Earth Day, SCA and the Obama Way

Photo courtesy SCA

I am so proud to be a part of this, even if only peripherally. Barack and Michelle Obama joined Bill Clinton and the Bidens for an SCA service project in Washington, DC yesterday. They worked alongside my colleagues and friends digging holes, planting trees and learning about watershed restoration.

If I'm going to be honest, this all makes me a little teary. To see something that I believe in so fiercely being recognized and honored by the President's presence is phenomenal. To know that there is someone in the White House leading my country and believing in things that mean so much to me is more than I can say.

The best part is that it wasn't just a photo op or a press stunt. Before planting trees with SCA, Obama got to work signing the Serve America Act into law. The Act allocates $5.7 million over eight years to make public service a more accessible option for people of all ages.

In his address, the President said:

We need your service, right now, at this moment in history. I’m not going to tell you what your role should be; that’s for you to discover. But I’m asking you to stand up and play your part. I’m asking you to help change history’s course. Put your shoulder up against the wheel. And if you do, I promise you – your life will be richer, our country will be stronger, and someday, years from now, you may remember it as the moment when your own story and the American story converged, when they came together, and we met the challenges of our new century.

This is a draft I can get behind. Happy Earth Day, everyone.

On Turning Ten

Someone read this poem aloud at a talk I attended earlier today. I love Billy Collins, and I loved hearing something from him read aloud. The last stanza stops me dead in my tracks. I love it, love it, love it.


On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

-Billy Collins