so many reasons to [help others] vote

Greetings, all! I'm coming in heavy today from the throes of planning the local version of a UU Climate Revival event taking place at 350 congregations nationwide on Saturday, Sept. 28th. The aim is to help our folks, who are traditionally very active in all kinds of social justice activism, see that climate justice overarches all the "justices"--both in that if we don't have a livable planet, reproductive rights don't matter much, for example, and also that economic, racial and immigration justice are all deeply connected to climate change.

What applies to every one of us is the hour of advocacy action we'll take as part of Sunday's service: a nonpartisan Get Out the Vote effort. Why does it matter? Because we can support those affected "first and worst" by climate change to raise their voices through their votes.

Wanna hear something surprising? Loads of people who identify as environmentalists don't vote regularly! (I don't know; are they out kayaking on Election Day?) The Environmental Voter Project aims to change that.

"We estimate that over 8 million environmentalists did not vote in the 2020 presidential election and over 13 million skipped the 2022 midterms. We are a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on a simple, high-leverage solution to this problem: with an 8-year track record of success, we are accurately identifying these non-voting environmentalists and efficiently converting them into a critical mass of consistent voters that will soon be too big for politicians to ignore.

13,000,000
Environmentalists who don’t vote in federal elections

1,824,260
Non-voting and seldom-voting environmentalists whom EVP has helped turn into consistent super-voters"

You can help! Look at all these opportunities to contact the kayakers and get them to the polls! (Unfortunately, my favorite way is to write, and those opportunities are already filled.) https://www.environmentalvoter.org/get-involved

And if you need to know which candidates in your area are the ones to vote for, try these resources:

• National Environmental Scorecard by the League of Conservation Voters, 501(c)(4), is a great topline review of members in Congress.
• The National Climate Scorecard by the Climate Cabinet, 501(c)(4), may be the first tool that tracks and scores all state legislators across the U.S. by their votes on climate and environmental justice legislation.
• Do you have a "Climate Mayor?" Check HERE to see if your Mayor is one of the 750 Climate Mayors or Climate County Executives. 
• Do you have a climate Governor who is contributing to a state-wide climate action plan? Check HERE.
• Have your community’s leaders already declared a Climate Emergency? Check HERE to see the more than 190 communities that have.

And now for the poetry...the only poetry book I know on democracy and elections is this one by Janet Wong from 2012--but it does the trick!

Go sow your own seeds, of course, and help others sow theirs. Thanks to Linda Baie at TeacherDance for hosting us today and celebrating maximum tilt!

ready for our close-up: poetry friday is here!

Greetings, Poetry Friday People!  May the special energy of a Friday the 13th animate you (some call it bad luck but I am a triskaidekaphile)!

I've spent this week kicking off a new round of WHISPERshout Writing Workshop afterschool classes. Our theme is TINY ENORMOUS. Drawing from the really wonderful materials and tools of The Private Eye Project, we are examining nature objects using jeweler's loupes with 5x magnification, thinking metaphorically, and writing poetry from our observations and imaginations.

Here are some photos from the first classes and a collaborative poem about the subject of our first loupe-study and drawing:

 

Fingerprint | The WHISPERshout Writers

 

My fingertip

bumps and twirls

like the feathers 

of a bird

like waves on the

water

It arches like a

rainbow, opens like a

cave

it swoops and spirals

stripes on a zebra

My fingerprint swirls

like soft-serve ice cream

Now let's see/hear/examine what you've been up to!  Add your links below, and thanks for being here.

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always a next time

Greetings, All!  My summer hiatus has come to a close and I'm happy to return to your company this week and particularly next week, when I'll have the honor of hosting Poetry Friday again. 

Not too much has changed since May, although an awful lot is different this year, both personally and professionally. I've dropped in over the summer because the Inklings monthly challenge has continued apace, and it's easy for me to rise to that kind of prompt. (Turns out it's much harder to rise to my own intentions, which have none of the force of someone else's expectation! A treatise on this subject sometime soon...)

And once again this week we've been offered a Good One--this time simply and straightforwardly by Mary Lee:

       Use Next Time, by Joyce Sutphen, as a mentor poem for your own Next Time poem.

I do love the way this poem is disorganized, not in a visual or syntactic way but in a conceptual way, so that the first time you read it, it seems quite sensible, but as you re-read, you realize the whole poem is built on an idea that not everyone accepts--that we get a next time, a do-over, another chance to be our-selves. And not only that, the poem goes here and there from the kitchen to a London coffee shop to Istanbul, from awake to dreaming, from knowledge of factoids to lasting connection, and it all happens subtly. I also found myself morphing from a trope about the hair & body I've always envied to, well, some-thing bigger.

I enjoyed doing the thing where I put the mentor poem in one column on the left and write my poem in the column on the right. Do you ever do it that way? 

Join me next week when the new school year will be in full swing for lots of you all, while I'm trying all over again to be a member of the Working Retired (which is nothing at all like the Walking Dead, nuh-uh).

Until then, let's thank Buffy Silverman for hosting us today, and let's be sure to visit the other Inklings to see what they'll be like Next Time.

Mary Lee Hahn @ A(nother) Year of Reading

Catherine Flynn @ Reading to the Core

Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone

Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche