At This Time of Year...

.
...in our Devon hedgerows, 

the campions reign supreme.

And when I get to the top of this lane, there is another beautiful sight to behold. 

The wild orchids have popped up again...

...like they do every year around this time,

despite the rough treatment this ground has seen during the winter, with those big, clumsy agricultural machines that gouge out deep, muddy ruts and hack the hedges around.

Nature is so forgiving, so resilient. Will it always be able to bounce back, just as these orchids do? As climate change bites ever more deeply and the sixth great mass extinction picks up speed, what will survive? Who will survive? In a hundred years, a thousand years, will the orchids still pop up each year? Will the campions still reign supreme in the month of May? How many more years will the hawthorn tree outside the bathroom window of our cottage blossom in glory, like it is doing right now and probably has done every year since the cottage was built in 1733?

Who knows? But right now, in this moment, in the midst of all this beauty, and despite the dark despair that so often tries to overwhelm me, I feel blessed. 

Living in these times can feel schizoid. But as Charles Eisenstein said in a recent essay,
"I am fond of saying that no optimism can be authentic that has not visited the depths of despair. But today I have realized a corollary: no despair is authentic that has not fully let in the joy."

I think he is right. So much so that when I look at these orchids and I start to cry, I realize that it is neither joy nor grief that makes the tears flow. 

It is both.

Sunshine, Sweat and Purple Flowers

Lately, the days are warm—so wonderfully warm that if feels like a miracle after the cool, wet summers we’ve had here in England in recent years. There are butterflies everywhere. The grasses are high, the meadowsweet is fading into seed and there are small green berries forming on the brambles.

The colour palette for these late July days is deep pink to purple, ranging from willowherb and loosestrife through to thistles, knapweed, betony and purple vetch.

I am still taking a long, brisk walk in the early afternoons, but today, as the hot sun beat down out of a cloudless sky I found myself slowing down a little and even wondering if I should change my timetable and walk in the cool of evening instead.

Not that I am a stranger to the heat. I have lived in the tropics and in California and in rural Texas and the only times when I ever found it too hot to go for walks were those searing summer days in Melbourne when the temperatures soared above the century and every gust of the merciless north wind was like opening the door of a hot oven. To take any vigorous exercise in those conditions would have been to court heatstroke and even I am not that silly.

But today, as I paused in the shade to touch the bark of my favourite oak tree and felt the salty sweat trickling down my face, I thought about the evolutionary gift of homeostasis that Nature has bestowed on all warm-blooded organisms like us. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it—a precious gift, in fact. From arctic cold to equatorial heat, we can adjust our lives accordingly and keep our body temperatures pretty much constant at all times. And that is something to feel very grateful about.

It is also salutary, I believe, to reflect that the principle of homeostasis applies to many, many other things in the universe. It’s another case of ‘as above, so below.’ As James Lovelock demonstrated, with his famous Daisyworld experiment, Earth herself operates that way. Like any other living organism, she has to keep her temperature within a certain range and she has a number of ways to achieve that but her ways are not limitless. Like us, her adaptability has limits. Gaia’s temperature regulation  is a mechanism that has worked for billions of years—until human beings came along and started messing with the system. And now we have anthropogenic climate change. If our precious planet ends up dying of heatstroke because we were too silly to change our ways, we can’t say we were never warned.

A Spring in Time

It takes a chest infection and a week of sitting around indoors to appreciate fully how quickly the spring is moving. Even before I got sick, the world around here was golden, with primroses dotting the banks and vast drifts of daffodils and celandines everywhere I looked. The marsh marigold beside our back door was bursting with thick buds, the first violets were appearing and the first few white flowers of stitchwort were starting to emerge in the rapidly-greening hedgerows.

Just one week later and the marsh marigold is now a mass of glorious flowers. Stitchwort numbers have doubled, the violets have trebled, there are already wild strawberry flowers appearing. Scurvy grass is suddenly flowering where last week there were just glossy green leaves: the wild garlic leaves are well and truly up and the dog’s mercury now has its sprays of flowers—those humble little things too tiny for the naked eye to register as such but flowers, nonetheless.

Ten days ago there were no chiffchaffs; on today’s walk I encountered eight of them, singing lustily from eight different trees spread evenly across my three-mile route. I fancied, in my anthropomorphic way, that they might be singing about how glad they are to be back: glad to have left the south before it hots up too much: glad to have made the journey safely back from the macchia to these English woods of oak and ash, beech and sycamore. There are other warblers again too now, singing from the about-to-leaf-out branches of the goat willows. And the robins, who never venture far but spend their winters quietly alongside us, are well into their glorious annual songfest now.

