I remember going to the first Earth Day event in Washington D.C. in 1970. I got lost from my friends. Phil Ochs remarked before singing in front of it that the Washington Monument looked like a great white . . . well, it rhymes with stick. At that time our favorite song of his was “Small Circle of Friends.” There’s a little of my radical history, though I was only 16 and going to massive Vietnam rallies and things like Earth Day, because it was spring and a fun thing to do on the weekend.
Now we’ve grown up and we still love our mother the earth and honor her by doing fun things on the weekend like picking up trash or cleaning up creeks. Earth has taken many forms in our consciousness over the last 39 years. Seeing Earth from space in the sixties changed the way we thought about it. She is a live thing in her celestial orbit. She is Gaia, Earth as a living organism, that we are all a part of.
In ceremony, we say:
A ho mitakuye oyasin; We are all related.
Happy Earth Day to all of us.
