Earth Day: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

I am holding "Earth Day" in my heart.  It's a wonderful thing to have been alive for the first one and even more so for her 50th and now is even more important as we look at our Planet Earth, our own innate Mothership as an integral part of humanity as well as that of the greater Cosmos. But of course that's only in this man-made construct of time, space, and our "sensing" of this reality and not what's truly real in the greater scheme of things of all there ever was, is now, or ever will be.

Michele Savikko:  "I was 20 years old for the very first earth day and a thousand miles away from home and family in college. Much was happening all around me. It was incredibly new and exciting. 

Every single day, every single moment was alive and breathing with so many, many new things, new experiences,  new emotions and most of all new acceptances and learnings.

To be this very quiet, very deep and happy and always smiling young person--still a girl truly-- and not yet feeling the beingness of coming into womanhood. To be alive and welcoming and so very excited by even the newness of tiny things was surreal yet always just my "new normal" for then.

Because the next day brought newer experiences, newer new normals. Normal didn't mean anything at all even if i knew what normal was supposed to mean or me. It was easy to accept that i was not anyone else's "normal". I was me and i loved the blessing of this huge huge gift of going off into this very,  very different new world.  

Growing up in an isolated and land locked part of Alaska where just flying south to the lower 48 was like entering a different world and flying in was considered the most dangerous approach and landing in the U.S. with only the pilot's visual abilities providing access to conditions below we just did all things bravely.

Qne didn't question or really even fear the experience just the roar of things coming to life and taking off and into new horizons We would just do, just cope, just accept each and every new experience as it was.

I should have been afraid but it didn't enter my awareness. I was raised with challenges and obstacles and the unknown--even death simply by riding "out the road" with my dad in his rattle trap old company truck was that day, the best, most exciting thing in the world. Especially if he had the money to buy us each a frozen treat out of the freezer chest at the grocery store!

We had 25 miles of road to to get to the end of what i should have seen as the end of my world. But i didn't. We reached the end of that old gravel road and it was exciting and accepted and enjoyed that as 25 miles was considered a huge amount of driving. 

Then we turned around and came back. There was only one way to do that with no alternate roads of any kind yet available. Yet the ride back gave me a up close and personal view of the other side of the road so even that became new and exciting!

I realize now how amazing that life was for me. My whole world was based on the earth, my earth as i knew her. It was living and thriving and surviving but without fear in nature. We were taught where the bears came out, where we had to be alert and careful and what to do if one charged us or attacked us.

I was never afraid to go there with my family as we did every 2 weeks. It was where we picked wild blueberries and the only place we had to dispose of the family garbage.

Doing brave things in nature and relishing and being excited and filling myself up with her breathing, living, ever changing energies just was. Feeling the existence of other earth beings as alive and part of me and all there was..that just was. 

I was curious about ancient burial grounds of the old native ones and felt them around me. Now i can see and feel the emotion known as fear that i should have felt, should have not perhaps been drawn to or not chosen to open to. Nothing bad happened when I did. 

It was just very very curious and different and i wondered if it was "real" or part of my amazing inner life of my own creative imaginings!

The earth was a part of all of us. The winds and the sky and ocean seas and rivers and lakes and waterfalls and the mountains rising on both sides of my world in between all things-- and absolutely all and nothing else--but all of life as one. "

Copyright: Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands". 

To celebrate "earth day" at age 20  (50 years ago!) wasn't a blip on the radar of my life in my memories  I probably just wondered why people in the "south" needed to to create a specific day to celebrate what always just was. 

Happy Birthday Great Mother. Happy Birthday yesterday, today and all of your tomorrows!

Michele Savikko Bilyeu

And yes, I made my 70's top.

Oh how Ioved it! Sold it for a very few dollars at my very first garage sale in the 80s. Live and learn!

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting... from my heart and with my hands.

"Write It On Your Heart"

Write it on your heart

That every day is the best day of the year.

He is rich who owns the day, 

and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.


Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;

Begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

(1803-1882)

American essayist,lecturer. philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

Michele Savikko
1972
Corvallis Oregon

(Photo by Larry Bilyeu)

Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands*: Singer Featherweight: Sewing Accessories Tutorial

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/2010/05/singer-featherweight-sewing-accessories.html

Of personal interest:

I taught two college classes as an undergraduate at Oregon State University in the Spring of 1972.  (English Literature  and Modern Poetry]. Two students that Professor Astro had taught over the course of our 4 years of studies there. My counterpart taught a class or (that i knew of) 

Thank you Professor Richard Astro of Corvallis OR and Drexel University (Professor Emeritus) for your faith and trust in me! What great fun and an excellent teaching opportunity! I loved teaching and knew that even though I was a shy young woman from Alaska that I was also a knowledgeable and creative teacher.

He offered me a full time job helping him with his next book on writer, John Steinbeck as a research assistant. Telling me that one of the to brightest students hed ever had the privilege of teaching. The other was a young man. I was still very young and I was getting married in Alaska that summer and turned that amazing offer down. Primarily brcause it involved being the ghost writer of a subject and a baseball play id never heard. The goal was supposed to be a comparison of the life of the baseball player and John Seinback. It seemed like an improbable if not impossible dream.  At the time and for the many decades that followed,  it was One of my bigger regrets!  

He was the West Coast expert on Steinbeck and I'd taken his classes and loved Steimbeck and his books. Just as I loved the poetry of William Blake...the other writer i had studied under Dr. Astro. The paper i wrote as my final term pa O er in any of  Dr. Astros  classes "only" received an A- yet he told me as he handed my graded copy to ne, that it was "the finest paper he'd ever read turned to him during his past decades of teaching. Just  knowing that and getting to learn all that i fid as an undergraduste and thus single term paper was suddenly such high praise that it was enough. I was enough and i glowed with that knowledge.  Great great educational experiences.  6 months of teaching @ $40.00/month plus my year of also student teaching at Corvallis High.  Mass Media (a class that had never been taught by anyine including the teavher who been assigned it and oass oof to me, Reading for Enjoyment (who wouldnt a free reading period? And Mythology. My Mythology class had no parameter as to Greek or Roman or Modern. I made it all three! And I managed to include the mythological poetry of William  Blake also with my artistic depiction of his drawings as well as his poetry!  Those were the days, my friend I truly thought theyd never end. But they were a wonderful path not chosen as poet Robert Frost has written. 💜 

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting... from my heart and with my hands.