(gentle music)
- In the fifth grade I won the science fair
with a project on climate change
that featured a paper-mache ozone layer
with a giant hole through which a paper-mache sun
burned the skin of a Barbie in a bikini on a lawn chair.
Glaciers melting like ice cubes in our lemonade.
It was 1987 ain the town that could have invented red hats,
but the school principal gave me a gold ribbon
and not a single bit of attitude
about my radical political stance because neither he,
nor I knew it was political.
Science had not yet been fully framed as leftist propaganda.
The president did not have a Twitter feed
starving the world of facts.
I spent that summer as I had every summer before
racing to the forest behind my house
down the path my father called the old logging road
to a meadow thick with raspberry bushes
whose thorns were my very first heroes,
because they did nothing with their life
but protect what was sweet.
Sundays I went to church, but struggled to call it prayer
if it, if it didn't leave grass stains on my knees.
Couldn't call it truth if it didn't come with a dare
to crawl into the cave by the creek
and stay there until somebody counted all the way to 100.
As a kid I thought 100 was the biggest number there was.
My mother absolutely blew my mind the day she said 101.
100 and what?
Billionaires never grow out of
doing that same math with years,
can't conceive of counting past their own lifespans.
Believe the world ends the day they do.
Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those
who have the longest commutes from their heads
to their hearts, whose greed is the smog that keeps us
from seeing our own nature
and the sweetness we are here to protect?
Do you know sometimes when gathering nectar,
bees fall asleep in flowers?
Do you know fish are so sensitive
snowflakes sound like fireworks when they land on the water?
Do you know sea otters hold hands when they sleep
so they don't drift apart?
Do you know whales will follow their injured friends
to shore often taking their own lives
so to not let a loved one be alone when he dies?
None of this is poetry.
It's just the earth being who she is in spite of us
stamping barcodes on the sea.
In spite of us acting like Edison invented daylight.
Dawn presses her blushing face to my window,
asks me if I know the records in my record collection
look like the insights of trees.
Yes I say.
There is nothing you have ever grown that isn't music.
You were the bamboo in Coltrane's saxophone reed,
the mulberries that fed the silkworms that made the slippers
for the ballet.
The pine that built the loom that wove the hemp
for Frida Kahlo's canvas, the roses that died her paint,
hoping her brush could bleed for her body
who more than the earth has blood for us.
How do we not mold our hearts after the first spruce tree
who raised her hand and beg to be cut into piano keys
so the elephants could keep their tusks?
The earth is the right side of history,
is the canyon my friend ran to when no one else he knew
would echo has chosen named back to him is the wind
the wailed through 1956 Alabama
until the poplar trees carved themselves
into Dr. King's pulpit,
is the volcano that pours the mercury into the thermometers
held under our tongues.
The earth takes our temperature,
tells us when we are too hot,
even after we've spent decades denying her fever.
Our hands held to her burning forehead.
We insist she is fine while wildfires turn redwoods
to toothpicks readying the teeth of the apocalypse.
She sends smoke singles all the way from California
to New York City.
Ash falls from the sky.
Do you know the mountains of California used to look like
they've been set on fire because they were so covered
in monarch butterflies?
Do you know monarch butterflies migrate 3000 miles
using only the fuel they stored as caterpillars
in the cocoon.
We need so much less than we take.
We have so much more than we give.
Squirrels plant thousands of trees every year
just from forgetting where they left their acorns.
If we aim to be just half as good
as one of the Earth's mistakes,
we could turn so much around.
Our living would be seed.
The future would have roots.
We would cast nothing from the garden of itself
and we would make the thorns proud.
(gentle music)