[By: Miriam Kashia]
One month left to go on this amazing and enormously difficult journey of despair and hope. Fun and exhaustion. Chaos and cooperation. We continue marching and planning and doing everything we must do to keep moving forward with this mission to protect our earth by demonstrating with our feet and our lives, our passionate awareness, and concern for life on the planet. We have walked our talk. It’s all here; each of us brings our own biases, habits, strengths, and challenges. As a marcher who started in LA and has walked every step, I’ve witnessed and experienced the whole gamut; climate crisis realities across this land and our own community struggles to resolve inequities and work together to keep on track and on schedule. Each day brings something new on the landscape (inner and outer) as well as plenty of the “same old.”
Putting one foot in front if the other – day after day after day. With a month to go, I can see a change in myself and the One Earth Village community. New marchers add to our small army of passionate activists and inevitably alter the flavor of our community. The “winding down” process has begun as each if us begins to ponder the big question: “What’s next?” We are bone-tired (perhaps I should just speak of my own weary 71-year-old bones) and are facing the most difficult stretch of road in PA as autumn brings darkness, cold, and wet weather. No one who has not been part of this journey will ever completely understand what the cost has been nor the personal investment and sacrifice. Each of us has found our niche and contributed in unique and important ways. Our petty differences have always taken a back seat to the mission: sounding the alarm and inspiring action on the greatest threat faced by humanity. We will never know for sure what the impact has been for the communities we engaged and the folks we met. We do know that this journey has deeply and irrevocably impacted each of us. We were called “climate patriots” when we started. Today I would change that to “climate warriors.”