Today the little babbling brook my dog and six-year old splash in every morning on our walk became, for the second time this week, a raging river as I tried to control, with a pile of towels and a bucket, the water running into my basement. Little Willow Creek, here in Blandon, Pennsylvania, raged over the bank and into the park, onto the road, around the neighbor’s house, into a farm field where you could hear chickens and sheep crying out. It flowed unapologetically, turning quiet roads into lakes. It took down trees, carried dead logs to front doors, ate away roads, and opened up sink holes in the middle of the path where I jog. It surrounded my neighbor's house, his backyard raging, thrashing logs and rocks against his house.
I couldn’t make it through the flooded roads to my appointment at the Cancer Center. I couldn't get my sick dog to the vet. Instead, I waded out into the road in my rain boots and helped my neighbor remove debris from his yard. It was a pointless task. But it was something to do. So we worked together, he, two others, and me, our legs shaky in the moving water, our hearts pounding with the sound of the current that had once been stable pavement. The creek went places it’s not been in 25 years. It crossed lines, interrupted borders and walls and blurred the places where we think divide us from it, from the trees, their desperately clinging roots, the big rocks now in the center of our well paved roads. It bubbled its brown water around corners where I stand with my children, telling them to look both ways before they cross. The flood reminds us that we are not separate. Climate is not something we can keep ourselves neatly separate from. It can and will continue to come into our parks and yards and front doors. It can come into our homes. It can interrupt schedules. Deny us safety, stability, dry and stable ground. Climate change is not about polar bears. It’s about you and me. And we can act now to change the course of the future and our relationship with a planet that will continue to tear down the lines we have drawn between ourselves and it.
This is a blog about how to see the planet beyond ourselves. But it's also a blog about how to see ourselves in the planet. It's about how every step and breath we take is its own impact. And it's about how we can define our relationship with the planet that will ultimately determine our future. And the future our children will inherit.
Join us. We're just getting started.
Want to talk more about the climate of the future and what that might have to do with you? Join Reading for 100 for our first virtual session, free and open to all, on Thursday, August 13th from 6-7:30pm so that we can hear from all of you! For more details, click HERE.
J