Sunny Notes: 04.29.26 - Earth Takes Care
This past Sunday, we honored Earth Day, National Poetry Month, and Lesbian Visibility Day. As a part of our service, we created a shared altar together using objects we collected from nature. This ritual provided an opportunity to connect with and celebrate the beauty of the natural world.
In addition to celebration, however, the ritual also invited us to engage with the challenging emotions of grief and anger many of us are carrying due to climate devastation and species extinction. According to University of Washington Environmental Humanities professor Jennifer Atkinson, our eco-grief is not a bad thing—it is actually a sign of deep attachment and a response that highlights our profound connection to others, including plants, animals, and places. She says “this makes grief a powerful but widely overlooked tool for cultivating hope and empowering ourselves to become agents of change.”
So, while acknowledging and engaging with our grief, we also made room for hope. We explored the growing "Rights of Nature" movement that has been gaining incredible momentum worldwide for about the past decade. With successful initiatives on every continent, this global legal movement gives legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and to the natural environment as a whole. The Rights of Nature have been used to do everything from preventing a mining operation in a protected forest in Ecuador to stopping toxic run-off into a lagoon in Spain.
But perhaps even more inspiring for me are the children coming of age among us who are displaying a wisdom and understanding seemingly far beyond their years around the preciousness of our planet. For the Chalice Lighting during Sunday's service, one of our new Celebrants, Eleanor Burke, and her daughter, Aubrey, shared a song that Aubrey (who is just four years old!) created (you can see the altar and Aubrey in the photo below - thank you, Peggy Jones, for this pic):
Earth Takes Care
by Aubrey Almskaar Burke
We see the forest everywhereTrees take care of us
They help us live!
Some trees grow food for us
And we collect it before the cold days come
The birds fly over the sun
They have pretty feathers
We like to watch them fly around
The wind helps the leaves blow
We collect the spirit rocks
Sun, wind and rain
Sun, wind and rain
Earth takes care
You bless our lives
You know our path to take
Make us care
Earth takes care of us
Earth takes care of us.
There can be grief and there can be hope—may we hold this paradox while living in gratitude that through it all, Earth takes care.
— Rev. Sunny, minister