To start, I want to thank the Ixonia community for letting us talk, laugh, and create with their children. The stories they’ve shared, and the joy I have felt working on this project, are genuine experiences I’ll never forget. Kids have a special way of opening up their hearts that reminds us to do the same, and I truly believe they’re our most sincere form of hope. 

 

Before you start reading their words, I want to talk a little about how we read their words. With any child or preteen, I think it’s easy to read their perspective as limited— they understandably have a lot to learn about the world. However, I think we often overlook their simplicity and wholeheartedness while dismissing their views as naive or cute. When really, what do we think we know? Sure, we know more about the vastly complicated hierarchies and disillusionment to be found in our made-up world of class, money, and value. But what about the real world, the things that exist without us? The trees, the grass, the lakes, the atmosphere, the sun, the ice, the birds… just because we can name them, and maybe understand their chemical makeup, does that mean we appreciate them more? Does it mean we see the Earth more fully?

 

I ask these questions to argue our “advanced” understanding of the world. I argue that it is indeed children who see the world most clearly. They see our home for what it really is, and are amazed. This planet of rock and dirt and water teems with more life than we could ever dream of understanding, and children find this mesmerizing. Do you remember what it felt like to see a butterfly for the first time? To have it land on your finger? Do you remember how you gasped the first time you saw a doe with her baby fawn, paused and staring back at you? I fear that too many of us have taken this awesome biosphere for granted. Where is our awe?

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I’ve talked to countless people about how this project was founded to be hopeful and positive and worth celebrating. About how we wanted this project to be a beacon of joy for the Ixonia community and beyond, in the midst of all the chaos we face. But truth be told, this effort, this website, is not those things. It is the kids, whose stories and art fill these pages. They are hopeful, optimistic, positive, and worth celebrating. All that we do should be for these kids who see the world in a light we have mostly forgotten.

 

Every good parent has the goal of giving their kid(s) the best possible. And frankly, every community should have this goal. Which is why we all must continue asking ourselves: will the children of today see a world more united by love, community, and decency in forty years? What we leave them will be shaped by what we do today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and what we fight for the rest of our lives. All this talk about investing in the future, as if it is some abstract savings account— no, the future is right in front of us! Running around on the playground, growing up faster and faster each year. The words they’ve written, and the drawings they've painted, are at once a time-capsule and a foreshadowing.

So, let’s see the world as kids again; let’s read their words and really try to see our miraculous planet with eyes of wonder again. Let’s make these kids as proud of us as we are of them.

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Thank you all,