Today is February 29th–Leap Day. Earlier this morning, I read a wonderful post by Seth Godin entitled “The Leap” in which he explained that sometimes we must “leap” into our desired future. At the end of the post, he wrote, “Often, the act of physically writing it down is the most difficult part.”
In this spirit and in the spirit of sharing more of my heart, I would like to make public my “Leap of Faith.”
I try to live my life by constantly asking and answering two questions. The first is what I call my “secular” question, and the other is my “spiritual” question.
My secular question is this: Am I being a good ancestor? In other words, am I living a life in which my future descendants will know that I lived a life where my actions demonstrated that I always kept them and their future welfare in my mind and heart.
My spiritual question stems from my Christian (Catholic) faith, and it is this: Am I living my life in a way that is true to the “greatest commandment”–“To love God with my whole heart, my whole soul and my whole mind and body”?
To be honest, I know I am falling seriously short on both fronts but in the spirit of making “a leap,” I want to publicly declare my intention for the future.
My intention is this: Moving forward, I intend to dedicate all of the financial proceeds from my books and speaking engagements towards the goal of either restoring prairieland or an old growth forest to its original, indigenous state. (The land, upon my death, will then be turned over to an appropriate conservatorship.)
At this point, neither my wife or I have much of an idea of what this work will look like or even how or where it might take place. Our goal for the time being is merely to begin moving in a direction where we can satisfactorily answer our secular and spiritual questions.
And, to this end, we have faith that if we can live into this promise that not only will we be able to say we were good ancestors, hopefully we can also say that we demonstrated good faith toward living the “greatest commandment” by demonstrating our love of Mother Earth–and both her present and future inhabitants.
P.S. Please feel free to check back with me occasionally to see if my wife and I are living into this “leap.”
