Become Like the Children This Earth Day
and beyond
Hi friends,
This last weekend I was in New York City, where I preached at the incredible Riverside Church for their Earth Day Service!
Obviously my proudest trourist moment was when I recognized Tom’s Restaurant, the diner from Seinfeld, while visiting a nearby bookstore.
New York, you’re an adventure, always.
Today I’m sharing the sermon I preached at Riverside with you all, and I’ll share the link to the video at the bottom of this post if you want to watch it.
I hope that my words inspire you to continue to cultivate and celebrate your relationship with Mother Earth.
Maybe you don’t know strength until
you’ve rested beneaththe branches of a magnolia tree,
feeling the weight of her regal, waxed leaves.
Maybe you don’t know community
until you’ve watched ants
rebuild what was broken
by a world much bigger than theirs.
Maybe you don’t know fortitude
until you’ve noticed geese
fly to the furthest border of warmth
to protect their children.
Maybe you don’t know compassion
until you place your hands in the dirt
and feel the pulse of the earth,
her heart and soul welcoming you.
Maybe you don’t know time
until you run your fingersover a river rock,
their skin softened by generations of magic.
Maybe you don’t know yourself
until the mirror of the water
reminds you of your goodness
and brings you home again.
Today I want to tell you about a little boy named Bo and a little girl named Dani.
They are siblings, and the main characters in my new children’s books Winter’s Gifts and Summer’s Magic, part of the Indigenous Celebration of Nature series that I’m releasing over the next few years.
Bo is short for Bodewadmi Ndaw! which means I am Potawatomi! And Dani is the Potawatomi word for a beloved daughter. Bo and Dani aren’t just characters in a book, though. They are my kids. They are me. They are all Indigenous kids trying to hold on to their sacred cultures. They are all kids trying to care for Mother Earth. They are the little kids in us asking if we remember what it means to care.
Bo is an activist. He grows a garden in his back yard and cleans up river debris with his friends. He is tender and kind. Dani is a contemplative. She navigates the world quietly, singing to the trees in her yard and helping her friends foster more genuine relationships with the creatures around them. Both are dreamers. And together, they remind the people in their community why a relationship with Mother Earth matters.
And this is what I want to share with you today, a spirit of childlikeness as we ask what it means for us to celebrate Earth Day in 2024, in a time when the world is so heavy, there is so much hate, and we are struggling daily to make sense of it on an individual and communal level.
I spent my early years asking questions of the world around me but not always having places to go with those questions. What happens for us as children when this is the case? Eventually, we let the questions go, and pieces of ourselves go with them.
Entering adolescence, I was a child of divorced parents, a young Potawatomi girl trying to understand who I was in all my complexities. Raised Southern Baptist, I learned how to assimilate, moving through the motions of life without recognizing the trauma within and around me. When we become disconnected from Mother Earth and our ways of knowing, we become disconnected from ourselves, too.
The Potawatomi people have a history of disconnection. In 1838 a group of Potwatomi people were forced at gunpoint to march from Indiana to Kansas, known as the Trail of Death. For 3 months they walked, many died, and more died when they ended up in Kansas, on land they did not know as their own. My ancestors ended up in Oklahoma, my origin place, where I began that complex journey of wondering, asking who I am on a deeper level.
So how do we find our way back again, to ourselves, to the lands and waters that hold us?
The first Earth Day took place in Michigan by a group of college students in 1970 to draw attention to the ecological and political issues of their time, and we continue to see Earth Day do the same. But what happens beyond earth day, all the rest of the days of any given year, any given generation, and why should we care?
In my book Living Resistance I write:
Curiosity takes root in us as children; I truly believe that. But as we get older, we are taught to trade curiosity for security, and often that security is baked into the status quo of society, of capitalism, which in reality is anything but secure for many of us. Instead of engaging with Mother Earth and the creatures around us, we are taught to commodify the land.
This is nothing new. We are aware of the reality that as we get older, we go from childlike tenderness to a time in our lives when we are told to grow up and become useful citizens, and for a lot of us, that comes with a cost. But here is what our faith, our spiritual traditions, teach us: that our questions and curiosities matter, because they bring us closer to ourselves, to one another, to The Sacred, and to the world around us. And that love matters for future generations.
But what happens to those of us who’ve lost our way? How do we find that curiosity again when we have become so sure of the answers, so sure that the “better” way, meaning the more powerful way, is our only option?
We turn to the children again.
In our Potawatomi culture, we believe in the wisdom that both children and elders hold for us. We remember that the love and care we embody will last seven generations after we are gone, and we hold that wisdom close.
We know that we are living this present life, and that we are also ancestors in the making.
This is why Indian boarding schools targeted children, because they knew what it would mean for the young ones to lose their cultures. They knew the wisdom children held, and they still underestimated their courage.
As colonialism continues to thrive across the world, bringing oppression to people and planet, the kids in our communities remind us to be courageous because Mother Earth is courageous.
Some Indigenous peoples have lost a lot of our cultures due to colonization and assimilation, so courage today looks like engaging in our relationship with Segmekwe and sharing that sacredness with others so that together we can care for Mother Earth and prepare a better way for future generations.
But we have a long way to go, and it’s not the first time we’ve had to pause and ask as humans how we are going to do this work.
