everything matters

Once when my sister, fourteen years young than me, was in college, I had written her a letter passionately voicing my concern about some issue that was up for me at the time. I do not remember the subject that aroused my energy.

My sister wrote back, dismissively, that 'you are stuck in the sixties, people like you think everything matters'.

I have never been stuck in the sixties. She was a toddler in the last few years of the sixties. I was in my girls' Catholic high school in dreamy oblivion. I read the news so I knew about hippies, protests, civil rights marches but I was not, and have never been, a hippie.

I did not address her denigration of hippies in my response.

I wrote back, simply, "everything does matter".

I remember feeling that the short sentence 'everything does matter' was powerful.

Today, more than ever, I know that everything matters, that everything is interconnected.

If everything is interconnected, I am connected to the greedy rich, to the reckless destruction of our planet for private profit and to everything.  Hummingbirds, starry nights, rustling sounds in a forest that hint of the animals that live there. The way sunlight causes redwood sorrel, which prefers shade, to fold to avoid too much sunlight. I am connected to the redwood sorrel.

Everything matters.