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An Entire Month of Glory
Written By: Luke Osteen | Issue: April 2024
Don’t go looking for Earth Day – it’s an entire month of glory.
Two months ago, when we began planning this issue, I was dismayed to realize that big Red Letter Earth Day Celebrations were nowhere to be found on our local calendars.
It seems like those big events just couldn’t survive a global pandemic and the ensuing panic that overtook everything.
But Friend of The Laurel (and Friend of the Earth) Winter Gary, the Highlands Biological Foundation’s executive director, enlightened me in her gentle way by explaining that this precious planet deserved more than a single day of honor. Here on the Plateau, and at various spots around the world, April is Earth Month.
And sure enough, once I looked around me, once I looked at this very magazine taking shape, I saw the profound wisdom of Winter’s revelation.
You need only look through the pages of this issue to understand – there’s William McReynolds’ perennially-wise Audubon column, a year-round valentine to our feathered neighbors, whose happy presence in our forests and meadows and wetlands is quietly slipping away; and the launch of the 2024 Village Nature Series, which throughout the season spotlights the lives – big, small, and microscopic – that shape our incredibly complex ecosystem; and Deena Bouknight’s Outdoor column with its focus on the achingly beautiful Gorges State Park; or Debby Hall’s wise words about the Mountain Garden Club’s Annual Plant Sale – “We offer plants that can’t be grown elsewhere because of the ideal climate and soil here on the Plateau.”
See how it would be the acme of foolishness to consider that Nature’s Bounty could be roped into a single day?
All of this leads me to our first-ever Laurel Homework Assignment. Or, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, our first ever Laurel Non-Homework Assignment.
Once you’ve carefully read every page and ad (especially the ads!) in this issue, I’d like you to turn away from the page or the screen and step out into creation.
This can be as simple as going out onto your porch, or as gentle as strolling through the astonishing Village Green Boardwalk or Highlands Botanical Gardens or The Bascom’s Horst Winkler Sculpture Trail, or if you’re feeling frisky, as invigorating as hiking through the hushed emerald cathedrals that surround us.
Open your senses, and your mind, and your heart and I promise you – I promise you! – that you’ll absorb a full measure of the magic and mystery that’s the Plateau’s Earth Day (or Earth Month or Earth Year)!
We’ve all been blessed.
