The Generosity of Bluebells

It's that day, the one when even though the sun is hidden behind clouds, the air is still warm. Spring's dress of bluebells and stitchwort has a haze of perfume rising from every flower and each bird not atop some nestlings is hurling notes into the air, hoping to catch something magnificent to bring home. It's a good day for a picnic.

Fergus had tucked his pastry safely into his belly before I'd finished rummaging through the basket for my phone and we began a search for the collective noun for bluebells.

I offered 'an insanity of bluebells', a madness, their intensity quite overwhelming.  A few sniffs more and I was sure it must be 'a sensuality of bluebells' or perhaps 'an opulence' or  even 'an epiphany'. Their scent fills me with some kind of wild deliciousness, I can't contain myself or restrain my desire to run about barefoot from one patch to the next taking deep  sniffing breaths. I become a child, or a honey bee, or perhaps I become the me that has not been trained by society to 'behave'. I cannot behave in any way other than as one utterly drunk on love in the presence of bluebells.

Fergus, so much less prone to being toppled by flowers, proclaimed them 'a generosity of bluebells' - and there we stayed, among the generosity of bluebells.

In our very visually obsessed culture it's easy to forget the smells of things, but smell, like all our senses, can feed our souls deeply. In fact there is some fascinating research that suggests that people who for whatever reason cannot smell are significantly more likely to suffer from depression than those who can. It makes perfect sense to me - we are fed by all our senses, we need beauty all-ways in order to be as deeply nourished as we can be. Without it we suffer.

Next time you see a flower, go and press your nose close and breathe in deeply.
I hope for your sake that it's a bluebell, for to me there is no smell more beautiful.

Imagine inhabitation

Inhabitation.

The act of inhabiting.

To inhabit.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary 'to inhabit' means "(of a person, animal, or group) live in or occupy (a place or environment)". The place or environment obviously being 'habitat'- "the natural home or environment of an animal, plant, or other organism."

This is my habitat.
This is where I'm happy. It's the very specific few square yards in which I invest huge amounts of time and huge amounts of love. It's where I belong and where I want to stay. I am very well aware that I'm ridiculously lucky to be able to live here.

This is where 'my' water is. The water to whom I listen, the one I sing with and pray with, the one I ask for help and to whom I offer my word-spells.  I firmly believe that words ARE spells, that we co-create the world around us via the stories we tell about it which are informed by lens through which we view it, and that lens is created to a very great degree through the commentary offered by our internal 'narrator'. We tend to see the narrator as an emanation of the ego, a voice which is typically very critical and who's narration is 'all about me'. 

I don't think it has to be this way. There are adults the world over who are waking up to a world in which there are two kinds of humans -  those who believe that everything is sacred,  and those who believe that everything is there to be used - a resource over which we have dominion, and realising that they have a choice as to which kind to be. 

"Imagine the technologies that would be invented by a culture of inhabitation, that is, a sustainable culture, that is, a culture planning on being in the same place for 10,000 years. That culture would create technologies that enhance the landscape...that would decompose afterwards into components that help, not poison, the soil. The technologies would remind human inhabitants of their place in this landscape. The technologies would promote leisure, not production. The technologies would not be bombs and factory conveyor belts but perhaps stories, songs, and dances..."

Derrick Jensen - Endgame Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilisation.

When I look around my garden I'm often reminded of my GrandPop. He loved gardening and grew all the fruit and vegetables that my mother and her family ate growing up. He was a Celt, deeply in love with his land and his history and created for me a world in which everything was alive and everything was worthy of respect. He taught me that we have an obligation - he called it 'noblesse oblige' - that as caretakers, those with the power to effect change in the lives of others, we have the responsibility to take care. Everything must be tended by those who had the capacity to do so. Especially if those we were taking care of didn't really have the capacity to take care of themselves within a situation that we had created for them. Everyone - no matter what they were made of - had the right to thrive.

Our imagination is powerful. We have, to a great degree, created the world in which we now live through that power of imagination: We've built buildings, invented plumbing, harnessed electricity, created motor vehicles, mobile phones, computers, stock markets and through all of that also have accidentally created a world full of inequalities in which many suffer and few thrive. And now, because of all those things we've imagined, and because of a failure of imagination to include every kind of life in our imaginings, we have the Sixth Mass Extinction and climate change.

