A Fine Balance
“Mommy-o,
I can go outside?” my two-year-old son, Kai,
just asked me, looking expectantly out our
screen doors to the open air stretching out
behind our home. Every day, he asks me this
question after I bring him home from daycare.
And every day, I’m grateful that my answer can
be Yes.
You
see, though we now live on my home island of
Hawai‘i, Kai was born in Berkeley, California on
September 9, 2020, the day the sky turned orange
in the Bay Area.
I
woke up that day knowing he’d be coming into the
world. I had a 10 am appointment at the
hospital. I remember opening my eyes and
wondering if I had accidentally slept through
the day because it was so dark, much darker than
it should have been at 8 a.m. I went to the
window and peeked through the blinds. Then,
alarmed, I ran to the front door to get a better
look from the courtyard of our apartment
complex.
Activist Kahea Pacheco writes
about the day her son was born, fear and urgency
around the climate crisis, and the grounding she
finds in her Seven Generations perspective in
this essay from our Autumn print issue.
|