Loose Leaf Notes

Do you keep it up all year long?” I asked my long time friend Alwyn Moss about her blue planet Earth flag.  We were in the garden behind her apartment in a local retirement community, enjoying the wild cats, the flowering phlox and azaleas, and each other’s company.

“No, I can’t,” she answered with an impish smile.  “My neighbors would be upset if I kept it up all year because it’s not an American flag!” 

 If your or my home was on fire, or severely damaged, we would take action. We would put out the fire if possible, and we would do everything in our power to restore it. The Earth is our true home, the place in which our species found it possible to be born, to evolve as a species, to establish a civilization.

That’s what she wrote in a commentary that appeared in the Roanoke Times the same day we had salmon, apple pie and tea for lunch at Our Daily Bread, shopped at Kroger for cat food and groceries and stopped at the CVS so she could get the film in her old school camera developed.

Meanwhile, carbon emissions increase, glaciers and ice shelves weaken, ocean levels rise, global warming and other extremes of climate change are at least in part the cause of disastrous forms of storms, droughts, floods, while endangered and threatened species vanish at historically high rates beyond any in the past 65million years.… I read aloud from the booth we shared while eating lunch.

“Don’t you want to hold it up straight?” I asked, seeing that my camera was lopsided and dangling precariously from her hand.  “No I like it this way,” she said, with her artist’s eye studying me as she snapped.

She – a poet, environmentalist and Waldorf kindergarten teacher – talked about her teacher Thomas Berry and her cat Luci who had recently died.  I dubbed Luci the macho opera singer cat in a tuxedo when he first showed up when Alwyn lived in the trailer park on the edge of the Jefferson Forest.  We looked at pictures of Luci and she gave me a copy of the poem she spoke at his burial.   No coming, no going / No after, no before / I hold you close / I release you to be free / I am in you / And you are in me… 

More than once she called out the name of her 97 year old neighbor, but there was no reply.  We had walked over to see the garden her neighbor had created after the clearing of a storm felled tree revealed an opening in a wooded section of the property.  The garden involved mats hand-woven from recycled plastic bags, plants, poetry and prayers taped to trees, and rocks, tree stumps and chairs that her friend had placed in various places along a walkway in and out of standing trees. “She has created a relationship with the land,” Alwyn said.

Back at Alwyn’s garden we had a moment of silence and a hug.  It was a big day and we were both tired.  I tucked a phlox flower behind her ear and gave her a kiss goodbye.

Post notes:  On this Earth Day, I invite you to let the conclusion to Alwyn’s Roanoke Times commentary sink in:  Changing an entrenched economic system that continues to operate on an earlier assumption of the Earth as an infinite resource of goods seems almost impossible at this time. Yet I believe, as do many others, that simplicity of lifestyle and an economy of enough, not of excess, one that meets everyone’s needs, are aspects of an economic healing that makes sense in this third millennium for the sake of the Earth’s long-term well-being and our own.  You can read the commentary in its entirety HERE.