Become like children this Earth Day (and beyond)

Kaitlin B. Curtice, citizen of the Potawatomi nation, storyteller, poet, and author offers this sermon at the prestigious Riverside Church. From her book Living Resistance:

Kinship can feel like a very abstract thing, but imagine it like this: I have a string attached to my body, to my heart center, and it goes directly from my heart to yours, and to every other living creature on this planet, to Mother Earth herself. Whatever I do with this heart, with this body, affects you; it travels across that thread and finds its way to you. And whatever you do or embody travels to me, to the ants, to Grandmother Moon, to someone across the world we’ve never met.

We do not get to escape each other, no matter how colonized or traumatized we may be. This is kinship.

When we remember who we are, what the children inside us teach us, we will remember how powerful our connection to Mother Earth, to Segmekwe, to one another, really is. There is no true climate work or acknowledgment of history without acknowledging our sacred relationship to the earth, and this is the lesson we learn from the kids in our lives: we must play, we must practice embodiment, we must connect.

There is no care for our children, our homes, our communities, without acknowledging the importance of curiosity and care in our relationship to the earth.