Rooted

Friends,

Quaker author and anthropologist, Elise Boulding, has written that we all live within a two hundred year span of life and memory. I was thinking of what this means when I was playing recently with our four year old granddaughter, Dani. She is living within the living memory of the combined hundred year life span that includes my parents and me, and when Dani is also a grandparent she will have added another hundred years of direct life and memory. This not so much about genealogy as it is about the ribbon of life we all share. I have memories of my grandfather and his draft horses pulling the hay wagon and party lines on our phones, and my boys, now in their fifties, will barely remember life without cell phones and computers. I cannot even begin to imagine what life has in store for Dani’s grandchildren, but neither could my grandparents probably even begin imagine the world I have inherited. 

It is important to remember that in spite of what seems like an overwhelming surge of rapid change, there are important ways that we are still bonded and rooted deeply with each other and the earth. I imagine generations of families over the ages tied together with real or intuited memories of each other. I imagine families in centuries past, of people of all tribes and nations, using oral histories or rites - funerals, festivals, holidays - to sit together around the campfire or family gatherings to recall the stories of heroism and valor as well as the love and sacrifices shared. In a world that often now seems to big and too impressed upon us, we can also imagine ourselves in a much more finite and tightly held bonds that unite us as families and tribes.

And as I look out over the magnificence of old growth trees that actually span a two to three hundred year life span, I can imagine their progeny scattered around them, their stories of fire and drought, their root systems intertwined with the rocks, earth and other root systems, and their resilience for all these centuries of survival. I am constantly reminded that trees teach us patience.

OK, maybe I am being too much of a romantic with these thoughts, a denial or escape when I feel with my life threatened. But I know that despite the instantaneous access to information and problem solutions that AI is said to offer, like the trees and our two hundred year shared human memory and life span, we are rooted in a life that has its own stability and promise. I so strongly believe there is a Life Force, so much grander and awesome than our imaginations can even dare to name, and its Force More Powerful, is ultimately love. 

So in the daily moments of our lives, especially perhaps with children or our beloved elders, let us appreciate the many roots of life that hold and support us with love and hope.

Peace,

Tom