Larkrise

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

(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)

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)

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.