Our Home, Our Only Home - Again
I goofed. A couple of weeks ago, I spent hours and hours writing a blog to introduce my newest picture book, Our Home, Our Only Home. You might ask why it would take so long to devise a short piece showcasing my own work. I’m not certain except that these small books take months of research, writing, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, and by the time I’m finished, I have little left to say, so the blog required some digging.
Then there’s the fact that a picture book takes, not just months, but years to move through the various steps toward publication, and by the time it’s ready for the world, I’ve moved on to another project or two or three … which means I’ve done a pretty thorough brain dump concerning this one.
Still … I spent much of the week framing a blog to present Our Home, Our Only Home to the world. Or to the small part of the world I touch through this blog. And just before I was ready to send it off to my daughter to be posted—Beth-Alison is a marketing professional and manages my website and websites for other writers, too—I decided that I wasn’t satisfied with what I’d written. I wanted, not so much to talk about the book as to let it speak for itself. So I revised once more.
And that’s when I goofed and sent the old version in to be posted.
So here I am, presenting Our Home, Our Only Home once more … a demonstration of what revision looks like.
Our Home, Our Only Home
We,
you and I,
are alive.
Alive in a vast universe
of fire and ice.
Alive on the only planet
in all this burning, freezing universe
known to sustain
life.
My newest book is here. The topic, climate disaster, the uncompromising changes that impact every scrap of life on this planet.
So here we are.
Greenhouse gases fill the skies,
and our climate warms.
Not over
thousands,
millions,
billions of years.
Over little more than a century.
Most of the warming
in the last few decades!
Only a humongous asteroid
ever brought more rapid change
than we have created
with our love
of fire.
It’s a challenging story to bring to children. I began my writing career long ago, however, with one solid conviction: that I could take on any topic capable of touching a child’s life as long as—and this is the imperative—I have something positive to say.
Positive isn’t easy to come by when writing about the collapse of the climate that has made human life possible for hundreds of thousands of years. I began researching this book four years ago, long before our government set out to destroy the inadequate safeguards we once had in place, and even then, I was afraid. What could I say that wouldn’t be too little, too late? Nonetheless, I kept mining for hope. If our children don’t believe in the world that’s waiting for them, believe in it and treasure it, what future can there be?
We did not bring this sweet world
into being.
I never made so much
as a singing frog
nor you a lily pad
to give perch
to a frog.
Yet we,
You and I,
can ensure
that frog and lily pad
live on.
That we,
ourselves,
live
on.
We, humans, are a self-serving lot, certainly. Self-serving and short-sighted. The more effective we are in satisfying our own needs, the more thoroughly we destroy the environment that supplies those needs … beginning long, long ago when we learned to control
fire. By the time we arrived at capitalism, a system that demands infinite growth from finite resources, the race against our own survival was on. (Yet somehow, it’s easier to believe in the end of the world than it is to believe in the end of capitalism.)
Nonetheless, I believe in human beings. I believe in our capacity to learn, to grow, to change.
This is the time—
there is no other—
to use what we know.
I’m a very old lady. I’ll not live to see this crisis resolved. But I believe in my young readers. I believe in their energy, in their intelligence, in their passion. I believe in their ability to heal this beloved world.
Yet our knowing means nothing
unless our big brains
and our even bigger hearts
learn again what we once knew
in our blood and bones.
That we are one with the giant sequoia
and the spiraling leaves of moss.
With the minuscule water bears
making their homes in that moss.
With shining minnows,
wind-riding hawks,
the resolute march of ants.
With every dandelion,
with every rose.
One with our life-giving Earth.
I began my career as a children’s writer with a single overwhelming desire. Not to be famous. Not to win awards. I wanted instead to be a truth-teller. To break through the silence we wrap around our children when we refuse to acknowledge the hard realities that impact them. For more than half a century, that desire has fueled my work. It has kept me writing. It has kept me writing and writing and writing.
It has kept me, against all odds, attempting to save the world.
Not that I’ll be the one doing the saving, you understand. Rather, it’s my job to inhabit young readers, to open them to their own ideas, their own energy, their own solutions. Their own hope.
So here I am once more, along with the amazing artist Sophie Dio, presenting Our Home, Our Only Home. We offer this book with the audacious hope that it might be a small catalyst for transformation in a world that longs to be transformed.
