Sunday, October 27, 2013

The elephant and the only answer i can find for suffering


folded knees
collapsing forward
is he alive?
and this is all i see:
folded knees
folded skin

without
a face
collapsing knees
folded folded
i stare at his knees
folded skin
is he alive?
without a face
is he alive?
folded knees
without a face

again, again, again

all this for piano keys?

is he alive?

on his knees
folded skin
without a face

how can i stop this?

dear deena, i almost write,
they asked you to help
in tanzania
the herd came
  and blocked
              the road


yes, they call to you and us---

is he alive?
on his knees
folded folded
no face

how do i stop this?
why so much suffering?

  so   my    buddhist friends
went to Portugal
this week

[i should have joined them
to learn the skill

of seeing this elephant
beaded with stars

face restored
upright with

his family
herd all

yes
amid a herd all of happy elephants
flapping ears tusks heart safe]

"it's all samsara"

that's what
Buddha said

the only answer i can find for suffering
 & human torture 

Monday, October 21, 2013

the heart

i like to write in the morning
in the evening
i am too tired for poems

where does this emptiness come from?

my mouth is the desert

he dove down into the earth
giving and leaving nothing

i used to feel that with each human contact

there was

what if?

now it has all become

a google map

perhaps it is time for a pilgrimage

to a holy place

of birds




Sunday, October 20, 2013

The alligator in the pool

there was a pool in the
basement of the house
and in it swam large fish
and an alligator.

i swam with the alligator
it wanted to be near me
it was lonely
it pushed up close against
me

i remained still
& tried to love its closeness

i was not afraid
i was near death

i was not afraid
of the alligator in the pool

Blue Water Morning

a terrible

loneliness
a dark hole
morning light
hello daughter
eggs and fruit salad
a walk with friends
bird song

what is despair?
why does it creep into my bed at night?
why do we see the worst after moments of love?

i will walk by the water
the clear blue
day after day in the house
i bought

can it be the house that makes me lonely?
how i wanted it
now i don't

i don't know what i want
i want to want nothing
i want san francisco
i want paris
i want a waterfall

is loneliness fog?
a not seeing
a coldness

watching barrels of radioactive waste
thrown into
the beloved ocean

pasting and copying my chapters

to send to a friend
she says writers must know
the loneliest of loneliness

i will research how many Japanese
women protest/ed
& mourn the loss
of Kaori Izumi
who took care of
irradiated children
& shut down the Oi reactor

her voice is on my computer
my dead bird sings in the
background

i cannot find the video
of her face
but in my memory
i see her son peering
in the skype screen
and her hands on her cheeks
(we talked for hours)

she returned to japan from italy
to help

she is dead.

now i must rise.
i must go to the water.

Friday, October 11, 2013

A Dangerous Poem and Quiz #1


Quiz #1.  
Date._________________ 
Planned Expiration Date.________________


good morning. i am going to write 30 poems before december.
let me count the ways i don't have hope
then the ways i do.
Rebecca Solnit says infuse hope.
Z, our mutual friend, says the same.

i read a book of hers, Savage Dreams, filled with stories that lap over my life, laps, swimming laps, my father swam back and forth, sitting on my father’s lap, stories about women strike for peace and the desert and my mother’s story infused in there, and my body’s cancer story and the American story all a jumble and Berkeley in the sixties and it turns out that her brother X went to jail with my brother Y for an anti-nuclear protest, and a man i loved is friends with her brother X, and he’s one of the Xs in her book, and i canceled our friendship, but Z is friends with him, and Rachel Carson now has a statue in Woods Hole, and I should have been there for the dancers who memorialized gene pools and
he never held my hand, it was all
about sex

facebook is god.

human beings break hearts and planets. or is it stars?

small love, big love, what’s the difference?

is there a difference between a broken heart and a nuclear bomb explosion?

this is a poem about love.  

nobody knows the difference or cares, so you must knock on the doors of your neighbors’ houses, and give them this quiz: where is the closest nuclear power plant? what is a storage pool for spent nuclear fuel rods?  what temperature must it remain before the rods explode?  how do you split an atom?  why in the hell would you split an atom?  why do they use uranium and where does it come from? what happens to a landscape that is mined for uranium? do you know what happens when a terrorist flies a plane into a spent fuel pool?

i am looking at the ocean now and changing the subject.  subjective realities are far more interesting than objective realities. don’t objectify me. say, what is the goal of philosophy or literary theory?  do something real. plumbing. build a house. seed the earth. this word is an abstraction, a hyperreal non-thing. it.

don't be so high and mighty.

what is real?

i/me will tell you what’s real.  loneliness.  running water.  three full core meltdowns. millions of gallons of radioactive water. children with thyroid abnormalities. death.

fukushima.

will you go with me on a pilgrimage there?  fess up.  it scares you.  YOU won’t admit it.  you’ll placate to get your name in print and get funding.  say radiation is safe.  but do YOU live in Fukushima?  do YOU go camping in Chernobyl?  would YOU buy a radioactive dog?  why is it forbidden for pregnant women to get x-rays, but YOU say it's all the same: bananas, airplanes, Cesium 137, plutonium, strontium 90, but when it suits, YOU laugh and remind us about the short life of tritium that YOU leak. ha ha and all the fellas drink the tritium in YOUR home-made beer. it comes right out in your pee.  you say: ha ha ha

weep not for the weary.

or the mothers who flee with internally contaminated children.

it's so easy to confuse the poor ignorant people who cannot understand physics or the news.

do you have an evacuation plan?

three big tuna swimming in the sea. radi-o-act-i-vi-ty.

am i the walt whitman of the sea?

my chest hurts, right in the spot on the upper right of my chest near the shoulder almost where the port catheter used to live.  turn down the volume please. i am getting way too loud. search in the archives.  be thankful. hang on tight the american e-conomy is sinking/booming shale/gas/tar/oil and privacy has been given up to Google.  hello edward snowden.

i was in the Russian airport, too, a summer ago.  it was empty in Moscow and crowded in Petersburg. 

swimming pools.  Americans.  we have them in our back yards.  they are mostly kidney shaped.  

in Japan, it is the old people who protest now.

i dream of swimming in and out and around them. spent fuel rods.  radioactive mermaid am i.

the fukushima workers have been lied to. they ingested 20% more radiation than previously told, but they, lucky souls, get free cancer testing.  catscans are highly radioactive. e-qual to exposure to the Hiroshima explosion. all things being equal, i did not see that on the form when i signed away my future.

look homeword angels.  Buddha Blue. hope.  there is always hope.

a man stands with a remote driving an electric car in the parking lot by the beach in the too warm weather. 

every day i ask the question: what will become of us?

we save pictures of animals on our computer screens and love one thing only.

this quiz counts for 100 million years of oceans free of human trash.

this poem is too long.  i wrote it in a parking lot.

a nuclear power plant is a plutonium factory.  not good.  no

Friday, September 27, 2013

For my sister who asked me to write a poem


What is hubris?

I used to think all hubris came from jealousy.

Scientists, like literary critics, make toxic chemicals.

Words.

A play on words.

Words are prettier than bodies.

Words do not wilt with age.

Words don’t have hormones. Not as far as I know.

Words don’t get cancer.

Words are not impacted by superfund sites.  Not directly.

Do words get sick from Strontium 90 and Roundup Ready?

Do words create naval dumping sites or aquifers?

Do words make 400 parts per million?

What happened to the bees?

Will words bear children when exposed to secret fracking chemicals?

Who will be the last baby?

Who will have the last word?


There is something about car dealerships. Today I bought a black Prius
because I haven't seen a butterfly lately.
Sandy and guns. Oh that too.
The saleswoman told me I should work less and feel less stress.
She said I would make myself sick.
Remain calm. Eat your vegetables.  Go to yoga class.
These are things we say while test driving a new car.
Then she told me she had cervical cancer and they took everything out and this week they found more cancer cells even though there was nothing left inside.
How can you do a pap smear when there is no cervix she asked her doctor.
The lady's eyes were deep brown.
I hugged the lady who sells cars.
I want to hug every body.
I told her there are over 100 superfund sites on Long Island.
She asked, 'what’s a superfund site?'

How do I begin to explain my frustration with words and persistent organic pollutants?

Where is eden?  Please text me the location and I will use my GPS to find my way there.

What is the butterfly effect?

Is it possible to restore words and living things to their rightful places?

Have you found your one rightful place?

Echoing the famous words of a famous poet this poem (if you can call it that)
exhibits hubris.


Sunday, September 15, 2013

The People All Said Sit Down, Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat

it wasn't supposed to be any easier on
yom kippur. not easier. as the leader of the republican party's wife sat
in front of me while I sang Pete Seeger's "God's counting on me"
and John Lennon's "imagine" these poisons seeping in my
cells killed by the chemotherapy that saved my life.
yes. breathe. now. stop. again. sigh. buddha.
singing while his girlfriend the man I made this child with
toes pointed inward uncomfortably looked down at
the words on the page of our service. again. start.
my daughter turned 16 this week on the day the towers fell
they say Georgie and Cheney knew before it happened.
now. the first responders ill from the smoke it's in the new
york times so. amen. it must be true.
suburbia smelled of poisonous stench for days.
a new idea. start. here.
i worked in one tower as a waitress at windows on
the world and the engineer high up on the ladder
looked down at me and said "quit this job.
you're breathing poison air.
when they built these towers they sprayed them
with asbestos that blew right over
brooklyn. get out."
the people all said sit down, sit down you're rocking the boat.
serving steak tartare and martinis
to business red faced men. we the lowliest lunch servers
made $300 a week. we had health insurance.
aprons. stockings. buns. hair spray. high heels.
nylon tan scratchy dresses.
asbestos never saved those people in toppling towers.
maybe that's where my cancer came from?
asbestos air and strontium 90 in my baby milk?
DDT for the birds and the bees?
oh silent spring. oh Rachel Carson.
oh yom kippur.  back to the mourning.
misheraberach a prayer for the ill
kol ni dre she plays violin. sixteen now.
i thought about my mom and dad.
i thought about the vanishing honey bees.
i thought about the vanishing ice.
i thought about the men i dated this year
big fat liars. all.
war and monsanto
Chernobyl
Fukushima
Rocky Flats.
Hanford.
Mothers
Daughters
Sons
little veins
port catheters
"the man died in his car
just like that suddenly
from lupus"
or suicide?
what species kills itself?
stop. now.
shma y'israel. adoni elohanu.
  adoni so sorry  for
          what my people have. done.  

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Sorry

Hello, it's Rosh Hashanah, meaning a new year.

What will you do this New Year?

What do you have to be sorry for and did you apologize to all those whom you might have hurt?

The book of life.

We have a week.

We're about to go to war, for the sake of something. What something?

We will kill to save more lives? To make a point? To show our strength?

I dropped her off tonight and did not go.

Feeling sorry for myself, on the freeway, in the car.  My car.  My car. My car.

My mother the car.

When I realized when something breaks down.

There is no one to call.

Imagine how those children feel in countries where their parents
are bombed.

We only know the fragmentation of the bombs.

It's after effects.

That's America.

No, that's callus and forgetful.

We had 9/11.

But since the civil war in the 19th century, what wars have we
known?  Directly?

Again, callous and forgetful, I will look to orion.  So many American soldiers.

I'm sorry.  It's the week of I'm sorry.  Yom Kippur coming right up.

What do I know?

Our bodies indirectly know.

Through cancer.  Through the street people and the homeless.

Through Agent Orange and Depleted Uranium and Chemical Warfare.

All those test bombs.  oh those.

Do we see them?

A terrible mother,  I am.

Sorry.  Sorry.  Sorry.

Sorry VERY Sorry for bombing your country.

Sorry is no enough.

No.

What else is there?

Sunday, July 21, 2013

The latest from a very busy environmentalist professor and mother

Just so no one gets worried about me as I've been a bit silent, lately, all is well.

It's been a busy, busy year.

Here's what I did since last Fall.  As an act of cracking eggs to enlighten the young, in addition to teaching my normal load of two courses a semester, plus directing dissertations (my PhD student Ula Klein just graduated and I'm so proud of her and her work), and writing articles for magazines, and Directing the Environmental Humanities major in our Stony Brook University Sustainability Studies Program, and becoming Interim Director of the entire Stony Brook University Sustainabilities Program (are you tired yet?  I am!), and trying to complete my environmental memoir, I taught two freshman seminars on Environmental Film. Oh, don't forget (I almost did),  I taught TWO summer classes on environmental literature and film-- graduate and undergraduate.  I'm sure I've forgotten something.

Why, pray tell, would I be so crazy as to add two courses on top of the other two and on top of everything else in the spring semester (or the summer courses!)?  It's my calling to wake students and others up.  That's why. Desperate times call for desperate measures!

The Freshman seminars meet seven times.  So I showed six environmental films and we talked about the environmental issues related to these films...  Here's what the students viewed: Earth 2100 (climate change), Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (made for PBS), Gasland 1 (2 wasn't out yet), Into Eternity (nuclear waste), Food Inc, and No Impact Man (along with the video short- The Story of Stuff). So, we covered: climate change; nuclear power, weapons and waste; toxics, chemicals and cancer; fracking; food and agricultural rights; garbage, waste and consumption.  The last--No Impact Man! was the lightest fare and left the kids with suggestions of things they can do, as well as a bit of humor and hope.

I think I made an impact with these two seminars... as the kids run off to their various majors, they said they plan to bring environmental awareness into these different fields, from Business, to Chemistry, to Engineering. Very cool.

My other courses were awesome.  In my Feminist Literature and Culture class we rocked to Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising on February 14th, V-Day.  Two of my students are dancers (thank you Jul Carmela and Melanie Magdit); they learned the choreography from the One Billion Rising site and taught my class of almost 60. We played the live stream and danced with the world--simultaneously.  Very powerful.  We also watched Nick Kristof's Half the Sky, read Ensler's Vagina Monologues and The Good Body, The Color Purple (and a bunch of Walker's work--essays and poems-- on eco-womanist themes--women and the environment), Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Into the Forest (by Jean Hegland).  So, we covered contemporary body issues, women writers/writing and feminism, colonialism, race, ecofeminism, and so much more.  Loved that class.  On the last day, one of my students, a single empowered very young mom,  brought in her little girl, and another student brought her beautiful hairy dog, Foosa. Students did creative research presentations on feminist topics most meaningful to them.  Some memorable ones: a book by my single mom student to her daughter about being an empowered teen mom, a presentation on women in comic books throughout history, and a presentation on women (and power) in Star Trek. Another mind blowing presentation was on a google chat where the question "what do you think of feminism?" was posed.  oh my, in the world outside the bubble of my classroom, it seems many folks have no idea what feminism is and anonymous chatters seem to hate women!  The mysoginist language used was pretty shocking....

My other class:  Eco Media (yes, I teach a class on environmental media-love it!).  In this class, my students created an amazing amazing live blog, and they wrote sharp critiques of all of our readings and film viewings -- on current environmental events in the media.  We were visited by a live New York Journalist--Karl Grossman, we attended a brilliant symposium on the future of Nuclear Power post Fukushima, hosted by Helen Caldicott, in the NYC.  Many of us took buses at 5 am on a freezing winter day to Washington, DC, where we attended the biggest Climate Change rally ever-- headed up by Bill McKibben and Sierra Club.  One group of my students made an amazing film about the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the Great South Bay.  We all participated in Stony Brook University's Earthstock (Earth Day Celebration), presenting research projects on toxics and cosmetics, fracking, GMOs and pesticides and food, and Hurricane Sandy and Climate Change.  Many folks at Earthstock were stunned, mesmerized, and impressed by what my students had to say and offer!

Oh and here are some other things I organized for the Eco Media class and the Freshman Seminars: two public showings of Dear Governor Cuomo, with the filmmaker, Jon Bowermaster, speaking!  What a great guy and what a rocking, rousing and inspiring film. One showing was in Huntington, NY, at the Cinema Arts Centre, and the other was at our Stony Brook Campus.

I also organized a showing of Chasing Ice at Cinema Arts--and we invited Professor Malcolm Bowman, an oceanographer to speak...

Gosh, there's so much more.... summer classes and attending The Clearwater Revival Festival with my students and working in the Green Cities Tent, again!  Hands-on environmental learning from the experts at its best.  Thank you Ryan Palmer, Manna Jo Greene, Karla Raimundi, and Linda Richards, for pulling this astounding learning experience together for my students, once again.  Unforgettable.

Last but not least, I just came back from Omega Institute, where I gave a lecture on the Power of Environmental Literature.  That was a lot of fun to put together.  I spoke about the profound influence of literary words on environmental activism.  Skip Backus and Laura Weiland created an amazing six-week program there on Sustainability (one of my students attended) and I was delighted to jump in and speak with this very engaged group and others for the evening.

Now, more to do, more to do... and back to revisions of my book.... soon to come to a store near you!


Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Summer 2

I walked and the creatures came to see me.
The rabbit stopped to say hello and a brown bird.
With a sharp black beak and orange fleck on his cheek.
A striped chipmunk scurried under my feet.
They looked into my eyes.
Save us, they said. 
We know you love us.
Bird after bird perched near me.
Please, they said. We know our time is up.
     
What a burden.
What am I to do?
What can I do?
I am dumbstruck at all that is wrong--how to fix it--
Yet I don't want to let on that.
I've lost hope.
I cannot lose hope.
Too many are counting.

And then I had a dream.
And then I saw a field of bright colors.
And then the people emerged from the tunnel.

On bicycles.

Waiting for me.
Waiting for you.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Summer's Gone, or The Bliss of Suburbia



-->
I woke this morning, happy to greet summer and looking forward to planting seeds.

Before, there was no time.  No time.  Never enough time.

This morning. I would make time.

I opened my door to greet the semi-quiet morning.  Birds. Lots of birds. The humming of insects.  The far away hum of cars.

First, I made coffee and planned to sit on my porch and read Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire

I read about the quiet and the red sand and the desert flower, the sexuality of bees and moths burrowing and pollinating.  I stopped for a moment and soaked in Abbey's words on solitude and the expansiveness of the desert and felt his thoughts link with mine.  I then scribbled a few words on paper about the end of romantic love, it's self-enclosed and selfish nature, about how I prefer the expansiveness of loving the earth, of giving to a greater cause.  

What a glorious quiet, simple moment: book, pen, notebook, coffee, porch, thoughts.

Then the sound.  The blast.  The churning BLAST.  A wood chip machine? 

 It is Sunday.  The Christians made a law that bans the machines on Sunday. 

Yet it blasts and blasts, and the partial silence is gone.  The breath. The day. 

I wait and hope.  Maybe it will stop.  Maybe it will go away.   It grows louder and louder.

I try to read, to bring back that moment of Desert Solitaire and me.  Gone.

The blast continues. Minutes.  One hour.  Two hours.  Three.

I move back inside the house to escape the noise-- shut my windows and doors, shut out the industrial noise that is always, always there.

The irony: following the section on the solitude of desert flowers and red rock, Abbey cries out against the industrialization of the national parks in Desert Solitaire.  New wide roads were built and brought in millions of tourists and their big machines. Quiet and silence and mystery vanished. 

The irony: I moved to the suburbs and bought a house with a yard so I could grow a garden.  I moved to a place where I envisioned long solitary walks.  A writer's dream.  I imagined peaceful summers.   

I came from Manhattan because the noise and bustle crushed my soul. 

Yet the noise is here, every moment, everywhere.  My neighbors run machines, buzz buzz buzz.  We cannot leave windows open, sleep in a hammock, or read a book in the shade.

There is no peaceful summer.  Maybe there never was.  Maybe Eden had leaf blowers and generators  and electric weed wackers and buzz saws and Strontium 90 and plutonium and TCE and PCBs and fracking waste and  DDT.   Maybe google earth snapped pictures of naked Adam and Eve and posted them on facebook.  Maybe Eden's evil snake was a sneaky drone.  Maybe Eden's apple was an iphone.

Maybe the writers of the Bible left industrialization out of creation to fool us all.  Maybe there have always been machines.

Friday, May 10, 2013

Mother's Day 2013-A Miracle


 

                              Mother's Day

1) You lose your mother to cancer and other disease.
2) You want babies and can't have them. 
3) You get cancer and think you'll really never have them.
4) Post-chemo: you have a baby.
5) You want more babies and cannot. 
6) You look back in love and awe at your mother's political and activist work. 
7) You become your mother and try to save the world. 
8) You feel: Gratitude and grace for the gift of motherhood. 
Amen.


 It's a fraught day for many, a joyous one for others.

I know, first hand, both the immense pleasure of being a mom, and the intense pain of wanting to be one and not being able to.  I also know the angst of losing a mom, the challenges of working full time and parenting, and the difficulties of raising a child alone.

It's a complex role, motherhood.

First, I lost my mom, too young.  That's a complicated story.  She was a complex person, married to a very difficult man.   It took many years for me to come to grips with her greatness.  I always saw her as weak and fallen, but now I see her differently.  I see her as a victim of her time.  I see her as a hero. That's the story of the book I'm writing.

And then there's the challenges of being a mother myself.

For years, I wanted to be a mother.  I mean really, really wanted to be a mother.  It was an obsessive desire.   I wanted to have five or six kids: With Six You Get Eggroll, The Waltons, Yours Mine and Ours

It didn't seem to be in the cards for me.   Yes, I was of the generation of women that wanted to work and have a family--but it wasn't my career that got in the way, I just didn't seem to fall in love with "traditional" marriage or child-friendly guys. They were artists, actors, dancers, hippies, and free spirits who saw the nuclear family as confining, repressive, anti-happiness.

So, for years, I watched, with intense envy and sadness, other women get pregnant, give birth, and do it again and again.  Everywhere I went, there seemed to be women with babies, toddlers, and pregnant women.  My friends all had kids.  Not just one, but several.

It was torture.

The sight of a stroller, a mother nursing, children in the playground with their moms, made me weep. I hated hated hated baby showers, dreaded the invitations, the cards, the excited calls from friends and their words: "I'm pregnant!"  I would try to sound happy and supportive, but inside, my heart was breaking.  'All I ever wanted was kids,' I thought,  'Why couldn't it be me?'

The man I loved through my late twenties and thirties "wasn't ready and wanted to wait to have kids."  I waited for him to change his mind, to feel at ease.  My partner poo-pooed the "nonsense" I told him about the decline in fertility rates in women as they age.  He thought medical statistics "were all in the mind." 

The years went by and the clock ticked. 

Then, in my mid-thirties, I got cancer and faced an onslaught of intensive chemotherapy treatments.  Chemotherapy, my physicians said, might very possibly render me permanently infertile.  I was bereft and upset with myself.  Why had  I hung out waiting for someone else to make up his mind, when having children was so vital to me?  Now I might never have biological children of my own, now I might die and never experience motherhood at all. 

There was no time for freezing eggs.  I needed chemo right away.

Out of guilt, and possibly a sudden waking up to the sacredness and fragility of life due to my life-threatening disease, my partner then promised to have a baby with me when I was healthy enough to try. 

Two years later, we tried to get pregnant.  Nothing happened.  Then after much help from an excellent reproductive endocrinologist, I became pregnant and gave birth to a beautiful, healthy girl.  At last, I was a mom.

She was and is my miracle.

Yet.  Even though I finally had a child,  I still ached for more.  So, I tried and tried, but I could not conceive again.  I went through several years of giving myself shots of hormones daily, of multiple surgeries and treatments and various drugs.  No luck.  Every month, I went through a dramatic cycle of hope and disappointment that took a heavy emotional toll.  Finally, I ran out of steam and stopped trying.  I was too exhausted to go through the adoption route.

The grieving and longing for more children passed in time.  Today, my heart is full with joy and gratitude for all that I have.  My girl amazes me more and more each day with her kindness, intelligence, grace, vision, and generosity.

My relationship with my own mother has evolved over the years as well.  Growing up, my feelings about Mom were fraught.  When she lived, I saw her as the beaten-down woman of an abusive husband.  I wanted Mom to be strong, to get out and save herself.

Now, twenty years after Mom's death, through researching her life in more detail for my book, I discovered that she was an important environmental and peace activist.   She put her own body on the line to save the lives of many.

I have also come to understand the complexities of motherhood in a patriarchal world.  It's not easy to leave an abusive relationship, and it was more difficult in my mom's lifetime.   Fingers pointed at women when men misbehaved or when marriages failed.  Women were supposed to keep everyone else happy.  Adrienne Rich explained it all as a kind of altruistic self-sacrifice. Yes, we still have to be very careful not to fall into the trap of mommy and women blame.  I was guilty of mother-blame myself when Mom lived.

I now see how deeply and positively Mom influenced me in a myriad of ways.  For Mom's sake, I wish she could have put feminism into practice in her marriage, yet I no longer blame her for not being able to do so.

On a very positive note,  I have come to follow Mom's path as an activist who works to protect all children from the polluting of our earth. 

So. Now.

Every day I thank my mother for giving birth to me, and for teaching me the value of working on activist causes for the good of the earth and all living beings.

Every day I look at my daughter with amazement and feel immense gratitude for the gift of motherhood and all that it teaches me.

I honor my child.

I honor my mother.

Today, when I'm feeling any (mothering) grief, helping to take care of our mother earth is the best medicine of all.

Thanks, Mom.