50 Years of Earth Day

Action on Climate Issues

By Julie Mierau

The picture indelibly etched in my memory takes me back to 1970. A high school freshman and a product of my times, I believed in the power of people to change the world. And what better day to begin than the first Earth Day.

I wore an armband, as did many of my classmates. My pins shouted the slogans of the day: Make peace, not war. Zero population growth. Sisterhood is powerful.

There were no marches in my hometown that day. There were no activist gatherings, at least none I knew about. But my fellow students and I made clear our priority of saving the Earth from pollution, from waste, from overpopulation. Perhaps we were ineffective; certainly we were naïve. Yet if you remember that first Earth Day as I do, then you know that our watchword was hope.

This year, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. According to www.EarthDay.org, the theme for Earth Day 2020 is climate action. According to the website, “The enormous challenge — but also the vast opportunities — of action on climate change have distinguished the issue as the most pressing topic for the 50th anniversary.”

Even in the midst of a pandemic, climate change continues to represent the biggest challenge to the future of humanity and the life-support systems that make our world habitable.

The first Earth Day in 1970 launched a wave of action, including the passage of landmark environmental laws in the United States. The Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts were created in response to the first Earth Day, as was the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Visit www.EarthDay.org to find suggestions on actions, including digital activities, you can take to celebrate this anniversary. And if you’d like to share your own memories of the first Earth Day or your thoughts on climate action, please do so on Science of Mind’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ScienceofMindMagazine/?ref=bookmarks.

Love, in Its Very Essence

In the May 2020 issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine, Susan L. Taylor issues a clarion call to “all the young’uns”: “We need you! A new world is on the way. We need your energy, passion and bold spirit in leadership, as we elders take our rightful place. Linking arms and aims, a new and more equitable world will emerge.”

Taylor, a best-selling author, fourth generation entrepreneur and former editor at Essence magazine, envisions this new world emerging, and it excites her. Today she devotes her considerable talents to National CARES Mentoring Movement, a nonprofit dedicated to a continually deepening commitment to breaking the cycle of poverty through transformational group trainings focused on emotional, physical, financial and community wellness and stability.

Taylor’s guiding principle is love at its very essence. “In the life God has in mind for us,” she says, “love is our only weapon, the assured defense against any offense.”

Coping with COVID-19

As our physical and virtual communities continue to grapple with connectivity in a time of isolation, we want to share your thoughts, ideas and successes in a new envisioning of what it means to be connected.

Arundhati Roy wrote: “The coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to 'normality,' trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

"We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."

Through this newsletter, on the magazine’s website, in our social media and in an upcoming issue of Science of Mind magazine, we’d like to share your stories, whether of struggles or successes.

To inspire each other, to continue to be one community, we ask that you please share your stories and photos with Julie Mierau at Julie@JMWordsmith.com.

Continuously Directed

—by Ernest Holmes

I am a center in the Divine Mind, a point of God-conscious life, truth and action. My affairs are divinely guided and guarded into right action, into correct results. Everything I do, say or think is stimulated by the Truth. There is power in this word that I speak, because it is of the Truth and it is the Truth.

There is perfect and continuous right action in my life and my affairs. All belief in wrong action is dispelled and made negative. Right action alone has power and right action is power, and Power is God, the Living Spirit Almighty. This Spirit animates everything that I do, say or think. Ideas come to me daily and these ideas are divine ideas. They direct me and sustain me without effort.

I am continuously directed. I am compelled to do the right thing at the right time, to say the right word at the right time, to follow the right course at all times.

All suggestion of age, poverty, limitation or unhappiness is uprooted from my mind and cannot gain entrance to my thought. I am happy, well and filled with perfect Life. I live in the Spirit of Truth and am conscious that the Spirit of Truth lives in me. My word is the law unto its own manifestation and will bring to me or cause me to be brought to its fulfillment. There is no unbelief, no doubt, no uncertainty. I know and I know that I know. Let every thought of doubt vanish from my mind that I may know the Truth and the Truth may make me free.

--Excerpted from The Science of Mind.