Day: March 4, 2024

I collect quotes. I suppose it is the teacher in me. I once had a drawer full of inspiring words to use on bulletin boards that I had to create as part of my job. Of course all of those pithy sayings were non-religious words about working hard or being observant and such things. Lately I’ve found myself keeping quotes that are more in line with spirituality. I won’t be creating any bulletin boards but I do a great deal of meditating, something that I greatly enjoy. I suppose that my age and the knowledge that the end of my time here gets a bit closer with each day has prompted me to think a bit of what I have done and not done that might make me a better person. 

I won’t be taking any money or possessions with me but I would like to think that somehow I will have made a positive impact on the tiny circle of life that is mine. With Easter just being celebrated I stole this jewel from a friend named Will that seemed to encapsulate the teachings of Jesus quite well. “Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come. I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Such a command seems easy enough but it can be a tall order to actually follow it day after day. We humans have some wonderful traits but also some that make us fall short of the simple command to love. Our anger, jealousy, greed, and hatefulness sometimes get in the way of fulfilling our intent to be good people. Luckily we have many opportunities to sincerely ask for forgiveness and start over again. At my age such opportunities do not seem to be as bountiful as they once were. For that matter given that we never know when the end of our road here on earth will come, we would all do well to set out with determination each day to simply do our best to love one another. 

Another quote that caught my eye and found its way into my collection of wisdom gives an idea of how to do actually see the best rather than the worst in the people we encounter. It tells us to be aware that holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. In other words loving one another sometimes means adjusting our points of view. The woman cleaning the floor where we work should be as important to us as the CEO of the company. The most meager meal is a great gift that feeds us. We should be immensely grateful that we are not going hungry no matter how humble the food may be. We look for miracles in burning bushes rather than seeing that little child laughing and playing as the most wonderful miracle we might ever witness. There are indeed angels all around us willing to help us when we least expect them to lift our burdens. Life is filled with wonder if only we are willing to see. Once we find ourselves noticing the good we ourselves become better.

I have personally had times when I was weary and full of complaints about my lot in life. Sometimes I did not think that I made enough money on my job or that I was as fully appreciated as I should have been. I internally whined and felt sorry for myself instead of looking at the positive aspects of my work that were so evident. That’s why yet another quote that I stumbled upon made me think a bit differently about my own good fortune. The words were quite simple, but powerful,”Your job is the dream of the unemployed…” 

This one smacked me in the stomach. I thought of how lucky I had been in always being employed from the time I was fifteen years old. My bosses and coworkers were kind and helpful. I felt that I was doing something important and while I did not make a fortune I was nonetheless remunerated fairly. The same has been true of every aspect of my life. I have a wonderful house that became a home filled with love. My cars have taken me safely to wherever I needed to go. I’ve had to struggle now and again but everything always turned out okay in the end. I find myself feeling ashamed for ever groaning about my status or income or possessions. I am certain that there are people who would think of my life as a dream. Surely I should be appreciative when I consider how lucky I have been.

Easter is the most profound day of the year. For me it is a holy day that reminds me over and over again of how I should attempt to live my life. The Bible tells me that Jesus died for our sins. There can be no bigger sacrifice than someone laying down his life for others. We are all brothers and sisters with one commandment that should have simplified our relationships with each other. Easter opens my eyes again to remind me of what I must do. I still have time to do my best to get things right. I still have time to love. 

Back in the nineteen nineties, which seem like yesterday and decades ago all at once, a teacher friend warned me about climate change. She was a generally quiet and low key individual so her emotional description of what was coming if we did not change our ways caught my attention even as I silently felt that she was in the throes of an emotional outburst. Contemporaneously one of my sons-in-law began beating the drum of  impending danger with regard to climate as well. Because I was still quite busy with caring for my family and advancing in my career I found such information to be interesting but hardly life changing. Like most people I ignored the signs and kept moving forward with my life. Somehow I did not feel the least bit responsible for the strange weather patterns that seemed to be just another quirk of nature. 

A few years back one of my grandsons who is quite bright and earnest began informing us of his views on what was happening on the earth. He spent much time researching climate and the human impact on it, becoming more and more convinced that natural disasters would be more and more frequent and consequential. He worried that if we did not plan immediately we would one day be caught in a worldwide migration to places that were more comparable with human survival. He spoke of purchasing land in a part of the world that might suffer less than others when the worst began to happen. He felt that having members of of the family live near one another would provide a variety of skills that might become necessary as society broke down. It all sounded a bit like a dystopian science fiction thriller except for the fact that my grandson provided actual facts and showed us trends that were disturbing. Since then I have seen terrible incidents occurring all over the globe.

I have witnessed first hand the changing nature of the seasons. I remember February as a time that was cold day after day even in a southern place like Houston, Texas. As a young girl I walked to school in the proverbial days of freezing. We rarely had snow but winter meant bundling up in heavy coats, wearing hats that covered my ears and donning gloves to keep my hands from becoming too cold. We turned on the heater in our home in November and our Christmases were mostly cold. From January through February we knew that winter was a certainty that sometimes even included snow. 

These days I hardly ever have to use my winter gear beyond a few days here and there. This past February felt more like spring on most days rather than the traditionally coldest month of the year it had been in my youth. We had to cover our plants once this year but mostly spring arrived earlier than ever. The changes are more and more noticeable and I often think of the science minded people who were so insistent that we all had to do something to stem the tide of the damage that had already been done to our earth. 

Over fifty years ago Exxon enlisted the expertise of notable scientists to determine the effect of fossil fuels on our planet. The details that emerged from the research predicted with certainty much of what is happening today, but the mega company chose to fire the researchers and hide the report when they might have been pioneers in changing the way we all live. They literally chose instead to launch a campaign of disinformation that lied about the impact that we humans have on the natural world around us. Those who were like my friend, son-in-law and grandson were made to seem foolish and perhaps a bit hysterical. We all went on ignorantly unaware of the monster at the door.

As I watch millions of acres burning out of control in my home state of Texas I feel regret that I did not pay more attention to the warnings that should have been apparent to anyone with a willingness to consider the evidence. We humans were slowing making our beautiful earth more and more sick. It was so much easier to look away and assume that we would be able to fix any problems with our human ingenuity when the time came to finally react. Sadly, we may have gone too far in our profligate ways to prevent great loss and suffering as dangerous weather events become more and more of a reality. Perhaps we would have been better served to listen to those whose only interest in predicting what might happen had been to help us all. 

The evidence of climate change is all around us and yet it is not the big issue that it should be. If we are worried about human migrations now, we should be even more concerned about how they will look if vast areas of land become uninhabitable. We must understand that sources of water are drying up, making human life in the places they serve less and less likely to be sustained. It is possible that in the coming decades we humans will witness changing dynamics in where and how we are able to exist.

Surely the issues surrounding climate change should be paramount in determining how we live from day to day and whom we choose as our political leaders. Other countries are actively preparing for the difficulties to come while we Americans are mostly stagnant in our efforts. A wave of anti-scientific thinking will be our destruction if we do not join together now to protect our world from ignorance. We can no longer push away the scientific experts and hide the evidence in a vault pretending that all is well. We are in a race against time that should have begun more than fifty years ago. The question is whether or not we are willing to attempt to catch up to where we need to be or if we will wait until disaster is our everyday reality. The fires are burning and we have to do more than just put them out. Will we wake up before it is too late?