Elderwomanblog

My Solstice Message

2011-12-13T11:23:00.003Z

Like most other children, I loved Christmas. I loved the mystery and magic of it, the scent of pine needles, the gifts, the food, the carols and of course the story. And like most other parents, I wanted my children to have the same experience. But in between my own childhood Christmases and my children’s childhood Christmases there was a very big gap: a gap of fifteen years and half a planet.

Oh I did all the same things that my mother had done and my grandmother had done: dressing the tree, hanging the decorations, wrapping the gifts, stuffing the turkey…and I made sure that the magic of Christmas was there for my children, just as it had been for me. It was—or so they tell me. However, it was not the same magic. Because by the time I had children I had relocated from one side of the globe to the other. So my children’s experience of Christmastime was not just the tree and the gifts and the rich food, it was also sunshine, blue skies and long, lazy days on the beach or at the local swimming pool.

It took me a long time to work out exactly why, as the years went by, I found myself disliking Christmas and wishing it did not have to happen. It was only when a friend of mine—an expert on symbolism—pointed out to me that almost all the traditional rituals we had taken with us from Europe to the Antipodes derived from ancient ways of celebrating the winter solstice— the promise of light returning to a dark, winter Earth—that my reaction suddenly made sense. Out there, in the blazing sunshine on the longest day of the year, why would I want to be lighting candles, stringing tinsel, hanging up stars, bringing in an evergreen tree…all those symbolic ways of honouring a midwinter moment?

Every year, I would hear various Australian friends talking about the irony of sending each other cards covered in snow and holly and eating rich, winter food when even the sparrows and mynah birds were wilting in the midsummer heat. “Let’s do it differently next year” they used to say, and everyone would nod and agree. Yet the old ways persisted. It seemed to me that there remained a deep disconnect between the migrants from Europe and the land in which they now moved. I felt it myself. The traditions and rituals we had grown up with didn’t work there but we all seemed incapable of devising new ones appropriate to the place and the season. To do so would require the kind of deep rootedness in the land from which rituals emerge organically, but the roots of many Europeans in Australia are still in the pots they arrived in. It may take centuries for the transplants to be complete.

By the time I came back to live in the Northern Hemisphere—and eventually, in retirement, to my native land—the over-advertised, stressful, jangly consumerfest that Christmas had become had no meaning or interest for me whatsoever. It now felt like something to avoid. At first, I felt like some kind of Scrooge, half guilty for not sharing what for others was still a joy. But as time went on that feeling dropped away, leaving me free to enjoy my own reality and seek my own sources of delight.

Nowadays, my partner and I quietly celebrate the winter solstice in our own small but meaningful ways—a meditative walk in the wintry woods, a glass of wine, a special, simple vegetarian meal at which we give thanks for the miracle of life within and around us, our deep and joyful belongingness to Earth and our faith that the days will once again lengthen and the sun will eventually return, as it does every year, to bathe and warm us with its rays.

What a joy it is to be free to choose. To be free of what the Russian writer Vadim Zeland—author of the much-acclaimed Reality Transurfing series of books—calls a ‘pendulum,’ a force field of communal energy that draws people into its embrace and traps them there. Over the years, dozens of people have told me they dislike Christmas…even dread it. Yet for one reason or another, they remain caught in the energy pendulum that Christmas has become.

This is one of the glorious freedoms we have discovered in our old age: the freedom, finally, to walk away from energy pendulums and do things in ways that are meaningful to us, regardless of what the rest of the world does. We don’t judge anyone else for their choices. For those who love to buy presents, send cards, hang baubles on a tree, pull crackers and eat some kind of bird, Christmas remains the magical experience it always was. And that’s great. For those who derive a special meaning and joy from the tale of a baby born in a stable, it is a special and holy time. Likewise for those who honour the traditions of their ancestors through Chanukah or Kwanzaa. For us, what is special and wonderful is that we no longer feel obliged to join in any of it. And we are fortunate in that, as far as we know, nobody judges us for that choice.

So my wish for you, as 2011 draws to a close and a new year begins, is that you will be happy in your choices and take delight in your freedom to choose.

(PS: Here's a great article on a similar topic, with lots of helpful and practical advice)

More Murmurations

2011-11-10T15:04:00.000Z

I remember blogging about this last year - or maybe it was the year before. But it happens every year and every year it gives me a thrill to see the winter starlings arrive again in their thousands and dance in the sky. I love to feel the rustling currents of them around me as they swoop low over the hedgerows or take off from the stubble fields with a roar of wings.
Of course, it signals a few months of heavy traffic around the bird feeders, as these brash migrants from northern Europe muscle their way in amongst the more timorous locals. But when they put on aerial ballets like this one so beautifully captured on video by Sophie Windsor Clive (to whom many thanks),I cannot begrudge them even one seed.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Future Primitive - an interview

2011-08-29T09:42:00.000+01:00

Whenever someone asks me a question about how I see the world or what it is that I care about, my mind blossoms with a million answers. Shaping my response to fit the requirement of the moment is always a difficult task for me.

It is so much easier when I can give the answer in writing, for that gives me time to think, to choose, to employ the exact sequence of words and sentences that will best express my truth. But every now and then I am required to speak ‘off the cuff.’ And this was one such time. In this 47-minute interview with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, which took place a few days ago, I had an opportunity to talk about some of the subjects closest to my heart, especially conscious aging, simple living, green spirituality and the role of the elderwoman.

It was a great privilege to take part in Joanna’s project and I would encourage you to check out the Future Primitive website and download some of the other podcasts she has produced.

Meanwhile, here is mine, complete with all its ‘ums’ and hesitations and hastily-chosen words that the perfectionist writer in me would love to improve upon.

(The bio was taken from my website and is not entirely up to date, as I am no longer secretary of the WFA – my apologies to Tess for that oversight.)

Eradicating Ecocide

2011-07-22T14:21:00.000+01:00

Wonderful news!
Polly Higgins's landmark book Eradicating Ecocide has won the People's Book Prize, 2011. Congratulations, Polly!
http://www.eradicatingecocide.com/general/eradicating-ecocide-peoples-book-prize/

And now, the whole world needs to read the book...

...and the whole world needs to come to its senses and recognize ecocide - the destruction of Earth's precious ecosystems - as the utterly heinous crime it truly is.

Shoulder High to a Thistle

2011-07-04T14:18:00.000+01:00

This morning’s walk takes me through my favourite meadow. It is my favourite because it is one of the few fields around here that really is a meadow in the traditional sense, i.e. several unploughed, undisturbed acres of mixed grasses and wildflowers rather than one of those the ryegrass monocultures so beloved of present day agribusiness.

Right now, as we move into July, the meadow is a wild natural profusion, an effusive, flowering, seeding, jumble of colour, shape, size and texture. Except for the well-trodden footpath that runs through its centre, most of the grasses and flowers that live here are waist-high now.

I stand next to a tall, many-branched thistle plant that is at least a foot taller than I am. Looking around, I can see a dozen more such lofty specimens, each bristling with flowers, some already beginning to go to seed. Could that be why they aspire to such a height, to take advantage of the breeze when the time comes to waft their progeny aloft on thistledown wings? It can’t be just to catch the light that they grow so tall, surely, since the entire meadow is in full sun. But maybe, I think to myself, there is no basis for their decision to keep reaching for the sky except the sheer exuberance of the creative, universal life force that powers them. And I feel the tingling flow of that same energy in my own body as I stand there in the meadow in the morning sunshine, shoulder high to a thistle.

Which, when you think about it, is the sort of relationship in which we ought to see ourselves at all times, we puny humans, compared to the vast plant kingdom on which our very existence depends. In fact, if height were a measure of ultimate importance in the scheme of things, perhaps ankle high would be more accurate. Even that might be to exaggerate our own significance.

If we have any importance, any special role to play in all of this, I think it is, as Brian Swimme suggests in his chapter of GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness, our ability to be amazed. Perhaps my role, right in this moment is merely to stand next to this thistle plant that towers over me and reflect on the wonder, joy and beauty of that and of this beautiful sunny morning in the meadow.

Downshifting? Easy Does It!

2011-05-25T18:23:00.000+01:00

I am delighted to announce that my new book on downshifting,
Downshifting Made Easy: How to plan for your planet-friendly future is now available for purchase.

It is one of the first six books in the new ‘Made Easy’ series that my publisher, O Books, is launching at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday June 1st at Watkins Bookstore near Leicester Square in London.

Click here to find out more about the launch. It’s a free event, of course, so if any of my blog readers happen to be around I would love to meet you there.
The aim of the O Books ‘Made Easy’ series is to condense into small, inexpensive and easy-to-read books as much useful information as possible on a wide range of interesting topics.
The aim of Downshifting Made Easy, like that of my book The Lilypad List and so much of my other writing, is to inspire people to live more lightly and joyfully on this beautiful Earth.
In particular, I want to convince my readers of three key things that I have learned from my own experience and from that of many ‘downshifters’ I have met. These are:

- You don’t have to move house in order to downshift to a greener lifestyle

- Downshifting is an inward, spiritual process as well as an outward, practical one

- Once you start downshifting, your life gets steadily more satisfying and more joyful

Please break some (virtual) bubbly against the bows of this little book as it sails down the publishing slipway. And please share this post widely.
Thank you.

Definitely Voting 'YES' tomorrow

2011-05-04T18:29:00.000+01:00

I lived in Australia for 35 years. At election time, I usually voted for a minority party that reflected my true beliefs In other words, whatever one was the greenest. At the same time, I knew that one of the other of the two main parties would almost certainly win. And I definitely had a preference for one of those (the Australian Labor Party) over the other.

Under the Australian system of preferential voting, I could express my loyalty to the party of my choice by voting for them. And at the same time I could indication my preference for the ALP. So that if it was a tight election, my vote would still count. In other words, my vote truly did express what I wanted.In full.

Here in England, under the FPTP system, if I vote for my party of first choice (the Green Party), which has a snowball's chance in hell of winning in my constituency, then in terms of the battle of Labour vs Conservative, mine is a wasted vote. I have no way, here, of expressing my full wishes. I am hobbled.

The UK Tories are telling people that Australians don't like their system. I believe that is a total lie. In all my 35 years there I never once heard anyone express a wish to switch to a FPTP ballot. A lot of people - including me - did say that proportional representation, like many European countries have, would be an even better way to choose a government. And maybe we'll even manage that, eventually. Meanwhile...

Brits are a conservative bunch and don't take kindly to change. I can hardly dare to hope that they will flock to the polls tomorrow to vote 'YES' and change this antiquated and unfair system to a fairer, more flexible and more democratic one. But oh, it would be so wonderful if they did!

Slow Boat to Sicily

2011-04-02T18:22:00.002+01:00

I just arrived back from a wonderful five and a half weeks of 'slow travel' to - and around - Sicily and would love to share some of the details with you. So if you would like to read about where we went and what we saw, you will find my trip report and pictures at: http://www.elderwoman.org/sicily2011.html

Thomas Berry Meditations Book Now Available in USA

2011-02-03T16:03:00.002Z

Last year, in my role as Publications Co-ordinator for GreenSpirit, I helped to birth June Raymond's wonderful little book entitled Meditations with Thomas Berry. This is a collection, lovingly chosen by June, of some of the most profound and inspiring things that Thomas Berry said and wrote over the course of his long life. And thanks to her, I am sure they will continue to inspire others for many, many decades to come. They will inspire not only people who, like me, were fortunate enough to meet this great teacher during his lifetime, but also those who are now discovering, after his death, what a truly wise man he was. Here is a small sample:

"There is an awe and reverence
due to the stars in the heavens,
the sun, and all heavenly bodies;
to the seas and the continents;
to all living forms of trees and flowers;
to the myriad expressions of life in the sea;
to the animals of the forests
and the birds of the air.
To wantonly destroy a living species
is to silence forever a divine voice."

(Dream of the Earth, p.46)

"Gravitation...binds everything
together so closely that nothing
can ever be separated from
everything else.
Alienation is an impossibility.
We can feel alienated,
but we can never be alienated."

(Befriending the Earth, p.14)

"Without the soaring birds,
the great forests, the sounds and
colouration of the insects,
the free-flowing streams,
the flowering fields,
the sight of the clouds by
day and the stars at night,
we become impoverished in
all that makes us human."

(The Great Work, p.200)

"Our human responsibility as one voice among
so many throughout the universe is to
develop our capacities to listen as
incessantly as the hovering hydrogen atoms,
as profoundly as our primal ancestors
and their faithful descendants in
today’s indigenous peoples.
The adventure of the universe depends on
our capacity to listen."

(The Universe Story, p.44)

Some of the quotes June chose were taken from The Universe Story, which Thomas co-authored with Brian Swimme, so some of those words are actually Brian's. And when he first saw the ones June had chosen, Brian remarked that she had chosen many of his favourites.

This little book, with an introduction by June and her guiding notes for meditation, has been on sale in the UK since last August but I am delighted to announce that as from this week it is also now available in North America and elsewhere, through Amazon.com. We eventually plan to have an ebook version available as well, and I shall be announcing it here when we do.

Reciprocity

2010-12-11T18:16:00.001Z

Inspired by David Abram’s marvellous book Becoming Animal, I have been thinking a lot about reciprocity today. And about the lack of it. In our culture, insulated as most of us are from the realities of wild Nature, even when we are in the countryside our surroundings and the creatures that inhabit them tend to slide into a two-dimensional backdrop for our thoughts and human-based activities, like a kind of wallpaper. We forget to be fully present, to pay attention, to interact consciously with whoever and whatever is around us. Tuned only to signals from the human world—the voices of companions, the chatter in our heads and perhaps the music from our iPods—we fail to interact with the more-than-human world and fail to comprehend its depth and richness. We swim through an ocean of potential relationships in wetsuits of distraction and withholding, in spacesuits of hollow solitude.

I have heard people who have spent all their lives in one place and know it intimately say that in a way they feel merged with the land. It is so familiar that it has become a part of them—or they a part of it. They rest into it in comfort. And although they may not remain consciously aware of it at all times, since they know it so well they notice even the smallest change—the swelling of a bud, a slight rise in the water table, the first migrating bird.

But those of us, like me, who have travelled a lot and lived on several different continents, face another problem over and above the problem of tuning out and that is the occasional lapse into nostalgic discontent. Walking under a dull, grey sky, I can so easily find myself yearning for remembered sunshine. Moving through the endlessly farmed and gardened landscapes of my native England I suddenly long for wildness and the challenge of mountain slopes, trackless forests and dry arroyos. And yet, when the wildness of a canyon or the strangeness of a strangler fig (or the sight of leeches crawling up my boots) threatens to overwhelm me I start thinking about the benign nature of my familiar woods.

I have reminded myself, sternly, that every place has its own, particular beauty and that places I have known and loved are, like old friends I rarely see, still a part of me. I belong here and I also belong there…and there, and there, and there. It is wonderful to feel that one belongs everywhere. But the dark side of belonging everywhere is to belong nowhere.

There is one simple answer. It is that old sixties slogan that has never gone out of date—be here now. Be where you are. Be fully where you are. When you see a bird, the bird also sees you. When you touch a tree, the tree touches you in response.

Every step on the Earth is a question to which the Earth supplies the answer—yes I am touching you. Feel that pull of gravity? That’s me holding you tight, loving you. And as you walk, your feet massage my skin. Yes you are a part of me, yes you are here, we are always together, in death or in life it matters not which. We are one. All of us.

Reciprocity. An exchange of gifts. Breathing in and breathing out. To whatever is around us we give the gift of our energy, our attention, our love. And it comes back to us tenfold. Those are the times when the world suddenly seems to swell and deepen around us, everything leaps into three dimensions. Maybe even four dimensions. And there is such richness and beauty all around us that we can only gasp in wonderment. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does…wow!

Tomorrow, when I go for a walk, I think I shall write a reminder on my hand. Delight in where you are. Wherever you are.

Wild Elders

2010-11-24T17:05:00.000Z

Just as we could say that becoming an adult it is the overall developmental task of the child, I believe that the overall developmental task of every adult is to become not just merely an ‘old person’ but a true elder. In my second book, Elderwoman, I listed what I saw as the twenty principles of true elderhood. These are:

Ø simplicity: living lightly on the Earth

Ø deep vision: seeing beneath the surface, the ‘big picture’

Ø passion: caring deeply about what really matters

Ø compassion: for humans and the more-then-human world

Ø non-attachment: to people, possessions etc

Ø Earth-centeredness: living ecocentrically, not egocentrically

Ø comfort: in one’s community and surroundings

Ø connectedness: with all that is

Ø respect: for others, all other life forms and the Earth itself

Ø creativity: in what one does and how one lives

Ø delight: in one’s senses, simple pleasures and life in general

Ø lightness: and the freedom to become one’s true self at last

Ø enoughness: living within our means, and those of the planet

Ø heart-listening: trusting the voice of intuition

Ø peace and quiet: enjoying solitude and a slower pace of life

Ø authenticity: being all one can be, like a ripening fruit

Ø responsibility: playing one’s part in the healing of our Earth

Ø radical aliveness: living fully every moment. A ‘yes’ to life

Ø acceptance of change: knowing it's the only constant

Ø balance: balancing the yin and the yang in one’s life

Although Elderwoman, as its title implies, was written specifically for ‘third age’ women, I have been surprised and delighted by the number of men who have written to tell me they enjoyed it too. But my list of ‘Elderwoman Principles’ is probably appropriate for both genders.

One principle I didn’t include—although in a sense it is covered, in a way, by several of the others, is the principle of wildness.

‘Wild’ is not an adjective one often hears applied to older folk. And yet, when I read the following passage on page 414 of Bill Plotkin’s book Nature and the Human Soul (New World Library, 2008) it set my heartstrings twanging. That’s why I want to share it with you. Bill wrote:

“A genuine elder possesses a good deal of wildness, perhaps more than any adult, adolescent or child. Our human wildness is our spontaneity, our untamed vitality, our innocent presence, our resistance to oppression, and our rule-transcending vivacity and self-reliance that social convention can never contain. We are designed to grow deeper into that wildness as we mature, not to recede from it. When we live soulcentrically, immersed in a lifelong dance with the mysteries of nature and psyche, our wildness flourishes. A wild elderhood is not a cantankerous old age or a devil-may-care attitude, nor is it stubbornness or dreamy detachment. Rather, the wildness of elderhood is a spunky exuberance in unmediated, ecstatic communion with the great mysteries of life—the birds, fishes, tress, mammals, the stars and galaxies, and the dream of the Earth”

Wow! Isn’t that great? I wish I could write like that!

(Thanks to Jay Luttman-Johnson for the picture. It is one of my favourites.)

This Little Cog Went Walkabout

2010-10-01T20:46:00.005+01:00

Today I read blog post about blogging. It was a list entitled
'10 Things Bloggers Should Not Do'.

Item #6 was: You Must Not Fail To Update Your Blog Regularly.

Oops! I have sinned, haven’t I? been away from my desk for several weeks. I have been visiting family members, hiking along trails, reading novels, sitting in the sun, playing with grandchildren, reconnecting with old friends, giving talks, selling books…and then travelling all the way home, coping with a head cold and dealing with the backlog of work that built up during my absence. One thing I have not been doing is blogging.

Strange, isn’t it, how we in our culture manage to turn everything we do into a duty, with sets of rules and obligations and schedules? (Who writes these rules? I often wonder. Who is the Grand Master of the world’s bloggers whose word became law? Where are the stone tablets of blogdom kept?)

The things we love doing, just for the sheer joy of doing them, seem so easily to turn into ‘musts’ and ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ and ‘have tos’. They get swallowed up in the great, busy, bustling, non-stop world of commerce and communication, just as cottage industries once got swallowed up in the Industrial Revolution.

In fact it is a kind of industrial revolution. Industry is our ruling paradigm, here in the West. The factory and its machines and the way they work: reliable, steady, monotonous, turning our widgets at so many per hour from dawn till dusk – or better still, around the clock – have become the measure of all things.

European settlers in places like Australia and New Guinea were baffled and frustrated when their local workers turned up every morning for weeks and then disappeared for days on end for no apparent reason. The aboriginal concept of ‘going walkabout’ was—and probably still remains—totally incomprehensible to the Western industrial mind. (You want to work for me? OK, you report for duty every day of the year except for the miserable couple of weeks of annual leave I’m obliged to give you. Thank goodness my machines don’t ask for time off. If they break I replace them immediately.)

So pervasive is this way of thinking that we expect ourselves to be machines too. We demand reliability, predictability, regularity. We treat our bodies as though they were motor cars, expecting them to perform for us on command, in the same way, every day, no matter what.

This is particularly hard on women, whose juices and energy wax and wane with the moon and who are often forced to try and combine their childbearing with earning a living. It is particularly hard on young children whose biology did not equip them to spend all day trapped at desks, learning about abstract things that for the most part they cannot explore and touch and interact with. It is particularly hard on elders, whose perceived value seems to follow the 'blue book’ principle, whereas elders are in fact much more like wine. Their wisdom grows and matures and becomes more valuable to their communities with every year they remain on Earth.

Well I am not a machine. And I refuse to remain a cog in anyone else’s. I’m retired, out to pasture, doing my own thing. I blog when I really want to, when I have something I really want or need to say. And if that means I am a Bad Blogger, well so be it. Some days I would rather be quiet and walk in the woods or work in the garden or read a book. Sometimes I need to leave my desk and wander far and wide. I need to go walkabout. It’s good for the soul. I can recommend it.

When Will They Ever Learn?

2010-08-23T15:02:00.002+01:00

You would think, wouldn't you, that after the huge environmental disaster that happened in the Gulf of Mexico, there would be a serious re-think about the obvious dangers of deepwater drilling? But no, the search for those last few drops of oil continues unabated. Just so that humans can continue to follow unsustainable lifestyles.

I have been an environmental activist for more than 40 years now. And although most of my energy these days goes into writing about consciousness and all things 'green' rather than getting out there and taking direct action myself, I think it is very important to support those courageous folks, like the ones aboard the Rainbow Warrior, who continue to take risks on behalf of our planet's health and wellbeing.

