preservation | Leslye Joy Allen

by Leslye Joy Allen

Back in the day in Atlanta, Ted Turner, the TV mogul, was keen on making sure television shows like Jacques Cousteau’s nature shows stayed on the air. Turner believed in the preservation of our natural environment. He drove an economy car and at one time he had an office without air conditioning. This was his contribution to not contributing to dirtying up our environment. When I was a teen, I thought he was just another eccentric White multi-millionaire. Yet, when I listened to his reasoning about cleaning up the environment, he made so much sense.

Now, my late maternal grandmother, Lorena Wilkes Wilson was born in 1886. She lived through the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 when she was a student at Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University). I remember that sunny, warm, Fall day when I was in my teens. A large flock of birds swarmed our front yard. I heard them. “Some bad weather is coming,” Grandma said. “It’s probably going to snow,” she said. I looked at her confused, “Grandma, it’s almost seventy degrees outside. Where is the snow coming from?” She stared back. “The birds know. They plan for bad weather. So when you see a swarm of them, you can be sure some bad weather is on its way.” Well…

right after that week of unseasonably warm temperatures, the snow came just as Grandma predicted. A well-read, well-educated Black woman from a small Georgia town she was. I remembered that my grandmother was born before there were any weather men and women on TV. She relied on nature to tell her how to prepare for bad weather, when to plant, and how to dress. I also remembered how cool Ted Turner was talking about saving animal populations and not disturbing the food chain. Yet, I also remember people being turned off by things like recycling and driving economy, rather than luxury, cars. Most people I knew then really didn’t want to hear any of this.

As I currently watch reports about one hurricane after another, about how deforestation has destroyed our natural speed bumps, I am grateful to Grandma and Ted Turner. I wonder what people would think or say if I told them that I recently spoke with a scientist who told me that almost all of us are consuming tiny bits of plastic every time we eat seafood because we have dumped so much plastic on the ocean floor that the fish are now infested with much of this plastic. The scientist said there was a guy working on some technology to clean up that ocean dumping ground. Yet, I honestly hope that what I just wrote made you a little sick to your stomach.

I hope you will recycle your bottles and cans and papers rather than throw them in the trash. I hope you will think about the health and well-being of future generations. And I hope someday that one of your children or grandchildren writes about you and thanks you the way I have to thank Ted Turner and my maternal Grandmother. They both taught me to pay attention to and to respect all of creation on and in the only home we have; and to treat this home like the temporary home that it is and one that I must share with all of creation. I hope you will too! Àṣé!

I’m still not blogging as much for a while…So, you are welcome to read my older blogs until I return later (trust, there is some good stuff in my archives at my blog)…I have to get my dissertation finished, and blogging and responding to every little detail is not on the agenda…In the meantime, stay focused, and stay woke, and for God’s sake don’t fall for the easy answers because the news media is full of “easy answers.” Do your research. Think for yourself. Peace and Blessings. I will see you when I see you. — Leslye Joy Allen

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by Leslye Joy Allen

Adire Eleko cloth (Yorùbá, circa 1960)

Imagine you have just graduated with an architectural engineering degree from a prestigious university. You rank at the top of your class. You cannot wait to build skyscrapers and office complexes and churches and do the remodeling and refurbishing of old buildings. Yet, you cannot build a bird’s nest. A bird builds its nest without any training or instructions; and that bird’s nest often withstands torrential winds and rains and storms while buildings lose shingles, windows, and some even collapse. I watched this happen once during a storm well over fifteen years ago.

Power lines were down; branches of trees were down; some trees fell in the streets and across yards; some roofs had missing shingles and damaged gutters; there were a few broken windows; and even the tree in my backyard with a three-year-old abandoned Wren’s nest fell down, but the nest itself was still intact, as intact as when I watched Mama Wren build it. That nest had no glue, no concrete, no cement, no steel, no aluminum, no iron, no rubber, no mortar. It contained nothing that we humans associate with the secure building of anything. Yet…

a Wren is just one species of bird, right?! You could argue that a Wren will never earn a college degree, build a skyscaper or play a guitar. It was not designed to do any of that. Yet, the Wren that built that nest in a tree in my backyard simply did what Nature and/or God (or whatever you call this “Life Force”) designed and created it to do.

The leaves change colors and drop from the trees every year in the Fall and then, in the Spring, the multi-colored blossoms appear everywhere on all kinds of flowers and trees. This all happens without a stop watch or a clock or a wake-up call or even a calendar. Creation, great and small, does what it was designed and created to do.

We, humans, are not so pliable or obedient. We find humility and our place only when we recognize that it is not so important to be the first to do something or to be able to do something that someone else cannot do. When we recognize that we are good at something, we must also recognize that someone before us did something that made it possible for us to do whatever it is we may be good at doing now. And someone (or some creature) also has talents we do not possess. Humility is always found in that place where one finds his or her niche and recognizes that in that niche, they make their contribution just like everyone else. It’s just that simple, and just that complex, all at the same time.

Àṣé!

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Tag Archives: preservation