Blessing the Backpacks

& Some Thoughts About Kids’ Books, Loss & 9/11

I AGREE WITH BOTH MY FELLOW POET, GEORGE BILGERE, WHO SAID:
“I vote to replace the Pledge of Allegiance with this poem,”
and with Diane Ackerman, who wrote it.

School Prayer
by Diane Ackerman

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

And how about this blessing from Kaira Jewel Lingo’s Newsletter “We Were Made For These Times” (9.4)

May your mind be filled with a thirst for what is good, beautiful, and useful.
May your light shine in ways that bring light to others.
May your words become a source of blessing.
May your presence help bring peace, especially when others choose indifference.
May you be protected as you come and go.
May you be given peace.

On the last Sunday in August, my church has a tradition of “blessing the backpacks.” This rowdy ritual involves inviting anyone who brings a backpack to school to bring it onto the stage and hold it open to receive blessings from the congregation. Led by our minister, folks in the Sanctuary call out and fling their blessings forward, loudly tossing such words as Love, Courage, Curiosity, Fun, Respect for our Teachers & Each Other, Choose Joy! … and ending always with an extra helping of Love. Such a beautiful show of community support! And don’t we wish it could have been true for this precious little boy and hundreds of others like him who have been unjustly detained (and some deported). For all the ‘Little Liams’, may your light shine in ways that bring light to others and may you be protected as you come and go.

If you’ve been hanging out with me for awhile, you likely know that my interests peck and poke and sometimes even dance their way into a variety of different spaces. My last post cited Mary Oliver, who despite a deeply troubled childhood, went on to become one of America’s most beloved poets. September 10th would have been her 91st birthday. The recently released documentary about her life, “Saved by the Beauty of the World,” is beyond lovely and I hope you’ve treated yourself to watching it. If not, maybe this is the nudge you’ve been waiting for. Having declared herself saved as a child by the woods, here is what Oliver wrote years later about how to best teach children. Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of a world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms … Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Some of us wonder these days what has become of “education”, what it means anymore, where has art and music and civics and cursive gone and how do we get it back? Imagine the taste of sassafras and wintergreen … going to school with peppermint in your pockets. I’ll bet Robin Kimmerer would agree.

Since we’re on the subject of education, thinking about both students and teachers and what is required to be one these days, you might appreciate Liz Prather’s warm and tender essay about a ‘composition for teachers’ class she took a long time ago with Wendell Berry. In it she says things like Berry believed literature mattered because life mattered … He wasn’t really teaching us composition as much as he was teaching us how to pay attention, think independently, and take responsibility for our words and our lives … I don’t remember learning a specific skill from him (other than “omit needless words!” a lesson I still haven’t mastered), but he made more of an impression me, as a teacher and a writer, than any other teacher I’d ever had. He witnessed to us the importance of honesty and practicing one’s own sermons … The world has just said goodbye to a great poet, a great Kentuckian, a champion of rural agriculture and community, a man of letters. I say goodbye to my old teacher, Wendell Berry – forever in my heart and forever in my classroom.

I may be veering a bit off course here (I do that sometimes) but do you remember the song “All God’s Creatures Got a Place in the Choir”? You’ll have a chance to see and hear an especially delightful version of it at the end of this post. For me it brought to mind a poem by Paulann Petersen, one of Oregon’s retired teachers and our own Poet Laureate Emerita. You can skip over it of course, but I hope you won’t.

Special Needs
by Paulann Petersen

Special. Because she needn’t
sing a note. Her specialty being
unneeded antic gesture—the at times
right-in-rhythm wave and flap of her hands,
the at other times out-of-sync swoop and pump
of her arms, those tilts, those bobs of her head.
Pulses of joy. Her constant ecstatic motion.
A sung note from her, now and again?
Perhaps. No one can tell.

One wildsmile after another, she holds her place
on the riser’s third tier. In the all-girl
Fernwood Middle School Choir
she’s a member
in good standing.

Who would sayshe doesn’t belong? Not the twenty-two
other girls who specialize in keeping
their eyes straight ahead on their director,
on her gesturing arms. They lip-read
their leader’s mouth as she swiftly forms
a lyric’s words. She models the script
her girls strictly follow. Their part
is to stay aligned with the song, regardless
of outbursts from the girl who attends
no regular classes, the one
needful of special care.

Between two numbers,the girl shouts out a bit of needling impatience,
anxious to get to the next number.
The director laughs, quips aloud,
“She’s said what’s on all our minds!”
Stretching her arms toward her group,
she coaxes them into the first notes
of “I See the Light,” while that girl’s
upper body jolts into charades of the lyric.

On cue from their leader,the twenty-two have given the twenty-third
their gift. They make room for the odd one
by not giving way to her distractions—
the only possible way this
Special Needs girl could,
with their choir,
stand and sing.

Before we get to the part about books, let’s talk just a little about screens.

