What a heartbreaking beginning it’s been for 2020. I’ve found myself teetering in and out of grief this week while sifting through news of the raging wildfires in Australia. Half a billion animals have been lost in the wild fires, scientists said In recent days the estimate was rasied to a full billion. My heart cannot contain it, not fully. I’m left wondering what will it take for our leaders to finally see the cost of doing nothing about fossil fuels. If not this, then what will?

We cannot do this alone, but we can demand more – so much more from ourselves and choosing worthier leaders.

Wendell Berry’s words below are so worth sharing. Please take the time to read them. 

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world – to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity – our own capacity for life – that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.

 

We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”

― Wendell Berry

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