That's why today's post is a Greenpeace message. I hope you will take action accordingly.

Blessings,
Marian

Stop deepwater drilling for oil in the Arctic from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

Close Quarters

2010-08-12T13:25:00.006+01:00

My blog tour is over and I am home. It was intended to last another week or two, but I decided it was time to stop. Somehow, it felt finished.

This time of year, in my corner of rural England, the vegetation along the lanes has reached its peak. The succession of white is nearing its end. First came the frothy heads of sheep’s parsley, then the sturdier, cow parsnips, then—the white deepening into cream—came the strange, wonderfully-scented meadowsweet. Now even that is past its fullness, dying back, going to seed.

I never see this roadside profusion without remembering Vic.

Vic lived in the village where I spent the latter half of my childhood. He could neither read nor write but he could play, accurately and flawlessly on his piano accordion, any tune you cared to suggest. He carried in his pocket a scrap of paper with his name printed on it in large, block capitals. If ever he needed to sign something he would unfold the piece of paper and carefully, laboriously, copy out the letters.

Vic did odd jobs for our family, and in breaks we would sit and chat and he would tell his tales of local lore and the ways of wildlife.

He also worked for the local council, trimming the roadside vegetation with a hand-held sickle. So he was always outside and his skin was tanned like a leather shoe. I can see him now, his broad, brown face split by a wide smile as I passed him on my bicycle. I can see him with that sickle, deftly trimming back the stems that had begun to hang over into the lane. He always seemed content in the work of his hands and the slow pace of his days.

Trimming back vegetation is a job best done at close quarters, the way he did it. But any day now, with the nesting season pretty well over, a large, noisy, smelly machine will rumble down our lane, its blades held close against the hedge, ripping indiscriminately into everything it passes and leaving ugly gashes in the bark of trees.

Our machines make short work of many tasks. But for everything they give us, they take away more. I know it’s no good trying to return to a life long past, but I’m convinced that we can find slower, more careful, safer, greener alternatives to many of the things we do that are so thoughtlessly—and rapidly—destroying beauty, diversity and ecosystems. We need to build an entirely new infrastructure, based this time on renewable energy, on local economies, on bioregional identities, on that wonderful maxim of ‘thinking globally/acting locally.’ And in doing so, combine the best of the new technology, such as the Internet, with the best of the old, re-skilling ourselves in some of the tasks that people have forgotten to do, such as darning socks and baking bread … and wielding a sickle.

This is why, in Part III of the new book, GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness, I have drawn together experts from some of the major institutions of our culture—medicine, law, economics, education and so on—to talk about the many ways in which this new thinking can be translated into practice.

The old world—Vic’s world—is gone. The new one is being created, brick by brick, person by person, moment by moment. For where consciousness leads, matter will follow. Keep the faith.

PS: If you haven't bought your copy of the new book yet, and you are in the UK, click here to get it from GreenSpirit Books for £10.75. If you are in the USA, here is the link to the Amazon page. And in Australia, it's in stock now at Angus & Robertson. If anyone is having difficulty obtaining a copy, just contact me and let me know.

Spirit of Green

2010-07-20T16:28:00.005+01:00

The other little corner of cyberspace that I paid a visit to this week was a lively, green site called 'Earth Pages'. Here, I talked about the experience of the astronauts who are the only ones fortunate enough actually to see, with their physical eyes, the planet we live on, in all its glorious roundness and wholeness. The rest of us, although we have seen photographs, will never have that opportunity. But we can still imagine it and feel an upwelling of love and caring for our lovely Earth.

My post on Earth Pages is entitled Getting Into the Spirit of Green. To read it, please come and visit me over there.

On Deck - and in community.

2010-07-20T10:51:00.004+01:00

Today's stop on my 'virtual blog tour' is one of the online communities I belong to. This one is the Creation Spirituality Communities Network, a rapidly-growing community of people (currently just over 700) from all around the world whose spirituality is grounded in our lovely Planet Earth and the wonder and beauty of all Creation. I chose this as a way to introduce you to a lovely and interesting community of people.

Today's post, inspired, as my posts often are, by my morning walk along the lanes, is entitled 'On the Deck of the Earthship'.

If you want to leave a comment on this post, you won't be able to leave it there unless you register with the site, so you can simply leave it here.

Today’s topic: ‘Sacred Messiness’

2010-07-09T11:12:00.002+01:00

As I said yesterday, this is a busy week, with two visits in quick succession. Today, thanks to my friend Tess Giles, I am making a guest appearance on a wonderful site called, ‘Anchors and Masts.’ This is a blog that focuses on learning and growth in the context of spirituality and creativity, and my post for today is entitled ‘Sacred Messiness’. You will find it at:
http://www.anchormast.com/2010/07/09/sacred-messiness-2/

Rainy Day Visit

2010-07-08T19:47:00.004+01:00

My virtual book tour, up until now, has been proceeding at a leisurely pace. But suddenly, this week, all that has changed. I am making two stops in the same week—one today and another tomorrow.

Perhaps it is not surprising that I feel the pace picking up. For next Wednesday is the biggest and most exciting event so far: the London launch of the new book. It is a free event. And it will be taking place at St James’s Piccadilly at 6.00 p.m., with a talk by Jonathon Porritt entitled 'Growth, Prosperity and the Human Spirit'. (Click here for details.) If there are any London readers of this blog, I do hope you will join us there.

Meanwhile, today, a big thank you to veteran blogger Rain Truaux for hosting me on her attractive site, 'Rainy Day Thoughts.' As the name suggests, hers is a thoughtful, insightful blog that covers many interesting subjects and concepts. Rain lists her interests as: “… creativity, dreams, relationships, politics, photography, aging, country living, transitions, our senses (all 6), and spirituality.” Sounds a lot like me, as a matter of fact!

So come on over to the Pacific Northwest and join us. You’ll find me, and my ‘buttercup musings’ at:
http://rainydaythought.blogspot.com/2010/07/green-spirit.html

GreenSpirit Book Tour, Stop #3: 'The Madeleine Syndrome'

2010-06-26T12:28:00.003+01:00

Alison Shaffer’s blog, ‘Meadowsweet and Myrrh’ is “…for the whispering poet and enchanted naturalist that dwells within each of us, jostling elbows with the anarchist, the skeptic, the cynic, the scientist, the self-deprecating intellectual and the humble, earnest seeker.”

Alison writes for a Druid Journal called 'Sky Earth Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality' and she is currently writing a book on paganism and peace.

She is kindly hosting me for the third visit on my ‘virtual book tour.’ I hope you will hop over there and read my latest post.

It is entitled ‘The Madeleine Syndrome’

Stop #2 - Seven Generational Ruminations

2010-06-16T10:04:00.004+01:00

Getting to the second stop on my 'virtual book tour' took longer than expected because of a technical glitch in getting my post on to that site (they have such a problem with spammers that the software program they have set up to prevent it behaves like a rottweiler on steroids). But it is up there now and I hope you will visit. The site is called '7 Generational Ruminations'.

As they say in describing their site, "In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations. That isn't just a marketing slogan from an excellent household products company. It can be a guiding principle leading us to low impact living for Sustainable Humanity so we can live in the garden paradise of our dreams."

It is an information-rich site, and as I visit there I find myself surrounded by dozens of posts about electric cars and motorcycles. But that's OK. We each do our part of The Great Work in our own way. Using renewable energy sources to create new forms of transport is an absolutely vital part of it. Changing our consciousness is another.

My post is called 'From Sunsets to Sustainability' and you will find it at:
http://www.7gen.com/blog/elderwoman/sunsets-sustainability

On the Road Again (sort of!)

2010-05-25T17:12:00.004+01:00

When my book Elderwoman was first published, I spent several weeks touring around, giving talks and workshops and signing books. It was all very interesting and enjoyable. I met some great people and saw a lot of places I had never seen before. It was also rather tiring and I was glad to get home again. I am an introvert by nature, so frankly I am more comfortable sitting at home in my slippers and sweatpants than I am dressing up and socializing. (I also wondered whether all the effort and expense had really been worth it.)

But now, there is a much better way to tour around. In terms of spreading the word about a new book it is a lot more effective, as it enables an author to introduce the book to many more people than the old-fashioned book tour. It incurs no cost at all. And best of all, you don’t even have to get out of your old, comfy clothes to do it.

It’s called a blog tour.

So as a way of taking the new book GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness out ‘on the road’, I am now embarking on a blog tour. The tour will take me to a number of interesting places over the next few weeks and I would be delighted if you could come along with me, read my blog posts and meet my hosts. In the process, you will, I am sure, discover blogs that are new to you, and if you like them, please bookmark them and come back to them often. I made the first stop today. So please come and meet my first host, Maddy Harland.
Maddy is the editor of Permaculture Magazine: Solutions for Sustainable Living and a co-founder of Permanent Publications, a publishing company specializing in developing our understanding of permaculture. www.permaculture.co.uk
She is also one of the contributors to the new book. Her chapter, which is one of my favourites as it is so comprehensive and practical and also very thought-provoking is entitled: ‘Permaculture: Bringing Wisdom Down to Earth.’
Here is my post on Maddy’s blog. It's called 'The Web of Connections.' And when you have read it, be sure and check out the rest of her blog and bookmark it. It is great.

Familiarity breeds ...

2010-05-04T14:16:00.006+01:00

... no, not contempt. Just a dulling of the senses: a loss of awe and amazement: a gradual failure of the 'wow' response.

I was thinking about this as I got ready to set off on my walk this morning. It was a beautiful, sunny morning. The birds were singing. There are wildflowers everywhere you look at the moment and the trees are waking into their glorious flush of spring green. And yet I knew it was quite likely that I would walk the entire three miles wrapped up in my thoughts, preoccupied with my inner landscapes, oblivious to all the beauty around me.

People come to the Westcountry for the scenery because it is one of the most beautiful areas of England. Over the long weekend just past, our little corner of Devon was full of visitors, especially hikers. I could see their faces as they walked past our kitchen window. They had that same look of awareness and keen enjoyment as I had myself on our hikes in Spain a few weeks ago. But I am so used to living in these surroundings that quite often I find myself walking in them without really seeing them. After nearly eleven years, I take this beauty for granted. It is only when I go away and come back that I realize how blessed I am to live here.

So I made a point, this morning, of turning my hour of walking into an hour of meditative contemplation, opening my senses as fully as I could to the sights and sounds and smells of this familiar piece of countryside, letting it come into me and fill me with its beauty.

And I took the camera with me so that I could take you with me also as I set off down the lane...

... over the bridge ...

... into the woods...

...and up the path to where the bluebells are blooming...

... in all their quiet glory.

Slowly to Spain and Back

2010-04-20T15:39:00.005+01:00

I took time out from the bustle and busyness of promoting the new GreenSpirit book and - together with my beloved partner and soulmate Sky of course - spent three quiet weeks in Spain. Click here for a description and details of where we went and where we stayed and what we saw.

The Man Who Was Not Green

2010-03-17T16:12:00.003Z

I will not be wearing green today. I will NOT celebrate St Patrick’s Day, today or any other year. No way!!

Do you know why?

Because if the legend is true, then Patrick was a stupid, ignorant man who for some misguided and utterly wicked reason decided to wipe out all the snakes in his native Ireland. What a senseless, idiotic thing to do. And he got sainted for that?

I love snakes. I have had some wonderful encounters with snakes in my life and I treasure every one of them. I respect snakes. I admire them. I want my world always to have snakes in all their glory, their sinuous, undulating beauty, their quiet, mind-your-own business way of getting on with their lives and avoiding messing with mine.

I have only ever had one intimate encounter with a rattlesnake. The snake saw me and rattled its rattle in warning. I obeyed. And I watched as it moved away through the grass, marvelling that for the first time in my life a rattlesnake had spoken personally to me.

In my book, Elderwoman, I told the story of the brown snake (one of Australia’s deadliest creatures) who once lived underneath the floor of our cabin in the Aussie bush, and how that snake was my Zen master, reminding me every day to be mindful, to step with awareness, to stay in the moment.

Yes, snakes are amazing. I love them. Ireland is very much the poorer for not having any. That Patrick was a very, very stupid man. And for messing with the ecosystem he was a sinner, not a saint. I am glad he is long gone.

Balancing Act

2010-02-09T18:16:00.014Z

I’ve become a bit unbalanced of late.
No, I don’t mean that I have been toppling over or that my mental health is any more precarious than it ever was, but that the ratio of time spent sitting at the computer to time spent moving around and doing other things has been steadily shrinking over these past few months. The result: some strong warning signals from my body, including eyestrain and a sore shoulder, forcing me away from my desk. Which is one of the reasons why my blog posts have been sparse (and they were never all that frequent to begin with, as you may have noticed).
I find myself feeling thinking back nostalgically, from time to time, to the early 1990s in Australia when Sky and I were building our own adobe house, making fifty bricks every morning, then turning yesterday’s bricks and stacking the week-old ones.

We planted trees all afternoon and spent almost every waking moment outside except when it was pouring with rain—which in that drought-prone area it very rarely did.
We ate outdoors, showered outdoors, came in only to sleep. Maybe we were unbalanced in the other direction, but it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time. We felt fit and healthy and full of energy. And our little computer that drew its power from a solar panel could only run for an hour or two a day.Human bodies were not designed for a sedentary life. Our species was certainly not designed for a life spent indoors, in airless, climate-controlled houses with fitted carpets and double glazing, eating instant dinners defrosted in microwave ovens. And our children and grandchildren were certainly not meant to spend huge chunks of their days and evenings in front of screens, either passively soaking up commercial propaganda and mindless triviality or vanquishing armies of virtual enemies with their thumbs.

It seems as though we have removed ourselves further and further from any real contact with the Earth. Small wonder, then, that we have wreaked so much mindless havoc. I am not the only one who’s out of balance. Two thirds of us are. And many, worse than me. At least I walk miles every day in the fresh country air, chop wood, grow fruit and vegetables and cook from scratch.

Even so, I have some way to go to get back in balance the way I would really like to be. Which is difficult, since I am a writer and an editor and in this remote, rural area of England where we live it is the Internet that keeps me connected to the wider world. Plus we live in a cold climate and it rains a lot.

Anyone else out there wrestling with a similar dilemma?

Fear of Falling

2009-12-26T14:09:00.004Z

The lanes have been icy and slick this past week and there have been some mornings that I missed my usual walk because I was fearful of slipping. Fear of falling makes me over-cautious. I find myself contracting my muscles, creeping along carefully, head down, shoulders hunched, watching for icy patches, looking at the ground instead of striding out confidently and gazing at the countryside around me. I start thinking about what can happen to people my age when they break hips and that thought makes me contract even more. On days like that, a walk is no fun. Better to come home, make a cup of tea and curl up with a good book.

But the image of that contracted self niggles at me. After a while, I have to put down my book and think about it.

The truth is, I believe, that at a psychic level most of us spend our whole lives in a similarly contracted state. Fear of falling makes us cautious. The possibility of calamity narrows our vision. It makes us shrivel up, huddle into ourselves, vainly seeking comfort by curling up in a ball, like a hedgehog, rather than remaining fully open to everything that is around us and open to all the uncertainties of the next moment.

When you think about it, most of us are afraid, most of the time, though often not consciously so. We fear illness, we fear death, we fear the unknown future. The great mystery that is life scares most of us rigid. So we huddle into the familiar—into our relationships, our work, our routines, our library books and movies: always seeking comfort. I’ve heard it called existential angst. Just to be alive is scary if you let yourself really face life—and death—full-on. So most of us, most of the time, distract ourselves from existential angst and our deep-seated fear of the unknown and what might happen in our personal—or planetary—future. We attempt to insulate ourselves in any way we can think of. Like seeking certainty where there really is none by following, blindly, the precepts and prescriptions of organized religion or other off-the-peg belief systems. In the same way that we seal up cracks in our houses so that no cold draught may enter, we fill up all the spaces in our consciousness into which fear may possibly creep. Thus we put iPods in our ears, jabber away on our cell phones, stay busy with our computers, our text messages, our social lives, our work, the TV…anything to stop ourselves from thinking too hard about all the unknowns that scare us and all the question marks hanging over us as individuals and as what may well be a doomed species.

The truth is that no matter how much we try to kid ourselves, there are no guarantees, no escapes and no safe places. I think that is what Christ meant when he said “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head" (Matthew 8:20) We humans are stuck with our existential dilemma: the dilemma of knowing enough to be scared of the future but not enough to be able to unravel the Great Mystery. All we can do is take a deep breath, step forward and say "yes" to it.

Opening up to whatever may happen, opening up to the unknown future, saying "yes" to life—no matter what—is, I believe, the ultimate spiritual challenge. And it is every bit as difficult to do as striding confidently down an icy lane on a winter morning, looking up and out at the world instead of creeping along, staring anxiously down at one's boots.

My Life as a Squirrel

2009-12-13T16:08:00.001Z

After several weeks of rain and overcast skies, the sun finally shone. And for a winter’s day, the temperature of the air was surprisingly balmy.

I suddenly noticed dozens upon dozens of tiny, moth-like insects, their wings silvery in the sunlight, dancing in the airspace just beyond my window—an unusual sight at this time of year, with all the swallows long since gone. At the risk of being anthropomorphic, I want to tell you that their dance seemed ecstatic.

I wondered where they came from. Did the warmth trigger an unseasonal hatching, luring these incautious creatures to the dance, only to consign them later to a frosty death? Or, like the squirrels, is their hibernation but a shallow one, a sometime sleep, allowing for opportunistic forays out of bed on any morning that happens to be fine and mild enough?

In my imagination, I am more bear than squirrel, myself. Burrowing deeply into my warm bed, I often fancy I could easily sleep right through till Spring and be the better for it.

Yet my truer squirrel-self responds, willy-nilly, when the sword of sunlight pierces the shallow crust of my winter sleep. Not only sunlight, either, but a new idea can do it: something noticed on a page: someone’s blog post: an item on the news: a message… Anything can awaken my resting mind and make my fingers itch to write.

However, come the darkening of the sky, the chill of evening, the winter somnolence returning early to my limbs and I am back in my nest, the nuts left strewn and only half unshelled, the paragraphs unfinished, the fickle flame of inspiration guttering and faltering yet again in the cold air.

There is much to be said for bear mode. And being a squirrel-type is frustrating, especially when one has not yet fully shaken off a lifetime’s conditioning by that darned old work ethic.

But problematic though it sometimes feels, on balance I am a happy squirrel. And I am glad I was awake to see the sunshine and observe those tiny creatures dancing joyfully in the ‘now’ moment with no dread of frost.

A Sense of Purpose

2009-11-23T22:11:00.002Z

Five tiny fingers, each but an inch long. I remember how they used to curl around one of mine, gripping with all the prehensile power of that old monkey gene. The rosebud mouth, in sucking movements. Eyes tightly closed. What was she seeing in her dream state? I often used to wonder that.

Later she would open, expand, uncurl those curved limbs and learn to move along the carpet, hand over hand, foot behind foot, tasting the carpet fluff, peering, inquisitive, reaching, grabbing. Quivering with a sense of purpose.

For the purpose of a baby, of a child is to learn, to explore to discover to venture forth to push the boundaries of the known, incorporating more and more of the outer world into the convolutions of the evolved cortex. In order to live in that world successfully.

In the Spring, I watched the blackbird in the tree outside my window. She was feeding her young. Little, feather-fluffing balls, squeaking, demanding, beaks agape. She had a purpose too, a single-minded, dedicated purpose. Every atom of her being was concentrated in that one, unifying purpose—to fill that gaping yellow hole until the chirping stopped. And then to fill it again, and again, and again.

What about later? When the babies had flown. What was her purpose then? Was it to sing, for the delight of human ears or for delight in the sunny morning—or as a call sign that speaks of territory, ownership, belonging?

It’s a strange and slippery concept, purpose. Scientists avoid it if they can. They study the what and the how, the when and the where and the who. But they avoid the why. Because nobody really knows. We just do our best. And usually, purpose is a fuzzy thing, like it might be for my friend the blackbird now, as winter draws near. (Though I guess her purpose now is simply to stay alive, stay fed and stay warm, to breed again next Spring.)

But then there are other times that purpose feels clear and strong and burns brightly in the human psyche.

Thomas Berry spoke of 'The Great Work.' All the work you and I and everyone need to do to bring our species back into balance and harmony with Gaia before it is too late and She sloughs us off as a failed experiment. The ‘green revolution’that we need to have and are finally beginning to have. Right now, there’s no better or more important purpose I can think of than that one. To keep right on learning and growing, just like a baby does. To push the boundaries of the known, incorporating more and more of the outer world into our inner being until we know—really know—that we and the planet are one. And start acting out of that knowledge at last. Then we shall finally have learned how to live in the world successfully.

All Aboard ... The Amphibian Ark

2009-10-02T13:22:00.007+01:00

I don't often do 'commercials' on this blog, but I guess you could call today's post a kind of commercial. You see, one third of all the royalties from my book The Lilypad List are pledged to an organization called Amphibian Ark. And Amphibian Ark has just opened its doors to membership by the general public. Which is why I wanted to say a bit more about it today in the hope that some of my readers will be inspired to come on board this special ark.

Did you know?

Nearly one third of the world’s 6,000 amphibian species are threatened and nearly one half are experiencing population declines. These figures represent more threatened amphibians (frogs, salamanders and caecilians) than birds, fishes or mammals, making them the most threatened class of vertebrates on the planet.

In the past few decades, as many as 159 amphibian species may have gone extinct, and all experts involved know that this is an underestimate.

Amphibians are more than cultural icons or simply the creatures we grew up with as kids. They are an important component of the global ecosystem, act as indicators of condition of the environment and contribute to human health. They survived on this planet for millions of years yet now, largely as a result of our own reckless activities, find themselves threatened with extinction.

Addressing this crisis represents the greatest species conservation challenge in the history of humanity. The global conservation community has formulated a response in the Amphibian Conservation Action Plan (ACAP), and an integral part of this response is the Amphibian Ark, in which select species that would otherwise go extinct will be safeguarded in breeding programs as a stopgap until they can be secured in the wild.

