘surrender’ our vision of comprehensive global ecological restoration and settle instead for the struggle to protect tiny percentages of marine and terrestrial habitat, we allow corporations (and the culture which gives them primacy) to set the terms by which nature and nature lovers must abide. Remember that 100 years ago, commercial air travel, computers, and the Internet seemed impossible. Extinctions on the scale we’re seeing now seemed impossible, too. We’re talking here about the ‘surround’ upon which life depends. Do we really want to tell our children that the best we can manage is to save 10% or less of what remains of the intact natural world?
Within each of us is a passionate love for some place or some being in Nature that will open our throats once again to the daily cooing of gratitude for Life. Once found, that gratitude is our most reliable guide to right action. All is not lost. Let us sing the natural world within and around us back to its fullness.
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