My Clarissa still remembers how her mommy carried her on her back when she was four-years old while pushing her one-year old sister in a stroller the last mile of a day out in the Nature Center in Birmingham, England. Clarissa was really tired and could not walk anymore. But after a few blocks, she got down and said she wanted to walk some more...
Now that Clarissa is 14-years old, she walks to pick up her almost 11-year old sister, Ashley, from school a few days each week. They often come home laughing and talking more than they would typically inside our house.
The other day, while walking home from school with Ashley in the rain, we picked up some lost worms from the sidewalk and put them on the grass. Ashley said to me, "Mommy, Jessica told me that her mom stepped on two worms yesterday and she wished she would step on more!"
I looked at Ashley and asked, "What did you say to her?"
Ashley looked up at me, smiled, and said, "I told her my mom picks up the worms and puts them on the grass so they can live."
"...so they can live."
ReplyDeleteThat's really what this is all about, isn't it? We are all part of an interdependent web of existence. Our task: To treat the world and every living thing in it as if our lives depended on them, which it does.
Thank you.
The difference is that it is not our lives right now that is at risk -- it is the lives of future generations. We have evolved to think of short-term survival, and we have shown that we are quite good at that. And some humans will most likely survive any environmental crisis in the future, but at what cost? The difficult part is to get enough people to think long-term to prevent large-scale catastrophe.
ReplyDelete