I suppose this is part of Emily Dickinson's doing. She's to blame. And oddly enough, so is Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. Go figure. And Ansel Adams, Wallace Stegner, the Audubon movement, Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, The National Endowment for the Humanities, Steve van Matre, The Orion Society, William Stafford, Montana, and Buddha. But so it is. Or, so it seems.

All of the above have moved or impressed me in some way. Some I feel like I've come to know. Others are still distant and barely known, but intuited water brothers -- and sisters. Family. Nature's people, after all.

That is what earthspeaks is all about: giving voice to and for Earth's family. And now that the software and hardware seem to be in place, it's time to get some content out there for you to react to. And I'm a little uneasy about it. Dreaming of Possibility is one thing. Acquiring the skill to manipulate cyberspace and decide on what actually makes it on the site is mind-bending. Nevertheless, here goes. Here comes volume 1, affectionally called Origins. In this issue I've invited some family and friends to help me get started. I think they all will help establish the flavor that will evolve into what earthspeaks will become.

I expect the content of earthspeaks will grow to include copy ranging from poetry to essays, short stories to reviews, commentary to scholarly papers. In the future you might find fine art photography, chapbooks, and other Earth writings for sale.

I hope there will be regular editors shepherding philosophy on a variety of Earth subjects from family to environment, activism to plain and simple observations about the world in which we find ourselves. I'm also hoping for one-time contributors who have found this site and want to lend their own voice to these chronicles. How often new issues are published is still up in the air, but I'm hoping earthspeaks will be at least a quarterly with new issues on solstice and equinox.

earthspeaks.org was born on a Sunday afternoon in January 2001. I was plowing through and playing with life in my office with Music for Airports, probably the ambient offering of the afternoon, playing on my stereo.

I daydream great on Sundays in January. Less stimuli, I think. Fewer nature sounds. Wind, yeah. And that's great. But the wrens don't chatter outside my window all day inviting me out to sit and veg and soak up the daily wonders of the small woodlot that is my Midwest backyard. Also in January, the small ecosystem outside my office window, so easily beckoning in spring with erupting ferns, exploding honey suckle, and flowering dogwood, is gray and retreating. So spaced out in more ways than one, I found myself daydreaming of the possibility of words, communication, and community.

The idea of a cyber community has not always been warm and fuzzy for me. I was a luddite who, in 1985 following the conquest of a masters' degree, celebrated by buying a new Smith-Corona electric typewriter instead of believing in Steve Jobs. Within a couple of years, though, thinking it was for my two daughters, I bought into the monochromatic screen of an Apple IIe. I was drawn into that world like so many of us. Communication took on a new perspective.

It was another five years before I allowed myself the luxury of an internet connection. In that interim came a divorce, daughters seen from a whole new perspective, a lover and new wife, and a Macintosh. And AOL, of course. No web connection, mind you, but departments and chat and "You've got mail!"

And in that time, too, a mellowing in the knowledge that I am, indeed, a born-again Transcendentalist. A liberal arts environmentalist. I've been out of the closet now for, oh, twenty years, I suppose. It was after nine years of teaching junior high English and the beginning of the incredible journey of graduate school that the way began to clear for me. I mean, I didn't know what I was supposed to create in this new open-ended humanities degree program at Wright State in Dayton, but I somehow knew I was in the right place.

And that's where Emily comes in. With the help of guru Jim Hughes, I fell in love with the Nun of Amherst. She is still an enigma, don't get me wrong. She is a mysterious woman to me, but the humanist in me knows her somehow and feels comfortable in her presence. And for that I am grateful.

Put the energy and freedom of loving Emily into my mix, along with nature writers, the freedom to change the unchangeable, psychotherapy, and twenty more years in the secondary classroom, and you've got a romantic self-actualizer who wants to exercise a voice.

So that is how, you see, at least in part, began the earthspeaks.org epic.

Perhaps you will want to take part in it. I hope you, too, are motivated by the idea of giving voice to the elemental in us all; the giving voice to our sense of wonder. Giving voice to wanting to communicate the ideas of the Earth with the people of the Earth: Nature's people.

Do be in touch.

Tom Schaefer
tom@earthspeaks.org