The successful Amphibian Ark 2008 Year of the Frog campaign brought news of the amphibian crisis to the masses and began to catalyze an organized, global response.

Scientists and conservationists around the world learned a great deal about the state of amphibians on a global level and are organizing to attack the threats facing these very important and diverse creatures. This is only the beginning and there is much to do!

Amphibian Ark is now a formal membership organization open to ANYONE interested in keeping amphibians on the planet. Boarding the Ark does not require that you work at a zoo, hold a PhD or bring in a six-figure income. Anyone can be a part! Join us in helping to save amphibians, a challenge that will ultimately be quite important to all!

Your support is critical to help the organization reach its goals and protect species on the brink

Please visit www.amphibianark.org/membership.htm and join today!
For more information please contact Kevin Johnson, Communications Director, Amphibian Ark at kevinj@amphibianark.org

And remember, if you buy a copy of The Lilypad List, that will be helping the frogs as well.

It would make a great gift for anyone you know who has been thinking about 'downshifting' to a simpler, less stressful lifestyle.

Oh and by the way, I thought you might be interested to learn that the book has now been translated into both Korean and Chinese. The Chinese edition (see below)is really beautiful, with some splendid colour plates.

Turning Green - Another Look

2009-09-15T20:07:00.003+01:00

Last year I wrote several posts about ‘turning green’ and why not everybody is doing it yet. But I really believe that more and more people are turning green.

One small indication is that the number of green blogs and websites on the Internet is multiplying so fast, now, that no one person can even attempt to keep up with them all any more.

It is a very good sign indeed. It is as though the revolution we have all been yearning for is finally getting going in earnest.

Mind you, every now and then I still find myself being sucked back into feeling disheartened about things. Things like the rapidly-melting polar ice caps, our lack of progress in curbing CO2 emissions and our corporate culture’s seeming inability to let go of its fantasy of eternal, economic growth and to embrace the goal of global sustainability instead. (If only governments would be bold enough to level the playing field for corporations by imposing limits, then I think a lot of them would start competing to be green. Right now they are all too afraid of losing their market share.)

But whenever I am tempted back into pessimism, I take another look at this wonderfully inspirational video clip of Paul Hawken addressing a Bioneers Conference.

I just love to watch that endlessly scrolling list of organizations working for a green world, for social justice and all the other causes that we ‘Cultural Creatives’ care so much about. There are millions of us. It is important to remember that. We don’t all necessarily care equally about exactly the same things. And we don’t all agree on priorities. But if you were to interview every one of us I am sure you would find a surprisingly huge degree of consensus about the sort of world we are hoping to create. And we are all beavering away, each in his or her own little patch, working in one way or another to bring that about. We are all envisioning a cleaner, greener, more peaceful planet where resources are fairly shared and co-operation is the ruling paradigm.

And I still believe it can and will happen. The signs are everywhere.

(Thanks to Pam Gallagher for the beautiful photo of a regular green visitor to her garden)

Setting the Record Straight about Health Care

2009-08-20T13:11:00.006+01:00

I have lived in the USA and in England (and in Australia too). I am 73, I have a lot of experience and I know what I’m talking about. So this is a message to the US Congress and the people of America about health care.

Our British health care system isn't perfect, but we would never trade it for the one in the US.
Yet conservative US politicians and greedy insurance companies are pushing lies about our National Health Service as a way to scare the American public off universal health care - risking Obama's whole movement for change and threatening his majority in Congress.

Please ignore the lies about health systems in our country and others that are being pushed by US healthcare companies. Our national system of public healthcare works very well and enjoys extremely high levels of public support. Yes, there is room for improvement. Sure, for some non-urgent procedures there are waiting lists. But our system ensures that treatment is available for every man, woman and child in this entire country, and that nobody ever gets turned away when they need medical help. Anyone over 60 gets medication free of charge. We have reciprocal agreements with the rest of Europe so that we don’t have to fear falling ill on vacation on the European mainland. We even have a phone-in line for instant medical advice which is free and available to everyone.

We wish you a healthy and honest debate about healthcare in the US. And I for one am crossing my fingers that you will one day soon have the kind of universal health care that we, over here, have long since taken for granted.

(And for my UK compatriots – please click on the title of this post to sign the AVAAZ petition, if you haven’t already. We must refute the lies that are being told to our brothers and sisters across the pond by greedy insurance companies.)

My Life in the Slow Lane

2009-08-16T17:36:00.005+01:00

I love the concept of ‘slow travel’ and I’ve written about it myself. We don't run a car, so most of the travel we do in an ordinary week certainly is slow. Sitting for an hour on our little bus as it lumbers all around the winding country lanes to get to town (which often involves backing up for tractors) is certainly not a speedy way to get around. But with a bare two hours to do a whole week’s worth of shopping plus choose library books, the whole outing sometimes feels just a little rushed.

I love the concept of ‘slow food’ too. Everything I eat is slow food, I suppose, since we don’t have a microwave, never go into fast food outlets, never buy ready-made meals. Then again, how long does it take to steam a bunch of broccoli or kale? How long does it take to boil an egg? Or to pick salad from the garden, wash it, pat it dry and put it in a bowl with some cold-pressed virgin olive oil, some balsamic vinegar and some seasonings? How many minutes does it take me to pull a carrot, scrub it, slice it into strips and spoon out a little dish of tahini to dip the strips in? I can have my sort of meal on the table in under ten minutes. I do eat slowly though. So maybe it is slow food after all.

Since retirement – which is sixteen years ago now – my time has been my own. With no employer to answer to and nobody else’s agenda to follow, I am now living in the slow lane at last. What bliss! I can have lovely, lazy mornings, deliciously unhurried afternoons, slow, quiet evenings. I can spend the day however I like.

So in retirement, I do all the things I enjoy. I take long walks every morning – walking as fast as I can, of course, in order to get my aerobic exercise. I have always loved to read, so now I read six or seven library books every week as well as the books I’ve been sent for reviewing. I love to connect with friends and relations and acquaintances all over the world and now, in retirement, I have time to do that, so I have dozens of emails per day and I’m on eight social networks. And since I no longer have to earn my living and I can do whatever I want to do with my day, I have a zillion projects on the go at any one time because there are so many things I love to do and so many fascinating things to get involved in and I am totally in love with my life By bedtime, I am usually exhausted.

Mind you, it is a happy, contented sort of exhaustion. The sort of exhaustion you get after a day of slow travel and slow food and...er...living in the slow lane.

A Novel Piece of News

2009-07-17T12:15:00.006+01:00

It is ready at last. My new book!

This one is a novel. Set in Italy, England and Australia, it is a ‘love story with a difference’. Its title is The Bird Menders.

The Bird Menders is a POD (‘print on demand’) book. The price of PODs is slightly higher than that of conventionally published books, but the cost of publishing them is much less and the royalties are a lot higher.

This means that once the first 53 copies of The Bird Menders have been sold, I shall have earned back the publishing costs. From that moment onwards, every penny of the royalties will be donated to an organization that is dear to my heart, the Italian League for the Protection of Birds (LIPU).

Every year, in Italy, millions of wild birds—including songbirds like thrushes, nightingales, wrens and robins—are caught in the illegal traps of poachers, where they hang by their broken legs, waiting to be strangled and sold to restaurants. Many more thousands of birds, particularly birds of prey, are shot every year for ‘sport’.
LIPU’s hundreds of members, mostly volunteers, work tirelessly to foil the trappers and shooters, maintain reserves and rescue centers and improve the welfare of the precious and beautiful wild birds of Italy. And many hundreds of others, both within Italy and beyond, raise money to support these efforts. (To read more about this organization and its work, in English, see http://www.lipu-uk.org )

Despite its title, this book is not about the slaughter of birds, though one of its main characters is involved in the battle to end this despicable practice. For this book is, of course, a novel. It is a tender love story, a story of healing, the mending of broken wings and the wisdom of women in the second half of their lives.

On order to maximize royalties and thus generate $5.58 per book for LIPU, I would like to ask that anyone in the USA who would care to buy a copy of The Bird Menders does so by clicking on this link. Here, you can read the first chapter for free and see whether you would like to buy a print copy. Or, if you prefer, you can download it as an e-book for $8.95 and $6.26 of that will go to LIPU

Readers in the UK who would like to buy a print copy will pay about £5 less by getting it through Amazon UK (click here for that) especially if they use one of the Marketplace offers. Print copies purchased through Amazon UK or other channels will generate approximately £1.53 per copy for LIPU. E-book downloads (see above) will cost UK readers approximately £5.49, £3.84 of which will go to LIPU.

The Bird Menders was only launched two days ago. I am looking forward to hearing back from the first readers. If you decide to buy or download a copy and you enjoy the book, please spread the word. And please consider leaving a customer review on one of the online sites like Amazon or B&N. Favourable customer reviews are a great way of encouraging others to buy the book.

Midsummer…and the fullness thereof.

2009-06-23T11:23:00.003+01:00

Have you noticed that there comes a point in every growing season at which everything suddenly seems to take off? One minute, there is space between plants and the next minute there is a mini-jungle happening. In the gardens, in the hedgerows, everywhere, there is a burgeoning of fertility that leaves one breathless.

The Devon lanes I walk along each morning seem to have become dark, green, growing canyons overnight, their high walls a tangle of brambles and nettles, grass and wildflowers. There are grass heads drooping heavily with seed, swirls of pollen in the honeysuckle-scented air, wild strawberries ripening, foxgloves surfing the white waves of cow parsley, insects buzzing to and fro, butterflies dancing, wrens quivering with song. Only the robins have fallen silent, hidden now in this vast greenness.

So much growth is happening around me that I feel almost breathless. I am drowning in those waves of white and green. I am being strangled by vines and trampled by trees. I find myself gasping at the sheer hugeness of the life force that is moving through the land—and through me—at an amperage so great it could burn me out like a light bulb.

Many people re-package Nature in their minds into a pretty, decorative concept—something to admire through a window, in a vase or on TV. Others, seeking direct contact with Nature’s raw reality, climb the mountains, raft the rapids, hike the trails and pitch their tents in the back country, the domain of bears or rattlesnakes.

I have done both. I, too, have ‘loved’ Nature as brought to you by Hallmark. And I, too, have laced up my walking boots and set off into the wilderness. Right now, in the warm, fecund fullness of this midsummer, I just went for my morning walk with all the doors of my senses wide open, and feared I might die from it.

Welcome to our Garden, Tullio Two.

2009-06-16T14:20:00.005+01:00

Fig trees are not something one would normally associate with cool, damp England, even in this milder, south-western part of it where I live. But the gardening catalogue assured me that the Brown Turkey fig grows quite happily here. And I know that to be true because there’s one in the village that yields dozens of ripe figs every year. So I ordered a fig tree. A small one, in a container.

A crazy thing to do of course, given our tiny, already-crowded garden. But there was one warm spot with nothing growing in it. The little fig tree, in its pot, was a perfect fit.

I’ve named it Tullio Two.

Gardening, for me, is not just about growing food. It’s about relationships. Relationships with plants, with the other creatures who share our space and sometimes even with people.

Tullio Zola was a tall, thin, affable, Italian man with sparse grey hair, glasses and impeccably gracious, old-fashioned, European manners. If you had ever enjoyed a bottle of wine with dinner in Melbourne’s elegant Windsor Hotel, it would probably have been Tullio who advised you on the vintage. You would have been well pleased with his choice. Tullio knew his wine. He knew good food. He knew figs, too. In his garden he had a huge, spreading fig tree. Sometimes it would throw up suckers from its extensive roots.

It is said that root suckers don’t always make good trees in their own right. So I had low expectations of the one that Tullio dug up and gave to me in a pot. I stuck it in the ground. But when the Spring came, nothing happened. I decided it was probably dead. Being the lazy gardener that I am, I simply left it there. Another whole year went by and still it sat there, this thin, brown stick, a foot high, doing nothing.

Until, suddenly one day, late in the second Spring, it sprouted a leaf. And then another.

I thought to name it Lazarus, this little thing that had returned from the dead. But instead I called it Tullio in honour of the old man from whose garden it had sprung.

Fifteen years later, when Tullio the man died. I helped to arrange his funeral. Meanwhile, Tullio the tree had been steadily growing bigger and bigger, and every year it produced more and more delicious, juicy figs. Eventually, in order to pick them all, I had to climb up into its branches. What an amazing feeling that was: perching high in the branches of a tree I had known and loved since it was a twelve-inch high stick!

I felt a deep kinship with that tree. So much so that when I left that place for the last time, I found it harder to say goodbye to the tree than I did to the house.

Melbourne’s climate suits figs really well. Devon, England, not so much. But Tullio Two is a Brown Turkey fig and it will survive here. Maybe even thrive. This morning I noticed several new leaves. I think it likes the spot I chose.

I doubt I’ll ever climb it. But I’ll love it. And if it ever gives me ripe figs I will eat them slowly and reverently, like a sacrament. Welcome to our garden, Tullio Two!

Synchronicity Story

2009-04-08T15:26:00.004+01:00

Imagine my surprise, last week, when the pleasant-faced stranger in the bar on Maratea railway station recognized me as the person who had blogged about my previous visit to that delightful little corner of southern Italy. He had followed a section of the itinerary I posted on the Web and now here he was. And here I was, walking straight into his morning as he sat there in the bar, waiting for his train.
John from Bristol, if you are reading this, I just want to tell you that you made my day!
For one thing, I love synchronicity. I mean, what were the chances of our meeting up in that place at that moment in time? My friend Kim says that synchronicity is a sure sign that "...things are going well and life is happening as it should." I am sure she is right. I believe that, too.
Secondly, I always thought I had a totally forgettable face. So it amazed me that someone would recognize me merely from a couple of photos posted on the Internet.
On the way home, Sky and I paid a brief visit to Sorrento. Why, I wondered, as we sat in a clifftop cafe drinking wine and looking at Vesuvius across the Bay, do people cluster so thickly in the same old tourist hotspots when there are so many other lovely places to discover? Sorrento is a picturesque spot, to be sure, but give me Maratea any time. Sky said he felt the same.
On second thoughts, I am selfishly glad that most people tend to stick to the tourist trail. Tourism eventually corrupts every beautiful place, stealing its innocence and turning it inexorably into something less than it was before.
Yet I, too, am a tourist sometimes. Just as with the destruction of the environment by human exploitation and overpopulation, I am one of those lamenting the problem and at the same time, by my very existence. I am also part of its cause. A sobering thought.

Shortlisted

2009-03-21T08:42:00.004Z

A big thank-you to everyone who voted for one of my essays in the Ooffoo Laureate competition. The results were announced yesterday and although I didn't manage to score first prize I did at least make it on to the shortlist.
There's no cash prize for that of course, so no money for the frogs on this occasion. But at least they get part of all the royalties from The Lilypad List, so that's something. And if there's another competition next year, I'll probably try again.

Just One Shift

2009-02-13T12:55:00.005Z

Over breakfast,I was watching a woodpecker on the peanut feeder and thinking about some writing I have to do on sustainability. And that set me pondering on perception.

If you are looking through your binoculars and the images you see are fuzzy, you don’t just keep searching for non-fuzzy images. You adjust your binoculars. The way we look determines what we see – and how clearly we see it. That applies metaphorically too. Perception and attitude influence each other and both determine behaviour. When things look fuzzy, and we can’t see clearly where we are going, it is WE who must make the perceptual shift.

It must have been tremendously discombobulating, back in the 16th century, if you had spent your whole life believing what you were taught about the sun going round the Earth, to be told that no, actually it is the Earth that moves. But in the fullness of time, people came to believe the scientists and adjusted their mental binoculars accordingly.

Sadly, although it became accepted that the Earth revolved around the sun, billions of people believed – and still do – that everything on Earth revolves around human beings and that human beings are the most important creatures on the planet. But important to whom? Well … the plain truth is that humans are important to other humans and to very little else.

There are creatures – bacteria, earthworms, insect pollinators for example – without whom entire ecosystems would totally collapse. If any of those groups went missing, we would all be in dire trouble. But if humans went missing, our absence would have almost no negative effects on anything and a huge number of positive effects, world-wide. So who are the ‘important’ ones?

The truth is that anthropocentrism – the belief that everything revolves around humans and that the planet is just a big pile (a shrinking pile, now) of ‘resources’ for our use – is our death warrant.

The perceptual shift that we all urgently need to make is every bit as significant as the one about the Earth circling the sun. We need to shift from anthropocentric way of seeing to an ecocentric way of seeing. What is really important is not people but ecosystems. So the first step in moving to a sane, sensible and sustainable way of life on this planet is to adjust our mental binoculars from an anthropocentric focus to an ecocentric focus. Just one shift, that’s all it takes. One shift in our way of seeing things. Putting the planet’s needs first, instead of our own.

When we do that, every single thing we look at comes into a sharper focus. And once you can see clearly, it is easy to know the way forward.

Thank You for Voting

2009-02-06T16:37:00.002Z

Voting for the Ooffoo Laureate competition has now closed but the results have not yet been announced. As soon as they are, I will post them here. Thank you so much, all those kind people who cast a vote for me.

Vote for Me and Help a Frog

2009-01-14T17:41:00.005Z

The wonderful thing about winter and these long, dark evenings is that there seems to be more time for writing.

I have been very busy, lately, working on the new book about green spirituality that I shall no doubt be doing a lot of blogging about in the coming months.

Meanwhile, however, I have six articles entered in the Ooffoo Laureate competition. And I would be SO happy if you voted for one of them. The titles are:

Digging for Victory - Again

The Yin and the Yang of it

Turning Green: The Rise of the ‘Cultural Creatives’

Micro-Yoga for the Busy Woman

Simple Blessings

Healing the Split

Here’s where you go to read the articles and vote.

Thank you, in advance. And if I win the prize, I'll donate part of the prize money to Amphibian Ark, the cause to which a third of my royalties from The Lilypad List are alreadypledged. (It is about saving frogs from extinction).

Feeling One's Age

2008-12-31T14:25:00.005Z

If you tell me, coyly, that you are 70 (or however many) years 'young',(which women frequently do) I cannot help but infer that you regard the word 'old' as at worst an insult or at best, something to be avoided. And that, I must remind you, is an ageist attitude. Same with " …but I am young at heart". Rubbish. Your heart is the same age as the rest of your internal organs. It may beat strongly and you may be full of joy and zest and enthusiasm for living, but that doesn't make you young. It simply means you are full of joy and zest and enthusiasm for living, and so we should all be, whether we are 5 or 50 or 93 or any other age.

“But I don’t feel 70”, you protest. Wait a minute. Stop and think about that. How do you know what 70 – or any other age – feels like till you get to it? I am 72. So the way I feel now must be what 72 feels like. How could it be any other way? “I don’t feel (insert the number)...” is a totally daft statement, in any context whatsoever. Yet one hears it all the time. So where does all this daftness come from?

I was thinking about that this morning, the last day of the year. 2008 is about to be archived.

The years that have already passed lie flat, now, like pressed flowers. They have lost their roundness, their yearness. The are stacked on the shelf of memory, each flat year on top of the last flat year, like a deck of cards. Each lasted fifty-two big, fat, juicy weeks, yet each takes only a few seconds to recall, now. All we remember are the highlights – the few, special moments that make that year distinguishable from all the others.

Not just years are like this but months, weeks, days, individual moments; once they are over they become all flat and thin, too. Unless, like the dried wakame I put in my soup, we soak them a while, plump them out with tears of grief or laughter. Even then, it’s not like the real thing. We are only fully alive when we remain in this moment. The one that’s happening right now.

As soon as moments have passed, they start to desiccate, flatten, turn into thin leaves of memory that can easily blow away in the breeze like tissue paper. So maybe it is because they require so little room in storage that when we look back on all our years of living they don’t seem to take up enough space. Have I really lived 72 (and a half, actually) full, round, action-packed years? And is this latest one really ending - so soon?

Yes.

Here goes another one into the pile on the shelf.

Happy New Year!

Turning Point

2008-12-21T12:49:00.004Z

I love the yin/yang symbol. And I love the fact that it describes a dynamic principle. Each half of the pattern contains the seed of the other. Yin contains the kernel of yang, yang contains the kernel of yin. Each seed ripens, enlarges and eventually gives birth to its opposite. I wrote a whole article on that, which you can read here if you are interested. It’s all about balance and how balance of any kind, whether on a personal or planetary scale, is based on this same dynamic principle.

I am writing this at the solstice, as we reach that tiny, still moment when light and dark begin to change places. It is a beautiful moment. Imagine our Earth, as it reaches the Solstice point and just for that tiny moment it touches the limit of its tilt in one direction, pauses for, what? a millisecond? … and then begins its six-month journey towards the other.

Our Earth has reached such a moment in more ways than one. The latest news about the speed and intensity of climate change is such that if we do not act now – right now – to reduce our carbon emissions and to pour all our energies and resources into setting up alternative, clean, green energy systems, there will be no way to halt the processes that will bring an end to our species and most others.

Ever the optimist, I still think we’ll pull it off, even if only by the tiniest, scariest margin. Humans are like that. Push almost always has to come to shove before we act.Remember how, when we were at college, after messing around for weeks we pulled an all-nighter to get a paper written and handed just in time for the deadline? The deadlines of climate change are providing the impetus finally to get us off our backsides and into action.

Not just big actions – billions of tiny ones as well. Billions of small hesitations as we remember the effect of every purchase, every choice we make in our everyday lives and then decide on the greener alternative.

Because the majority of us, I believe, really do care about our world. The spectacular result of the recent US election proves that things are moving, times are changing. A groundswell is happening. I just read, in Orion Magazine, an excellent essay about all this by Auden Schendler, the ‘Sustainability Director’ for a ski resort in Colorado, USA. He says “Climate change doesn’t have to scare us. It can inspire us; it is a singular opportunity to remake society in the image of our greatest dreams.”

Yes. That’s our project. And at this Solstice moment, as we pause to honour the eternal and ever-reversing dance of light and darkness, what better time to remember it?

