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)

More Murmurations

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

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Future Primitive - an interview

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

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

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

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

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

Eradicating Ecocide

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

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

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

Shoulder High to a Thistle

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.

Definitely Voting 'YES' tomorrow

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

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

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

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

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

Slow Boat to Sicily

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

Thomas Berry Meditations Book Now Available in USA

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

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

(Dream of the Earth, p.46)



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

(Befriending the Earth, p.14)



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

(The Great Work, p.200)


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

(The Universe Story, p.44)


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

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

Reciprocity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wild Elders

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

Ø      simplicity: living lightly on the Earth

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

Ø      passion: caring deeply about what really matters

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

Ø      non-attachment: to people, possessions etc

Ø      Earth-centeredness: living ecocentrically, not egocentrically

Ø      comfort: in one’s community and surroundings

Ø      connectedness: with all that is

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

Ø      creativity: in what one does and how one lives

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

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

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

Ø      heart-listening: trusting the voice of intuition

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Little Cog Went Walkabout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Will They Ever Learn?

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

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

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

Blessings,
Marian

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

Close Quarters

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


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

I never see this roadside profusion without remembering Vic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spirit of Green

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

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

On Deck - and in community.

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

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

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

Today’s topic: ‘Sacred Messiness’

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

Rainy Day Visit

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

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

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

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