October 7 2020
A LETTER TO MY GRANDCHILDREN
Dear grandchildren.
You all live in cities. There’s where the jobs are. You all are successful, live healthy lives, have good jobs, happy families, beautiful children, loving parents: in a word, you have made it. The last thing you need is a letter from a 92 year old man who happens to be your grandfather.
Talking about grandfathers: as a kid, 4-12 years old, I often stayed at my mother’s parents, who operated a farm, a small holding, about 30 acres, powered by one horse for work and bicycles for transportation. No electricity. A pig, a flock of chickens, a dozen milk cows, and some young cattle. My paternal grandparents had a grocery store and this Opa, in his horse-drawn wagon, called on my mother’s parents once a week, to barter eggs for coffee, tea, soaps, etc. Both my Opas were elders in the same large village church.
They all lived simple and sustainable lives. When my mother married in 1923, the only one of the five children to settle in the city, her father gave her in today’s currency the equivalent of $200,000, enough to buy everything the young couple needed to furnish a complete household, with enough left over for my father to start his business, buy a car and the machinery he needed to manufacture bakery ingredients.
In 1934 I started to attend elementary school just around the corner from where we lived. I remember one particular lesson in 1938, the 100th anniversary of the first steam-powered train in 1838, traveling from Amsterdam to Haarlem, a distance of some 15 km. The teacher told us that some people then called this new-fangled transportation a ‘devil’s device’. We all laughed: how could that be true!
Things have changed.
We now live in a world where a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive. We live in a world where an elephant is worth more dead than alive, where a whale…..
When we moved to Tweed in 1975 from the city, the bullfrogs would wake us up in the morning, accompanied by the loud rapid-poor-will, often repeated for an hour. These sounds are gone. In the city you don’t notice these changes: here in Tweed, I do. They are no longer heard for reasons you know: it’s the economy!
That’s how the economy works: it will keep on destroying trees, keep on mining the earth, keep on pulling oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and leave a worse world for you, my dear grandchildren.
James Lovelock, an atheist scientist, now 100 years old, coined the word GAIA, his designation for a planet that is fully alive. In his important book, “The revenge of Gaia”, he maintains that our planet is fighting back: hence Climate Change and melting Poles.
I, my generation, started this unraveling process. That is my legacy, and I beg you for forgiveness. The short-term thinking of my generation based on the RELIGION of profit at all cost is at the root of it all: now I see that WE are the severed tree, WE are the dead whale, WE, my generation, were the initiators.
My grandparents, born 150 years ago – the 1870’s – in rural Groningen, knew how to live: community-entertainment thrived. Yes, no penicillin, people died younger, but there was genuine fellowship, music bands, choir, theatre groups, church. All gone, together with the frogs and birds. Yet, I believe that some of this ‘living close to nature’ is still in you, after all we are products of our forebears, still partners with the air, soil and water around us.
What I hope you will do is cultivate a planetary consciousness: we all are the earth; we all are the air; we all are the water: embrace the natural world around you and in every action work for her welfare: truly a full-time job. Love the earth; love her unconditionally. Question every one of your action for its consequences, every step for its ultimate result.
You are smart young people. When you more closely examine what goes on out there, you will re-discover the unity and order that is evident everywhere, because everything on earth is somehow harmoniously connected to everything else. The one species influences the other and the one creature depends on the other. Plants cannot exist without the earth that feeds them. Animals, on the other hand, cannot function without the plants as these often are the sole source for their food.
The phenomena of day and night, of summer and winter, of rain and drought, of heat and cold, all are part of the grand chain of happenings, depending on where the sun happens to be and from where the wind blows. The one event influences another and yet the one cannot be without the presence of the other.
A closer look will show that the order is full of purpose. The great connectedness of all these entities is at the same time the reason why the totality is served by it as well. We don’t even need to explore everything too deeply to discover the amazing fact that behind everything there is an invisible set of natural laws: the butterflies serve the flowers just as much as the flowers serve the butterflies. The sun is itself not conscious that it from a distance of millions of miles brings light and warmth, yet it is the sun that maintains life on earth, causing plants to sprout out of the moist earth. If the sun had a mind if its own, then perhaps it would muse: I shine because that’s my nature: I delight in it; it’s the joy of my life. But it knows not that a law mightier than the sun has included it in the beautiful law of serving. The sun, that so superior sun, serves that tiny, tiny plant that full of life expectancy courageously stretches its stem to absorb its rays.
That little plant cannot think beyond its nature. It winks at the sun and dreams of the joy that awaits it in a life of light and sunshine. But it has no inkling that it serves just as much as it is served by others. It serves the miniscule seeds it now carries and that later will form new plants. It serves the animal, looking for food, or is needed to help another plant using it as a crutch to climb higher. In manifold ways it serves other creatures, who need support or shade or nourishment or moisture.
When you look around with open eyes and minds then there is one thing that time and again touches to the core: it’s all about serving. The law of serving is at the heart of every creature: it is the overarching purpose for every being. That law makes it possible for the entire world to exist. Every creature thinks that it is there only for itself, but in final analysis it is nothing else but a servant for others. To be alive, to exist at all, finds it destination simply in serving others. Without that law nothing else can be.
Yet that law of serving is remarkable in more than one way. What is so truly amazing is that, as a rule, no creature is there for the sole reason of serving, as they all think that self-help is their sole goal. All that serving goes automatically, is not a conscious act. It is as if a mighty hand brings all this in motion and, in spite of itself, stimulates this self-less serving. This serving, therefore, is not a sacrifice, not a duty, but in-born, without compulsion, without intent. Each single being is there according to its nature, but everything together is so oriented that the existence of the one supports the other and maintains it.
How about us?
With us humans, service is simply different, is infinitely richer, but because of that also more difficult. It is self-evident that the afore-mentioned natural instincts are also present with the human race. There too the care for children; there too a touch of the ‘specimen-egoism’. But these powerful instinctive forces are here recognized as such. Humans know exactly what they do and why they do it.
As a consequence, humans have much greater opportunity to serve. Every category in society serves the other, a world can’t do without medical helpers, but it also needs arborists and food inspectors, and even video-makers.
The trouble with us humans is that the inclination to only serving OUR needs is both stronger and more dangerous, promoting OUR welfare at the expense of our fellow citizens and especially all other species. Even though we are more conscious of what we do, are able to gauge the needs of others, we also can easily ignore the plight of our neighbors and the care for creation.
In short: serving is for most of us something we are reluctant to do, driven by self-interest, the ‘I come first’ instinct. That ‘I come first’ inclination often overwhelms all other feelings, stifles them, and comes out on top. With us humans the urge of ‘me first’ usually takes priority over conflict, the struggle, the concept of serving.
Given this weakness, we humans have been given a command: serve one another, serve creation! This serving, so ‘naturally’ accomplished by all other segments of the world, by instinct as it were, we humans have to implement in full awareness of what we are doing.
That’s why we must cultivate a Global Awareness, a Planetary Consciousness because we all are connected from bottom to top to each other and all living matter.
My wish for you, my dear grandchildren, is that this multi-level serving will be an integral part of your daily life.
Yours, with all my love, and a tear in my eye,
Opa