Our Blue Marble: Praise for the Earth
Were you watching the astronauts as they traveled around the moon? The pictures they have shared with us are both beautiful and eerie. To see the earth suspended like a swirly blue marble in the black space of our solar system—well, it catches the attention. How can all of life as we know it be housed on this one ball?
This planet earth is perfectly positioned to create an environment that can sustain life with warmth and water and light, as well as with gravitational pull that provides seasons and rotation and keeps everything held in place without squashing all of us. So many intricate settings, relationships, mathematic equations (science-y things) are so finely dialed-in to make everything work. This truly is a marvelous place! And, we get to live here!
Around Richmond, VA, spring is springing, with flowers and new buds pushing up through the ground or branches, a thousand shades of green vie for our attention, and warmer breezes invite us to come outside and enjoy it all. The smell of cut grass is a welcome enjoyment that reminds us of the changes happening. The birds in chorus creating such an arrangement of songs might even make you want to wake up earlier. If you don’t have the “merlin” app, you might consider downloading it. With it, you can identify the sounds of birds that you are hearing and learn who is singing right beside you. This is just one way to connect with and deepen appreciation for our natural world.
Today’s children are unlike any previous generation, in that they have more competing for their attention with more bells, whistles, flashes, and dazzles. Screens are useful for so many tasks but they are also consuming. I “fall into the hole” of the screen all the time. But real life isn’t happening on the screen. And, so many artificial things can capture our attention that we may miss out on real life happening in this space and time.
Maybe you have noticed, when working or playing outdoors, time seems to melt away and the smells, textures, sounds, and connections we make remind us we are alive and in a body with feelings and senses. This provides a most suitable space for imagination, reflection, and relaxation. It can grow within us an appreciation for life in all of its shapes and forms. And, at a time when our earth is changing, struggling, and being mistreated, there couldn’t be a more important time to grow some earth appreciation.
Not long ago, I read an article that basically said, we don’t take good care of anything we don’t actually care about. We don’t offer nurture to any relationship that isn’t important to us. The basic idea being highlighted is our need to be in relationship with nature and delight in it, if we are to have any hope of being willing and able to actually respect and care for the earth. Children are inquisitive and filled with wonder. They are naturally curious, love sensory exploration, and are ready to interact with their surroundings. What better time to let them fall in love with nature? Now is the perfect time for exposing them to the amazing living world, so they can have a relationship with it and develop a love for it that can move them to respect and care for it.
Birds sitting on their nests, butterflies flittering by, the sound of wind in the trees, the smells of wet earth after rain—the enjoyments are endless. The wonders surround us so entirely that we don’t even really think of them as wonders any longer—until we pull ourselves out of the fray, shift our attention, take a big look and listen, and inhale a deep breath in the beautiful outdoors. If you do it, your body will thank you. Someday your children will thank you. And, the earth will thank you by continuing to support our lives.
Creating this kind of care is of greatest importance. The pictures from space don’t show a bunch of blue marbles hanging in space. There is just one. And we need it. We need it to thrive as much as it deserves to thrive.
-Written as an Earth Day blog entry for my friend and author, Danielle Simone