That Other World Wide Web

2008-11-26T12:46:00.003Z

Economist David Korten commented, six years ago, that the language of economic dysfunction has become so common that when he uses the term “the global suicide economy” in his talks, he doesn’t need to spend much time explaining what he means. For as he says “Most people are now aware that rule by global corporations and financial speculators engaged in the single-minded pursuit of money is destroying communities, cultures, and natural systems everywhere on the planet. Until recently, however, most people responded with polite but resigned skepticism to my message that economic transformation is possible.”

But that is changing. We are starting to wake up to the fact that economic transformation is possible. All it needs is for enough people to believe that it is possible. And to take a step further by acting on that belief. To put Main Street before Wall Street.

Because the way to deal with the global suicide economy is not to try to destroy it – it is so powerful that not even governments can do that. (In fact, they are up to their necks in it). The way to deal with it is to starve it out. Replace it with something healthy. And we can do that. The means to do it are right here, in everybody’s hands, in everybody’s purses, and we can work on it right now, today, every one of us.

All over the globe, there already exists a spider’s web of local enterprises. Farmers’ markets, small businesses, local co-operatives, local tradespeople, village stores, artisans, craftspeople, artists, CSAs (community supported farms), roadside fruit stands … Local economies have been in decline for a long time – probably since the Industrial Revolution – but they are coming back. There is evidence of it everywhere you look, nowadays. I find this really exciting. Another world really is possible.

No matter where we live, every need we have can theoretically be supplied without a penny of our money going directly into the hands of multi-national corporations. Sure, some might find its way there indirectly. (Our local dressmaker may have bought her thread from Wal-Mart). But that’s OK. We can't accomplish everything at once. What we are speaking of here is just the first step. Think local. Buy local. Support local. Even if it costs more money. (It only costs more money because the global suicide economy hides the true cost of its products, i.e. the cost to the planet). Anyway, it will only cost more money in the short-term. Eventually, it will be cheaper. And even if, right now, it costs a bit more money, is it not worth it, for the Earth’s sake? For the sake of all life?

If you live in an area where there simply are no local alternatives whatsoever to the global suicide economy, well at least you can avoid supporting the worst offenders. Click here for a list of companies NOT to buy from – and why. (Some of the entries may surprise you).

But if you can, even if only in part, try to buy local. The more we support Main Street instead of Wall Street, the thicker and sturdier that web of local enterprise becomes. And the stronger it gets, the faster the global suicide economy will wither. The wealth that right now flows into the pockets of greedy CEOs needs to be redirected into the pockets of the people who truly deserve it – the people in our own localities who are working to supply the needs of their communities.

True wealth, David Korten points out, is “… a sense of belonging, contribution, beauty, joy, relationship, and spiritual connection. … a world of locally rooted living economies that meet the material needs of all people everywhere, while providing meaning, building community, and connecting us to a place on the Earth.”

That’s the world author Arudhati Roy was referring to when she said: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

One for the Jungians

2008-11-05T22:03:00.005Z

Like millions of other people I wept with joy and relief last night too. And I'm not even American. I had to stay up till 4 am GMT in order to watch history get made.

I also laughed, early this morning. Because I suddenly remembered something the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson once said about the importance of honouring the Shadow.

Johnson pointed out that we can often prevent the Shadow’s tendency to mess up our lives and plans and projects if we can ‘get in first’ and find creative, symbolic ways of honouring it. Kind of like bringing offerings to a tricky god.

And I had a funny vision. I thought how splendidly auspicious it would be if the new puppy were to wee right in the middle of the carpet in the oval office on the very first day.

What do you think of that idea, you Jungians out there? Taking on the Presidency in these troubled times is going to be one helluva challenge. Do you think a propitiation like that might be good insurance? If so, I'm sure it could be arranged.

On Being - and Not Being - a Gypsy

2008-11-01T13:54:00.005Z

I spent most of October travelling.

I don’t usually blog when I’m travelling. For me, the time to talk about my travels is after I return. Travel is like breathing-in; writing is like breathing-out. I find it impossible to do both at the same time.

And even when I do talk about the places I have been, the things I’ve seen and the people I’ve met, I usually don’t do it all at once. All I write, at first, is a brief account of the trip. Like the one I just wrote about this October trip (which you are welcome to read if you are interested; you'll find it here). The rest – the impressions, the feelings, the sights and sounds and smells of my journeying – gets put away for future use as needed. Like herbs hung to dry. So I guess I am not cut out to be a travel writer.

But I would make a hopeless travel writer anyway. I am always too busy having fun and taking pictures to go around collecting the sort of important, factual information that travel magazines need for their sidebars.

Right now, I am feeling unsettled. I always feel unsettled, for a while after I come back from a trip. Getting me away from my home needs an emotional tyre lever. But then getting me settled back into home again needs a tyre lever also. Crazy, isn’t it? I think being a Cancerian with wanderlust is probably quite a difficult sort of person to be. Two opposing forces facing each other like football teams on the field of my poor old psyche!

Neither side can ever win, of course. The answer to such inner dilemmas, as we all know, is always fully to accept and honour all the disparate and sometimes conflicting parts of who we are.

OK, I’m trying, I’m trying…….!

Apologia for a Surname

2008-09-24T21:01:00.007+01:00

I never liked my maiden name. So when I got married I enthusiastically took my husband’s name. He was a Dutchman and his name was van Eijk, which, in Dutch, means ‘of oak’. By the time I met him, he had anglicized it to Van Eyk.

I loved that name. The oak is my favourite of all trees and I felt proud to wear it as part of my name.

Twenty-three years later we had an amicable divorce, but I still, with his blessing, kept the name because I loved it and because it was so much a part of me by then.

Then I remarried.

For a while, I considered changing my name altogether, to something of my own choosing, just like other women sometimes do. After all, why walk around with a name just because it was the name of a father or a husband? But when I thought and felt more deeply into that idea, it dawned on me that all our surnames – in this culture anyway – are the property of men. So if I switched to a different surname I would simply be taking on the name of yet another man. Not my father, this time, or my husband, but somebody else’s father or husband. And the other alternative – calling myself by some daft, New Agey sort of name like Rainbow Dolphin or something – just wasn’t my style. So in the end I gave up trying to figure out a more suitable name.

It seemed a bit unfair to my new husband to keep walking around with the name of his predecessor, yet I didn’t want to lose the name I loved. So the way I resolved it was to tack the new surname on to the end of my existing one. And for this past twenty-two years I have worn both names together. It was a bit of a mouthful at first, but it started to seemed fine to me, after a while. Two marriages, two names – there was a whole lot of life experience all bound up in that. And since I had an extra given name that I disliked, after a while I dropped that off and made Van Eyk my official middle name. That felt good. Together with my given name – which I have always liked – my full name came to express, for me, the complexity of all I am and all I have been. And by now I have published four books and countless articles, essays, stories and poems under that name. So it is really too late to try and change it now anyway. It is a fixture.

But lately, people have started taking notice. Almost daily, this past few weeks, I have been reminded that nowadays I find myself carrying a surname with associations that make me cringe. And that has become really, really embarrassing. People are sniggering. Friends are poking me in the ribs and saying “Better change your name, gal!!”

Oh if only my second husband had been called Obama instead!

Time to Climb the Steps

2008-08-20T13:41:00.003+01:00

I’ve noticed myself getting a bit strident and judgmental lately, both in conversations and online and I don’t like it. Moreover, it is stupid. It doesn’t achieve anything except to alienate people.

Oops! Time to climb the steps to where I can get a better view.

Yes, I know the world around me is achingly beautiful and it makes me burst into tears every time I think about how we are poised on the edge of ecological collapse - a crisis every bit as devastating as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and extinguished more than 90% of the life forms existing at that time. I know that there almost certainly are no ‘techno-fixes’, since every techno-fix we have ever tried has created its own problems. I know that our human numbers are expanding exponentially and using up far more resources than the planet can possibly accommodate. So unless some powerful virus comes along to cull us, we are probably going to destroy the living tissue of our planet altogether, just the way cancer eventually kills its host. And that is incredibly, heartbreakingly sad.

I know that the only hope of avoiding this is for every single human being on the Earth who is using more than his or her fair share of resources (and that is most of us in the West) to scale down, stop consuming non-essentials, reduce, re-use, repair, recycle, and simplify, simplify, simplify …

Yes I know all that – only too well. That’s why I try to reduce the size of my own eco-footprint. It is why I wrote The Lilypad List: 7 steps to the simple life, in the hope of gently encouraging others to do the same. And telling them how much more joy and delight there really truly is in a life of voluntary simplicity than there is in a life of consumerism.

But ‘gently encouraging’ is the operative phrase here. In that book I didn’t harangue people. I didn’t lecture them or preach at them. I didn’t get cross or impatient with them. Because I understood – and still do – how hard it can be to make changes to the way we are used to living.

After all, I am not blameless, by any means. I feel guilty, often, about the amount of carbon I use to travel, even if it is mostly to see loved ones. For flying is one of the most ecologically damaging things humans do. So I have no right whatsoever to walk around being all self-righteous. No right to preach.

I really do know that scaling down can be hard – or can even feel impossible sometimes.

I know that when I get all strident and judgmental it simply puts people off. In other words, it is counter-productive. That’s why I shouldn’t do it, no matter how impatient I feel, no matter how urgent the problem is, no matter how risky it is that so many people are still fiddling while Rome burns, while the Greenland icecap melts much, must faster than anyone thought it would, while the oil is fast running out.

What I need to remember is this: life in some form may well go on, even if we don’t. After all, it survived the cataclysmic changes that wiped out the dinosaurs. The life force is strong. Evolution is a long-term project and will probably go on regardless. Humans may have been just a blip, anyway. The Earth will do even better, I expect, without us to mess things up. This is the Big Picture.

When I remember to climb the steps to where I can start to see the Big Picture, I immediately feel myself calming down. Whatever happens is OK.

Once I get to that point, all the stridency just melts away.
(Note to self: must do that more often. Like every day).

Oh I can still talk about simplicity and all of that. But gently.

Coasting Along On My Birthday

2008-07-22T17:41:00.009+01:00

I spent my seventy-second birthday doing one of the things I love best, which is walking on the SouthWest Peninsula Coast Path. This, as you may know, is the longest long-distance trail in England, stretching 631 miles around the south-west peninsula, from Minehead (Somerset) in the north, right around Devon and Cornwall to Poole (Dorset) on the south coast.

It passes along clifftops, down into valleys, along beaches, up hills, around harbours, through villages, over fields, between walls, around river estuaries, in and out of woods, over bridges and stiles, through gates, past waterfalls … and every inch of it is interesting. Mind you, I have only walked a fraction of it to date, though I do hope to have covered the entire path before I die.

One of the things about walking the path that I love the most – especially in some of the wilder stretches – is being out on my own, miles from anywhere, with just the sea and the breeze and the birds for company. I can talk to myself out loud, sing if I feel like it, and stop and rest when I am tired.

Another thing I love about it is being surrounded by beauty in all directions. So much beauty, at times, that I almost explode with sheer joy at being there. There is something totally wonderful about being able to see things that can only be seen by those who are prepared to walk for miles along the path. It feels like being one of only a handful of privileged people at a special, private banquet.

And something else I love about walking the path is the discovery of unexpected treasures. Funny-shaped houses for example, built for some ancient purpose long forgotten. Like this one:

And this one, which was once a mill of some kind.

Or a tunnel, suddenly appearing in the middle of a wood.

Or a holy well. I’ve visited a number of holy wells over the years – in fact there is one just down the road from where we live. But the more visited they are, the more they seem sapped of whatever energy it was that first made them sacred places. As though the hundreds of people who visit them all take away something but leave nothing in return, until the vitality of the place is somehow drained.

But this one is different. It is hidden deep in a wood and very few people pass that way. Legend has it that Jesus came with Joseph of Arimathea to visit England and when they came by here on their way to Glastonbury they stopped to drink at this well. It’s a lovely legend and though I am not a Christian, standing next to the well I could almost believe it to be true. In fact there is such a lovely feeling there, it brought tears to my eyes.

All that – and the sunshine, the purple heather, the smell of the sea … there is no better way I could possibly have found to celebrate my birthday. It is the second time I have spent my birthday on the Coast Path and I think it is what I shall do every year from now on – at least as long as I can still place one foot in front of the other.

The Words for Honeysuckle

2008-06-16T19:15:00.003+01:00

It is mid-June, and along with the foxgloves and campions and the froth of white cow parsley, there is honeysuckle everywhere. Its scent fills the lanes. Every morning walk I take is a feast for the nose as well as for the eyes.

The honeysuckle bloomed early this year. On the first day of the month I noticed it already in flower in several places. Excited by my discovery, I was looking forward to getting home and sharing the news.

A few moments later, I saw a pleasant-looking couple coming around the corner, striding briskly towards me in in their hiking boots, knapsacks on their backs, almost certainly heading for the Coast Path that runs along the clifftops close to here. They smiled as we drew close. And as is the custom in these parts, wished me a polite "Good morning". I responded in kind, adding eagerly that it was a lovely morning and "Look, the honeysuckle is already coming out, just up there."

The man and woman had not broken their stride till then, so were almost past me before they paused and the man said "I beg your pardon?"

I re-burbled my happy news item. At which they smiled again, albeit tentatively, nodded slightly and went on their way.

Only after I was well around the next corner did it dawn on me that they obviously had not understood a word. And only then did I connect that with the careful, phrase-book English of the "Good morning" and the "I beg your pardon?"

As I walked on, I began to think about how easily I could have conveyed the message about the honeysuckle in a just a few simple, wordless gestures: my hand as an unfolding flower, held to the nose, a sniff, an expression of delight, a finger pointing towards the hedge they were soon to pass. Clear. effortless. They would have understood perfectly and watched out, perhaps, for the sight and scent of those first flowers. It would have been a shared moment, a moment of relationship, bypassing the artificial boundaries of language.

It had never occurred to me not to use words. It rarely does. I am a writer. Each day of my life is crammed to the ceiling with words. So that morning's encounter reminded me that although words can build bridges of understanding to connect minds and hearts, they can also build walls of bafflement to separate them.

Watching a young mother whose child was crying so hard he could not tell her what the problem was, I heard her say "Use your words, Joe. Use your words." That wise young woman knew that only by learning to name his chaotic feelings would Joe ever be able to control and understand them.

But there are so many things - like the development of the ego itself - that once learned and mastered need then to be unlearned. Or at least labelled 'optional'. Our automatic turning to the use of words may possibly be one of them.

I hope that couple noticed the honeysuckle anyway, and stopped to smell it. Even if they never did connect it with my message in a foreign language.

Is It Me, Or Are You Gabbling?

2008-05-20T15:56:00.006+01:00

I walk in the door, change into my slippers and check the voicemail. Two messages. I play them both and they sound like gobbledygook. I play them again. I still can hardly catch a word of either of them. Perhaps it is because I am tired. I check my email, then make myself a cup of tea and relax in the chair for a while. Some time later, I play the messages again. I can sort of half make out the names and a word here or there if I concentrate really hard. But whoever these people are, they sound like a couple of hyperactive marmosets on speed.

My partner comes home. He listens to the messages. One of them appears to be for him. He can’t understand most of it either.

It is not just voicemail. I called our bank with a query and after a few moments I had to stop the young man who answered me and ask him please to slow down and stop talking at fast forward. Then a pleasant-sounding young woman called us to ask if we would like to buy some advertising space in her magazine. At least, I eventually found out that’s what she wanted. It took me three or four ‘I beg your pardon?’s and, when that didn’t work, a polite request to slow down from the speed of light to something approaching the normal speed of sound.

I was asked to do a radio interview a couple of months ago and it was a real struggle. I felt as though I, too, had to talk faster and faster till I was breathless in order to keep up with the manic pace of the interviewer. I came away from the interview feeling totally exhausted and vowing never to do another. It is just not comfortable any more.

Even some of the people I know are starting to talk faster than they used to.

Or is it just that I am old? Or the fact that I live a quiet life down a quiet country lane, don’t own a TV set, rarely watch movies and usually travel at the speed of my legs or of the local bus (which is almost as slow).

No, I suspect that the frenetic pace at which so many people seem to live their lives nowadays is causing them to speak at twice normal speed. And I suspect that video games, TV and fashions in film editing all have something to do with it as well. Everything has revved up without anybody really noticing that what they are now doing is gabbling, rather than talking.

Anyway, if you are going to leave a message on my answering machine, please speak slowly enough for me to understand what you want. Otherwise I’ll simply click the ‘erase’ button.

Better still, send me an email. Then I can answer you in my own time – and at my own speed. Which I don’t think is slower than it ever was, despite my age. (Oh and by the way, I’ve noticed that the birds around here don’t seem to be singing any faster than they ever did. Thank goodness).

My Need of Mountains

2008-04-24T16:49:00.006+01:00

To my surprise, the other morning, I found myself suddenly longing for the sight of mountains. I mean real mountains. And forest. Wilderness. Wildness. The sort of landscape you might get seriously lost in. Just for a change. I don’t feel this often, but every now and then it pops up and surprises me.

It would be impossible to get lost here. In most parts of England, you can’t walk for more than eight or ten miles in a straight line without ending up in a place where you can fill up your water bottle, buy (or beg) a sandwich, or catch a ride to somewhere where you could. And in a way I love that. I love the safety of it, the feeling of being held and cherished by the funny little patchwork island that gave me birth.

And yet, just to be contrary, sometimes I long to be able to turn a corner in the road and glimpse high mountains in the distance. Or to stand somewhere high up, where I can see for a hundred miles without my eye lighting on one single sign of human habitation.

Not to see it on film, either, but to be there and stand in it and breathe it in. To feel the heat coming from the rocks. To catch the green flash of a lizard as it scuttles past my feet and then to lift my eyes and feel them straining to see all the way to the farthest horizon, just as my mind strains to encompass the greatness of it all.

I guess what I want is to be reminded, every now and then, that the Earth is bigger and older and wiser and a zillion times more vast and unknowable than humans seem to think She is. I need to have it pointed out to me, by the massiveness of mountains and the endlessness of forests, how small and insignificant I am compared to the entirety of this planet. I want to be visibly reminded of my puniness and of the stupidity of believing that anything I do or say or write can have more than a pinprick of significance in the great scheme of things. A homeopathic dose of anti-arrogance. That’s what I like. Every once in a while.

Our Need of Woods

2008-04-05T12:35:00.010+01:00

In the woods nearby, the bluebells are starting to come out.

In another couple of weeks, I shall be able to walk into the depths of the wood, see a sight like the one above (that picture was taken last year) and breathe in the gentle fragrance of what must surely be at least a million flowers. It is a treat I look forward to every April.

I read the other day that at least eighty percent of people in the British Isles do not live within walking distance of a wood. That felt to me like a sad and very disturbing statistic. Disturbing not just because it reminds us that the destruction of native woodland – which in these islands began with the Romans and continues to this day – is a factor in climate change, but because we really need woods. We need them in all sorts of ways, not only for the carbon they sequester.

To stand alone in the middle of a wood is to be outnumbered. To be one solitary human organism, less than ankle-high to any one of several thousand other living organisms around you is to be, just for a little while, back in the right importance ratio of human to planet. It cannot but make you feel humble. And we all need to feel humble and outnumbered, often.

It was not by accident that Dante chose to begin his journey of mid-life self-discovery at the time and place that he did:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi retrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.

("In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost").

Mid-life is like that – or can be, if we allow ourselves to let go of the heroic phase, the ‘outward arc’ of our existence and start along the ‘inward arc’, the deeper journey of exploration that, as Jung, explained, is the true task of our later lives.

I like to imagine, too, that as a species we are coming close to that same point in the evolutionary cycle. Lost in the woods, with no ‘diritta via’ in sight, we are challenged to look within, to examine ourselves, our lifestyles, our priorities and to face the murky shadows of our exploitative, hubristic history. We are challenged to learn, to grow in consciousness, to find a new way out of the wood and into the clear light of a simple, peaceful, co-operative and sustainable way of living in harmony with the rest of creation.

If we don’t succeed in this, then eventually some April day will come that my woods are bare of bluebells and no human eye will ever see a glorious sight like this one, ever again.

Larkrise

2008-02-28T14:15:00.003Z

This morning there were clouds and the sun was coming out for only a few moments at a time. But as I walked along I heard a sound I had not hear since last summer. It was the first skylark of the year. Instantly my heart swelled, as it always does, at the sound of that exuberant cascade of notes falling from somewhere in the early morning sky.

As I searched for the small, dark dot I knew would be up there somewhere, against the background of grey-white cumulus and small patches of blue, I found myself wondering: what must it feel like to flutter up and up and up like that, singing as you go?

Would you look down, delighted to find that as you gained height you could see more and more of the landscape beneath you? Would you look up, wondering how much higher you could go before your breath began to come less easily in the thinning air? Or would you just concentrate on singing?

And if you sang, would it be because of your passionate intention to make your voice heard, especially by certain others to whom it seemed especially important to convey your message? Or would it be because the song came bursting from the depths of your soul, out into the cool, morning air and there was nothing you could possibly do but give voice to it?

I believe that the reason many committed people – especially environmental activists and those who work for social justice – end up suffering from burnout, is that although they care deeply about issues, their caring grows out of indignation and anger rather than out of a sheer, full-hearted love of the Earth and everything in it. It is only when our passion is infused with spirituality and when our anguish is shot through with joy that we are able to fly high enough above the world’s problems to see the larger landscape. That’s when the goal-seeking, the understanding, the passion, the message and the joyous celebration of life on this lovely planet all merge together in one outpouring.

And that’s how we can keep coming back, season after season, down to the ground where the hard work happens and then up again into the sky. Not to escape from our groundedness into some imagined heaven but to see more clearly the heaven that is right here, all around us, and to which, with every atom of our being, we belong.

That’s the secret power that powers our wings and keeps us singing. Even on days when the sun is not shining.

Turning Green - Part 3

2008-01-31T16:37:00.001Z

(Photo by Jesse Wolf Hardin)

In Part 1 of this series, I posed the rhetorical question 'Why hasn't everybody turned green yet?' My conclusion was that although most people by now know that our planet is in serious danger of ecological collapse, they haven't yet understood where they, as individuals, fit into the picture. They have not joined the dots. In other words, they don't yet fully realize that dozens of the small decisions they make, every day, make a difference. Each decision, even if it is as tiny a decision as turning off a light switch, either adds to the problem or helps to ameliorate it.

