A Question of Action

Here in Oregon we are doing the Happy Dance at news of a new 43,000 acre national forest near Bend that will help protect against urban sprawl and give wildlife room to roam. With that in mind, I would like to share this essay by author Barbara Kingsolver titled Understanding the Value of Wild Places. Excerpt:

It's a privilege to live any part of one's life in proximity of nature. It is a privilege, apparently, even to know nature is out there at all. In the summer of 1996, human life on Earth made a subtle, uncelebrated passage from mostly rural to mostly urban. More that half of all humans now live in cities....I find this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like or that trees breathe out what we breathe in..I wonder what it will mean for us to forget that food, like rain, is not a product but a process. I wonder how we will imagine the infinite when we have never seen how the stars fill a dark night sky.

According to the Wild Hunt, Orion Foxwood made this statement at PantheaCon 2010 and the quote is making it's way around the earthwise net:

The Earth isn’t running a democracy. She is calling us all into action whether we like it or not.

Yes, yes and again yes. As always, I come back to loving the questions we ask ourselves. As a Green Witch I ask this question on a daily basis: "What is right action in this place and time?" The answers may differ for each person but the fundamental need for action does not, even as the question itself becomes ever more urgent for us all.

Sia

Celtic Tree of Life by the talented Kevin Dyer at Compost.com. You can buy copies of his creations at that gallery link.