I grew up and became who I am in the gentle beauty of the Catoctin Mountains. I moved away for school and stayed away for work, and now I am back. I have always loved the geography of here, but now I love it more than I knew I could.
Now I see with both old and young eyes our old worn down mountains and our streams and little rivers (that are headed for our Chesapeake Bay and the ocean beyond), our rolling hills with ever-changing fields and farms. I am here for the outrageous green and yellow and every other bright color of our Spring, the almost overwhelming bold of our green Summer, the explosion of brilliant then muted reds and oranges and yellows of Autumn, and the colorless and cold light of Winter that reveals the brown beneath it all.
Now I listen to the streams in which I used to splash; I embrace the cold and sometimes surprising warmth of the stone on which I used to scramble, or that I chucked at my friends or whatever other target presented its self; I feel an honest friendship with the trees I used to climb, and fall from; I understand and now revere the dirt I used to not even ignore.
In school and work I learned a lot about things like economics, government and business and how organizations work and change. I have worked with and seen people, groups and organizations change for better and worse, to grow and stagnate, inspire and demoralize. In my life I have been with success and failure, with health and with disease. I have lived and witnessed triumph and failure.
I have now a keen, unshakeable awareness of how short each life is. I am sometimes paralyzed by the knowledge of how truly precious is this opportunity we have to live here and now. I feel deep in my gut the bottomless loss of death. Somewhere deeper I feel the even more bottomless loss of entire species and habitats. In all this, I thankfully have only a vague sense of the horror of what such loss means for us now and tomorrow.
I wonder if you feel what I feel. Do you feel the anger and shame of knowing it didn't have to be this way? We could have done it differently, better. If you feel this, I hope you feel something else at the same time: we can do it better.
We understand now. We understand enough about life and our natural environment to make better choices. We understand how to think and learn together, and how to spread the word and make change in human organizations and across societies. We know that we not only can change the world, we do.
We understand our responsibility for our impact on the world and on each other. We recognize that we have been given a world of beauty and life, and if we want to give the same gift to our grandchildren then we have to change how we live and work.
We live here. We know what we have to do.
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