I highly recommend the Center for Humans and Nature to all readers. Find solace among great leaders and artists who are providing direction in troubled times.
These stories are from Indigenous nations. Stories heal and stories give us direction. Save this link to listen and return to remember.
Life is under assault because we do not understand that all our ways of being and doing must support life. Life is all. We have forgotten ancient wisdom. We are related to every form of life on Earth. Our kin. It might be a tiny moss or a giant tree, a bug or an elephant, a drop of rain or an ocean. We are all kin.
This film about Aldo Leopold’s life and the development of his thinking about our relationship with land is a true gem. I could not find when it was created, however, the people interviewed are his biographers and scientists who knew and worked with Leopold. It was shown on Wisconsin Public TV. A special treat is narration by Lorne Greene best remembered as “Pa” on Bonanza.
The film gives viewers an in depth history about Aldo Leopold’s life and how his ideas about The Land Ethic evolved over his lifetime.
WATCH EARLY THIS YEAR TO SET YOUR COMPASS TOWARD TRUE NORTH.
I am the mother of two wonderful human beings, my daughter Heather and son Tommy. As a septuagenarian I am in those latter years, still relatively healthy, and full of enthusiasm for life in general. Sure, there are plenty (a plethora) of worrisome forces at work in the world, poverty and war among the worst. But on this 2022 Mothers’ Day, I am reflecting on what I can do to help my country and my worldwide sisters and brothers in every nation to achieve harmony.
Starting the day as I usually do with Heather Cox Richardson‘s Letters to Americans, she told the true story of Mothers’ Day. Here. Heather is an American historian at Boston College. Letters is independent of her work at the college. Find it on substack.com where you can subscribe to receive it each morning. She puts current day political and social issues in an historical perspective.
Today, in thinking of Julia Ward Howe’s work on behalf of women to influence leaders to avoid war as a solution to conflict, I am calling on all my fellow mothers and mothering women to join together to bring our powers to stop the dissolution of women’s rights to privacy, to sovereignty over her own body. We are and can bring about a national and international outcry for a woman’s right to choose whether she will give birth to a child. It is unfathomable to me that this nation could be on the way to eliminating a fundamental right for women. It can only be from a hatred of women, of feminine forces that some men fear. Control of reproductive rights is a darkness of ages past.
I never thought I’d see this day. Born into a military family with a deep love for America, I revere my parents and their generation for making the world a fairer place, eliminating the dark forces that ravaged Europe. Those forces have emerged again in Russia, Hungary, Venezuela and other autocratic states, and in the U.S.A. in the Republican Party. Right wing forces have all but destroyed that party. Conservative moderates have always had my respect as a balance to more progressive thinking in Democrats. That of course was the America that talked to each other and listened respectfully. Slowly the forces of polarized thinking have chipped away at that fragile but necessary conversation.
We stand at a precipice with numerous winds blowing at our backs. Women today can converge to bring sanity back to this nation. Women of all ilk — political, religious, racial, gender identity, and ages — can and must wage peace and reason upon society, and lift our voices in every kind of place for truth and reason. I regard this moment in American history as a pivot point.
Everything is at stake: environment, health and wellness, sovereignty…
We will need to put away everything now to manage to save this nation from its path toward anarchy. Join hands. Protest, conjure, march, and do so without rage and anger but with moral force behind you and the ghosts of millions of mothers, women and girls who saw clearly that a democracy exists when women are empowered. Mothers Unite!
Susan Feathers 