As I write this, wildfires in LA County continue to rage out of control. My daughter, who lives in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles cannot breathe. This tragedy was preventable. We are being offered opportunities to connect the dots, to see the relationships and root causes between who suffers and who does not. And despite the hellscape images rolling across our screens, the people who are actually responsible for this will drink and drill and eat and lobby and burn again tomorrow.
Appalachia has yet to recover from Hurricane Helene. 2024 was the hottest year on record. The Phillipines endured 6 typhoons in 30 days this fall, some of them occurring simultaneously. This week, on a national holiday honoring Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., we inaugurated a 34 time felon and a climate change denier to serve four more years as president of the United States.
What are we going to do?! As a friend reminded me just last week, the answer to that question is “the next right thing.” Over and over and over. As W.E.B. Du Bois said, “The prayer of our souls is a petition for persistence: not for the one good deed, or single thought, but deed on deed, and thought on thought, until day calling unto day shall make a life worth living.”
This past week a colleague shared with me this poem by Wendell Berry. I share it now with you, because it gave me shivers. We must practice persistence. Persistence to do the right thing, over and over, to honor MLK’s legacy, to build the future we envision for those who follow.
A Vision
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance
cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have
opened..
Families will be singing in their fields.
In the voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not
return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into a legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this
place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and in dwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibilities.
Susan Phillips
Executive Director
Image credit: Ricardo Levins-Morales
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