In Part 2, I said that it's hard to join the dots because of all those so-called 'market forces' that have a strong vested interest in preventing us from doing so.

As we know, our national and global economic systems are all based on a growth model rather than a sustainability model. And since every one of us is part of both a national and a global economic system, the systems need us to keep consuming so that the growth can continue. Even though, like cancer, it is growth that's slowly killing us.

The trouble is, if too many of us were to jump off our consumer treadmills, profits would go down. The companies would start laying off their workers. The workers would complain – and of course the workers are US. Ourselves, our partners, our children, our relatives, our friends … As Pogo said, 'I have met the enemy, and it is us.'

Most loggers don't personally want to chop down the rainforest; they just want to keep their jobs in order to feed their families. Fishermen have absolutely no desire or intention to reduce the world's fish populations to zero, they just need to keep catching fish in order to survive. People who work in offices and stores and on factory floors all want to keep their jobs too. So round and around it goes and life on Earth keeps heading towards catastrophe. Even if it is not your job that would be at risk if everybody stopped buying what they didn't really need, it might be your father's or your daughter-in-law's or your cousin's. And even if nobody you know would be affected, (which is highly unlikely) somebody would, somewhere. Lots of somebodies. The farmer in Kenya who stopped producing vegetables to feed his family (plus a bit more to sell in the market) and switched to producing cash crops for export so he could afford to send his kids to school needs me to keep on buying his carnations or his green beans or his cocoa and if I don't, his kids will starve because they can't eat carnations. We are all tangled in this together. So however can we possibly unpick it?

Well, I guess we unpick it slowly, carefully, one little piece at a time. The first step is to start setting up parallel, alternative systems and supporting the ones that already exist. Dig up the lawn and grow veggies, just like we did in World War Two. Stay out of supermarkets and support local stores whenever and wherever you can find them. Patronise farmers' markets and CSAs (community supported agriculture schemes) and local box schemes. Join a co-op. Switch to green energy suppliers, install a solar water heater, insulate your loft, lower the thermostat, compost your waste. If you live in the country, consider building a composting toilet. Leave your car at home whenever you can and use public transport or walk or ride a bike. Or at least carpool or consider sharing car ownership with other families like they do in Germany. Dry your washing in the sun and wind. Borrow books and videos from the library instead of buying them. Sign up to the 'compact' (challenge yourself to buy nothing for a year except food and other necessities). Stay out of the air as much as you possibly can. Reduce, repair, re-use, recycle, de-clutter, downsize ….
When we learn to differentiate between our needs and our wants, we can get sober (i.e. heal from our addiction to unnecessary stuff). We can stop being 'users' of consumerism's drugs. How could you reduce your needs so that you could spend more time with your family or in doing the things you love? How could you be fitter, healthier, more active, more creative?

Maybe we can also stop being dealers in consumerism's drugs, too. Think about your work: is it what the Buddha called 'Right Livelihood'. If not, would it be possible to use your skills in something more benign and better for the planet and still earn enough money to survive on?

Like relay runners, the two systems need to run side by side for a while until the new one can take over completely. Slowly, gradually, we are setting up alternative systems and at present these are running parallel with the mainstream ones. Little by little, the alternative systems are getting bigger and stronger. Compared to the vast system they are intended eventually to replace, they seem almost laughably tiny. Like a mosquito trying to replace an elephant. Yet on almost every graph you look at, they are growing. There are heaps more farmers' markets than there were ten years ago, lots more veg box schemes, more LETS schemes, more towns climbing on the 'transition town' bandwagon, more wind farms, more solar panels, more hybrid cars, more recycling schemes, more intelligent minds turning to research in alternative technology, more businesses trying to 'out-green' each other, and more and more people turning green.

When I was born, plastic had not yet been invented. When I was in high school there was no TV, no PCs, no Internet, no mobile phones, no iPods, no fax machines, no jumbo jets, no microwave ovens. A lot can change in a short time. We need big changes now. And as fast as possible. So how can we bring them about? Well firstly, by doing as Gandhi exhorted us to do and being the change we want to see. And secondly by visualizing a green, sustainable world. The more people who visualize it, the sooner it can come to pass, for thoughts have energy.

See the change and be the change. Those are our twin tasks.

This may be a mosquito-sized movement now, but as Gandhi also pointed out, if you think a mosquito is too small to matter, you have never had one in your tent.

Why hasn't everybody turned green yet? (Part 2)

2008-01-17T13:09:00.000Z

The wind was blowing hard this morning as I set off for my walk. I heard it whistling round the chimneys and sighing in the wires, even before I left the house. It was blowing from the west, as it often does around here. In fact it blows so often and so hard from the west that it has sculpted the trees in all the exposed places into eastward-leaning shapes.

As I set off down the lane, I was thinking again about the rhetorical question I posed in my previous post, about why it is that everybody has not yet turned green.

One of the conclusions I came to was that lots of people have not yet grasped the connection between the way we live our individual lives and the problems we as a species are collectively facing. But why are we all so slow to make those connections?

I turned westwards, and one answer seemed obvious. The market forces driving our consumer society are so strong and all-pervasive that it takes an enormous amount of effort to resist and defy them. As Anne O said in her comment on my previous post, " …it's like swimming against Niagara Falls to Do The Right Thing." Yes, that's how it feels. Or walking into a really strong and persistent headwind as I was doing now, on my walk. The wind was so strong that I had to push really hard to move forward, even when I was walking downhill.

So we have to give a tremendous amount of deliberate thought to the ways in which our own behaviour, our own lifestyles and all the small choices we make, day by day, affect what is happening in the wider world. Where does our rubbish end up? How much carbon are we putting into the air when we take that 'short break' flight to Lanzarote? When we take antibiotics and hormone pills and various other pharmaceutical products and some of that is excreted and goes down the drain, what effect might that have on the watercourses and the creatures that live in them? When we buy those cheap, chemical-sprayed supermarket bananas or that cheap, sweatshop-made T-shirt, whose life are we helping to damage in some other part of the world? How long before the plastic toys we bought for the kids' Christmas stockings end up in the landfill and how many centuries will it be before they break down – if ever? How much fossil fuel did it take to make that new, shiny gadget that we didn't really need and have managed for forty years without? (And on and on ....)

No TV commercials are ever going to remind us of these questions. They are geared to our forgetting, not to our remembering. The headwind of commerce blows relentlessly, day in and day out. Buy, buy, buy. Spend, spend, spend. Use, use, use. Pushing against it takes effort and persistence. Like the trees round here, our own shapes are by now so sculpted and stunted by the forces of consumerism that we no longer stand free and tall. But we are still alive. And we can still resist. If we do, we and all we love can still survive and thrive, and maybe eventually grow straight.

In the third post of this three-post series, I am going to look some of the ways we can resist – and bring greater contentment into our lives at the same time.

Why hasn't everybody turned green yet? (Part 1)

2008-01-14T12:26:00.000Z

You'd think every one of us would have turned at least light green by now, wouldn't you? So why haven't we?

Is it that despite all the publicity about climate change, peak oil and environmental crisis there are still lots of people who still have not realized that the human species is wrecking the planet it lives on, endangering its own survival and that of many other life forms?

Is that they have heard about it but they are assuming that someone else – the Government, the technological experts, the United Nations, God – will fix all the problems?

Is it that they know about the problems and know that nobody else is going to fix them but the whole thing is so big and awful to contemplate that they stick their heads in the sand and pretend it is just not true?

Is it that they know about the problems and that nobody else is going to fix them and have decided that since the problems are unfixable and everything is going down the tube anyway they may as well just have a good time and to hell with tomorrow?

I suppose the answer to my question is 'all of the above'.

It would be surprising if there really was anybody left in total ignorance of the environmental crisis since the media are full of stories about it these days. But your average daily newspaper is quite likely to run a story about global warming, another about some species of furry creature that has just joined the endangered species list and a third about how disappointed the retailers are because the Christmas sales figures were down a notch. And not a word about the deep connection between these three stories. No joining of the dots.

A neighbour sitting near me on the bus the other day was loudly lamenting the closure of yet another little local food store. And even as she did so, she was clutching on her lap a plastic bag full of food from the supermarket she had just been shopping at. A highly intelligent woman, but obviously not good at joining dots.

I think this is one of the main reasons why there are so many people who have not yet turned green. It is not that they don't know about the problems our species is facing. It is not that they are in denial. It is not that they know but don't care. It is that they haven't really joined all the dots together yet. They have not really got it that it is we ordinary folk who hold in our hands the power to change things, to live differently, to turn green and to create a new, sustainable way of life for everyone on the planet before it is too late.

The newspapers and radio and TV programs are not going to join the dots for us because their existence depends on our continuing to buy stuff from the companies whose advertising keeps them in business. We have to do our own dot-joining.

So why don't we do more of it, and faster? I have some thoughts about that, too. Watch for the next post.

Meanwhile, if you haven't yet seen that wonderful little video 'The Story of Stuff', click on the title to do so.

Land, Sea and Sky

2008-01-09T15:18:00.001Z

As a child, my favourite story was one about a bunch of animals who lived in a wood. I loved that story. And I used to think that one day I too would like to live in a little house right in the middle of a wood.

I was over fifty before I tried to realise that dream. The first time I went to look at an actual house for sale in an actual wood I knew for absolutely certain sure that I didn't want to live in a wood after all.

I realised, that day, that what I now wanted was to live where the sun shone. I wanted to live where I could see the sky. And I wanted to live near the sea because I knew I could not bear to be too far away from the shore.

As we age, we change. And it is good to keep track of those changes. It is as well never to say "I am a person who …". Because we might not be that sort of a person any more. Better to check within and ask "Who am I right now?"

And right now, although I love to walk through the woods, my favourite place to be is that place where land, sea and sky all come together.

I don't live precisely in a spot like that, 'tis true. I live a couple of hundred yards below the lip of a small valley. At the bottom, there are woods and a stream, but at the top, where I walk most days, the countryside is open, patchwork farmland and I can see for miles. The sky is big. And in the distance, I get a glimpse of the ocean. A forty-five minute walk will take me to one of those magic, land/sea/sky places. The sort of place where I could stand for hours, just watching the waves rolling endlessly into the shore, the seabirds circling, the land sloping down to meet the water, the ever-changing pattern of the clouds.

How wonderfully small and insignificant I am, this dot of living tissue called a human being, standing knee-deep in the heather with the salty sea-wind whipping my hair. Who am I right now? A speck of life, smaller than a grain of sand in the mighty and mysterious scheme of things.

In the Deep Midwinter ...

2007-12-20T17:22:00.000Z

Despite the cold wind roaring in from the north-east and freezing my face till my cheeks ache, and despite the clatter of a JCB just down the lane, digging trenches to fill with stones and drain a waterlogged field, there is a deep quietness about this time of year.

As I walk through the woods and between the hedgerows I can feel it. The restful silence of midwinter.

Tomorrow is the Solstice. The turning. Here, in the northern hemisphere, it is the sweet, imperceptible turning back towards the light. But for now – and for more weeks to come – everything feels quiet. Waiting. Hibernating.

Of course I know everything is gently ticking over. My blood still circulates and I am breathing. I know that deep in the soil the bulbs are moving. In another month or so the first snowdrops will emerge. Squirrels are still coming out, late morning, to scamper around in search of this or that, children still need to play and the birds, as always, are doing their thing. I did my 'timed tetrad visit' a few days ago, counting species around here for the new Bird Atlas. Yet despite all that, it still feels like Nature's quietest time of year.

As above, so below. Or rather, as outside, so inside. It is my quietest time of year, too. A hermit at the best of times, at midwinter I feel myself turn inwards even further, in towards myself, towards our life here in the cottage, towards contemplation, meditation, reading novels in the cosy warmth of the woodstove, playing on my computer.

I like the idea of a ritual to mark the promise of the returning light. So we shall have our private celebration, our small, midwinter feast in honour of the Solstice. But we long ago let go of that whole Christmas stress-out that so many people seem to get caught up in. Dashing round the shopping malls buying stuff? Forget it! It is entirely the wrong time of year for frenetic activity.

But the same mindless, ugly consumer culture that has turned Christmas into a shopping spree and a simple Christmas tree into a lawn full of hideous, plastic crap is the one that has driven a wedge between humans and Nature. If we were really listening, really tuned in to the energies around us we would not be hurtling around Wal-Mart. We would all of us, here in the north, be sitting quietly by the fireside by ourselves or with our loved ones, breathing gently like the quiet hedgerows, like the bare trees, like the silent, resting land around us, waiting for the light.

Any Thought in a Storm

2007-12-06T15:29:00.000Z

When I set out for my daily walk this morning it was 9:00 a.m. but the sky was so dull and dark and heavy that it felt as though night had not yet fully retreated. It was raining and a strong wind was blowing. The hedgerows were sodden and there were parallel streams of water running down the margins of the lane, heading for the already swollen river at the bottom of the combe. I set off downhill, head bent, huddling into my wet weather gear, ears tuned, just in case a car or tractor should come down behind me, the sound of its engine drowned out by the roar of wind and water.

I paused on the bridge to contemplate the river, rushing and roiling, churned to the colour of of our local clay, and thought ruefully that I should have done my quarterly otter survey before the rains began. There will be little to record now, for any prints or spraint will have been washed away in the torrent.

I climbed the hill on the other side of the combe. Once at the top, out of the shelter of the trees, I met the full force of the westerly wind, as it drove the rain into slanting sheets – the kind that penetrate the gaps around cuffs and collars, sending trickles of cold water through the layers of clothing, like clever spies on a mission to discover skin.

My walking boots are sturdy, and although they leak a little I wear thick wool socks inside. So it was more than half an hour before I noticed the squelching. From then on, however, it felt as though my feet were encased in sphagnum moss.

There was something else I noticed, too, at around the half-hour mark. Which was that I was still there. I mean THERE there. There with the wind, there with the rain, there with my squelchy socks. There with the bare, stunted wind-sheared trees that grow in the exposed places, there with the damp sheep in the field, munching on wet grass, their tiny stick-like feet sunk several inches into the sodden ground. There with the few crows and seagulls still attempting to get somewhere but forced into detours by the insistent wind. There with the tiny, pink faces of the last half dozen campions, stragglers of summer, still blooming in their sheltered microclimate at the base of the hedge, their petals bruised and drooping.

Usually, by that time, I am just coming to the realization that I have walked for thirty minutes without seeing anything except the pictures in my mind. Usually, half an hour into my walk, I am reproaching myself for being 'out of my body' and off on a journey to one of the four places to which, like everyone else, I go whenever I leave the Now: i.e. the past, the imagined future, the 'me-world' of my troubles and schemes or my conceptual 'you-world' of all that is not me.*

Most days, the half hour point is where I realise that I have gone missing, so to speak, and remind myself that as well as good exercise, my morning walk is also, potentially, a meditation. But it can only be that if I stay present.

This morning, in the twenty miles an hour westerly wind that gusted to nearer thirty on the corners, in the drenching rain, with cold water trickling down my neck, I didn't go off anywhere. I stayed. And in the staying, I became aware, once again, of what Martin Buber called the 'I-Thou' relationship. Nature is not something to use. It is not wallpaper. It is not an 'It'. It is a 'Thou'. When I touch a tree, the tree also touches me. When I see a bird, the bird sees me also. As Thomas Berry says, "The world is not a collection of objects. It is a communion of subjects." Oh amen, amen, amen.

Why, this morning, did I find it so much easier to stay present to the here and now? Do we need 'bad weather' – floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, drought, global warming – to wake us out of our collective, sleepwalking state and propel us into a better, more mindful way of being in the world? Hmmm. Perhaps we do.

(*as described by Richard Moss
in his latest book, The Mandala of Being)

A Teddy Bear, Seagulls and Some Thoughts on Evolution

2007-11-29T13:54:00.000Z

There was an uproar in Britain this week when a foreign government arrested a middle-aged English teacher and threatened her with a public whipping and/or imprisonment for allowing her class of little children to name a teddy bear Mohammed. (The kids' idea, it should be noted, not hers).

No doubt the UK government is happy about that diversion. Getting scandalised and indignant about fundamentalism 'over there', takes people's minds off the corruption (e.g. 'disguised' donations to party funds), hypocrisy (e.g. carbon-lowering rhetoric combined with plans to expand airports) and pathetic impotence (dancing always to the corporate tune) of our own so-called leaders. It's easy to decry what happens 'over there'. When deplorable things are happening 'over here', that is harder to cope with because it means we need to DO something rather than merely grumble. We usually don't, though. The British have made grumbling an art form but we are not good at revolutions.

The Americans were good at revolutions once, but these days most of them seem too busy watching TV or trying to earn a living to notice that the hard-won 'freedoms' they have been taught to believe in since their first day at school are being rapidly taken away from them by a government that's becoming just as scarily repressive as the one that disallows certain names for teddy bears.

Since the tragic events of 9/11, there has been what one journalist described this week as "…a virtual avalanche of legislation and commissions designed to protect the country at the expense of the Bill of Rights." It's a one-two punch, and the final sock to the jaw is likely to come from the passage of a new bill that has the potential to turn any citizen or resident into a 'terrorist' just by jiggling a few words and definitions. (Like they jiggled the definition of 'torture'). Everyone who reads Ronni Bennett's blog, 'Time Goes By' already knows about this. (And if you haven't read what she has to say about it, please do, and forward the link to anyone you know in the USA.)

The problem with revolutions is that they don't usually work. Whatever group seizes power from dysfunctional leaders generally ends up being dysfunctional itself. We may belong to the family of primates but I often think that human beings are more like seagulls than they are like any of the primates I have ever seen. We seem to find it so much easier to fight and squabble – over territory, over belief systems, over just about anything you can name – than we do to co-operate. We talk about democracy but we have really never had it. Not really. Whether it was kings and dukes. governments or multinational corporations, there have always been the rulers and the ruled, the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless. It never changes. It merely changes form, from place to place and from era to era. Let us not kid ourselves.

I believe, along with many others, that there is only one path out of this morass and that is not north, south, east or westwards. It is upwards. We need to work on changing our own consciousness. To start with our own inner seagulls, watch how they operate, get them talking – and listening – to each other for a change. Next step: learning the skills of interpersonal communication and co-operation. Co-operation, after all, is as much a part of our evolutionary heritage as competition is. Darwin only saw half of the picture. The other half is finally being documented and understood.

This, I believe, is the only way we can avert catastrophe, either political or ecological – and ultimately, both are the same. We face a stark choice now. Evolve or perish.

The one-celled organisms who were our original ancestors faced this same choice three and a half billion years ago, when the planet's oxygen levels rose so high that those CO2-breathing prokaryotes could no longer survive. They learned to breathe oxygen instead. They survived. They learned to co-operate and become multi-celled organisms and all life on Earth is the result, including you and me. But they each had to start with themselves and their personal habits.

So do we.

Murmurations and Mutterings

2007-11-20T21:01:00.000Z

The first fourteen people have signed up to the new 'elderwomanspace' network and all sorts of conversations are already happening between them. I shall be sending out a fresh batch of invitations tomorrow. Wow, this feels so rich and interesting. Although I dislike most kinds of parties, I am certainly enjoying this one.

The rest of my life has been on hold since last Friday. Soon, I shall have to go back to some of the more difficult tasks I have been avoiding. Like trying to get my novel published.

It's the first time I have tried to publish full-length fiction, and it is so much harder to place than non-fiction. With all three of my non-fiction books I was able to find a publisher fairly easily, but this time I decided to try and get an agent, as I don't know the fiction market very well.

I have approached a lot of agents, but none of them want to take it on. They all say it's very well-written and they enjoyed reading the sample chapters but "the fiction market is really tight right now." I think what they are really telling me is that the publishers' marketing departments won't want it because it's not chick lit, it's not crime or sci-fi or historical romance and the main character is a woman of 51. Grrr!

The trees are all bare now and we have had our first frost. Squirrels are busily caching their winter supplies. The huge flocks of starlings that come over each winter from eastern Europe are already making their fascinating, aerobatic swirls across the sky. I love to watch the patterns they make. And I love it when I am out on my morning walk and suddenly the whole flock swoops low over the lane with the strong, soft swoosh and flutter of a thousand wings.I can even feel the movement of the air current they create as they pass over me. There is something that feels so lovely about that. It's like a sort of avian blessing.

Yet an hour later, when I am home again and I see half a dozen of them dominating the bird feeders, squabbling and driving all the smaller birds away, I find myself muttering crossly at them and wishing they would go back where they came from, like some anti-immigration fanatic.

Life is so full of contradictions, sometimes, isn't it?

Champagne Day

2007-11-19T13:37:00.000Z

The new networking site is up and running and I just sent out the first batch of invitations. I wonder who will get there first?

I feel as nervous as though I were throwing a party. But the good thing about this party is that I can sit here in comfort, in my old sweatpants and ny favourite slippers.

And there won't be any dishes to wash afterwards, either.

What's not to love about that?

Ready, set ... LAUNCH!

2007-11-18T19:44:00.000Z

Wow, things are really moving fast. I have had a terrific response to my suggestion about a social networking site for elderwomen. Some of you have responded here in the comments - thank you very much for that. And some have emailed, either directly or via the Discussion Group.

Almost everyone seems enthusiastic and there is a high level of consensus about what form the site should take. It should be private, by invitation only. And for women only. Those were my preferences too, but I wanted to see what others thought, first. So I am glad we agree.

Encouraged by your response, I have spent most of this weekend setting up the site. I am calling it 'elderwomanspace'. This is what it looks like (at the moment, anyway, though we can always change the design if someone else comes up with a better one):

And some time in the next twenty-four hours I am going to send out invitations to the first twenty potential members. These are the 'first responders', the people who answered my questions so promptly and expressed their enthusiasm for the project.

You twenty are the foundation members of elderwomanspace. Together, we will set the tone for the site and make it something that elderwomen everywhere will want to be part of.

