Synchronicity Story

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

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

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

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

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).