It’s been a little cooler here the last few days under the beautiful River TREE. Though unfortunately, in this neck of the woods, we have had to start doing a little watering to maintain the God given beauty of our gardens.
Pretty much recovered from my outing with the Golden Knights in Mt. Vernon last week. No major physical injuries, and in addition to the fun, I got an increased appreciation for the dedication and commitment of the Golden Knights as individuals and as a 95-member unit.
They were formed as an Army competitive skydiving team in 1959 and now travel around the world participating in demonstrations, competitions, providing tandem jump opportunities and devoting a tremendous amount of technology and skill to ensuring the safety of their jumps and amazingly to videoing their “victims” or guests as they make their 15,000-foot leap into the clouds.
After I was safely back on the ground, I asked my videographer how many jumps he’d made, and he matter-of-factly noted around 2,700 and then quickly added that his more senior comrades have done 14,000!
And while their skills and preparation are amazing, my wife Dorothy had asked me prior to my jump if anyone had died during a jump, and though I pooh poohed her concerns, I did look it up and found that Golden Knights had died d u r i n g jumps both last year a n d t h e year before, although they were both competition or demonstration jumps, which undoubtedly push their skills and technology to their limits.
And, on the subject of amazing dedication and commitment, I had someone last week ask me what the heck the River TREE Partnership was. Kind of thought we’d covered this before, but here goes: first a couple of pertinent quotes: “From the seed of knowledge grows the TREE of citizenship & democracy.” And… “When we embrace God’s infinite and indefinable love for us His children, we both acknowledge and grow the TREE of this His loving creation.”
We are an apolitical, informal public/private partnership of individuals & organizations with the goal of encouraging/promoting lifelong civic and spiritual awareness, learning and commitment. If you meet that very broad criteria, we’d love to have you join in helping to build this partnership and grow this amazing River TREE.
What are we doing?
■ Working to get passage of legislation designating a State Civic Seal of Recognition for high school seniors who’ve taken qualifying classes and done sufficient work in the community to meet specific criteria, speaking to their qualification for it.
■ Working to pull together partners around the state to create community events to support youth civic commitment efforts.
■ Working to create youth “Civic Seals Teams” or clubs in communities around the state to support youth achievement of the state Civic Seal of Recognition.
■ Working with religious institutions to encourage innovative ecumenical outreach and commitment.
■ Meanwhile, we’re reaching out to the Golden Knights and our military recruitment partners to see if we can make available other tandem jumping opportunities for potential partners around the region. Pretty exciting when you think of it.
■ And we continue to work with our legislative and military partners to keep our legislation at the forefront of everyone’s minds, and we have some exciting opportunities for everyone to explore their spiritual life at three locations around Perry County and in the coming weeks, you’ll see flyers which will hopefully further open the doors to spirituality.
Well, we have some watering to do to see if we can grow this River TREE, so I’d better get to it.
Give us a holler if you can.