I have never set up a site like this before, so it is a big learning curve for me. What I am hoping is that as you sign up, explore the site and start adding content of your own, you will give me feedback about what is missing, what needs changing, what works and what doesn't. This way, we will shape the thing together. I see this as very much a co-operative venture.

Over the coming days and weeks, I will send out several hundred more invitations. And I hope that you, too, will invite everyone else you know who may be interested.

To set the site up, I am using what is known as a 'white label' company. In other words, I am building the site on a platform developed by somebody else - a company called Ning - and offered to us free, on their servers. ('Ning' by the way, means 'peace' in Chinese. I like that.)

Like Yahoo and Google and Facebook and all those other companies who offer free services, Ning makes its money by allowing advertising on members' pages. I'm pleased to say, though, that the ads on our site take up just one small section on the right hand side and are fairly unobtrusive.

I anticipate that once we get going, we'll probably find ourselves attracting ads for some of the age-denying things we all dislike so much. But once we have a few hundred members we can ask everyone to chip in a dollar (or 50p), and that way we'll have enough to buy the ad-free, premium service for at least a year.

If anyone else who is reading this would like an invitation to sign up for elderwomanspace, please go to this page on my website for details of how to get one.

I am feeling very excited about this new venture.

(PS: Jill and Mary - please see note on previous post)

A New Venture

2007-11-16T15:16:00.000Z

This morning, I announced to the members of my online Elderwoman Discussion Group that I am just about to create a social networking site – one that elderwomen might find more appropriate to join than, say, Facebook. I want it to be a site that encourages deeper, more thoughtful interaction than any of the existing social networking sites seem to do.

I asked members of the group to comment on this and help me decide exactly how the network is going to be run. For instance, will it be an 'invitation-only' group, where members invite other potential members, or will it be open to anyone who sees it and wants to join? Will it be just for women, like our Discussion Group is, or should we open it to 'eldermen' as well?

If there are any readers of my blog who are interested in a network like this and would like to add some ideas on how it should be shaped, I would love to hear from them.

You can either leave a comment here or email me at marian(at)elderwoman.org (and please put the letters OKEM in the subject line of your email to ensure that your message gets safely through my spam filters).

Musings on Firewood, and Other Earthy Things

2007-11-08T15:38:00.000Z

A Woman Gathering Faggots
at Ville-d'Avray, ca. 1871–74
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
(French, 1796–1875)
Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher
Collection, Bequest of Isaac
D. Fletcher,
1917 (17.120.225) Metropolitan Museum of Art
http://www.metmuseum.org/

I've spent several hours this morning doing something that I find marvellously satisfying, and that is gathering firewood and breaking it all up into the right sized pieces for our ancient kitchen range.

I suppose some people would think that is utterly mad. In this push-button age of oil-fired central heating, why would anyone want to go wandering around collecting sticks in order to keep warm in the winter? Don't we pity those poor souls from earlier centuries who had to chop wood and carry water, wash their laundry by hand, grow their own vegetables, sew their own clothes …? Well actually, no. (Except for the clothes, that is. I never did enjoy sewing). When I have to spend any length of time cocooned in indoor spaces and surrounded by labour-saving devices like dishwashers and microwave ovens, I start to feel marooned, alienated, separated from the real world.

I love the physicality of firewood. The satisfying snap as you break a dry stick in your hands or against your knee or under the heel of your boot. Now that we live in a small cottage, all I have to do with those broken pieces is to pile them in a basket. But years ago, when I had to carry the pieces some distance, I used to enjoy making them into sturdy bundles. 'Faggots', as in the title of this Corot painting. What a lovely, old-fashioned word that is. It makes me feel connected with all the other people, all down through history, who have brought their firewood home this way.

I love the physicality of gardening, too, and the deep feeling of connection that comes from plunging my hands into the soil. As I pull weeds or plant seedlings, I see the robin nearby, head to one side, waiting and watching with a black and beady eye in the hope that I shall turn up a juicy earthworm, and suddenly we are companions in the task, each with our own reason for being there. I feel the breeze on my face and in my hair, and in the air I smell the season – right now, the moist, mushroomy aroma of autumn. In moments like that, despite all the problems in the world, everything feels OK.

My back aches a lot these days. Seventy years of walking upright and sitting in badly-designed chairs and all those decades of overriding the deeper needs of my body in order to earn a living have all taken their toll on my spine. And physical tasks – particularly gardening – all bring with them, these days, the possibility that some thorn, some jagged edge, some projecting object will pierce this unbelievably thin skin of mine. The merest bump, like brushing too hard against the corner of a table, will tear the skin on my arm as though it were tissue paper. I stare in amazement at the oozing blood and say "Gosh, all I did was …" Now I understand why elderly patients in hospitals are so prone to bedsores. Our skin has lost its robustness.

Yet paradoxically, as my energy ever-so-slowly declines and my body gradually becomes more subject to aches and bruises, my delight in the physicality of living close to the earth seems to increase. I can't do the hugely physical things I did years ago, like building a house and backpacking around the world. But the small, physical tasks I do outdoors, like pegging out a line of laundry in the garden, spreading compost, planting seeds, collecting kindling for the fire, bring a measure of delight to my days that I would sorely miss.

Don't Do Something. Just Sit There.

2007-10-30T08:13:00.000Z

Here I go again. Still trying to resolve the 'doing/being' issue. "What have you stopped doing in your old age?" was the question Ronni Bennett asked readers earlier this month on her popular blog 'Time Goes By: what it's really like to get old'. And that's what started me off again on this train of thought. What have I stopped doing? And what can't I stop doing?

"What have you stopped doing?" was a popular question. Men wrote in to say that they had given up shaving and wearing ties. Women exulted over the freedom they had discovered in ceasing to torture their bodies with pantyhose and high heels. They no longer bothered with make-up or with shaving their legs and they now felt delightfully able to abandon a book they didn't like instead of reading doggedly to the end. Many reported an increased casualness about housework.

I didn't wait for 'old age' to give up most of those things. I haven't worn high heels, pantyhose – or a bra – in thirty years or more and it is at least twenty years since I gave up make-up, leg-shaving and book-finishing. We haven't had a television since 1985 and giving up that colossal time-waster was no problem at all. There's no way I'd ever have another. I long since relinquished my driver's licence, not because I'm old but because I hate driving (and we don't have a car now anyway). Housework has never been something I indulged in much, beyond the basics of hygiene.

So what, I asked myself, have I given up in my old age? And what remains a challenge? As if I didn't know! Achieving, of course.

In old age, all types of conformism seem easier to give up. But the deeper you go, the harder the layers are to peel off. Things that were programmed into us at a very early age can be difficult to shift. So whilst the things we took on in early adulthood, like shaving our body hair and wearing high heels, can be shed easily and with relief, the older programming needs more effort to release.

At 71, what I am challenged to give up now is my need to accomplish things. I've been going on about this a lot lately, I know. But it keeps coming up. It's such a tough one for the ego. "What have you achieved today? This week? This year?" I ask myself. When the answer comes back "Nothing much," I feel guilty. As though I am taking up space in an (unsustainably overcrowded) world and not doing anything to justify it.

When I was young, the goals and achievements used to be personal ones – a university degree, a better job, more money, a husband, a family, a house, another university degree, a book published – but in later years, the emphasis shifted. Now it's "What have you done today to help reduce global warming/cut carbon/lower your ecological footprint… etc?" But the pattern remains the same.

So that's the big challenge. I keep reminding myself – and others keep reminding me – that even if, at the end of the day or the week or the year my ego has nothing to carve notches about, it is still OK to be here. But how do I settle into that feeling? How do I sit quietly in that chair, not do anything to help the planet yet still feel good about my day? Any helpful hints would be warmly welcomed.

The Aquatic Ape

2007-10-24T17:36:00.000+01:00

I live two and a half miles away from one of the most rugged stretches of coastline in south-western England. Many a ship foundered on these jagged rocks in centuries gone by, and even now the lifeboat crews remain always at the ready. This picture gives an idea of how it looks at low tide.

To swim from our local beaches, you have to know the weather and the tides and where the sandy bits are likely to be (they shift, from season to season), and watch out for the rocks and the rips.

Although there are several sandy beaches further down the coast, the ones round here are made of pebbles – beautiful, grey pebbles with white markings, from pea-size to boulder-size and everything in between. So you move slowly, stepping carefully from one smooth pebble to the next and being careful not to turn an ankle on the wobbly ones.

It is not a comfortable world, this one; not the sort of place where you can stretch out in the sun or play frisbee or volleyball. But it is awesomely beautiful, and I love it.

I love, too, that I can walk from my home to the edge of the cliffs in forty-five minutes and that sometimes, when the wind blows from the west and the night is still, I can hear the sound of the waves in the distance and smell the sea.

Why is it, I wonder, that for some of us there is a deep need to be close to the ocean? Whenever I go too far inland to be able to walk to the water's edge, I start to feel claustrophobic. I remember how one year, when we lived in California, we drove north up the coast and then turned and began a journey that would take us all the way to the East coast. And as I took my last look at the Pacific Ocean I felt something akin to panic. A certain tension arose in my body that did not dissipate until at last I was able to run across the beach at Plum Island, in Massachusetts, and step into the frothing, salt water of the Atlantic.

The best explanation I can think of for my need to be close to the shore is what is known as ' the aquatic ape theory'. ( See http://www.primitivism.com/aquatic-ape.htm) which postulates that five million or so years ago, our ancestors lived in the shallows.

Maybe somewhere, deep down in my cellular memory, the aquatic ape is still alive and well. I like to think so, anyway.

On NOT Packing the Pea

2007-09-26T17:07:00.000+01:00

As I pack for yet another journey – this time from one end of the country to the other for the GreenSpirit Annual Gathering – I fine myself once again struggling with the twin impulses to:

(a) take with me everything that I could possibly need over thee next few days, 'just in case', and–

(b) travel light and feel wonderfully free and unencumbered.

Before every trip, those two impulses wage war back and forth across the battlefield of my psyche for hours (sometimes days) on end. The result? I usually finish up somewhere in the middle; regretting the absence of something I really wish I had brought and yet feeling somewhat disappointed and overburdened by luggage that is heavier than I would like it to be. A very unsatisfying situation all round.

On our latest trip, since we were heading towards a warmer and sunnier place, I left my slippers at home. But the first couple of days the weather was slightly cooler than I expected and I ended up shuffling around on a cold, tiled floor in my socks and feeling grumpy about it because I hate the feeling of walking in socks. A couple of years ago, packing for a conference in one of those large and ancient English 'stately homes' that are almost always cold and draughty, I packed my sheepskin boots, only to find the central heating turned up so high that my feet got unbearably hot and I had to take the boots off and walk around barefoot.

As what's known in pop psychology as an 'HSP' (a 'highly sensitive person'), I find it enormously difficult to tune out any personal discomfort such as scratchy labels, tight clothing, restricting shoes or being too hot or too cold and not being able to fix it. Being physically uncomfortable in my clothes seems to addle my brain, somehow. Even if I wear jeans and trainers to go out, the instant I get home I change into sweatpants and slippers so that I can relax, breathe freely and think.

All HSPs know this feeling. Everything has to feel just right or we cannot function properly. Other people might think we are fussy or mad, but we who know the reality of living in a body that reacts to every tiny stimulus as though it were a thunderclap also know that we simply cannot help being the way we are. We are born like that. It is, as Elaine Aaron and others have pointed out, simply another version of normal (15-20% of the population are HSPs). And we owe it to ourselves to honour that aspect of ourselves and arrange our lives accordingly.

So when I pack to go somewhere else, whether it is for a few days or a few weeks, I have to make sure I get the balance right. The obvious answer, of course, is to plan for all eventualities. But then I finish up taking more than is necessary and having to cope with the discomfort of dragging a heavy bag around and feeling not only overloaded but disappointed in myself for not achieving my ideal of travelling light.

Arrgghhhhh !!!

A Cup of (Tribal) Comfort

2007-08-17T15:09:00.000+01:00

Since our ancestors lived in tribes for millions of years, the feeling of belonging to a defined group of people – an 'us' that sets us apart from the undifferentiated hordes of 'them' – is almost certainly hard-wired into our psyches.

These days, most of us don't live within our tribes any more. Yet the feeling of identification, the sense of belonging to a discrete group of fellow humans set apart from all the rest is still a basic need. When we don't have our tribe, we long for it. So we search for it. We may search for it in our local communities, but more often these days we search for it in sub-cultures. No matter how unusual or bizarre our preferences and preoccupations, through the global interconnectedness of modern life it is possible to link up with other people who see the world through the same sort of lenses as we do. And when we find those individuals or those groups, there is an 'Aha' moment, followed by a long, sighing 'Aaahh' of pleasure. Something in us has come home to itself. 'There are people out there just like me'. We no longer live within our tribes; nowadays, our tribes live within us.

So rich are the possibilities that modern communications like the Internet have given us that, unlike our ancestors, many of us nowadays feel part of several tribes at once. When I think about my own life, I am aware of being part of at least four major tribes apart from my biological family and my professional colleagues. One, I became part of not simply by passing through menopause but in writing two books about aging and, through those, linking with various branches of the world-wide tribe of 'conscious' elders who are reclaiming elderhood for our times.

Another, I am part of by virtue of my love of our precious, lovely Earth and the Earth-based spirituality of Thomas Berry, Matthew Fox and dozens of other, inspirational writers. That is my tribe of 'green' people. It, in turn, has natural and obvious links with another of my tribes – the folks who live, as my partner and I try to do, lives of voluntary simplicity in which we take as little as we can of the planet's resources and give back as much as we are able, in service, in compost, in love and in writing.

It is writing that unites me with the fourth of my major tribes: the tribe of writers. We are everywhere, we are legion and we really, really need each other. For there are some things – a lot of things, in fact – that writers feel and experience and talk about that no-one but another writer could possibly understand. Writing is, for most of us, a solitary pursuit. Yet without the knowledge that there are others just like us, sitting at our computers, dealing with precisely the same sorts of struggles and doubts, pleasures, pains and questions, we would probably not be able to sit there very long.

It is for this reason that writers band together in writers' groups and encourage others to do likewise. And it is for this reason that writers love websites, discussion groups, magazines and books that explore this special, tribal world that writerly folk inhabit.

What I am (slowly) leading up to telling you is that a wonderful anthology by and for writers was published a few days ago and I just received my copy yesterday. It is called A Cup of Comfort for Writers.

I am telling you this, not because it has an essay by me in it, although I am very happy to say that it does (my essay called 'The Baptism' is on page 236). I am telling you because I have been reading some of the other essays in the collection and I know that if, by any chance, you are a writer, they will speak to you, just as they are speaking to me. They may well give you an 'Aha', followed by a nice, long 'Aaahh'.

And if 'writer' is not one of the labels you wear, I encourage you to find – and rejoice in and talk about and blog about – the tribes of which you are a part and which, in turn, are part of you.

A Blast of Cold Air

2007-08-14T20:52:00.001+01:00

Washington DC. July. Temperature nudging ninety degrees in the shade. My father-in-law invited us out for a meal. Lovely, Italian restaurant, with attentive staff, a good wine list and food to die for.

There were some tables outside, but the place was on a busy, noisy, downtown street so we opted for the peace and quiet and starched, white tablecloths of the interior. Which was fine. Except that in the summer skirt, short-sleeved cotton blouse and sandals I had been wearing on my walk around town, I now froze. We all froze. It was like the inside of an ice chest. I had not thought to carry a sweater. Well why would I, in midsummer with an ambient temperature of eighty-nine and high humidity?

The dessert menu included one of my top favourites – coconut sorbet – and I ordered some, since I rarely get the chance to taste that delicious concoction these days. But my teeth were chattering as I ate it and my fingers were numb. It was the strangest sensation, eating that yummy stuff and shivering with cold; a mixture of pain and pleasure.

It was a relief to get out on to the hot street again.

Next day, needing to go to Boston and being the greenies that we are, we took an eight hour journey on Amtrak, instead of flying. Lovely, comfortable carriages, a wide, clean window and interesting landscapes to gaze at along the way. But once again, air-conditioning so cold that we had scarcely left Union Station before we had to haul down our suitcases and find sweaters. My partner, who had been wearing shorts, had to go into the toilet and change into long pants. The people around us were complaining too. Someone put on a woolly hat. One woman was forced to wear her raincoat, as it was the only other garment she had with her.

We complained to the conductor, who shook her head and told us there was no way of controlling the temperature. The air-conditioning, she said, had just two states – 'on' and 'off'.

Well, my preference would certainly have been for 'off', if only there had been windows that opened to let in the breeze, as there used to be in the old days. Not any more. We had no choice but to suffer.

The conductor came back a while later to tell us that the very last coach was warmer than all the rest and there were not many people in it. Would we care to move? We investigated and found that she was right. It was a much older coach and more decrepit and the seats were nowhere near as comfortable, but at least it did not feel like the North Pole, so we dragged ourselves and our luggage all the way to the back of the train. We noticed that when our friend the conductor had finished her rounds she chose to sit in that coach too, and read her magazine until we got to Penn Station in New York, where she went off duty. We thanked her again as she left.

Three days later, we took a bus from Boston up to Bar Harbor, with a stopover in Portland. The same story, all the way. Hot weather, icy buses, and the Greyhound station in Portland so cold that we chose to stand for half an hour out on the forecourt amongst the traffic fumes rather than to freeze our butts off inside.

We both came down with colds soon after that and I am sure it was because of these experiences. Getting chilled is known to lower the immune response. It is lucky we didn't catch pneumonia.

So why do things have to be this way?

Is there some engineer out there who can explain to me why the thermostats on heating systems are so effective that you can choose the exact temperature you wish to live at and yet Amtrak's air-conditioning systems are either on or off?

Why does a restaurant, a bus or a bus station need to be so cold that everyone has to pile on winter clothes in mid-July?

Or is it that some people actually like freezing to death in the height of summer? Do they enjoy doing this mad dance between the extremes of heat and cold? Do they get some kinky thrill from having the sweat beads on their bodies suddenly turn into icicles? The whole thing strikes me as totally crazy. Not to mention environmentally wasteful and utterly unnecessary.

I guess it is just as well I live in England where we wear our sweaters for nine months of the year anyway and nobody needs air-conditioning anywhere. I always thought it would be nice to live in a somewhat warmer climate, as I like hotter summers than we have here, but if that involves freezing to death the minute one goes indoors, then forget it!

Journeys with Giants - a reminiscence

2007-07-10T07:25:00.000+01:00

Journeys with Giants, England, 1946

Once there were giants, giants of iron,
giants that travelled on seven-league wheels.
Fire-bellied giants, roaming the countryside,
filling the air with their belches and squeals.
Giant can take me. Giant can tempt me.
Lean out the window as far as I dare.
Wind in my face. I'm in disgrace.
"Marian, DON'T! You'll get smuts in your hair!"

Over the stream, over the fields,
glimpse of a manor house, cottages, pubs.
Slow down and stop. Suddenly quiet.
Station with shrubs and bright flowers in tubs.
Bang of a door. Make room for more.
Song of a skylark and fragrance of hay.
Giant's slow huff. Starting is tough.
Huffs gather speed and we're back on our way.

Field becomes lawn, house becomes factory,
lark becomes pigeon, that becomes this.
End of the line. Into the terminus.
Pull to a stop with a hissssssss..... Then a kiss.
Aunt Jane from Chiswick, lives on her own.
Sensible shoes, and her hair in a bun.
"Welcome to town.. my how you've grown..
...we'll have ice cream when the shopping's all done"

Into a world that's made to fit giants.
Slow-moving forest of trousers and skirts.
Down escalators, up escalators.
Mummy is holding so tight that it hurts.
Man with balloons playing the spoons;
blur of red buses and people and shops.
Roaring traffic. Whistling cops.
A huge, restless city where sound never stops.

Corner House lunch, down in the Brasserie,
strawberry ice cream with wafer so thin.
Then the Museum of Natural History.
But I'm too tired to take it all in.
Back with a giant, giant of iron,
rumbling home under darkening skies.
Such a long day. Such a long way.
There's lead in my eyelids and grit in my eyes.

Fields are dark. Gone is the lark.
Stations are dim-lit, mysterious places.
World become small, nothing at all
in the window except our own, town-weary faces.
Take off my shoes, lean towards Mummy.
She snuggles me round and I curl up my feet.

Falling asleep to that comforting sound,
the ticketty-boom of the giant's heartbeat.

The Hare's Dilemma

2007-06-15T17:06:00.000+01:00

It is now more than twenty years since I gave up working in a full-time, nine-to-five job and twelve years since I left the workforce altogether. Yet all those years in the workplace – not to mention the twelve years of school, the five years of college and all those years of round-the-clock parenting – have programmed me in ways that make it really difficult for me to replace 'doing' with simply 'being'.

I have noticed that a busy day with many tasks accomplished leaves me highly satisfied whereas I tend to feel vaguely disappointed if I get to the end of a day and cannot point to anything significant that I have done since I got out of bed. (Who is assigning significance? Me of course!)

Sometimes I think I am getting the hang of this 'being' thing. Then a deadline approaches. Like, for example, the departure date for a journey. Soon, I find myself compiling the inevitable 'things-I-must-do-before-we-leave' list. Redirect the mail. Weed the garden. Buy a new suitcase. Get my e-mail up to date. Clean my shoes. Re-charge the camera batteries …

It's not the list that is the problem. Nor even the utter glee with which I cross things off it. The problem is the feeling of vague dissatisfaction I get when a day goes by with nothing crossed off and nothing to show for having lived another twenty-four hours.

As long as I can remember, I have had days of pottering interspersed with days of prodigious output. I am like the hare in the hare and tortoise story who alternated between napping and sprinting. I can totally relate to the hare.

But of course he lost the race. The plodding tortoise is the hero of the story. Our industrial culture rewards the person who works at a steady pace, just like a machine, and has a full 'out' basket at the end of each day. That is what many of us learn to expect of ourselves, regardless of how well that pattern actually suits who we are.

