BUFFALO, N.Y. — This is a season set aside for the celebration of life, a time to take stock of our lives and to give thanks for what we have. So it's only right to look further around us and to extend gratitude to the Mother who gives selflessly and nurtures our lives, every moment of every day. Margaret Wooster is the author of, "Meander: Making Room For Rivers". "We can be very grateful for that. We wouldn't be here without Mother Nature."
"Every time we live at the moment, there are gifts every place, and the gifts are free," says Environmentalist Stephanie Berghash.
Yet we often take this marvelous bounty for granted, and should we continue our wanton destruction, we will lose it all and have no one to blame but ourselves.
"We're having a crash of ecosystems, and a crash of nature, and we're doing it by being deliberately ignorant, or in some cases deliberately wanting to defeat nature," explains Jay Burney, Executive Director of the Pollinator Conservation Society. "It's going to cost us everything that nature gives us, including our life."
So what can we do to heal these self-inflicted wounds, to reverse what we've begun and learned again what it means to live in harmony with our planet ? Wooster believes that education is a good first step.
"We need to understand how it works. It's almost like our bodies, you know, we need to understand how our bodies work in order to resist disease and to be healthy, and we need to understand how the earth's body also, in order to help it be healthy."
Reconnection is also part of that first step in our long journey to understanding, and Berghash says that can begin simply by stepping outside.
"That's exactly it, you become one with the cosmos when you look up and see a star in the sky, or you get to look at a beautiful tree, and it's so wonderful to be part of that again."
Once we make that reconnection, it becomes a daily, rather than a seasonal celebration of life, giving thanks each moment for what is given to us so freely and with so much love. "Nature gives us everything. Nature gives us life." Burney says.
And Berghash agrees. "Put light around you. If the light is around you, not the darkness, you can see that everything you need is right there."
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