04/22/2026
Happy Earth Day! 🌎
"It was a long winter." We've all said it this year. That's what's making spring feel so sweet. The warmer air, thunderstorms, open windows, and firing up the grill. Though these past couple of days are making us all a little moody! That not-with-standing...It seems as though all the plants - all at once - decided to blossom.
In Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer in the chapter titled, "The Council of Pecans," one theme she talks about the phenomenon of mast fruiting in relation to community.
"If one tree fruits, they all fruit...Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; not one grove in the forest, but every grove; all across the county and all across the state. The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don't yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all."
Nature is often a mirror to our shared humanity. Things wilt. Things grow back. Beings hibernate. They spring back to life. Things break. They heal. We feel collective joy. We feel collective suffering.
With technology, we often find ourselves disconnected from nature, but we are part of nature. We are beings on this incredible planet floating in space.
Astronaut Christina Koch of the Artemis II crew recently said, when noticing how much blackness was around the Earth, "It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive."
We are more alike than different.
Her fellow crew member, Astronaut Jeremy Hansen noted, "Our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy in lifting each other up by creating solutions together."
As Kimmerer puts it, "All flourishing is mutual."
🌱 💗 🌖