Such an expectation, fully internalised by the time we reach adulthood and reinforced in the workplace, makes it difficult ever to recapture the pure, joyful present-centredness of early childhood. Instead, we become addicted to Getting Things Done and for many of us the addiction persists into the years of so-called 'retirement'. (Even into really old age. I have a 91-year-old relative who frequently chides herself for being 'lazy' and 'not doing anything').

Not that retirement means we should forego the pleasure of doing what we enjoy or of doing a whole lot of things we never had time for before. Being busy is fine. But we should never feel driven. Never, ever, ever.

I often write about the importance – and the pleasure – of living in the Now and substituting 'being' for 'doing'. But do I practise what I preach?

Well yes I do, sometimes. On my daily walks in the countryside, or on vacation, or just strolling around my garden simply observing and breathing instead of weeding or planting, I am often able to do what Richard Carlson calls 'slowing down to the speed of life'. It feels really good.

But the rest of the time? Hmm … not so much.

And by the way, have you noticed that even this post is couched in terms of achievement? I am trying to achieve a state of not being preoccupied with achievement. Arrgghh!! That's enough to drive even a Zen master to drink.

Of this place ...

2007-06-07T13:17:00.000+01:00

The foxgloves are everywhere in the hedgerows now and the sweet scent of honeysuckle is in the air. I love June in the English countryside. Well as a matter of fact I love the other eleven months of the year in the English countryside also. But it is in the Spring and early summer that the scenery here is at its most beautiful. Especially down here in Devon where we have, as most people would agree, some of the most beautiful areas of countryside in all of Britain.

I cannot claim to be 'of' this village, since we have lived here only a little over eight years. But I certainly can claim to be 'of' Devon, since it is where I come from and my ancestors have lived in one part of of this county or another for the last however-many hundreds of years.

As a child, I assumed that all countryside, everywhere, was like this – green and lush, with woods and fields, moors and streams, pretty villages with thatched houses and hedgerows thick with wildflowers.

It is not, of course. As I found out when I was older. There are lots of beautiful places, but to me the Westcountry is extra special. So every time I leave, coming back is a homecoming for my heart.

Like salmon, who swim back up the river at spawning time to find that one, particular patch of pebbles that is special to them, many people have a tendency to form a special bond with a place. Not just a place they like or admire, but whatever place it is that they feel 'of'. For many – perhaps most – that is the place of their birth or their childhood. For others, it is a place they have found which for some unknown reason feels more like home than home ever was.

It may not be anything as specific as a village or a town or even a county or state. It may not even be a country – though it often is. But it is a certain feeling. The smell of the air, a certain sort of vegetation, the shape of the terrrain. The atmosphere. My partner, though he has the adaptability to live contentedly anywhere – and nowadays lives a full and contented life in England – has a special affinity with the Southwest of the USA. It doesn't matter much whether he is in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah or wherever. The place where he feels the most alive is the place of deserts and mountains, red rocks, dry air, the scent of sagebrush and piñon pine, the big sky, the feeling … the indefinable something that he cannot even name. He is not 'of' the Southwest (he was born and raised in Indiana) and yet, somehow, he is. Maybe in a past life he was a cliff-dweller. That certainly feels right.

I love that area too. I also love the redwood forests of California, the chaparral, the misty, rocky coast of Maine, the mountains and olive groves of Italy, the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean, the whitewashed villages of the Spanish Alpujarra and the unspoiled southern coast of Crete. All these places are special to me. I love to go there, to drink them in, to revel in their beauty and enjoy their sights and sounds and smells and the taste of the local food.

But here, where the foxgloves bloom in early summer and honeysuckle twines in the hedgrows, where little streams run through small, wooded valleys to the pebbly shore of the ocean and a day of full sunshine is like a special blessing … this little piece of the funny, patchwork island called England is not only where I am 'from', it is also where I am 'of'.

If I didn't live here (and for many, many years I didn't) I would have to come here from time to time to take a sip from it. Just as the Italians, wherever they are in the world, feel the need to return to Italy once in a while per rinfrescare lo spirito – 'to refresh the spirit' – so do we all need to do that if we possibly can. Some can't, of course. And even though they accept their lot, somewhere deep inside, they pine for the place they are 'of'.

I would, too, I know. So today I give thanks for being alive, here, now, with the foxgloves blooming and the scent of honeysuckle in the air.

Comings and Goings

2007-05-06T15:23:00.000+01:00

I don't know much about astrology but since I have so many friends who do I'm never short of someone to explain me to myself in terms of the stars. Right now, still jet-lagged from a trip that whisked me from England to California to New England and back to Old England again, I am reflecting – for the hundredth time – that travel can be especially tough on us Cancerian types who are loth to leave our sheltering shells.

First, there's the preparatory grief about leaving home. This time, I had to depart just as the bluebells down in the woods were reaching a state of perfection, the hawthorn tree outside our bathroom window was bursting into leaf and the dawn chorus each morning was a crescendo of delight. It's a particularly tough time of year to have to go away, especially when one is a keen gardener. But when family members set their wedding dates they don't usually consider the annual bluebell cycle or the needs of seeds. So this time, I had no choice.

The pain of leaving, when blended with the excitement about the forthcoming trip and reunion with distant loved ones, always creates such a weird state of mind that checklists are for me an essential guide to staying sane and focused in the week before departure. Thanks to my lists, I usually make it out of the door with everything I need and all the necessary switches and taps turned off. Even so, I worry for several hours that I have forgotten something important that will cause the house to burn down as soon as I am out of sight (despite the fact that it has been sitting there intact since 1733).

Then there's the travel itself, with all the physical and mental disruption it causes. I really don't think it is good for the human body to be hurtled around the stratosphere in a pressurised, steel capsule at six hundred miles an hour, strapped into a narrow seat, breathing stale, endlessly recirculated air, and eating weird substances out of little plastic containers. Neither is it easy to find oneself disgorged at the other end into a completely different time zone. The reward, of course, is the ecstatic hugs of reunion that wait just beyond the customs hall. I'd suffer anything to get those.

Despite the delight of being there, homesickness still grips me the very first night away from home, just as it did when I was a child on a longed-for visit to grandparents. Like many other animals, I sleep best in my own, familiar den, where the walls hold me safe, the night-time creaks have known origins and the sheets smell right. During my youth, I learned to suppress the homesickness but now I am in my seventies it seems to have become worse again, for some reason.

I adjust, of course. And within three or four days, I feel perfectly fine and normal. But then, all too soon, the trip is over and we have reached the most horrid part of all – the tearful, agonising goodbyes. "I just can't keep doing this", I said to myself this time, between sobs, while tying my shoelaces back up again on the other side of Security. But I can, of course. And I shall. For as long as I am physically able. It is what goes with having a geographically distributed family. My daughter and I like to think of each painful parting as a beginning – our 'payment' for the next batch of happy reunion hugs.

Now I am back home, waking late, dealing with a mountain of mail, a garden-turned- jungle and all the problems of re-adjustment. Nothing feels normal again yet. But in a few days, it will. It always does.

The view from the bathroom window is like a snow scene now, for the hawthorn tree is flowering. So are the wisteria and the campions, the hedge parsley and the wild garlic. While I was away, the swallows returned. I wonder if they find their annual comings and goings easier than I do. They probably do. Since most of them hatch in May, they are not Cancerians. That must surely help.

And speaking of help, I have some in the form of Bach flower remedies. There is honeysuckle for the homesickness, walnut for coping with change and mimulus for fear of all the things I am afraid of, like flying. I also take melatonin tablets for a few days at each end and try to get as much sunshine as I can, both of which help to re-set the body clocks.

There's to be another family wedding in July. Two overseas trips in one year is bad news, environmentally, and I feel guilty about that. But I am going, anyway, and will try somehow to balance the carbon debt in other ways. So I've just started on a new checklist. And I have already paid for the arrival hugs. They cost me a lot but they will be worth it.

People Power

2007-03-29T15:29:00.000+01:00

One of the members of my Elderwoman Discussion Group reminded us all, this morning, about a wonderful organization called Kiva.

It is a way in which ordinary people in the so- called 'first world' can help ordinary people in the 'third world' to get themselves out of poverty by means of 'micro-loans'. A man or woman in, say, Africa, wants to start a very small business, selling vegetables for example, or keeping chickens or weaving cloth. But he or she has no money for the first lot of seeds or the chickens or the loom or the yarn. All that is needed is a tiny loan, just to get the project going. That's where we come in.

The Grameen Bank, in Bangla Desh, pioneered these 'micro-loans' as they are called, by lending small sums to women. It worked really well and was so successful that the Bank and its Director, Prof. Muhammad Yunus, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

Kiva provides a way in which we can all do this same thing and help thousands of people move out of the trap of poverty.

How much better this is than the World Bank and other monster organizations that repress and enslave the very people they are supposed to be helping!

It makes me realize, yet again, that this is how we need to heal and rebuild our world. People thinking globally and acting locally. Ordinary people reaching out to other ordinary people across the dividing lines of language, politics and power. Working together. Building local structures. Re-empowering ourselves and revitalizing our own neighbourhoods. Let's face it, Government and Big Business will never do it for us. Politicians are focused only on staying in power and Big Business has its eye only on the money.

If we want to clean up the mess that our planet has gotten into, and survive the perils of climate change and the bottoming-out of the oil supply on which our system currently depends, we have to roll our sleeves up and do it ourselves, tiny piece by tiny piece. Shopping locally, simplifying our lives, opting out of the consumer ratrace, riding a bicycle, growing our own food, farmers' markets, veg. box schemes, CSAs (community-supported agriculture), learning to make do and mend, sew and darn and patch, cook from scratch -- there are a million ways in which we can, each one of us, take charge of the situation instead of waiting for politicians or technology to rescue us. And a million ways in which we can help each other along the way. Kiva is just one of them.

Children and Nature

2007-03-13T18:16:00.000Z

As a child I roamed free in the woods and fields and ranged around for miles on my bicycle. My friends and I hid secret messages in hollow sticks, cut willow to make bows and arrows, climbed trees, and swam in the river unsupervised. Most people my age have similar memories. Even those who spent their whole childhood in the city remember playing outside, walking to school etc.

My own offspring, though they grew up in the suburbs, still made mudpies, climbed the huge tree at the end of our garden, played for hours outside, biked around the neighbourhood and walked unaccompanied to school, shops and municipal swimming pool.

Sadly, many youngsters in our modern, Western cultures now live indoor lives. Nature is something on TV. Grass stains, daisy chains, muddy knees and frogs in your pocket have been replaced by consoles, joysticks, mobile phones and virtual reality. Imagination has been hijacked by the Disney Corporation and most playthings come in plastic.

There also appears to be an 'epidemic' of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a condition little-known before the 1980s. An estimated six million children in the USA are now being given amphetamine-like drugs to control their unruly behaviour and unfocused attention.

Are these two phenomena – children's loss of contact with Nature and the alarming rise of ADHD – connected? Since human beings co-evolved for millions of years in deep, reciprocal relationship with the natural world, could it be that moving out of that relationship into artificially-created, urban environments has negative consequences for our wellbeing as a species and for the healthy development of our young?

This is not mere conjecture. Author Richard Louv has researched the connection very thoroughly and in his book Last Child in the Woods he presents sufficient evidence, both experimental and anecdotal, to suggest that by keeping our children indoors we are creating something he calls 'nature deficit disorder'. It is not a clinical diagnosis – not yet anyway. But it is a wonderfully apt name for the condition we our producing.

Why do we do it? Why do we keep our children inside when they should be out playing in the countryside, the park or even just in the backyard or the street?
Louv explores all the reasons. They range from the fear created by media focus on the (small and actually not increasing) number of children harmed by strangers or in accidents, to the officious attitudes of planners and local government officials for whom parks are neat and tidy places and to whom ten-year-old fort-builders appear a menace.

As a grandparent now, I am thrilled to see the delight my grandsons are taking in being outdoors, in the woods, in the park, even splashing in puddles. I've noticed they even spontaneously hug trees. (Must be genetic!!) And I'm thrilled that their parents give them plenty of opportunities to do all those things.

The latest edition of Orion Magazine has a splendid article by Richard Louv entitled "Leave No Child Inside". If you are as interested in this subject as I am, click here to read the article.

Unsung Heroes

2007-03-09T13:56:00.000Z

Spring is coming in fast, where I live. The daffodils are nodding brightly, primroses are appearing everywhere and celandines too. The fist butterflies are venturing out. And I noticed several bumblebees yesterday. No honeybees yet. But they will be around soon.

Or will they?

I live in England. And so far, according to what I have heard from beekeeping friends, everything seems normal here as regards honeybees.

But across the pond, it is not normal at all any more. For millions upon millions of honeybees have suddenly disappeared, all over the USA. Vanished without trace.

Since bees are so crucial to the pollination of crops, especially fruit trees, a lot of people are very, very worried right now. Livelihoods are threatened.

And everybody is perplexed. Why is this happening? It is not that the bees are necessarily dying. Beekeepers opening their hives are not finding piles of dead bees. In fact they are not finding any dead bees at all. They are finding totally empty hives. The bees have simply vanished, leaving no sign, no clue, no note on the mantelpiece.

They are calling it Colony Collapse Disorder. But merely giving it a name gets us no nearer to understanding what is going on.

However it is rather strange that it is only happening in the USA, isn't it? Are the bees trying to tell us something?

Yesterday, I read a possible explanation for this phenomenon. A certain kind of electro-magnetic signal that has a disorienting effect could be preventing the bees from finding their way home. Hmmm. It sounds very plausible to me. See what you think. I'd like to bet, though, that there will be a chorus of denials from everyone with a vested interest in these transmission systems. Specially the military. You watch. They will say the so-called 'war on terror' (an oxymoron if ever there was one) is far more important than a few bees.

The trouble is, it is those millions of little, seemingly insignificant creatures like bees and ants and earthworms -- and the even smaller ones, like bacteria -- that keep everything going. It is on them that our whole wellbeing depends. They are the unsung heroes. Without them, we starve. Without them, we die. It's that simple.

Media Consumption Diet Meme

2007-03-06T21:10:00.000Z

How do you live a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity, many, many miles away from the city and yet feel totally connected to the rest of the world?

How do you keep a sense of what is happening in the world-at-large when your own interests and activities diverge widely from the mainstream of your own culture?

How do you keep tabs on world – and national – events yet not become swamped by despair at much of what you read? Buddhist teacher and activist Thich Nhat Hanh warns that we should avoid over-consumption of ‘bad news’ and stories of war, violence and environmental destruction because it tends to weaken and disempower us. We know the bad stuff is happening; no need to wallow in the details. Better to save our energy for working on the solutions than to keep reading more and more about the problems.

How do you stay au fait with mainstream culture when your favourite magazines etc. are all ‘alternative’ ones?

These are questions that are important to me. So when Ronni, at 'Time Goes By' suggested on Monday morning that we all follow her lead and talk about how we get our info, I thought it would be interesting to join in the discussion.

I really related to Ronni’s comment that she reads a lot of news because "It’s not just information about what goes on the world I’m after, but a sense of the zeitgeist, of what the culture concerns itself with." That’s important to me too. Not just because I am a writer but because I remain really interested in all of that stuff. And it is becoming increasingly important as I get older and less 'out there' in the world in a physical way.

The older one gets, the more longitudinal is one’s view. I find it fascinating to be able to look back as far as the 1940s and track all the various changes that have taken place in my own liefetime. Also, the more parlous our planetary situation becomes, and the closer we come to the edge of the cliff, the more I feel the need to tune in – usually in the hope that I’ll discern signs of positive change.

So what are our preferred ways of getting all this information? Here’s my own list:

Web:I have Google Alerts on topics that are of special interest to me, particularly aging and simple living. It is fascinating to see where these take me to each day – blogs I would never have discovered otherwise, articles I would never have read in newspapers and journals I’ve never even heard of.
For mainstream media, I subscribe to the headline service for the New York Times and The Independent (UK) and I also check the main news stories on the BBC and The Guardian each day.
For alternative media I subscribe to Alternet and Grist. (Plus Dahr Jamail’s 'Iraq Despatches' though I can’t always face reading them).
Then there’s a whole bunch of e-zines and newsletters that come via e-mail, particularly writing-related and environmental ones.

Music: I love to dwell amidst silence and birdsong so I only listen to music when I go to a concert. Or very occasionally – about once every couple of months – I play a CD. If I listen to music I do just that and only that. I like to sing and drum though, so most of the music I hear is DIY.

As for TV, we haven’t had TV in our house for over twenty years and don’t ever plan on getting one. I hate TV. It trivialises important things, sensationalises unimportant things and turns people into zombies. No, I don’t even want to watch the wildlife programs. I like to go out into the woods and fields each day and be with the wildlife here, now, in real time.

Communications:I read e-mail on my Web host’s mail server and only download whatever needs answering. I have a Gmail account too, but rarely use it. Have a landline phone but no mobile. Yes, cell phones are useful gadgets (and my beloved son-in-law owes his life to one) but I detest the thought that people can interrupt me wherever I am. (And I suspect the radiation is unhealthy).
I subscribe to a Swiss phone company that gives me the ability to make calls to the US from England at a mere half a penny per minute. Rather than being tied to my computer, as I would be with Skype, it means I can take the phone all over the house (important when one is sharing a small space with a partner who may be trying to work or read a book).

Movies:Since we live in the depths of the countryside and don’t have a car, I rarely see movies. And movie theatres are uncomfortable places for me nowadays because I’ve noticed that they turn the sound up much louder than they used to. But when I visit my daughter, she rents DVDs or videos of movies I have said I’d like to watch and we watch them together. (I could watch them on my computer, but I figure that I spend quite enough time sitting there already).

Magazines:I subscribe to The Ecologist, New Internationalist, Vegetarian Times, Writers News and Mslexia and all the myriad organizations I belong to have their own magazines also so there’s always a huge pile of magazines and journals next to my armchair.

Newspapers I never buy, and even the local freebie doesn’t get read. It goes straight into the compost. Printers’ ink makes my eyes itch.

Books:I get a lot of books to review and I also borrow books from the library so there’s always a ‘to-be-read’ pile. There’s also a ‘part-read’ pile. I like having several books on the go at once – usually one novel and several non-fiction books about different subjects – so that my reading can suit my mood and energy level.

So that is how I live a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity, many, many miles away from the city and yet feel connected to the rest of the world. Well … perhaps not totally connected. Without TV, there is another whole layer of the world that I don’t tap into. But that’s a layer I prefer to live without. And maybe it’s as well that some of us remain outside that layer. On a ship full of sleeping passengers it's good to have a few people on watch.

2007-02-24T13:18:00.000Z

'The Glow (of Money)'

Someone has just drawn my attention to an article in the latest AARP magazine about skin care in the second half of life. Forwarding the link: http://www.aarpmagazine.org/health/skincare_erase_ten_years.html she wrote: "It gives a lot of info about caring for our skin as we age -- with illustrations showing women in their 50s, 60s, 70s -- along with product names. Titled "Go with the Glow," it is about care of the skin, not about staying young, and it illustrates the point with some beautiful aging women. A specific dermatologist gets a big plug as the scientific/medical expert, and a number of specific products are recommended. … it is an illustration of an issue that pertains to many of us. No promises to stay young, but info on keeping our skin healthy. It does place a lot of value on spending for skin care products at the same time it addresses basic protection measures of caution about sun, not smoking, eating healthy, etc..."
Hey, that’s great, I thought. If the world’s highest-circulation magazine for ‘seniors’ can publish an article on skin care while avoiding ageism, well things are really looking up.

They are not. (sigh)

The article, I’m sad to say, is as full of ageism as any other article I have ever read about skin care for the over-fifties. The ageism is just a tad more subtle, that’s all, and overshadowed by the use of older models. Here are some ageist quotes from the article (with my emphasis added):

"Other changes aren’t as pleasant… freckles, fine lines, and wrinkles can become more prominent. But advances in skin-care technology mean many of these problems can be addressed, so long as you use the right products—and see a dermatologist regularly"

"…she hasn’t taken any preventive measures to ensure her skin stays youthful-looking."

"Beverly is lucky; her parents and grandparents looked much younger than they were, so she has some genetic protection. Doctors aren’t sure what genes are at work, but if your parents looked young, chances are you will, too"

"Seventy years later, those preventive measures—and a lifelong diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and fish—have paid off: Joan looks years younger than she is"

"She could also use a facial cream that prevents sagging, which is a concern at her age."

Yes, it is the same, tired premise: looking young is better than looking old. And that, my friends, is ageist. Totally. But ageism is so deeply woven into our culture that most of the time we don’t even notice it. The person who forwarded the article obviously didn’t notice it. Although she asserted that the article is ‘not about being young', as you can see from the link its actual title is ‘Erase Ten Years’!! I don’t want to erase ten years. I like being 70. Why should I pretend to be 60?

Where skin is concerned, I think the problem is this. Babies have smooth, soft, peachy skin that is delicious to touch. Most healthy, well-fed children retain the softness and fullness of their skin until adolescence when the hormones start to kick in and we get our first ‘blemishes’. So healthy, smooth, soft, peachy skin inevitably signals ‘youth’. And healthy, youthful skin that is once again free of blemishes means we are through adolescence, which is the classical look of the nubile ‘maiden’.

The trouble is, no matter how old we are, we naturally like our skin to remain healthy and to feel soft to the touch and be free of blemishes. I mean, who enjoys zits? If our skin starts to feel dry, we moisturise it. Fair enough. Nothing wrong with that. But because healthy skin and youth are so linked on everyone’s mind, the advertisers, instead of saying ‘moisturise your skin with this if it feels too dry’, say ‘buy this, it will keep your skin looking young’.

To cap it off, the natural changes of aging, such as freckles, age spots, wrinkles and crows’ feet, instead of being seen as badges of honour for elders, are now neatly redefined as ‘blemishes’ in order to put more money in cosmetic manufacturers’ pockets – and the massive chemical corporations who supply their raw materials.

I did some deconstruction of the AARP article. The ‘world renowned dermatologist’ they feature works for an outfit called The University of Miami Cosmetic Center. This center "..specializes in clinical trials, cell cultures, bioengineered skin and porcine models that evaluate cosmetic dermatology and skin care issues." (Which, roughly translated, means they work on behalf of industry to try out new cosmetic products on tissue made in the laboratory from, e.g. pigs’ guts.)