Imagine if we inhabited our world always remembering that it is inhabited by many other kinds of life and that all of them are indivisibly interwoven in a web of interconnected interdependence.

Imagine if we inhabited our world with an eye always to the future - to the life opportunities our actions will give to, or take from, those who come after us.

We cannot allow our imaginations to fail us now.

Earth Ceremonies for Change

On Sunday some friends and I gathered to create a ceremony of love for Water -

We wanted to show our love and appreciation for water with an offering of beauty. We brought her ourselves, our songs, our drums, flowers and prayers, and we stood in the freezing cold and offered these things to Her - in her shape as the River Exe and in her shape within all of life, in all of us.

We asked her to send a message through all waters, in support of the aims of Extinction Rebellion - for me this it is in particular the aims as they relate to taking necessary action on the climate and ecological emergency. .  We must reduce carbon emissions and halt biodiversity loss and we need our Government to stand up and take the lead on this. Businesses are clearly either not going to, or are not acting fast enough, and as individuals we don't have the power that either the corporations or the Government do to effect the fast change that is so urgently needed.

We asked that we may remember who we really are - children of Earth, indivisibly interwoven with all of Life, one among many; precious, sacred, necessary and beautiful. All-ways.

That's me with the flag and my friend Annee Bury with the bottle of water, she collected water from the Exe and poured into it a small amount of water that has been gathered from places all around the world, in ceremonies like this one, celebrating our love for our Earth, and for water. These photos were taken by Christa Mackinnon, our third co-creatrix in this ceremony.

We were joined by a swan, who arrived as the circle gathered, walked to the middle to inspect our basket of flowers (perhaps hoping for a picnic?) and the wandered off again, keeping us close as we moved to the bridge and back again, his presence feeling like a blessing and an acknowledgement of our consanguinity with all of Life.

The XR Solemn Intention Statement reads as follows: 

"Let's remember our love for this beautiful planet that feeds, nourishes and sustains us. 

Let's remember our love for the whole of humanity in all corners of the world. 

Let's recollect our sincere desire to protect all this, for ourselves, for all living beings, and for generations to come

As we act today, may we find the courage to bring a sense of peace, love and appreciation to everyone we encounter, to ever word we speak and to every action we make. We are here for all of us."

Animist Monday

Every aspect of my life is founded on the unshakeable belief in the sacredness of everything. I am, in the old-fashioned sense of the word - an animist.

 I wrote that and then wondered what I meant by 'the old-fashioned sense of the word'. It seems to me that there is an idea or a feeling amongst those who would perhaps describe themselves as Animist now (and I'm delighted to say that number is growing) that only the 'natural' world has Spirit - human creations do not; cars don't, houses don't, businesses don't. But to my mind, in order to be authentically animist, we need to concur with the notion that everything is made up of the same stuff, everything is connected, everything is containing of and contained in Spirit. Everything.

Wikipedia gives this rather lovely definition of what it is to be an animist - "Animism is the religious belief that objects, places and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Potentially, animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork and perhaps even words—as animated and alive." Amen to that! So I guess I'm an animist in the modern sense of the word too! 

When we perceive that the world is alive, every last bit of it, then we start to live in a constant conversation - a reciprocity between ourselves and everything that is not ourselves, understanding that 'they' all have their needs, their place, their ways of being which may or may not be harmonious with our own. 

So what is the conversation you would like to have - for example - with your job, your house, your garden? What about your conversation with money? Or the one with the food you eat? 

That's nettle and wild garlic soup thickened with lentils. I give back my gratitude and a song when I pick the nettles and wild garlic, having asked if it's ok to do so. The lentils are organic and from Europe, so I hope they were farmed kindly, but I don't know, so I offer them a blessing and of course my gratitude for their life sustaining presence in my bowl.

If you're talking to your house, are you going to stand there an complain about how ugly the paint is, or how horrible the neighbours are... or are you going to thank it most gratefully for keeping the rain off you as you sleep, for keeping you warm, protecting you from the elements, giving you a place to be, to call home, however humble or imperfect? 

If you're talking to your breakfast, does it matter if it was covered in chemicals and transported half way round the world to get to you? Do you need to apologise to your food for the way it has been treated? A conversation with our own bellies can be a life changing experience, beginning with gratitude for there being anything at all on the plate. 

How might a few moments in an animist mindset change your relationship to literally everything? 