Soon there will be bluebells—their leaves are now well up. And today I searched for a hint of the wild orchids. No leaves yet except in that certain place in a nearby bank where I knew one would have already emerged. Why that plant is so far ahead of the others I’ll never know but it always is. And when I parted the ferns and peered down into the tangle of undergrowth there it was, sure enough, its exotic-looking spotted leaves already in position, patiently awaiting the flower spike that always comes.

In the worldview of many indigenous people, such as Native Americans and Australian aborigines, time is perceived not as a linear progression but as cyclical, with patterns that appear, disappear, reappear. Living with that worldview also involves living with a sense of responsibility for maintaining balance and harmony. It comes with a feeling of deep embeddedness, a knowing that we humans, as one species among millions, are part of the very fabric of the Earth. As part of the Earth, we can never be separated from it. Thus it behoves us to take care of whatever other parts of it we come into contact with, whether directly or indirectly. For if we harm the Earth in any way at all, we are harming ourselves. 

Being outside, walking these green lanes in the fullness of spring, I find myself remembering other springs, just like this one. As I walk, springs past present and future merge together seamlessly and just for a few precious moments I know what it is to live in cyclical time. These celandines, as they fade and reappear, shining golden again in the sun, year after year, are eternal celandines. They are the celandines of my English Dreamtime. There is only one timeless spring, a pattern that appears, disappears, reappears in endless celebration of the life force. There is just one chiffchaff, a bird who was and is and always will be, singing those two joyful notes again and again from the top of the tallest tree.


(Chiffchaff photo by Andreas Trepte (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Engaged Elderhood

One day recently, two things that came into my email inbox at the same time set me thinking about the way old age is commonly portrayed in our culture these days. The first was a post by that indomitable blogger, Ronni Bennett, whose 'Time Goes By' blog about aging is read and relished by hundreds of people every day. In this post, headed 'An Old Age Better Than I Ever Expected,' Ronni wrote: "I never expected to feel as alive and vibrant and spirited and vital as I do at this time of my life." She was remarking about something that many of us have often said and felt but probably don't proclaim loudly and publicly and frequently enough, i.e. the discovery that elderhood has the potential to be one of the most enjoyable and satisfying of all life's stages.

Why should we expect it to be otherwise? Well, as Ronni goes on to say: "There is little if anything in our culture that would lead me to believe I would feel this good about being an old woman. The media relate to old age almost entirely via health, poor health - and mostly about dementia."

And she's right. The awful image so commonly presented by the media seems to be that once you finally give up the (obviously futile) effort to 'stay forever young', all that is left is just a slow countdown to death. Old age is portrayed as a time of sharp physical and mental decline, withdrawal from the world, misery, illness, incontinence, loneliness, incapacity, feebleness and dementia.

Which brings me to the second item in my mailbox. It was a helpful suggestion that since I edit a newsletter for elderwomen and have a website about women and aging I might like to add some links to useful, elder-related websites about...yes, you guessed it: illness, medication, incontinence, incapacity, dementia...

What the writer seemed not to have noticed was that my books, websites, newsletters—and sometimes this blog—are all focused on the hundred and one far more important aspects of this section of our life journey: our attitudes, our feelings and experiences, the role of elders in the community, the culture and the world, our personal and spiritual growth...and so on. Not on indigestion remedies.

Yes, for sure if we can no longer walk upstairs we may need to install a stair lift, but if so we simply Google 'stair lifts,' read some reviews and do some comparison shopping, just like we do for every other major purchase. We may want to find out more about prescription drug side-effects but the Internet is full of info about those (and also full of good advice about how to live healthily and drug free at any age). Why on Earth should I want to fill up my links page with info about the relative merits of various brands of incontinence pads just because my readers are all over fifty?

As William Thomas says in his brilliant book What Are Old People For? getting old does often necessitate a search for work-arounds that enable us to keep functioning optimally—in fact he sees elders as walking advertisements for the wonderful human capacity for endless adaptability. This ongoing process of adaptation to each change in the ever-changing body doesn't begin at 44 with the first pair of reading glasses however. It begins in toddlerhood, with shoes to protect our tender feet, bibs to catch the drool, high chairs to keep us from falling on to the floor and pull-up pants for toilet training. It continues through orthodontic appliances, tampons and nursing bras, dental crowns and hiking poles and all the way through to Zimmer frames. Humans are clever animals and we have become really good at finding ways to augment our bodies' functions and deal with their impairments and inconveniences. But these logistics of our lives are not what defines them. It is meaning that defines them. It is meaning that gets us up in the morning and meaning that makes our hearts sing.

Rather than being preoccupied with what we are losing, the key to an old age full of meaning is to look at what we are gaining and also at what we are giving. As Jung taught us, the second half of life is about individuation, about growing fully into our potential selves. And it is about sharing with the world the fruits of our personal harvest. Elders, rather than withdrawing from the world outside their skins are at their happiest and most fulfilled when they are engaged with that world. I call this 'engaged elderhood.' Our beleaguered planet, right now, needs all the engaged elders it can get.

So if there is anyone out there who dreads getting old and really does believe that old age is nothing but dyspepsia, aching joints and damp knickers, let me assure you that it doesn't have to be like that at all. Honestly. And if you don't believe me, read Elderwoman. Or, if you are male, pre-order this great new book by my friend Alan Heeks called Out of the Woods: A Guide to Life for Men Over 50. Alan's book is due for publication on September 19 and can be pre-ordered now from the author's website in the UK or from Amazon in the US.

Making a Mark

My Teva sandals have a distinctive tread on their soles and when the summer sun softens the tar patches along the lane the little kid in me can't resist pressing my foot's pattern into them. Then, next day, I look to see if my footprints are still discernible. They almost never are of course. By the time the sun has left the lane and the tar has cooled, they have long since been obliterated by tyre tracks.

Yesterday, though, I found one. The boots of those few others who had passed that way had missed it and, since it was near the centre of the lane, so had the vehicles. I felt strangely pleased.

I detest graffiti. Yet in a way I understand the impulse to leave a mark. So would I step in wet cement? No I wouldn't, out of consideration for others and because I would feel terribly guilty afterwards, just as I did when I was thirteen and carved my name on a beech tree. But I would think about it. I would imagine doing it. The temptation would be there to make a mark and then come back later to look at it as it set into that which, in this world, passes for permanence.

What is it about us humans that makes us so keen to leave our mark? Is it the ego's denial of mortality that urges us to create something that will outlive us even though we know that whatever it is will, like the statue of Ozymandias, eventually follow us along the path to oblivion? Nothing is eternal. Permanence is an illusion. Everything changes in every instant. The quantum universe is nothing but a vast, restless dance of energy and we and all our works blink in and out of existence like fireflies in the dark of unimaginable space.

I know that. I know that in another decade or two (or less probably) I shall be gone. Oh I shall live on a bit longer in the memories of those who knew me, particularly those who loved me. The books I have published will remain in print a few years maybe, and some of my traces in cyberspace might even persist till after I am dust. But as that which constitutes this separate me dissolves back into the All-That-Is, it will soon become just a faint outline, like yesterday's tar footprint, and eventually it will be as gone as a cup of seawater tipped back into the ocean.

Since some of my books were written with a helpful purpose, I hope they will remain a while. But apart from that, does any of this really bother me? Well, not so much, any more. I think I am learning at last the futility of trying to make a permanent home out of today's evanescent reality. And here is where I think I differ from the kid with the spray can who scribbles his tag on the wall and scuttles away. Because for me, as well as the tactile pleasure of a sandal pressed into soft tar, it is not so much about longing for permanence as it is about coming back and looking again. It is about wondering what will be different tomorrow. It is about noticing and being fascinated by— and yes honouring—the inevitable process of constant change and unpredictability that lies at the quantum core of everything. Even if the looking makes me sad.

Here's a sonnet I wrote thirteen years ago that seems to fit well...

I am so old that I remember green

grass hillsides where now mushroom villas crowd;

blue, endless space, and rising skylark seen

dark silhouetted, singing to a cloud.

Behind neat privet hedge, hydrangeas bloom.

Video library. Fast food for sale.

Car parks and garages. No longer  room

here for the spinney, or its nightingale.

Yet the old beech still stands, and in her bark,

carved long ago by thoughtless, teenaged hand,

my name, scar-tissued to the faintest mark,

may just be traced. At last I understand

forgiveness. Fifty uncomplaining years

the tree has waited for these healing tears.

'The Mark' © Marian Van Eyk McCain, 2000

                                               

As Plain As the Nose On Your Face

I wouldn't have the courage to leap out of a capsule 23 miles up, that's for sure. Hell, I could never even pluck up courage to leap off the high diving board. But one thing I do envy our culture's latest daredevil hero for and that's the chance to see the Earth from that incredible height, to get a greater sense of its curvature, its wholeness, its planet-ness. And to feel in his body, for four whole minutes and at a greater intensity than ever before, that deep strong pull homewards that we know as gravity.

One of the first astronauts to see our Earth from space spoke fervently about his feeling of identification with it. Just as we may see a photo of our own house, our own street, our own town and say "Ah, there's home," he suddenly realized that he was seeing, through the porthole of his spacecraft, the only home that humans have ever known. And exhilarating though that moment was—he said later that it changed his whole life—one can only imagine the profound sense of relief he and his companions felt when their feet eventually touched solid ground again.

Most of us never get further up than 40,000 feet and even then we are more likely to be watching movies, reading in-flight magazines or waiting for the drinks trolley to reach us than we are to be marvelling at our (somewhat) expanded view of the landscape. And millions of our fellow humans have never been inside a plane. However, the concept of flight, the concept of travel, even on a train or in a car, plays tricks with our minds. In fact, just our very ability to move from place to place on foot rather than being rooted in one spot for life, like a tree, gives us a false idea of who and what we are.

We talk about being on the Earth, as though anyone except Neil Armstrong has ever actually been on anything else. Religious people sometimes talk about being 'stewards' of the Earth, as though our planet hadn't managed perfectly well for millions of years before we turned up, a few cosmic seconds ago, to be its self-appointed 'stewards.' We talk about 'Mother Earth' and ourselves as her children, but most children grow up and leave home and that is one thing we cannot do. Nor would we want to.

We have no difficulty in seeing rocks and mountains, sand and sea, rivers and stones as being an intrinsic part of the fabric of our planet. Even plants, we can imagine as part of that fabric, since apart from tumbleweeds they mostly stay where they are. But moving creatures, the ones with feet and hooves and wings and manufactured wheels, those seem different to our literal, childlike minds and it takes a leap of intellect—a leap that many people seem unwilling or unable to take—to understand, to really get it, that we, too, are just as much a part of the Earth as a mountain, a pebble or a mushroom. The molecules and atoms we are made of have been here since the Big Bang and the energy forces that formed those molecules and atoms were here even before that, part of a vast mysterious universe that is beyond the grasp of our finite minds. 

Yes, it is an intellectual leap, but it is a leap worth making because it is a leap that can change your life. Some people can go even further than that and are able, even if only for a few seconds at a time, actually to experience that oneness and have a total knowing and bodily feeling of it that is way beyond all thought or concept. I long for the day when we can all do that. 

I want to say to everyone: you are part of this planet in the same way that your nose is part of your face. Yes, theoretically you could chop your nose off and hurl it out into space, beyond the sky, beyond gravity's pull…

But why would you ever want to?

Sunshiny Days

How very hard it is to stay indoors when the sap is rising, the birds are singing and the garden is calling me to dig and weed, and rake and sow. Who wants to sit at a desk, staring at a screen when they can sit or walk or work outside and feel sunshine on their skin? Well, some folks might, but I don't.

My skin craves sunshine. I know this is not just because I spent forty years of my adult life living in sunny parts of the world like Australia and California and got accustomed to it, because I remember how I craved sunshine as a child. It was as though there was some ancient piece of programming in this English brain of mine that made it well-nigh impossible to remain indoors on a sunny day. Whenever I awoke to a morning of blue sky and slanting sunbeams I would experience an immediate and powerful urge to leap out of bed and run outdoors. 

I can still remember, vividly, the power of that bodily urge and I remember how quickly and surprisingly it left me when I moved away from England. So much so that I forgot all about it for decades until, the first spring after I came back here to live, it reasserted itself with the same force as ever. 

There was an item in the BBC news yesterday about the importance of Vitamin D to our health and about how we poor denizens of the northern latitudes who don’t get enough sunshine on our skin need to take Vitamin D supplements to keep ourselves healthy. Those same health authorities who fussed and worried and sent us all scurrying for shade and slathering ourselves from head to toe with SPF 15, are now suggesting that maybe they went a bit too far overboard and a little sun on the skin is actually a Good Thing  (just a little, mind). Not that I ever took much notice of those warnings in the first place, except that I was always careful not to burn. 

My own experience tells me that sun-craving, for people who live as far north as I do, is actually an adaptive mechanism. I am convinced that, just as the food cravings of pregnancy signal a shortage of some dietary element or another,  sun-craving is a natural and evolutionary response to insufficient levels of Vitamin D. So, as with everything else, if we remain fully tuned to our bodies and fully receptive to their messages and requests—which, by the way, tell us not only when to get out into the sun but also when it is time to move to the shade—they will serve us faithfully and with much gratitude.



Productivity Rules (Forever, dammit!)

When I look back and muse upon it—which I frequently do each evening as I draw the curtains—the very best kind of day is one that has contained all the following ingredients:

● I created something

● I exercised my body

● I spent time outdoors

● I completed something

● I enjoyed myself

● I felt fit, healthy and in love with life 

Some days are like that. But how to deal with the ones that are not? How to deal with the days when I feel like Stephen Leacock’s character who “… flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”?

How to deal with the days when, as I draw the curtains, I cannot even remember one single thing I actually did except for eating meals, going to the bathroom and checking email?

How to deal with days when, despite all my good intentions, the piles of paper keep piling up and all efforts to bring order to my chaos fail (again)?

How to feel OK about a whole day spent sitting in an armchair reading the latest Michael Connelly murder mystery when I really should be out there doing Something To Save the Planet (or at least pulling a few weeds in the veggie garden)?

Over  the years I have convinced myself that it is perfectly OK to be erratic, perfectly OK to have quiet days and doing nothing days, perfectly OK to please myself from moment to moment as regards what I do with my day, especially now that I am retired and officially an old woman. Besides which, I’m a writer and writers need quiet gestation time as well as busy scribbling time, right? Yes, I have convinced myself of all these excellent arguments. And yet…

Something I have noticed is that it is heaps easier to feel good about a doing nothing day if it happens to occur on a Sunday. Interesting, isn’t it? Interesting to notice how deeply our childhood conditioning  sinks into our psyches, how it is reinforced throughout our lives by twelve or more years of schooling and half a century's exposure to the industrial culture* and how hard it is to eradicate entirely. Kind of like couch grass.

Anyone else noticed this?

(* not everyone is paid for what they do, more's the pity, but we're all conditioned by the so-called 'working week.')
 

All Our Relations



Have you noticed how so many of the ways that we talk about Nature and about our fellow creatures drive a semantic wedge between ‘it’ and us, between ‘them’ and us? So much so, in fact, that it is quite a challenge to talk about other life forms without falling into the trap of separating ourselves from them with our words.

There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that our species Homo sapiens is a member of the Kingdom called Animalia (we are animals), the Phylum Chordata (we have spines), the Subphylum: Vertebrata (a special sort of spines), the Class: Mammalia (we suckle our young), the Order: Primates (along with apes, and monkeys), the Family: Hominidae (one of the so-called ‘great apes’) and the Genus: Homo (men and women, boys and girls). Yet to listen to the way we speak about ourselves—and the way we think about ourselves—you would never know it.

After all these centuries of imagining ourselves as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom and forgetting that all of these other life forms are our relations, our language has been shaped by our beliefs. So yes, it is hard to avoid the linguistic traps. But I really wish we could all try harder. It really bothers me when I hear people say “humans and animals,” as though we weren’t animals. We need to reverse the trend and re-shape our language to fit our new realization of who we really are—one organism among the billions that make up the body of the living Earth.

It bothers me when I hear phrases like “walking in Nature,” as though there were any place on our planet were Nature isn’t. Nature is us. Nature is in us and everywhere and in everything. Even in the heart of the city, Nature is not just the pigeons and rats and cockroaches and mice and the slivers of living green that grow up in the cracks between the paving stones, but all-pervasive. The air is full of unseen creatures; our own bodies have other creatures living on and within them, creatures in their millions. We are Nature and Nature is us.

For all of my adult life I have consciously and delightedly revelled in the experience of being woman, being human, being animal. So when Stephanie Sorrell, one of my fellow authors at John Hunt Publishing, told me she was thinking of co-ordinating a new publishing imprint called ‘Animal’ I was delighted. If any of my readers are interested in Stephanie’s proposal, you will find it here.

So if you have a book in you and it is about other animals and our relationships with them, contact Stephanie. The email address, in case you can't read it very well in the box,  is animalpub(at)hotmail.com (just replace (at) with the @ sign)

My Solstice Message

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)

Future Primitive - an interview

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.)

Shoulder High to a Thistle

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!

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.

Reciprocity

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.

This Little Cog Went Walkabout

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.

Today’s topic: ‘Sacred Messiness’

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/

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

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’

On the Road Again (sort of!)

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 ...

... 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.

Balancing Act

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?