Another week has passed, and I’m still here, and so are you if you are reading this. I ‘m glad for that. May is my favorite month. Probably because my birthday is May 24 and it’s Spring. The season I love the most.

Early Spring – our small Koi pond

As I look out my kitchen window, I see our little pond that we made three and a half years ago when we first moved here to North Carolina. The Irises and Peonies are in full bloom, and I can see the Koi swimming happily around in a circle. Their world is small, but they never knew any other life, and so they are content.

Unfortunately, none of us can say the same. It was such a short time ago that our lives were so different. I wake up every morning and remember again that my life and yours and everyone’s has changed perhaps forever. We will probably never feel the same again. We will never feel completely safe or that our loved ones are safe either. On the news, on the internet, we are reminded that this Virus will probably return every winter to threaten our very lives and way of life.

This fact is a reminder that we humans never had control of many things in our world. We all believed that we were in charge, but we are not. We live on this planet, but it does not belong to us. We have not respected it, we have polluted the land, the air, the water. We are steadily depopulating our world of hundreds, if not thousands of species that shared the earth.

We are greedily killing them by deforestation, or murdering them as a recreational activity. We have polluted the ocean with our plastics waste and garbage and trash. We have caused the climate change that is occurring as I write this.

The weather here in NC is schizophrenic during this past winter we had days when the temperature was 87 degrees and then the next it dropped down to the mid-thirties. We were inundated with rain and wind. You never knew what the next day’s weather would be. Last summer, the heat was unbearable, and the hottest Summer ever recorded. Natures way of reminding us that we are not in charge. And that actions have consequences.

And yet because we humans have to isolate ourselves at home, there have been positive changes. The air quality is improving all across the globe because we are not driving our cars on the roads and in our cities.

Animals feel safe coming out and visiting areas that they haven’t been seen in decades. There is a healing taking place on our planet, and it is a clear message that we humans are the cause of the problems. That all our thoughtless, selfish actions have had devastating consequences. Can we learn this lesson? I hope so. This time of loss for us has given us perhaps our last chance to change our behavior and save ourselves and our home, the earth.  We have an opportunity to look at a distance and gain a better perspective,

My hope is we do acknowledge that we have perhaps our last opportunity to save our planet, our home. And we can start making the changes that will ultimately rescue this planet and ourselves.

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