Sometimes really nice things happen, and sometimes they happen at just the right time. Here is an email from America which I received yesterday morning, completely out of the blue:
I greatly enjoyed reading A Message from Martha.Living on the beach in Florida, I saw swarms of birds wheel and swoop, and I thought I was seeing many. What a sad awakening to history.
Ironically, I was reading the closing pages and Martha’s message in the early hours following our election, and I was struck by “You can now choose what type of world you live in…do you care enough?”
I do remember the stories of our Dust Bowl created by over farming land and taking away tree lines…and the consequences of that in the soil blowing away and the devastation to our farming.
I compare the quote above to page 114 that the “book pigeons live forever by not living at all.”
I am hopeful. Our political climate now makes it an uphill slog, but your book suggests still there is hope, because we, humans, can change, can choose alternate paths. We have done well in fits and starts, but it has been painful if we look back at the cumulative losses we have suffered.
I needed another book to carry in my bag as I thought about the troubling issues you raised in yours. Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner crept into my fingers. I opened it to the first page and Plutarch’s quote, “Music, to create harmony, must investigate discord.” As the science of global warming bumps into ideology of “no it’s not,” I guess we have some discord to live through. Hopefully, we will talk to one another more, demonstrate that we are together here, and help one another move forward in the balance of surviving and living on a planet that allows and celebrates all living things.
Thanks for stirring my thoughts.
Best wishes,
Kit
Christopher Robin “Kit” Adams,
writer UCF Florida Writing Project/Mentor
Facebook: Spanish Cedar
Mark writes: I occasionally get lovely emails like this one and obviously they tend to make one’s day. This one was very special as it related to words that I had written almost four years ago but which were having an impact on a stranger, far away, on a day of importance for that person. When Kit’s email arrived I was thinking of my travels around the USA in the context of the results of the USA presidential election and so to get Kit’s email at that time was special for me. I wrote and thanked him and told him that he had cheered me up.
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Nice.
Fortuitous environmental messages ebbing then flowing among the currents and vicissitudes of our old and modern communication systems. Alexander von Humboldt, the father of environmentalism, would have smiled. (Ref. The Invention of Nature, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt by Andrea Wulf.)