‘Jimmy Dunne Says’

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning, and I bicycled by a dad gardening in the front lawn of his home. He had a good sweat going on digging a hole for a little bush.

From the look of his snappy home, he wasn’t out there to save a few bucks on a gardening bill.

My guess is he’s tapping into something that goes back a couple of thousand generations in all of us.

He’s tapping into a connection, a need, a gravity to be one with our home. This place we’re so privileged to be a guest at. Our extraordinarily amazing, colorful, delicate, evolving earth.

And in planting that bush, in some way, we’re holding in our hands where we came from. We’re seeding something with the wonder of imagining what it will become.

We’re all hurting right now, in varying degrees. Political divisiveness as we’ve never seen. The Middle East. Inflation, gas prices, nuclear threats, all-things the environment, Ukraine.

All this stuff exacerbates our worries about what we’re handing over to the next generation and to their children.

We may not feel it, but it’s there under the surface of it all. And we don’t know when it will end—or what we can even do about it.

There’s a wonderful Ukrainian toast they make at large family events; they click their glasses, look each other in the eyes, and say something that translates to, “Know who you are.”

What a beautiful thought. To know who you are.

From the moment of waking into the world in a loving mother’s arms, we spend a lifetime trying to uncover the answer to this ultimate puzzle and mystery of life.

Maybe just touching the earth is a good place for us to start.

To show our deference to our home. To remind us to find a humility, a thankfulness, for who and where we are.

To touch, and feel, and smell, and hear, and witness nature.

Or maybe making a special weekend morning with our kids or grandkids to stick some bulbs in the soil with our hands.

Maybe it’s taking a walk at dusk with our dog—listening to what the swaying trees in town that blanket us may be trying to whisper.

Maybe putting our feet in the gentle, lapping water where the warm sand meets the cool greeting of the ocean.

Maybe it’s a morning picnic at the park with our families where the blue jays, hummingbirds, parakeets, and song sparrows are the loveliest choir to a stunning song.

Or maybe it’s when we take a bite of that apple, or cherry, or orange—and we taste it as we haven’t tasted it in a while. And wonder where it was born and where it grew to be as

beautiful as it is.

Maybe it’s about tonight after we go around our home and turn off all the lights. Stepping out in our backyard all by ourselves.

Looking up.

And thinking about how what we see and what we feel will never be exactly this way again.

And in those moments, when we hold in our hands that rich soil, may we hold a little bit of who we were, who we are—and who we will one day be.

Jimmy Dunne is a modern-day Renaissance Man; a hit songwriter (28 million hit records), screenwriter/producer of hit television series, award-winning author, an entrepreneur—and a Palisadian “Citizen of the Year.” You can reach him at j@jimmydunne.com or jimmydunne.substack.com.