Recently, one of our grandsons came to visit. He’s four, and pulling slash (the highly flammable dead wood) was a grand adventure. He was a mountain man, a biologist, and a geologist, pointing out every unusual moss rock and bright fallen leaf he came across.

Hiking back up the steep incline after dumping a load into the pick-up, I asked him what he thought we should name our hill.

Without hesitation, he said, “Moon Mountain,” grinning ear-to-ear with the kind of uninhibited confidence every child should have.

So now, we live on Moon Mountain in the Colorado Rockies. At the top of the hill, next to the ravine, is a granite outcropping where fissured boulders stand like Celtic ogham stones. Craig and I had already begun calling it the temple; Liam renamed it Moon Temple. I like it. If you were to nestle among those stones, you could see the moon rise, travel unfettered through the star-filled sky, never creeping below the dark forested horizon until it sets into the west. It’s a fitting name.

The aspens are turning. Many of the leaves have fallen, but the trees stand in communities, and when they shed their leaves they all do it together. Where a road separates an aspen community, you’ll see one side barren-branched, their shining bark fully exposed, while their neighbors across the road are still in full color. Do they retain memories of the time before the bulldozers came, tore apart their root systems, and created the winding dirt roads? Are they lonely? It’s possible. Scientists are increasingly finding evidence that the trees do communicate with each other.

But, while they have been cut off from the larger forest, they still have their close families. From the outside, they appear to thrive magnificently.

When I think about the children locked in our for-profit detention centers, I wonder what they have seen before they were torn from their mothers and fathers and other family members. As they crossed the miles, did they name the hills, trees, or rocks? Did they marvel over the beauty they passed, stockpile those memories so they could turn to them, hills and valleys, trees and rocks and flowers, during bleaker days? Or did they enter those walls and cages with only memories of the traumatic events that sent them fleeing to the hope of a safer future? If so, I pray that hope will sustain them.

Dear children, you can’t see it from where you are, but outside your walls the world hums with color. The trees cry out to each other. Leaves are falling. Not in sadness, but in the ongoing natural change of a beautiful globe rotating on its axis. If you have lost hope in a nation that once declared, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” then put your faith in this. Outside your walls, change is happening. We, the people, are working for justice – for you, for your mothers and fathers, and for all our families. Like the aspen communities, you deserve to thrive. Name your mountains and temples.

Cry out your truth, the world is listening.

And don’t give up hope.

 

Copyright © 2018 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.