A July opinion piece in The Epoch Times, by Jeffrey A. Tucker opens with these words:

I just left a crowded theater showing “Toy Story 5,” a movie that is already a huge hit and the highest-earning film so far in the charming series loved by audiences. This one has a biting angle that we all know to be true. Not only does digital obsession threaten the childhoods of kids; it even threatens this movie franchise, which has featured all the now-famous and very physical toys of Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, Rex, Bo Peep, and Jessie, the yodeling cowgirl who has the main role in this film. In fighting back against the screen hegemony, Pixar is not only calling for the redemption of kids, but also striking a blow for the subject of the movie itself … The movie doesn’t go full “technology is evil, go live in the woods” mode. Instead, it shows a nuanced warning: Screens and apps aren’t inherently bad, but when they become the default way kids connect and play, something important gets lost—imagination, face-to-face friendship, the messiness of real play, and the role of physical toys— and, by extension, real-world interaction … Digital media are fantastic at flooding the world with information. However, they are terrible at imparting learning, discipline, judgment, and wisdom. They have made it super easy to seem to know something, but have crowded out serious thinking and learning … ”Toy Story 5” is a magnificent propitiation for the sins of this industry and society in general for even for a moment thinking that digits could replace real experiences. The closing of schools and the forcing of students into an online addiction, from 2020 to 2022, was nothing short of evil. A long and arduous penance is in order.

And it’s these words that carry us right to the first book I’d like to bring to your attention. Written for today’s ‘tweens and younger teens (those known as GenAlpha), the book is titled The Amazing Generation, authored by Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation) and Catherine Price (How to Break Up With Your Phone). They’ve teamed up to create a graphic novel that speaks directly (and honestly) to kids. Their goal is to empower young people to stand up for themselves by choosing a life that is not dominated by screens and social media. There are plenty of online reviews geared to parents and other adults, if you’re interested, but the one I liked best is by Emily Cherkin on Parent Map, updated on January 13, 2026 with an estimated reading time of 6 minutes (I love it when they do that)

Here’s a direct quote from Cherkin, whose ‘mini focus-group’ is her own 14-year-old daughter and her daughter’s friend: “Having spent years working at the intersection of children and technology, I approached this book with a critical eye. Within its intended scope, Haidt and Price do an excellent job addressing the realities Gen Alpha faces, and, as illustrated by my mini focus group, they have succeeded in creating a guide that feels empowering, hopeful and age-appropriate for young readers.“

Here’s a bit of wisdom I borrowed from my granddaughter’s Facebook page. Sure wish I had it 60 years ago when her dad and his siblings were little – also makes a nice segue into the other two books I’ve become especially fond of.

A provocatively thoughtful story about a group of young friends, The Hallway of Doorknobs is written by Lynn A. Haller and beautifully illustrated by Justyna Nowosadko. This lovely book takes five kids and their readers on a “journey to the feelings inside.” It is a charming adventure, inspired by the author’s training in Internal Family Systems (IFS) and is meant for children of all ages, not only to read, but to digest and to talk about with each other and with trusted adults. The book includes a guide for parents about talking ‘feelings’ with their little ones, and an accompanying workbook for kids who just might recognize some of the characters behind the doors. Take a look. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

And again, a nice segue to another sweet book titled Here and Now and Small and Close, beautifully illustrated by Stacey Chomiak, and written by John Pavlovitz (yes, that same John Pavlovitz whose Substack post, The Beautiful Mess, is one of my regular reads). It’s a very special DIY book for little kids about practicing kindness.

I know today’s post is long and its offerings are numerous. Mind you, I’m not apologizing, just acknowledging. But if you’ve stuck with me this far, I have a little gift for you. Remember Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree? Remember what happened to it in the end, as a result of all that giving? UhHuh. Sure you do. And if you’re like many of us, you’ve done some grumbling about it. Well, so did Topher Payne, who not only grumbled, but actually did something about it. Here you go … a PDF download of The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries. You’re Welcome!

And so we come now almost to The End, which is always where the next story begins. But we’ll get to that next time. For now, a reminder about the new Netflix documentary, Turning Point: Generation 9/11 … a powerful and thought-provoking documentary that explores how one single sunny day in September 2001, and its aftermath, shaped a generation. GenZs and most younger Millennials have no recollection of the horrors of that day, while for the rest of us, it is one we will never forget. I didn’t write much about it back then, but I did write this. And I still wonder how today might be different if …

Watch Turning Point: Generation 9/11 on Netflix

Not wanting to end on a too solemn note … try this, as promised. Until next time, let’s be kind to everyone, smile at strangers, help each other out when we can, sing, dance, clap our hands or paws or anything we got, and if you’ve not yet registered to vote, do it!

With Much Love to All God’s Creatures,
Sulima

P.S. Don’t you wonder what it might have been like if Celtic Thunder had been part of the Welcoming Committee for that old guy’s recent visit to Ireland? Oh My!

P.P.S. Today 9-2-5 is being officially celebrated as Dolly Parton Day.

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