According to an Anishinaabe story, long ago, a messenger sent to see how the Neshnabék, the true people, were living, discovered they were living their life in a negative way, which impacted their thoughts, decisions, and actions. Some had hate for others, displayed disrespectful actions, were afraid, told lies, and cheated. Others revealed pride or were full of shame. During his journey, the messenger came across a child. This child was chosen to be taught by the Seven Grandfathers to live a good life. He was taught the lessons of Love, Respect, Bravery, Truth, Honesty, Humility, and Wisdom. We call these the 7 Grandfather teachings.
Before departing from the Seven Grandfathers, they told him, “Each of these teachings must be used with the rest. You cannot have Wisdom without Love, Respect, Bravery, Honesty, Humility, and Truth. You cannot be Honest if you are only using one of the other teachings. To leave out one teaching would be embracing the opposite of what the teaching means.” The Seven Grandfathers each instructed the child with a principle. It was then up to the child to forget them, or to put them to use, to share them with the people.
We still follow the seven grandfather teachings today, because they help us remember how to stay connected to ourselves, one another, the sacred, and mother earth.
I want us to notice a few things from the story.
First, notice that something was wrong—the people were not living in a way that was good, that was about kinship, that reflected these teachings. They forgot that they belonged to Mother Earth and Creator.
Second, the answer to the problem was found in a child—and not just in a child, but in a relationship between the seven grandfathers and the child. It was an inter-generational relationship that brought healing, and now we learn what it means to have relationships that build into the teachings so that the teachings can be applied to our lives.
Mother Earth is our elder, and we are her children. How can we embrace childlike care and curiosity in this relationship?
We must acknowledge what has happened throughout history. Colonization has brought devastation, separating the sacred relationship of body and land. We must pay attention to history, to the legacy and ongoing work of colonialism, so that we can heal.
When I think about trusting Creator, I think about also trusting Mother Earth, trusting what childlikeness can teach us, and noticing what kinship reveals to us every single day.
The teaching goes on to say that we are like the child in the story, and we are called to go into the world and live into these teachings, to live in a good way, mno-bimaadziwin. We do this through the practice of kinship.
From my book Living Resistance:
Kinship can feel like a very abstract thing, but imagine it like this: I have a string attached to my body, to my heart center, and it goes directly from my heart to yours, and to every other living creature on this planet, to Mother Earth herself. Whatever I do with this heart, with this body, affects you; it travels across that thread and finds its way to you. And whatever you do or embody travels to me, to the ants, to Grandmother Moon, to someone across the world we’ve never met.
We do not get to escape each other, no matter how colonized or traumatized we may be. This is kinship.
When we remember who we are, what the children inside us teach us, we will remember how powerful our connection to Mother Earth, to Segmekwe, to one another, really is. There is no true climate work or acknowledgment of history without acknowledging our sacred relationship to the earth, and this is the lesson we learn from the kids in our lives: we must play, we must practice embodiment, we must connect.
There is no care for our children, our homes, our communities, without acknowledging the importance of curiosity and care in our relationship to the earth.
2 things I invite you to do in the coming weeks:
1. Write a love letter to your child self, or, if you are a child, write a story about Mother Earth
2. Write or draw/paint a love letter to Mother Earth, or better yet, start a love letters to mother earth journal/sketchbook
Let your art find its way to this relationship. Let your heart connect with Mother Earth through embodiment.
And in embracing this relationship, let’s celebrate who we are, who we have always been, so that our gifts show up in the world in ways that will help one another toward care and love. So, are you more like Bo, or are you a lot like Dani? Are you an activist or a contemplative, or, if you’re being honest with yourself, a little bit of both? This isn’t an either/or, because we often fall into the liminal spaces of inhabiting many truths at once, don’t we?
So as you show up to your work in the world, what does that look like? Are you a poet? A gardener? An organizer? An entertainer? Are you an innovator? Do you move quietly in the world, or enjoy the spotlight?
For our relationship with Segmekwe to last, for us to practice sustainable justice and care, we must know and trust ourselves, and that means knowing and trusting our child selves, too.
Because this is about relationship, right now, for Earth Day, for this moment, to remember who we are and who she is. We are also building a foundation for every Earth Day, every moment that comes from now on. What kind of relationship do we want with Segmekwe? How can we heal it, and in doing so, heal ourselves and future generations? Are we brave enough to know our place in history, to own it, and to dream of a better future for all of us?
And to return to the childlike curiosity that keep us tethered to sacredness along the way.
I want to close with a poem about surprise, curiosity, and laughter, because I hope that’s what you take into your relationship with Mother Earth in the coming days, months, years.
He walked in the door
caked in mud.
I couldn’t see
anything but his eyes,
looking down at his shoes,
caked in mud, too.
After a few moments of silence
his eyes met mine,
nine year old meeting
adult, childhood
meeting sophistication.
I wondered at the best response,
wondered what it means to be
an adult in a world
full of kids caked in mud.
I stopped myself, took a breath
and remembered the child in me,
what she’d do if she came home
caked in mud and her eyes
cast down at her own two feet.
I ran to him, grabbed him,
hugged him, laughed,
let it all go, all the
sophistication and the meetings,
all the adulthood sliding
off my own body as the mud
caked and covered me, too.
I pulled his head back,
my hands on his face.
He cracked a smile,
lines showing up around
the corners of his eyes.
Mud is a cleanser.
Mud brings us home.
Mud teaches us who we are
and who we are not,
just like the children do.
What is the Mud Poem called?
So beautiful! As an outdoor educator of children, just what I needed to keep going when the day to day is tough and unpredictable! Thank you!