So I’m having breakfast with Meryl Streep. I’m eating eggs over easy with rye toast, she and her 2 kids are eating blueberry pancakes. Well, we’re all in the same restaurant, Izzy’s on 15th Street in Santa Monica. Well, she’s at the table next to mine. Everyone in the restaurant is pretending she’s not there but we all know. Meryl Streep is eating blueberry pancakes as if it’s an ordinary event and we’re spinning wildly, pressed into our booths unable to breathe in a heightened moment, the kind when you know nothing will ever be the same again. This breakfast happened 36 years ago and I can still remember every detail, the brown-haired waitress trying to stay professional, how the sun reflected off the morning counters and the only sound heard was the click clack of dishes. It’s like remembering where you were when JFK was assassinated, or remembering the smell of the Pacific Ocean as the air flashed green in the setting sun.
They say a heightened moment can be a teacher, that we’re changed if we’re willing to listen to the lesson. We are living in a heightened moment, swaddled in layers of deep fakes and AI bots, our reality ripped out from under our footing. The earth is 2½ degrees warmer and we’re watching the Charles River rise as our forests fill with suckering insects. Leo Tolstoy said that everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves. Except maybe for Thoreau. I don’t know what his heightened moment was, but he changed and he moved to Walden Pond and didn’t pay taxes. Tolstoy refused to serve in the army. Gandhi took up nonviolence.
Did I change from having breakfast with Meryl Streep? I was in awe of her presence yet I was a cardboard prop in her world. But maybe there was an energy exchange between us of expansive proportions. Maybe she based her next character on how cool I was. Or maybe that’s the moment she decided to start her climate change activism. Or maybe it was when I started mine, because what could possibly be better than having breakfast with a movie star than annihilating the climate crisis?
In the 19th century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton said women needed to believe they deserved the right to vote. But Susan B. Anthony said “Give them the right” and their doubt would melt like the morning dew. So in 2022, when the United Nations declared a healthy environment to be a right, what did it mean to you? Do I believe we deserve that right? Yes. Am I willing to protest for that right? Yes. Go to a rally for it? Yes. Risk my life for it? I don’t know. But as long as we don’t fight for a right, we won’t get it or keep it. And to fight for it, we have to believe we deserve it. So let’s start by maybe eating blueberry pancakes. Made locally. Together. While listening to the curiosity of woodchucks and the raw aching of red oaks. So that we can build community, make connections and strengthen our resolve.
Thea Iberall, Ph.D., is on the leadership team of the Jewish Climate Action Network–MA. SheIberall is the author of The Swallow and the Nightingale, a visionary fiction novel about a 4,000-year-old secret brought through time by the birds. In this fable, she addresses the real moral issue of today: not whom you love, but what we are doing to the planet. Iberall is also the playwright of We Did It For You! Women’s Journey Through History — a musical about how women got their rights in America, told by the women who were there. Along with her family, she was inducted into the International Educators Hall of Fame for creative teaching methods. In her work, she bridges between heart and mind and teaches through performance, the written word, poetry, sermons, workshops, and storytelling. www.theaiberall.com.
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