Today is election day in Canada. Please vote. Please do it with kindness and consideration for our planet and for the people who most need help.
This month, I’ve been collecting quotes and links about humanity and the earth. Here are some that touched me the most.
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World by David W. Orr
We are alive for the briefest moment. But that time is a gift from the universe… What’s important with the time you have?
A beautiful poem of loss and hope by Frederick Joseph.
More mourning and hope from another beautiful writer, John Green.
A couple of these links include powerful examples of humanity’s “temporal range,” the amount of time humans have existed. The Overstory by Richard Powers (one of the best books I’ve read), includes another, which I’ve copied below. I hope you’ll read this passage and think about our place in the world and the impact we have.
“Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day.
First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning–a million million years of branching–nothing more exists than lean simple cells.
Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membrances. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town.
The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout–backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run.
Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.
Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals.
Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.
By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.”
Home on 129 Acres 
Good morning Julia,
Agreed, the importance that every eligible Canadian exercise their right to vote.
Jaro and I are walking to our election voting polling station in a few minutes.
Enjoy this beautiful sunny day. ☀️
Pam 😊
🇨🇦
Well done, Pam.
Very powerful pieces. I’ve been reading a few different writings about mourning because my youngest brother, who was ten years older than me, died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack on April 2nd. He was an astronomer, and would have loved the desert demonstration with the little lights. He came to my son’s grade six class and did a somewhat similar demo there of the solar system, which is what the kids were studying. He had the kids spread out at different intervals down the longest school hallway and right out the door. The Neptune kids were about a block away! The measuring tool was a roll of toilet paper. It gave the kids a tactile sense of the relative distances of the intervals between the sun and all the planets.
My brother was also a hockey writer, and tributes and messages have been pouring in in the thousands. We’ve been absolutely blown away by his reach (it was global), as he himself would have been. Tonight my sister-in-law and my nephew and his wife all voted. My nephew handed in my brother’s voting card. The voting official offered his condolences, then said that his son, who lives in Texas, followed the Cult of Hockey (where my brother wrote) and had been gutted to hear the news.
In terms of the overview of time we are but a speck, but what we do with that speck that can make a difference in each other’s lives and to the world.
You’ve written beautifully of your brother here. There are so many connections in our lives and so often we don’t realize the impact we’ve had. I’m glad that you have received so many messages. I hope that they give you some comfort. It sounds like you have many special memories of your brother. My condolences to you and your family.