Drinking in the sun at daybreak today, I’ve felt as if I was nourishing a sun within - the sun of my heart.
Happiest day, beloved Joy Train Rider! Bless you! How sweet it is! I hope you’ve had some adventure and fun since we last rode together Monday. I assure you, we did.
I told you we were going to see the Century Palm we’d just learned is flowering in our Hope Botanical Gardens 20 minutes away. It was overcast and drizzling when we got there, but nothing could dim the gigantic flaming yellow inflorescence on several of the majestic trees. Not one, but SEVEN!! They look like divine beings showering their luminescence on the Earth. I vow to go back every chance I get for as long as they have blooms.
We are on the verge of National Park Week in the US starting tomorrow, April 20 through April 28, and World Earth Day, Monday, April 22. I am juvenated every day by the beauty, diversity and joy I find in the world. So much of that stems from my experience in Nature and National Parks which are accessible to almost everyone with a sincere desire for the experience.
“He or she is a better citizen, with a keener appreciation of the privilege of living here, who has traveled the national parks,” said Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service.
It’s an experience that the most privileged people on Earth seek out and the ordinary person can have exactly the same experience. For an $80 ANNUAL ENTRANCE FEE a carload of up to five people gain entrance to ALL 428 parks in the system for a full year. (Check out the various passes here.) The majority of sites have no entrance fees. All fees will be waived tomorrow for EVERYONE at EVERY national park. Find yourself in one.
I’m feeling almost giddy with joy because I see the thing we’ve been calling for over so many years literally happening in front of our eyes. My Facebook and X feeds are suddenly flooded with news out of the parks!
Here’s one from Shenandoah National Park offering a geologic history, “Stones Tell the Story.” I hope we can drop in and see if the stones include the story of how Black Americans were once segregated and kept from the view of white visitors in this park as late as the 1950s. Will it include the story that the smell of food from the Black campgrounds, wafting over the berm meant to separate them, drew the white visitors to their side, thus ending the insane practice? We have two elegant lady friends who were part of that experience and whose story is told in the museum here.
Next, here we are at the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park in Massachusetts which is offering guided tours of the Underground Railroad. I’m sure they’ll be talking about the Black whalers who were the backbone of the industry that powered America with whale oil in the early to mid-19th Century.
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