Earth Day

When I checked my email this morning I had received a Ben Harper Newsletter announcing:
Earth Day Nat Geo Music broadcast April 22nd
Reminder! To celebrate Earth Day, Nat Geo Music channel is hosting a live broadcast concert featuring Ben Harper & Relentless7 in Rome's famed Piazza del Popolo. The free concert will air live 4/22 at 8pm in Italy (2pm ET USA) and will be featured simultaneously on Nat Geo Music channel in the USA and Nat Geo/Earth Day internationally.

We're also planning to catch the new movie, Earth, about a year in the life of the creatures on our planet.  The trailer by itself was enough to give me a lump in my throat...  For every ticket sold Disney will plant a tree.  Which brings me to Arbor Day, which is Friday...

When I was in Storrs Grammar School in the mid-1960s, to mark Arbor Day one year, three classes planted three evergreen trees on the corner of the school property.  We all wrote our names on a piece of paper and put the papers into three waterproof jars and buried them with the roots of each tree.  Those trees are huge now!  I drive by them several times a week on my way to visit my dad.  The old grammar school is now the town hall.  This is one of my few memories of my very early years at school, so I know it made a deep impression on me.

In honor of Earth Day today...

"The planet you're standing on
looking out at the stars
is the earth, the third planet from the sun

and the mildest
and softest
of the nine....

If you can stop, and let yourself look,
let your eyes do
what they do best,
stop
and let yourself see and see
that everything is doing things
to you
as you do things to everything.

Then you know
that although it is only a little planet
it is hugely beautiful
and surely the finest place in the world
to be.

So watch it, look at it
see what it's like
to walk around on it

It's small but it's beautiful
it's small but it's fine
like a rainbow,

like a bubble."

~ Lawrence Collins (Only a Little Planet)
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