I am a descendant of slaveholders. My five times great grandfather was a man named Josiah Anderson, who was listed owning two slaves in the 1810 Hardin County, Kentucky census. It is said that the Andersons came from West Virginia, from where they were ironically fighting for their own freedom during the Revolutionary War. In a story that begs to be written, Josiah’s grandson, Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, became a staunch abolitionist and one of only 21 souls to join John Brown’s infamous failed attempt at instigating a slave revolt at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in 1859. Historians say that this event helped hasten the Civil War. What has captured my fascination in reviewing my family history and its involvement in the institutionalization of racism and believing that one human can legally own, torture, or kill another, is that within this system, one of my distant relatives not only questioned it, but gave up his life defending what he knew to be right. That dramatic transformation of belief occurred within the course of a single generation gap.  The day after Independence Day in 1859, Jeremiah wrote, “Millions of fellow beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every mans, but how few are there to help. Just as there are few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the center.” Although I firmly believe that their unwavering commitment to racial equality was just and on the side of right, their methodology was not. 

Reflecting also on the last several months of events in the United States, I have often wondered what Jeremiah would have felt, said, or even done.  What has history’s lessons taught us, and what could I learn from my great-grand uncle's voice out of an unmarked and unknown grave? Although history has taught us that progress moves more in a spiral than in an upward slope, I was naïve to think that having elected our first black President, that we were continuing to move in an upward trend in terms of equality and the elimination of prejudices in its many forms. Now I see how much Jeremiah’s words still ring true to this day- 157 years later. 

Today in 2016, the current President-elect has unarguably moved our nation more in the direction of division and hate rather than unity and love. Cabinet appointments have recently been made that give evidence that hateful campaign words were more than just rhetoric. Although I do not believe that every person who voted in support of the current President elect holds racist or discriminatory thoughts and beliefs, I have been absolutely dismayed by the general apathy I have witnessed regarding events, and I question now which is more damaging. If history is any guide, apathy appears to be more dangerous than extremism. What gives me great hope; however, is that we have become such an amazingly diverse country.  I believe that it is our diversity that makes us stronger-and it is unprecedented in the history of the world.  So America is again reaching a crossroad.  And another Anderson asks, “Whose duty is it?” “Is it yours?” Is it mine?” The answer is clear to me:  it has always been, and continues to be, every one of us. Right or left.  I would hope that each and every one of us at some point in our lives have thought: what would I have done if I had a time machine and could go back and make a difference? Today, the better question seems to be, what will I do now?

One of the many themes I wanted to teach my children in Isora and the Pearl of Wisdom is the interconnectedness of humankind with the natural world.  I grew up in an atypical way in the 1970s—my family lived far out in the country for a few years away from the modern conveniences of power lines and telephones. We got our electricity from a generator and even used car batteries. Surrounded by natural beauty, I grew up with a deep appreciation of nature that many of my peers didn’t seem to share.  I would spend hours cross-legged in a field, braiding strands of grass while waiting for groundhogs to peek out of their holes. Something I learned was that groundhogs are more patient than little girls! 

Now I live in the suburbs and my two boys are having a very different childhood experience than I did. My boys live in an age of fantastic technology that I couldn’t have imagined when I was young. I admittedly have allowed them to probably spend too much time watching movies and playing video games, but I have also tried to find ways to teach them to at least have an appreciation for, if not feel some kind of interconnectedness, to nature.

Living in the Pacific Northwest has provided ample beautiful scenery in which to hike and explore. We have a small garden in the backyard and through the years have grown some of our own fruit and vegetables. We try to attract as many beneficial insects as possible with a wide variety of perennials and shrubs. One of my most memorable moments with my youngest boy, Alex, was watching an Orb-weaver spider put the finishing touches on his web. 

We also had a Fibonacci Day, in which we collected several objects from the natural world that contains the Fibonacci sequence. For those of you who are not complete geeks, the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers in which each number in the series is formed by adding the two numbers before it. It begins like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ect….  Well, I normally dislike math and would be rolling my eyes by now, but what knocks your socks off is that this very pattern is seen almost everywhere in nature. We collected pinecones, sunflowers, flower petals, and leaves, and also bought a pineapple and an artichoke. Spreading them out on the table we counted the number of spirals in the fruit and sunflowers, petals in the flowers, and numbers in leaf arrangements. Count them and you will have a Fibonacci number. Who would have thought that by gazing into an artichoke you would see something so divine? So profound and perfect? This is where science and nature meet God. 

For more information about Fibonacci, check out: