Green Fest: Good Morning!

All photos by yours truly.

Happy Green Fest, all! I'll be heading down there shortly but wanted to share some reflections on my inspiration for attending today.

I believe it's time we started caring about our world. Our neighborhoods and our people, and our natural environment, too. 

I believe now is the time to consider where our food comes from, how our hunger impacts our world, how brothers and sisters in other parts of the world go hungry every day. Now is the time to consider our health and treating our bodies to clean, healthy food.

Sustainability is an issue to consider now, in this moment. So is climate change. Pollution, energy, transportation, endangered species... the list is long, because the time is now.

Can you be challenged to listen to our world and the problems within it? Can you be moved to action? There are simple ways you can make a difference. There are simple ways you can encourage others to do the same.

I can't help but hear words by Walt Whitman ringing in my ears:

Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling;  

Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard;  

Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows;  

Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape;  

Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching content;

Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars...

--From "Leaves of Grass" (130) by Walt Whitman

Or maybe Wallace Stevens speaks more closely to your heart:


It is possible that to seem -- it is to be,
As the sun is something seeming and it is.


The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.


Thus things are like a seeming of the sun
Or like a seeming of the moon or night


Or sleep. It was a queen that made it seem
By the illustrious nothing of her name.


Her green mind made the world around her green.
The queen is an example... This green queen


In the seeming of the summer of her sun
By her own seeming made the summer change.


In the golden vacancy she came, and comes,
And seems to be on the saying of her name.


Her time becomes again, as it became,
The crown and week-day coronal of her fame...

--From "Description Without Place" (I) by Wallace Stevens

You hold the world in your hand. On most days, it may seem like you don't, but you do. Now is the time: do something great with the world.