This is a repeat post from about a year ago. In honor and memory of Coretta Scott King, I thought it might be a right time to post my Mother's words again. The following is a letter that she sent to me in 1969. I was a young woman in my twenties about to marry and as millions of mothers have done at this special time, my Mother was giving me the benefit of her experience and thoughts about being a woman. I believe her words to me then are just as special and relevant today. I hope all of you, and especially my female readers, will be touched in a positive way. We know no better way to honor Coretta King than with this letter, she truly touched so many lives, in ways I'm sure she never expected during those turbulent times.
Dear Daughter, as you begin this new and exciting phase of your life ... Mother (December, 1969) Remember ....
TOMORROW IS TODAY'S DREAM
Tomorrow is today's dream - these are words from the philosopher Kahlil Gibran -- the entire quotation is "Yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream. And that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars in space." Perhaps we can't afford to be quite so poetic right now, but should be asking ourselves some hard questions ...
Like, how did the world's yesterdays bring it to its confused, uncertain "today?" Also, what tomorrow are we talking about? I think it is one that is rather soon, a tomorrow in which the girl will be a teenager and the teenager our new generation of grownup, managing the world.
What kind of dream? Some people predict that it will be a bad one, a nightmare. Some wonder if there'll be a dream - as the cartoon had it "Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled!"
I am not one of the pessimistic. I think we can and must dream of a tormorrow where there is balance and harmony - man with man and man with nature.
At the moment it's apparent that no one or group of a generation is prepared to say how the dream can be achieved. Ways will have to be worked out by the best minds and most caring hearts of all the generations working hard together and starting now, today, or it will be too late.
I don't know the methods that will be used, but I believe I know some of the qualities, and attitudes, of the people who will make the dream come true -- I believe that girls and women can play a big part as they have in times of distress and crisis, or lack of direction, in the past.
The attitudes, or attributes, I think, must contain large amounts of courage, faith, awareness, intellect, and adventurousness, if we are to find answers and make them work. These are qualities that we learn from others - from our parents, Rabbi, priest, minister, Scout leader, or the example of our heroes and heroines. When my own back needs stiffening, I turn to the example of persons I admire - such persons are not always women - but this is pretty much a girl's night, isn't it? I'm going to share, briefly, the stories of four women who exemplify the things we need today - maybe one or more of them will mean a lot to you too.
I don't know how old the first woman is, but I think just a teenager, although she has been married and left a widow by the wars. Her name is Ruth and we have to go back 3,000 years - to a dusty road on a late summer's day. The road leads from a Moabite village to the land of Jordan and the land of Israel. There are three women standing in the road, crying. One is Ruth, the other a girl named Orpah and there is an older woman, Naomi. All have lost husbands in the war, and Naomi is about to leave to return to the town of Bethlehem where she was born.
Both of the younger girls cling to Naomi and plead with her to go with her but Orpah is persuaded to turn back, to her own home. Ruth, after speaking the loveliest words of faith and total commitment that were ever spoken, goes on the road with Naomi. You must know the words, "Entreat me not to leave thee, and to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest, will I die." It was her choice to go into unknown country, to face the hardships of the road - it must have been a kind of primitive camping - all would be new and different. This is the combination of faith and adventurousness that explorers have. "I've never seen a hill, but I have dreamed a hill behind it; I've never watched a falling star, without the hope I'd find it; and all the islands of the sea, have known my name and called to me." This is the faith and adventurousness of our astronauts. This was the girl, Ruth, and it may well be you taking off to live, or work, on the moon or Mars one day - or maybe in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Miami or Dallas or in lands far away.
The next woman I want to mention was a southern society girl, but she had solid roots in the Chicago pioneer Kinzie family. In today's world, she would have been, as a young married woman, a jet-setter - in the late 1800s, she traveled this country and the continent by carriage, train and steamer. We see her about 1912, when she was already 56 years old and physically handicapped by deafness. Her own life had turned out to be sad, but this woman, named Juliette Gordon Low, was thinking about other things. She had spent summers in Scotland, teaching young, very, very poor Scottish girls some simple skills, so that they could support themselves, and in England, she had seen the very beginnings of the Boy Scout movement with its emphasis on self reliance, high ethics, and skills. She dreamed a new dream - that girls and women shouldn't just be drudges around the home, or decorations around the home - but that they could learn to be terribly resourceful and learn skills that would enable them to take care of themselves, and others, in any kind of emergency, or even in the wilderness.
For the rest of her life, which was only 14 more years, Juliette Low committed herself entirely to this dream - she started the first Girl Scout troop in America, and kept going until there were troops, serving rich girls and poor, from every kind of faith and ethnic community, all over the country. She had enormous courage and inventiveness.
The third woman came rather lately into my life, but her qualities of intellect and faith and courage are an inspiration. She is Coretta King, Mrs. Martin Luther King. Living and working beside a man who had a dream so great that he was willing to die for it, was almost certain to die for it, and did die for it - she was all woman and helpmeet during his life, but found the courage needed to carry on the work for his dream into the future. "I say to you today, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream, I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed; 'We hold these truths to be self-evdent, that all men are created equal' --- 'that the rough place shall be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight. --- when we allow freedom to ring - when we let it ring from every city --- we will be able to speed up that day when all God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing ---- free at last."
Lastly, I want to speak of Rachel Carson, a woman whose reputation for evoking the beauties and truths of natural science in writing was unequaled. Her book "The Sea" for example, is almost sheer prose poetry. Rachel Carson had the courage and commitment to reveal unpopular hard truths to all of us - "you are ruining your good earth, your good sea, your good air." At first we just didn't believe that little bits of DDT could spoil a forest and lake, that a few dozen extra unbreakable, unreturnable pop bottles in the nation's garbage, could really hurt anything, that our government's practic in regard to mining rights on public lands, the exhaust from just one more car, or smoke from any one industry's chimneys could permanently change things. Now, though, we've all had a look at the surface of the moon - we've seen what an atmosphereless, scorched earth could look like - and our dream of the future doesn't include having us live here on earth in astrodomes - we want the life support system that God gave us - animals and plants and bacteria and sea and forest and man all in balance and harmony.
If balance and harmony are today's dream - then working together to find ways of bringing the harmony about is today's task and we must find the courage and commitment of Ruth, the courage and inventiveness of Juliette Low, the courage and womanliness and intellect of Coretta King, the awareness of Rachel Carson and the adventurousness of all those women. 70, 17 or 7, none of us is excused from trying to do what we can as individuals or as members of groups, families or religious groups to bring about the dream.
My Mother passed away last year at the age of 94. As I watched the funeral for Coretta King this morning, I couldn't help hoping that my Mother and Mrs. King are now together and if there is such a thing in the after life, that they are both continuing to be the strong and courageous women they were in life. Goodbye and may you be at peace with God, Coretta Scott King. And thank you.
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