An Earth Day Celebration

The Little Snook Kill as it splashes and dances through the Orra Phelps Nature Preserve in Wilton

Winter's cold has fled at last, and springtime warmth is spreading across the meadows and creeping into the forest on this gorgeous blue-sky day.  What a wonderful Earth Day gift from the weather gods!   I'm heading out now to immerse myself in this glorious day, but before I go I want to share this passage from poet Mary Oliver, a writer after my own heart:

"Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones–inkberry, lamb’s quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones–rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms."

Attention is the Beginning of Devotion.
— Mary Oliver, from Upstream: Selected Essays