A New School Year: Planting Seeds of Hope Together

From External Success to Internal Discovery

For the first ten years at Green Our Planet I lived my life focusing on the external. Building gardens. Raising money. Creating relationships. Hiring team members. All the things. The 11th year, this past year, as a result of having cancer, I spent on an inward journey, lying on my old cream sofa traveling through space and time for many hours at a time, suspended between life and not quite death but being a lot less alive. I felt my Life Force flowing out of my body and into the ether. I’ve never contemplated my Life Force like this before. I’ve never gotten quite so up close and personal with the spirit, the force that connects me and my life back to the beginning of time and the Big Bang 13.5 billion years ago. It led me to some important realizations. There are no sunflowers in the stars. Humpback whales don’t breach in the hydrogen seas of Jupiter. Fields of prairie grasses do not cover the desolate landscape of the moon. Sparrows do not build their nests on Mars. If we press our eye to the Hubble or Webb Space telescopes and look back to the beginning of time we do not find life beyond Earth. In this vast Universe, containing more than 100 billion galaxies and trillions of planets scattered throughout the cosmos, humanity has yet to discover any evidence of life beyond our own planet. The truth is - we may be alone in the Universe. 

This Life Force that I connect with in myself is a miracle, this life force is so rare within the cosmos that mathematicians say it is, we are, statistically An Impossibility. And by we I mean the bees, the lions, the redwood trees, the penguins… All of us are a rarity beyond imaginable. If this life force that pushes through the earth to become a splendorous multicolored bouquet of zinnias, that flies through the skies as a murmuration of elegant starlings, that swims through the oceans as a shoal of angelfish is so rare, why do we destroy it?

A World We No Longer See

The truth is we walk the busy streets with broken hearts because we cannot see anymore. We don’t notice the dewdrop on a blade of grass. We miss the fluttering wings of a monarch butterfly on milkweed. We have lost the skies to smoke. We are losing the land to concrete and asphalt. In the words of Thomas Berry from his book The Great Work. “We’ve put ourselves at the center of the Universe, bestowing all rights unto ourselves and none to other living Beings.” Our work now, as Berry explains it, is “to move from this period of human devastation of the planet to a time when humans and all living beings can coexist in harmony.” That is our work at Green Our Planet. 

Together. We plant the seeds. We tend the gardens. We reach for the stars. 

But without a doubt the most important of our values is Together. Together we must plant the seeds. Together we must tend the gardens. Together we must reach for the stars. Together with our teachers, students, schools, families. Together with our partners. Together with our communities. We must build the movement together because as the wildfires burn and the hurricanes destroy our cities and towns we are running out of time. We must take action with speed and haste and so this movement we are building must be a movement of Radical Togetherness. 

Back to School is a Season of Hope and Reconnection

This week as we work hard together preparing for the year ahead, students and their families are busy buying pens and book bags and all the things getting ready to return to school. I remember this time of year so well when I was a kid. I loved the smell of my new pencil case. I loved taking my second hand school books and covering them with stiff brown paper to protect them throughout the year. I’d put my name in flowery letters on the front of each book. I held my Mom’s hand on our trip to the uniform shop where the friendly old lady took my measurements exclaiming what a big girl I’d become. Thousands of students across the country are doing these same things. Getting ready for the new school year full of hope and promise. 

These students we serve will in the weeks ahead take another journey with their teacher and with their classmates. Together they will plant the seeds in their gardens or in their hydroponics systems. Together they will watch and observe their plants grow. And as they do their teacher will teach them lessons from the Magic Garden Portal: science, engineering, conservation, nutrition and entrepreneurship. Through these lessons and videos they will begin to understand the world around them, they will open their eyes to the wonder and magic of the planet. They will see again. They will understand. Together with thousands of students across the country they will take this journey back to themselves. They will understand how they are a part of this ecosystem on Earth, not the ruler of it. They will understand their place in the Universe. They will become whole. This is a journey we take in search of a new and expanded meaning of ourselves, nature and the Universe. It is the journey I took inside myself this past year. This journey is our pilgrimage. We’ve taken this journey 11 times. This is our 12th time as a company to take this journey. While the connections between us, our students, the teachers and the schools are invisible, they are there in the life force released from each seed planted, every lesson taught with good intention and kindness. And like all good pilgrimages we will rejoice in celebration. We will celebrate with our farmers markets at schools across the country. We will celebrate at Giant Student Farmers Markets that this year will expand beyond Nevada. 

And we will do it together.