Love of Truth, Love of Earth
Next week, April 23-29, 2023, is National Library Week in the U.S. I share with so many, daily deep gratitude and reverence for the worlds beyond my world opened through books and the people passionate about writing them and the people passionate about protecting them.
When my 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Hart, created a paper caterpillar for each student, adding circles to the body with every book read, my paper caterpillar stretched halfway around the classroom.
When my very first college term paper was on Senator Joe McCarthy and the press, and my university had a library and the library carried Time magazine, forbidden in my ultra-conservative family home, I learned that McCarthy was not the strong-man Communist hunter that my parents idealized but a demagogue, and came to understand the damage done to so many people in my country through the era of his Congressional witch hunt.
The privilege – and necessity for survival – of understanding the people in our world through perspectives other than the standard issue of the dominant culture is a door I walked through long ago. And now libraries are facing assaults from small but fierce groups of parents who put enormous pressure on libraries – public and school – to ban books they don’t approve of – which is banning perspectives they don’t agree with. It’s dangerous, uncalled for, and the National Library Association is asking supporters of free access to the world’s wisdom to push back. Here’s how: American Library Association and Unite Against Book Bans.
And Saturday, April 22, is Earth Day, sharing with so many around the world deep gratitude and reverence for the planet that supports life and that sustains what supports life every moment of every day. Many, many opportunities to invest in protecting planet Earth, including calculating your carbon/food/plastic footprints, planting trees and cleaning up beaches, and moving toward a greener economy. I’ll personally recommend the hybrid workshop at Spirit Rock: The Time Is Now; Showing Up for the Planet on Saturday, April 22, 2023.
And one more recommendation for exploring and celebrating all that is good in the world of words and writing and truth in writing: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s online workshop The Poetry of Truth: Writing What Truly Matters on Saturday, April 29, 2023. Rosemerry has been writing a poem a day for the last 17 years. I’ve posted many of Rosemerry’s poems here. (One more below) Gratitude and reverence for the warmth, wisdom, deep truth, real empathy.
For the Living
It is the work of the living
to grieve the dead.
It is our work to wake each day,
to live into the world that is.
It is our work to weep,
and it is our work to be healed.
Some part of us knows
not only the absence of our beloveds,
but also their presence,
how they continue to teach us,
how they invite us to grow.
It is our work to be softened by loss,
to be undone, destroyed, remade.
Wounded, we recoil,
and it is our work to notice how,
like crushed and trampled grass,
we spring back.
It is our work to meet death again
and again and again,
and though it aches to be open,
it is our work to be opened,
to live into the opening
until we know ourselves
as blossoms nourished from within
by the radiance of the ones
who are no longer physically here.
They have given us their love light to carry.
It is our work to be in service to that light.
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer ~