Earth Day Every Day

Earth Day started on April 22, 1970. It now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally through earthday.org including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. You can read more about the origins of Earth Day here, thanks to  Wikipedia. 

Nature, environment, climate and weather are all part of Earth Day activities.  Helping animals, clearing rivers, planting trees, we learn to  live in harmony with the Earth we are a part of.  It is not just for people, but for all living things.

And here, in the midwest, near the Great Lakes, the Earth is in bloom--tulips and magnolias, violets and dandelions, the new green leaves on the trees. It is beauty.  It is hope and renewal again.  

And who among us has no worries, especially in these times of uncertainty, plagues and wars?

The natural world offers a refuge and a connection to things beyond the affairs of men.  All this, and cherry trees blooming...

This is why Earth Day is not just for one day. It is every day.

April Alive Again

April may be taxes and tariffs this year.  Thousand-year rains and tornadoes, economic uncertainty. But April is also national poetry month. Here's a post from two years ago  on April  9th, 2023---

 

 April is National Poetry Month

April  may be the most poetic month---alive again, the earth in bloom---flowers and new green leaves.  Buds on the lilacs,  and today, the magnolias are blooming!

And how many poets have been inspired to write about April and Spring?

Wordsworth and the daffodils--

and ee cummings--in just spring---

Chaucer's  opening of Canterbury Tales --When that April with showers sweet with fruit  (modern English translation)

and moody modern Mr. Eliot--April is the cruelest month...

Simon and Garfunkel  sang  "April come she will, when streams are ripe and swelled with rain..."

 There are Japanese poets who write about the fleeting beauty of cherry blossoms.  There are  French poets writing about rain...

 And Shakespeare--"thou art thy mothers glass, and she in thee beholds the lovely April of her prime" 

 And William Carlos Williams---the alphabet of the trees is fading in the song of leaves...

April--love and spring  

when everything is new again.