Planting the seeds of a global heart.
A vision of healing.
"The truth is that we are all wounded.
The only question is whether we use our wounds to hurt others or whether
we use them to become healers"
– Dr. Cornel West
The Power of a Healing
As we sat with Dedan’s question, a poem came into Belvie’s mind:
“Torture” by Alice Walker.
“When they torture your mother
plant a tree
When they torture your father
plant a tree”
(excerpt)
The vision: Helping to inspire the planting of a million trees along the Trans-Atlantic Slave Route in West Africa and the Underground Railroad to honor and remember the millions of unnamed, unheralded and unremembered souls who were lost during the slave trade, and to combat the ravaging effects of global warming and catastrophic climate change.
As the refrain of Alice’s poem echoed through Belvie, a vision of trees began to emerge, and an inspiration for what became Growing a Global Heart.
What emerged in the course of our African journey was a powerful vision of helping to heal the planet from the ravages of catastrophic climate change while honoring and bearing silent testament to the “many thousands gone”–one tree at a time.
In the depths of despair, we realized that the seed of an idea had been planted. The truth is that it felt more like a calling than an idea.
As we traveled across Ghana and Senegal, we were inspired by the number of people engaged in sustainable practices and solutions. We were also struck by how often African-inspired sustainable practices were minimized or marginalized in the context of the global environmental movement. We realized how important it is to highlight and support these efforts, as well as involving people across generations in effects for healing.
“Planting trees in this time of cataclysmic climate change is like stacking sandbags along the shore of a flooding river. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but sometimes that is all you have to fight with. But what we do know is that when we all labor together in the face of a common peril it transcends division and builds community.” – Dedan
Over the next many years, beginning in Selma, Alabama, the vision of tree planting and the seed of Growing a Global Heart became a reality.