Month: November 2024

Voices for Mother Earth

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (from goodreads)

“Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human. It is to transcend not only national limitations, but even our species isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and value.” (Thomas Berry, “The Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth, 42). https://thomasberry.org/quotes/

Photo by Susan Feathers at Virginia Beach Botanical Garden Hydrangea Park

M. Scott Momaday, reading his poetry, A Man Made of Words.

Scott’s understanding of language arises from his deep conversation with the land of the Kiowa. He received the Pulitzer Prize with his first novel, The House Made of Dawn.

To read or listen to powerful voices of people who have devoted their lives to celebrating the Earth is to heal and to find our way home. Each offers us solace and a direction for our lives as we anticipate times of destruction in America and around the world. Earth teaches us to live in community, to know each other and to be in reciprocal relationship with each other and all of life around us. I highly recommend these great teachers, each of whom has helped me understand a way forward in uncertain times. They offer hope and a longer point of view than ephemeral politics. They are an antidote to avarice. We need this deep resonance now to stabalize our spirits and our collective wish for unity, equality and peace.

Listening

Here is a brilliant conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer and Emanuel Vaughn Lee of Emergence Magazine. Robin describes the wonderful serviceberry tree and what she has learned from its generosity. I also recommend Emergence Magazine for its films from artists and thought leaders across our great planet. I go there frequently to keep the balance.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimerer. I am awaiting my copy!

When I Discovered the Living Web

“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” ~ Aldo Leopold

When I was 13, my family moved to Plattsburg, New York. We rented a model home built at the edge of the forest surrounding St. Bellarmine College and Noviate. It was housed in what had been the 2nd Hotel Champlain and surrounding grounds with trails winding down to Lake Champlain.

When I left our home, I walked on the monastery trails toward the lake with our family beagle who loved exploring the grounds with nose and long velvet ears with which he breathed in the fragrances of the woods and touched the rocks and trails sensing creatures who had passed by.

I was pensive on this day. Military families, as we were, suffer trauma through moving which separates children and youth from new found friends and causes stress in parents through absense of the father or mother, and often living in less than ideal housing and circumstances. I longed to belong somewhere.

It was fall in the Adirondacks and the woods were aflame in nature’s palette of red, gold, purple, orange and yellow. I stopped in a spot ablaze with autumn leaves which appeared as a mosaic. As I stared into its palette, I became aware that I was becoming a part of the wholeness of it. At that moment “I” no longer existed. I was lifted out of body.

This realization of the oneness of life in varying forms, colors and beingness profoundly changed me. At 13 I realized there is no separation between the “natural world” and me nor any other life form. We are part of a living mosaic moving through space on a spinning planet.

After that seminal day, I have felt that I belonged, wherever I may be; I draw no distinction between myself and the mosaic of life around me. And now, wherever I live, I belong. This has brought me great peace and satisfaction. Desert, mountains, grasslands, tropical zones – I’ve lived in each one loving it and learning from the people and the land, waters, and all the life there.

Rising Sun Redbud in VA Beach at Tidewater Community College

Explore Further:

The Land Ethic by Aldo Leopold

The Gaia Hypothesis

When the Earth Restores Herself

Accelerate Regenerative Farming

The adoption of regenerative agricultural practices is a low-cost, ready-to-deploy approach to combat the climate crisis on a meaningful scale. But numerous challenges remain that hinder widespread adoption. ~ American Farmlands Trust

This video is from the podcast, No-Till Growers.

I have drafted a fiction story based in Kentucky about a young woman farmer who sets out to regenerate the land of her family’s legacy farm. Readers learn the challenges that stand in the way of family farmers and young people trying to do the right thing on their land.

In part, I based the novel on the experiences of the No-Till Growers whom I came to know when I lived in Bowling Green, KY. I was part of a Community Supported Farmer network who grew my food.

These young farmers are the true dreamers of America. And I think you’ll agree with me that this is a time for dreams that are based in reality.

Afternoon Glow Just Before Hay Harvest at Dream Acres Farm

Down Ballot Races Tell a Story

To readers: I recommend Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder as historians and active citizens – as people who can provide trustworthy guidance as we move into a period. While we are entering a stark reality in he U.S.A., there is still much we can do to protect democracy, and there are long term strategies to protect the nearly 250 years of progress toward equality for all and the rule of law. In fact, if we do not engage in protecting this progress, we may lose it all.

What American Voters Actually Voted For

In state governments citizens voted to restore or protect abortion rights for women’s health; better wages; higher taxes on super wealthy, equality under the law, protection of workers’ rights. Voters also voted for climate mitigation and green energy development. Americans voted to protect right to fair voting rules. This is what Americans voted for on both sides of the political ticket.

Why did more than half of them then vote for Trump? They were deceived. Disinformation created a picture that by voting for the MAGA movement you would get all those things. They are in for a big disappointment.

We don’t have to stand by while Trump and his cronies hack away at democratic institutions and use violence against the American people.

We are entering a period of potential internal destruction/reconstruction of our governing structure (with the wealthiest men in the world in charge now) with promises to withdraw from international leadership (even participating at all) with other countries working together to keep a rules-based system of world peace. We’ll be cronies with Putin and the like. We are probably entering a period of isolation from other democracies while the new governance forms partnerships and deals with other autocracies that increase their power and individual wealth.

Trump promises to withdraw from the climate accords and he and the elected party deny that climate change is real. Call your Senators and Representatives to let them know you do not support this, even if they are MAGA recruits.

So we have some slivers of light and hope. On the local and state levels we can start building coalitions as a stabilizing force to what is happening federally. Many states are already working on this. Call your representatives.

All over the country we are witnessing right wing leaders declaring loyalty to Trump: “He is always right. Whatever he tells me to do, I will do it.” This is an acute sign of impending autocratic rule. Right from the play book.

Timothy Snyder, Yale professor of history, and author of On Tyranny and most recently On Freedom, calls this ‘obeying in advance’ to the dictator.

What can we do? We get in touch with our Senators and Representatives to tell them no, we do not believe this is right. We need to do this now. Also, create communities. Work together. You are probably already in one or more that have been active on one or more of these aspects of democratic governance.

Unqualified individuals and cronies of Trump are moving into powerful position such as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense (heading up our entire miliary establishment). Shout from the mountain tops that you do not agree and will not support it!!!!!

Remember, Kamala and Tim built a large coalition of democracy-loving citizens from left, right and center.

We must now step up together to defend our country.

Check out a Politics Chat with Heather Cox Richardson

See below this instructive set of short videos from Timothy Snyder.

Daughter’s Lament to Her Father on Veterans Day and Loss of Democracy

In a timely interview by Jon Stewart with Heather Cox Richardson, the historian reflects on how Americans chose an autocracy as our form of government, and then reflected that we have witnessed the end of the American century.

In that century Americans rose to the moment to protect America by joining free nations in the world to overcome autocracies led by Nazi Germany who strove to establish a white Christian oligarchy and rule by a few powerful men.

Richardson is a respected historian of history who publishes Letters from An Americans on Substack in which millions of readers learn to interpret the present moment in politics by understanding our history. She has become an island of sanity in the stream of disinformation on social media and legacy media. Richardson observes that voters in a “swirl of disinformation” voted for something they do not expect. In fact we elected an autocrat with eyes on dismantling our institutions that protect our democracy.

On this Veteran’s Day, how can I go to my father’s memory – a man who fought in WWII as a B-29 pilot and then came back to our democracy and served for another 22 years as an Air Force officer – now that we just threw away the country, the democracy, for which he risked his life and defended at great risk against autocracies that threatened the world?

We lost our democracy on November 5, 2024.

The truth is that Kamala Harris ran a strongly democratic campaign in a centrist coalition which gained Republicans, independents, and a diverse electorate in the belief that a majority of people with agency, doing the best for as many as possible, can continue a lasting, democracy. [This is a paraphrase from Heather Cox Richardson.]

I highly recommend to Americans who voted for democracy to listen and relisten to this interview by Jon Stewart with Heather Cox Richardson to understand what was lost and how we might organize to restore democracy to the United States of America. It will be the long game.

This, then, is my tribute to all the Veterans – to the memory of my father, Edward B. Feathers, Colonel, US Air Force and recipient of the Air Medal of the Army Air Corp (now the Air Force)- who risked their lives in defense of democracy as did Veterans throughout our history. I pledge to you to devote what is left of my life to gain back the democracy we have lost.

WWII Veteran, my father, Edward B. Feathers

The FDR era comes to an end. Bill McKibben, Substack

Return to Beauty

My sources of inspiration are men and women who have graced our world by writing or painting or creating soliliques about nature, about the land, about the nonhuman existence. Trees, bears, bugs, soil, water in all its forms. The human, with our species ability to think, rarely understands how thought stands between the experience of being alive and the life of the mind.

Thought can stand between wonder and the mind – our political constructs a recent example. I have to relearn this periodically. Nature is an endless well of creativity and joy and the font from which the best thoughts arose when our species had ready and more intact nature for inspiration.

People can be wells of beauty, too. Think on a little child and the wonderment in his eyes…before thoughts circumvent that pure sense of wonderment into an altered form of itself. The people whom I turn to for inspiration go to nature often and some eventually return to a life in the wood.

Aspen grove by cabin – Frank Waters Foundation

Somewhere in “there” we might reside in joy and be a part of a constructed world. We would need to rethink almost everything about modern Western culture that places a dollar value on everything. Everything.

I came to believe that what is on the news, the fear-saturated society in which we have become experts at scaring the s**t out of ourselves, is real. Then, I go to the trees or the mountains and step into wonder and commune with them. I had forgotten we are not in a political jail without a get-out-of- jail free card. My God, I got sucked down that well of artificiality, again!

It’s not that I step completely away from our self-made social terribles, but only that I remember what is real, where my soul resides, and how to stay sane when the world we’ve made becomes insane, as it has in my country now. We got here because so many of us believed a contructed image, a constructed reality that is anything but real. Because of that, we have lost our minds.

I step toward beauty. I step toward love and communion as one of God’s beings on a vast and beautiful planet spinning in a universe more awesome than we can ever conceive. I understand that I do not understand.

Walk in Wonder

John O’Donohue

Anam Cara

Photo by Susan Feathers

Requiem for America

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Mozart never finished the score to the Requiem mass. The story of how it was finally finished is a drama itself. See this history. **What is important here is that others picked up the mantle to finish it and ultimately this work was performed and now lives across the planet as hope in the face of death.

I leave this with readers who mourn the loss of our democratic principles in the election of Donald Trump and the rise of autocracy in the USA.

I am broken-hearted on this day, November 6, 2024. But, I will not yield to oppressive forces in my homeland. Our Constitution is truth manifest. These are times when Americans have faltered in their discernment of what the 2024 election means for the American experiment. God help us.

A Republic – If We Can Keep It

Benjamin Franklin’s famous response to Elizabeth Willing Powell at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, rings with great meaning today.

Our Republic’s integrity, its very existence, will be decided on this day in American history. Let’s ask Mrs. Powell’s question today.

Well, Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a Republic or a Monarchy?

Library of Congress

Photo by Susan Feathers