My brother, Allen; my sister, Leah; and I would spend hours exploring the terrain around our home: a trailer down a dirt road that Dad reinforced with pine milled from the trees he cleared to bring light around us.

Black mother, white father, three kids the color of earth.

Mom taught us about being independent, making things from scratch, speaking up, defending what we love, being proud of who we are, about not giving up. Dad taught us to revere all life, how to work hard, how to listen to nature, how to make up our own songs, how to be resourceful, that there are many paths to God.

And Nature taught us to be generous, loving, cooperative, multidimensional. That we are part of something so much bigger. We are no accident. We are never alone.

A ferocious love for the Earth arose in us from being in relationship to the ecosystem around us, as instinctively as a mushroom emerging after rain. And with it came the innate response to defend what we belonged to.

Like so many of you, I am a lifelong lover and defender of the Earth, devoted to healing and justice for all her inhabitants, and giving my all to do my small part.

See FRUITS (projects, passions, purpose)