Earth Day 22 April 2022
Loving greetings to you all on Earth Day 2022!
We belong to the Land
The Land does not belong to us
Native wisdom from Australia
Responding to the ravages of a massive oil-spill off the coast of California, and inspired by the energy of the student anti-war movement, 22nd April was first proclaimed Earth Day in the U.S in 1970. Since then it has grown into a world-wide environmental movement, encouraging us to engage in local and global conversations, taking transformative action for the planet.
The images we are seeing daily from the Ukraine and other war-torn parts of the world bring home the heart-breaking human cost of conflict and remind us once again of the terrible desecration being wrought on the land. Days of despair and sorrow, and yet… I read last week of a naturalist in Lviv conducting bird-watching tours around the parks of his city for refugees from the east.They had lost their homes, some had lost family members, and he’s trying to help them to be calm, he says, to take a break from thinking about what’s happening.
This is a time indeed when we can know with intensity the power of nature to nurture us, and I am glad plans are now firmly underway to develop a Garden for Reflection here in the university – a distinctively spirit-led green space for calm and contemplation. There is much we need to do to understand and approach differently the climate emergency and the world’s political problems, but inspired by that bird-watcher, on this Earth Day and in the days that follow, let’s put aside moments for opening our hearts and loving the earth in the simplest and smallest of ways – in Lviv they rely only on eyes and ears, binoculars and telescopes would cause suspicion.
I’ve recently returned from a week on Iona, the island in the Inner Hebrides where St Columba first established a monastic community in 563 CE. Iona is often described as a thin place. It’s a creative place for me to nurture my inner life – a paired-down landscape where details rise to the fore, held within other timescales and ways of being. Here are a few poems about the birds I saw there, written with echoes of the early church praise poems.
Near the Strand of the Seat
I cross the machair
beneath lapis skies
sounding of streams —
treasures hidden, larks unseen
At the Port of Hummocks
A pair of pied wagtails
pick over the kelp
looping the foreshore
elegant and full of grace
Near the Nunnery
In the undergrowth
the startle of a songthrush —
its speckled generosity
as the light begins to fade
And here’s a photograph I took of the north beach at the tip of the island, looking out towards Ireland from whence Columba had come. The wonderful formations in the foreground are gneiss, the most ancient of rocks.
Returning to the native wisdom with which I began, and full of respect for the riches it can offer, I’d like to finish with something from an anonymous Swampy Cree Indian; part of a trickster cycle narrated by Jacob Nibenegenesabe, who lived for some ninety-four years north-east of Lake Winnepeg. The piece is intriguing and delighful, and gives me a whole new way of looking at the world!
There was an old woman I wished up.
She was the wife
of an old pond.
You could watch her swim in her husband
if you were
in the hiding bushes.
She spoke to him by the way she swam
gently.
One time in their lives there was no rain
and the sun began making the pond smaller.
Soon the sun took the whole pond!
For many nights the old woman slept
near the hole where her husband once lived.
Then, one night, a storm came
but in the morning there was still no water
in her husband’s old house.
So she set out on a journey to find her husband
and followed the puddles on the ground
which were the storm’s footprints.
She followed them for many miles.
Finally she came upon her husband
sitting in a hole. But he was in the wrong hole!
So the old woman brought her husband home
little by little in her hands.
You could have seen him come home
if you were
in the hiding bushes.
In friendship,
Barbara Davey
Honorary Quaker Chaplain