Let Us Pose A Question

Let us pose a question.
Do we truly comprehend all that we hold in our hands?
We grasp to hold precious moments in time, captured instants of light and shadow.
To hold them in snapshot memories of blessings we then easily forget.
We tussle with the less easily forgotten cursings.
We hold in respect the responsibilities.

I reach for the same, far apart as we are, and having never met,
when we compare family albums, you and I, we share more together
than we might have thought.

We carry in our hands the unique but not dissimilar histories of our families
and communities, towns and the landscapes under our feet and off our front porches.
The places of our lives that we have made unique and that in turn
have shaped the contours of our sense of the good and the beautiful,
places from our particular stories of what it means to be at home in the world.

What we hold in our hands is the destiny of our children and grandchildren across the whole Earth,
particularly the young who, by choice or by house rules, do not know
the freedom of unstructured play in the rough margins of cities and suburbs.
They are to their peril and ours no longer very interested in the drama
of living things that goes on some small distance from the electrical outlets.

It is no less than the shape of tomorrow that we hold in unsure hands,
uncertain of how to do what’s best, determined to do no less than that
for those to whom we leave this earth.

We hold infinity in the palm of our hand, eternity in an hour, William Blake tells us.
You don’t have to go far to see the world.
And in so doing hear a universal call for all of us to think
more deeply about what we know and care about.
Our here, our now, our known riches of the senses, of memory, of relationship.

To care for each other in profound and persistent ways.
To celebrate and sustain the precious natural world we do not own
but whose fate we hold in our hands and from which our living
and future ultimately derives.