Letter to the Earth

Written for the Letters to the Earth project. I'd love for you to write and share your own letters (which can be art, or poetry, or however you like to express yourself) to help encourage and inspire change ahead of the COP in November. In uncertain times, putting pen to paper can be cathartic. And the more of us who speak up on behalf of the Earth, the harder we become to ignore.

Dear Earth,

I'd love to have something pithy and original to say here, but I'm going to try to speak from the heart. I think you deserve that much. 

The fact is that I'm scared. I never thought I'd be a mum, but now that I am, now that there's a little being dependent on me, I'm finally looking around at the mess we're in, and I'm terrified that it's too late to make meaningful change. 

For a long time I took you for granted. Yet as a child I loved nature. I loved to play in the woods and build 'grass houses' in the fields. I still remember waking early on frosty mornings to ride horses out on the rolling downs, when the grass was still cold enough to crackle under their hooves. I remember building dens in the woods with my friends, coming home for dinner with muddy knees and leaves in our hair.

I'm not sure when the disconnect started, but I know that for a while there was a time when I was too busy to notice a sunset, too concerned about my hair and make-up to swim in the sea. I'm lucky that my little one loves nothing more than to be outside - our daily walks gradually, quietly reminded me of all the wonder that was here all along. 

I just want to tell you that I can see now the state that we're in, and I want to change it. I want to help you, to protect you, like I wish I had been doing all along. I want my little boy to have a future, a safe and thriving future, but even had I not been a mother, I would want to protect and cherish you simply because it's right. Because you have given me everything. You are my mother, and my mother's mother. You were my playmate in childhood, and as I grew up your beauty gave me strength when I felt down or lost. 

I'm sorry for all the ways that I am and have been part of the problem. Change is slow, and going against the grain of convenience and consumerism is sometimes stupidly difficult. I'm also sorry that those in power are choosing not to listen to our voices. It's frustrating, and it's terrifying, when every day more is lost and we have so much more to lose. It seems that those who could change things will not. I'm furious that 'growth' and profit and business-as-usual are deemed more important than the Amazon and the pollinators and the oceans, and I don't understand how we came to conflate destruction with progress.

But I promise that I will keep trying to do what I can. I promise to take action on your behalf, as much and as often and as fiercely as I can. And I will keep on loving you, and I will teach my little boy to love you too, with all his wild heart.

Forever,

Kat