So who do you think shells out the cash for their salaries and all their batteries of fancy equipment - scientific UV camera, spectrophotometer, ‘Tewameter’, laser doppler, ‘Visioscan’ and all the rest of it ? Why, Big Pharma, of course. It is a very cosy arrangement. (And, sadly, a typical example of the way things are nowadays, with university research departments funded by Big Business and all the well-known compromises, fudged data, loss of objectivity and cover-ups which that so often entails).

So if we look at this story closely and ‘follow the money’, we see that the UMCC gets lots of juicy funding in return for handing back the much-coveted stamp of scientific respectability to the manufacturers and marketers. The product-peddlers can then use impressive terms like ‘clinically evaluated’ and ‘scientifically proven’ to fool more people – primarily women – into paying good money for ever more ‘scientific’-sounding cocktails of petrochemicals (with the odd herb or three thrown in for good measure) to slather on their skin in the hope of looking ten years younger than they are. Those guys are laughing all the way to the bank.

We are being conned, folks. The con gets cleverer and subtler but it is still a con. We are now being conned into needing supplements to combat Vitamin D deficiency because we’ve been so busy slathering ourselves with the sunscreen they managed to convince us we needed. We are being conned into spending millions on fancy products to moisturise our skin when simple, traditional things like olive oil and shea butter (and washing our faces just with water to preserve the natural oils) would serve us just as well – in fact better because they aren’t full of dodgy chemicals like parabens.

Above all, we are being conned into believing that looking exactly like the old women we are is not OK.

Don’t fall for it.

2007-02-22T23:32:00.000Z

'Cybertribes'

What fun to find Cate turning up on my blog page . (Thanks for stopping by, Cate).
It makes me realise that the 'blogosphere' is a lot like my village in some ways. When I walk up to the Post Office I always see at least one person I know -- usually three or four -- and there is something that feels really cosy about that. These people are going about their daily lives and I am going about mine and our paths intersect somewhere along that little five hundred yard stretch of street, just long enough for a greeting, a remark about the weather, an acknowledgement of our relationship as co-inhabitants of this small patch of Earth.
In the same way, despite the vastness of cyberspace, one often meets familiar figures there and that, too, is a cosy thing. And quite remarkable, when you think about it, given the millions of people thronging the Internet.
Somewhere, recently, I read a definition of the Internet as being 'the place where we meet our own tribes'. I like that concept. Whoever and wherever we are, and no matter how geographically isolated we might be, with a few clicks of the mouse we can link with our tribes. Tribes, not of blood but of a different kind of kinship; the kinship of shared interests, beliefs, worldviews...
Like many people, I have several different tribes. One is the tribe of elders -- particularly elderwomen. Then there is the simplicity tribe -- all the folks who are turning towards a way of life that is simple, sustainable, eco-friendly and non-consumerist. And of course there is my writing tribe. They all span the globe.
In my village, there are one or two representatives from each of these tribes, and their presence here is precious to me. But out there in cyberspace, there are hundreds, probably thousands of them. I meet new ones almost every day. What a wonderful thing it is to be able to do that. And then, of course, the next time I meet them we are no longer strangers. It's cosy. I like it.

2007-02-14T13:27:00.000Z

A Trampled Tradition
How St Valentine's Day used to be

Back in my high school days (1947-1952), February 14th was a day of sweet but semi-secret excitement. For it was the day when some unknown person – or several of them if you were really lucky – might send you a valentine.
If you got one – and we all hoped and prayed that we might – it meant that someone, somewhere, fancied you.

For us girls it meant that a boy (usually one who was too shy to ask us out or even too shy to speak to us) had been watching and admiring us from the shadows. But of course one never know who he was. That was the whole point.

What was special and different about a valentine card was that it was never signed. That was the beautiful mystery of it.

On February 14th I would also hug to myself the delicious thought that whatever handsome, wonderful, unattainable boy I was secretly lusting after at the time would on this special morning be holding in his young, sweaty hands the card I had screwed up my courage to send him, and wondering who on earth it was from.

Of course, the day might come and go and no cards would fall through the letterbox or appear, tucked under the lid of your school desk, at morning recess. Inevitably, (especially if your best friend had scored a sheaf of valentine cards and had walked around all day looking smug about it), you would go home feeling like the ultimate no-hoper and spend the evening moping around in a stew of low self-esteem and squeezing blackheads. But hey, life is like that. It is all part of growing up.

In the years that followed, I remember receiving a few valentines from prospective suitors but usually I could guess who had sent them. And any time I was ‘going steady’ with someone, I could guarantee that he would send me a card. Though still unsigned of course, even if he didn’t bother to disguise his writing. For that was the tradition.

Once I was married, there were no more cards. Not that I recall, anyway. The only thing that might happen on February 14th was that one of us might say “Hey it’s St Valentine’s Day today. Will you be my valentine, darling?" And we would have a hug.

Fast forward to 1987. My kids are grown up, I’m divorced and I’m now re-married – this time to an American. February 14th and goodness gracious, here in the mail is a valentine card. Who on earth can that be from? It is not my husband’s writing. Surely I don’t have a secret admirer, do I?

Imagine my surprise, consternation and… well yes, embarrassment .. when I open that card and find that it is from my new mother-in-law. My mother-inlaw? !! She fancies me? Good grief! Oh surely not...

No, my mother-in-law had simply fallen foul of the Hallmark Conspiracy. Later, when I went to live in the USA, I discovered, of course, that St Valentines Day over there had lost all its meaning and its mystery. Now it had become yet another day for people to buy cards and chocolate and teddy bears and all kinds of consumer stuff. (As if we didn’t already have too many opportunities for that.) Yet another sweet tradition trampled by the muddy boots of commercialism. What a shame.

You might say, in defence of all this indiscriminate sending of (signed) cards and chocolate hearts to anyone and everyone including daughters-in-law, that it is simply a nice way of telling someone that you love them.

Well OK. But I think there are better ways – ways that don’t buy into the whole consumer culture. If you love someone, just tell them so. Any old time, not just on February 14th. Give them a hug, a shoulder rub, a foot massage, a pot of home-made jam, flowers from your garden. Walk their dog, baby-sit their kids, help them with their homework. If they are far away, send them an e-mail, telephone them, write them a poem. Tell them how special they are to you.

Poor old St Valentine was martyred and lost his head. There's no way I am going to lose mine and get caught up in the Hallmark Conspiracy. No cards for me please. (Unless, of course, you are a secret admirer who is too shy to tell me you fancy me... now wouldn't that be interesting?!)

2007-02-08T13:02:00.000Z

Hare-brained.

When someone asked me the other day in an interview what my favourite animal was, I replied that it was a hare.
Why? I don’t know exactly. I just love hares. I love their long, lanky legs and the funny way they gallop and their long, sensitive ears. What particularly endears them to me is their strange habit of running towards me rather than away from me like most other wild animals do.
Sometimes, when I am out for my morning walk, I see a hare in the middle of the lane. I stop and wait and almost always, after a little while, the hare comes lolloping towards me. He (or she, I can’t tell the difference) will sometimes stop for a moment, look around and sniff. And then run a bit further. There have been times when, if I continue to stand still, the hare will run right past me. Other times it will change its mind and disappear into the hedge instead. But the encounter always leaves me with a special feeling of having been somehow touched by magic.
It was said at one time that witches could shape-shift into hares and back again. I have often wondered where that idea came from. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the ‘moon hare’ was the totem of the pagan goddess of springtime, Eostre (the ‘moon-hare’ was of course the original ‘Easter bunny’ who laid eggs for good children to eat).
Be that as it may, I take a special delight in hares.And it occurred to me yesterday that the hare and I have something in common. Remember Aesop’s fable about the hare and the tortoise? Hare teased Tortoise about his short, stumpy legs, so Tortoise challenged him to a race. They set off, and of course Hare quickly pulled ahead. So far ahead, in fact, that Tortoise was soon out of sight. Hare, realising that he had plenty of time up his sleeve, decided to lie down by the roadside and have a little rest. He fell asleep, and when he woke up he realised that he had stayed too long. He raced to the finish line only to discover that Tortoise, in his slow, steady, plodding way, had beaten him to it.
Try as I may, I cannot behave like a tortoise. If I dealt with my e-mails every day, they would not pile up in my in-box. If I did a little bit of filing each day, I wouldn’t finish up with a towering, wobbly pile that threatens to engulf the whole room in an avalanche of paper and I wouldn’t have to set aside a large chunk of time to get it all tidied away. If I pulled a few weeds each afternoon, I would never need to exhaust myself by spending the entire day on a weeding marathon.
But one of the things I have learned in my 70 years on this planet is that there are some things about ourselves we need to change and there are some things that are so much a part of our basic natures that we cannot change them. The wisdom is in knowing the difference.

2007-02-02T12:23:00.000Z

Greeting the Tiger.

I got into a patch of despair again this morning. As usual, it was triggered off by reading the news. This time it was a report about plans to spend millions of pounds on hugely enlarging Stansted airport and making it even bigger than Heathrow.
The report said that the Department of Transport expects the total number of passengers using UK airports to rise from 228 million per year to 465 million. This of course is totally incompatible with the UK Government’s plans to cut carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. However the Department for Transport says that although domestic aviation emissions are included within the carbon reduction targets, international aviation emissions are not. This enables the Government to allow the growth of flying unchecked while still claiming to be cutting the UK's carbon output. Talk about hypocrisy!!
Then I read about how a huge oil company (Exxon) had paid a million and a half dollars trying to bribe scientists to undermine the most recent, objective and pretty well definitive report on climate change.
I went for my morning walk with these things chasing each other around in my mind. After half a mile or so or inward musing and fuming, I looked up and became fully aware of the beauty around me – the green fields, the emerging snowdrops, the swelling buds on the trees, the birds …
Suddenly I found myself weeping, sobbing from sadness and despair over what greedy, selfish humans are doing to our beautiful Earth and how powerless I feel to change things. Despair washed over me like a tidal wave.
For a few minutes I stopped, my hands on the friendly bark of my favourite tree, listening for advice (that tree frequently gives me handy hints about how to cope with whatever is bothering me). I didn’t hear anything today. So I walked on. But a little way further down the road I found myself mentally stepping slightly aside from the feeling of despair and just simply looking at it, without judgement. I said "Hello despair."
It’s funny, but whenever I can do this – not just with despair but with any feeling at all – something always seems to shift. It’s like that old piece of advice that I have heard many times about turning to face the tiger that is chasing you and calmly greeting it.
It’s not that I finished my walk with any better idea about how to solve the world’s problems. But the powerlessness was gone, replaced by my usual feeling that by doing whatever I can to ‘be the change I want to see happen in the world’ I am playing a useful part, even if it's a very small one.
After all, I am not just walking round on the surface of a planet, I am an intrinsic part of the fabric of this planet. A tiny fragment. The fragment cannot know the fate of the whole. All it can do is play its part as well as it possibly can and trust the process.
I felt as though I had, once again, faced despair and moved through it. I walked home singing. And I noticed that there was blue sky in the west as the clouds gradually rolled back.

(Note: If you wish to join the campaign to stop the Stansted airport expansion please contact Stop Stansted Expansion.)

2007-01-29T11:32:00.000Z

Those Web People.

“Yes, I’ll have to get my Web People on to that…”
How many times have you heard that response? I am starting to lose count. Contact someone to report that there is outdated or erroneous information on his or her website, or that a link doesn’t work, and it is highly likely that you’ll get that reply – or something like it. Frequently, it goes along with complaints about dilatory webmasters who have been given the information but have not yet gotten around to making the necessary changes. (As if it took more than three minutes to change a bit of text or fix a link and re-upload the page).
I haven’t yet tackled the people who informed me yesterday that the room I wanted to book in their fancy bed & breakfast inn will cost $10 more per night than the price currently advertised on their website. When I do, I bet they will tell me the price on the website was for the 2006 season (even though it doesn’t mention a year) and their 'Web Person' hasn’t updated the site yet. (Even though the inn's season ended last October).
So where are all these dilatory webmasters and mistresses? Probably on a nice island in the Caribbean, soaking up the sun and laughing at all the poor suckers who paid them thousands to marry their bits of deathless prose with pretty pictures and clever little mouseover buttons.
A few hundred years ago, doctors and lawyers used to write everything in Latin so that everybody else had to pay them for their know-how. A clever trick, that. These days, instead of Latin we have HTML.
Under general business law, if a bricks-and-mortar store has an outdated price label on some merchandise they are obliged to sell it to you at that price. But when you buy online, it is different. The large, online retailers, most of whom use automated pricing software, usually have wording on their sites that protects them from the results of pricing errors. So when you order something online and the price turns out to be higher than advertised you have no comeback unless you can prove that the vendor did it deliberately.
Meanwhile, those lazy, lotus-eating Web People are happily swimming and snorkelling on their island and people who are good at running fancy inns but can't write HTML are having to break the news to potential customers that oops, the room you set your heart on is going to cost you $10 per night more than you thought. Sorry about that. The site needs updating, you see. I'll have to get my Web People on to it...
If I wasn’t such a kind-hearted person who likes to think the best of everyone, I might have another phrase to describe it. Bait and switch.

2007-01-24T17:43:00.000Z

Gardens of the Mind
Today is a special day. There’s a day like this every year – usually some time in January – and it is a day I enjoy very much. It is the day I place my seed order for the 2007 growing season.
I have two gardens. One of them is the garden that I see when I look out of the window, or when I put my boots on and wander up the path looking for something to pick. At this time of year, it is a rather dismal scene out there. The kale plants are trying valiantly to produce new leaves faster than we can pick them, but with the days still short, the light still scarce and the cold, north wind blowing, it is a real struggle for them, and they are looking leaner and stragglier every day. Likewise the spinach, though it huddles closer together and closer to the ground than the kale, as though it is trying to keep warm. There is still quite a lot of rocket (arugula) that had not quite gotten around to bolting when the cold weather came and is still hanging in there, its leaves more peppery now than they were back in the summer.
Elsewhere, I see the bare stalks of plants long dead, some half fallen bean poles with the brown and withered remnants of stems still wound around them and the early signs of a new weed invasion. A shrivelled bean pod lies, black and mummified, in the middle of a patch of bare earth. The only colour in this garden besides green and brown and black is a bright splash of orange where a lone calendula plant is flowering, happily defiant against the frosty nights and the cold, drab days.
But the other garden – well I wish you could see it. It is a glorious, multicoloured slice of heaven, bright with flowers, rich with vegetables and fruit, neat and tidy and yet natural-looking and abundant, a veritable cornucopia of delight.
In that other garden, the roses don’t have black spot, there are virtually no weeds (except a few dendelions, which I like to put in salads) and of course there is no slug or snail within miles.This garden, unfortunately, only exists for a short time each year. And no-one else but me can see it. It comes into being on this special day in January, as I pore over the illustrations in the seed catalogues and carefully, with much thought, place my order. It lasts until about July, when reality finally sets in and I admit, once again, that reality can never match the vision.
This year, I say to myself, it will be different. This year, I will pull the weeds before they are big enough to strangle anything. This year, nothing will get out of hand. This year, all my seed will germinate, the slugs won’t destroy the bok choy, the mice won’t eat those precious and expensive (only four in a packet) cucumber seedlings, no containers or hanging baskets will dry out, the Brussells sprouts will actually have proper sprouts on them instead of miserable little things the size of peas and there will be flowers blooming absolutely everywhere. You wait. This year, I really will create that other garden. The one I dream about every January.

2007-01-22T20:17:00.000Z

Washing the Flagstones

Sky and I usually divide up the housework. He does the downstairs and I do the upstairs. But he was up in London for a few days, so this week I did his half as well. Which meant that I got to wash the kitchen floor.
I've never liked using mops, so if I have to wash a floor my preference is always to go down on hands and knees and do it the old-fashioned way. I find it rather satisfying, as a matter of fact. And washing our downstairs floor is especially satisfying because it is made of flagstones -- big, old, uneven flagstones made from black slate.
I love it that we have a flagstone floor. It is almost certainly the original floor that was put there when the cottage was built, back in 1733, and I enjoy thinking about all the people who have walked to and fro across it over the last couple of centuries and all the people (probably women) who have cooked their meals in our little kitchen and washed the flagstones the same way I did today, on their hands and knees.
The other thing I like about it is that the flagstones are continuous with the ones outside on the porch. Most people's houses seem to have a very definite separation between inside and outside and ours doesn't. And I like that. In these dark, cold days of winter, when I spend a lot of time indoors, I like the feeling that the inside, with its cosy fire, and the outside where the tree branches sway in the wind and the leaves of the honeysuckle (that I keep forgetting to prune) tap against the window, are -- in one way, at least -- all of a piece.

2007-01-20T17:55:00.000Z

Dust to Dust (to Compost).

I saw something really interesting in the latest issue of The Ecologist, which came this morning. Apparently some folks in Sweden are working on a new, eco-friendly way of dealing with dead bodies. It's called promession. This means cooling the body in liquid nitrogen to a point where it is so brittle that when it is vibrated it turns to dust. The water is then evaporated out of it and any metal (like mercury from fillings) removed and what is left goes into a three-feet square, biodegradable box, which can be buried in a very shallow grave where it can decompose aerobically and become part of the topsoil within 6-12 months.
Sounds like a great idea.
I read more about it on the Internet. They have been trying it out with dead pigs, and it works a treat. So very soon it will be possible to do it with humans. But I couldn't find the answer to the main question I wanted to ask. Which was: in that case, do I really need a grave at all?
Whenever we have talked about funeral options, Sky has always said "Please just chuck me on the compost heap." He thinks it is awful that human beings, unlike other creatures, deny their bodies to the topsoil.
Obviously, since most of us these days live in cities, it would not be practical for everyone simply to lie wherever they fell, and there aren't enough vultures and carrion crows for us to have 'sky funerals', so burial or burning have always been our main methods of disposal. That is recycling too, of course, but in the case of traditional burial it is a much longer-term kind, since bodies way down in the subsoil rot anaerobically and very slowly, (which can create pollution problems with groundwater) and cremation increases carbon pollution.
With this new promession technology, if all that is left of us is a box of dry powder which will decompose easily when put in the soil, would it not be possible to do exactly what Sky is asking for and either mix it in with compost or use it as mulch in an orchard or field? I think that would be even better than having a shallow grave in a woodland burial site.
A town council in the Midlands is considering adopting the new technology when it is ready, and they invite questions on their website, so I submitted mine today.
I'll let you know what they say.

2007-01-17T13:04:00.000Z

Our Global Network

Over and over again I am reminded of how important the Internet has become for me. Sky and I were watching a video on the BBC News website the other day about a couple in France who were celebrating their 78th wedding anniversary. They were both 100 years old and both seemed to be in good health. They were bright-eyed and lively. I don’t know how agile the husband was, as he remained seated throughout the short clip but the wife jumped up and went into the kitchen and seemed far more agile than some 80-year-olds I have met.
That got us thinking and talking about what it might be like if and when we get to that age. And that in turn made me think about what a vitally important role the Internet playes in my life – and has done for some years now.
We live in a fairly isolated, rural area and (by choice) have very few visitors. We have various activities that take us out and about but we also spend a lot of time at home. We absolutely adore the peace and quiet of our little cottage.
Yet I always feel totally surrounded by friends and acquaintances. I talk on the e-mail with people all over the world. I join in global discussions on all manner of things. I meet new and interesting people in cyberspace every single day. Often, I have the experience of discovering someone thousands of miles away who has so many of the same ideas and feelings as me that it feels like we must have known each other in some past life or something!
It is true that globalization – e.g. the globalization of trade and of entertainment -- poses huge dangers to many of the world’s cultures. Languages and customs that used to make a group of people unique are being lost, replaced by a mass-marketing consumer culture that flattens everything out and gradually turns the rainbow colours of our human tribes to monochrome sameness. Yet there is also this other thing that is happening. Thanks to the globalization of communication, people are reaching out, finding others from faraway places whom they would otherwise never had met, interacting, interconnecting. Nobody need ever feel lonely any more.
Even as I strive to minimise, in my own life, the effects of trade globalization, such as unnecessary imports (why import apples to UK when they grow so well here?), ‘food miles’ and so on, this other kind of global connectivity is one that I heartily welcome.
When we talked about how it might be to be 100, I said that there is only one thing I fear about it. And that is the fear of losing my ability to log on.

2006-12-10T17:18:00.000Z

I've had some nice comments about the new look of the Elderwoman website, so I'm pleased about that.
Lately, I have been preoccupied with fiction-writing. My short-story collection is now available, if anyone is interested in reading it. It is called Apricot Harvest (after the title of the lead story) and you'll find the link to it on the 'other books by Marian' page of the website.
I recently finished my first, full-length novel and right now I am in search of a publisher for it. Needless to say, the main character is a woman of mature age, for I think we women of 50+ are the most interesting sort of people in existence.
Next task on my list - the December newsletter. I hope to have that ready very soon. Stay tuned ...

2006-11-13T14:00:00.000Z

I have just spent three days completely updating the 'Elderwoman' website. What a huge task! I have enjoyed it though. I'll be uploading all the new files this afternoon - I hope!
It is amazing to look back and think that I hadn't even touched a computer until 1989 and to tell the truth I was a bit terrified of them. But one day I confessed that to a man sitting next to me at a meeting, and he said "Oh don't worry. It's just a fancy typewriter."
Somehow, that made it a lot less scary. Funny, isn't it, how sometimes a person will say just the right words!
So my partner, Sky, (who at that time worked in the IT industry) invited me to come into his office on the weekend and started to de-mystify computers for me. That was the beginning. Since then, I have never looked back.
After we both retired, Sky was relieved not to have to think about computers any more whereas I had launched myself a new journey of discovery. So nowadays, I am the one who shows him how to do things on his computer. How times have changed!
Mind you, I couldn't do any of this without him. For he is the one who reminds me to get up, stretch, take a break and be kind to these aging, 70-year-old bones...