This morning my lovely Treesister sister Tracy Shefras sent me this poem, she had been speaking with a Holly Tree and received these words -  

Be like a child
No Goal No Destination

Simply Present

No Agenda

Life will unfold itself

Into Spectacular Everyday Living

Surely it can’t get any better than That

Finding the Extraordinary in

A mop and bucket

A pair of garden shears

A bowl full of washing up

Surely the Mystery is veiled in The Mundane

The Rote

The Habitual

The Magnificent Present

No need to search for Anything

It's all right under your nose

Have fun just living Daily

Take a moment to gather the required Tools

To Perform

Your Own Personal

Height of Living
Quench Yourself First



There is so much beauty in engaging with the 'more than human world' ( a term created by David Abram I think), so much to gain, so very little to loose.

Grief is a Doorway

It's 3:23 in the morning and I'm awake because my great great grandchildren won't let me sleep, My great great grandchildren ask me in dreams; "what did you do while the planet was plundered? what did you do when the earth was unraveling?"—Drew Dellinger

"An apprenticeship with sorrow offers us the chance to build our capacity to stay present when the intense feelings of grief arise. Through meaningful rituals, a community of friends, some time in benevolent solitude, and effective practices that help us stretch into our bigger selves, we are offered the opportunity to develop a living relationship with loss. We can recover a faith in grief that recognizes that grief is not here to take us hostage, but instead to reshape us in some fundamental way, to help us become our mature selves, capable of living in the creative tension between grief and gratitude. In so doing, our hearts are ripened and made available for the great work of loving our lives and this astonishing world. It is an act of soul activism." The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller

For many the only sane reaction to the news (or the 'not news', as so many broadcasters and newspapers are steadfastly refusing to report on it) of the 6th mass extinction and global heating/climate change - is grief.  I have always referred to grief as "the left hand of love" - for we do not grieve what we do not love.

It is widely acknowledged that there are a number of stages to the process of grief. The first of these is denial - which is where the majority seem to be right now. Perhaps the thinking is "if we ignore it, it might go away", because we don't want it to be true. Ever fibre of our being wants our world to be full of all the beauty there has ever been; all the diversity, all the colours the flavours the different kinds of beingness - all those who are currently dying at a rate of 150 to 200 every single day. It seems inconceivable that one day we might wake up to a world where there are no Polar Bears, Gorillas, Sea Turtles, Orangutans,  Snow Leopards, or Tasmanian Tigers - oh no, wait, there are no Tasmanian Tigers, they've gone. A world where the intricately woven web of life is broken. A world that is so radically changed that it cannot support the lives of those with whom we are consanguine, and it cannot support our lives. A world of famine, and flood. Desertification and starvation.

After denial comes anger. "ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing... in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability… Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics.

Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence." David Whyte on Anger, from his wonderful book 'Consolations'. 

The original model for the stages of grief comes from the work of Elisabeth  Kübler-Ross and David Kessler and was specific to the grief felt by someone who loves someone who is dying or is themselves dying. In this model anger is followed by bargaining, depression and acceptance - these pre-suppose that the final outcome is unavoidable and acceptance, therefore, is the only sane destination. As this model relates to our grief for our Earth and for the lives of other Earth-dwellers, ourselves and our descendants - the outcome is not necessarily certain, and at the same time completely, unavoidably, definitely certain. We will all die - there's no getting round it. The Earth will die one day. BUT, we're not dead yet, and now, although the diagnosis is bad and the prognosis is not much better, what's happening is not yet a terminal diagnosis. We haven't been given a date to organise our funerals by, we've been given an opportunity to carry on and become very ill, very fast, or change our ways now and have a future which might include an ease-full old age.

So out of anger - righteous, heartful anger - needs to come the bargaining that finds it's expression in action. Action right now. Actions that change the way we live, not only on a personal scale but on a national and international scale. We, the humans, have the power to make a difference to how the next century looks for all of life on earth. But we must do it now.  Or get used to the idea of depression, followed by acceptance, followed by death for the majority of us, and sooner rather than later.

We have everything to gain and nothing to lose but our sense of powerlessness.

Related Poem Content Details

Turn annotations off BY THEODORE ROETHKE In a dark time, the eye begins to see,  I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;    I hear my echo in the echoing wood—  A lord of nature weeping to a tree.  I live between the heron and the wren,    Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.  What’s madness but nobility of soul  At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!    I know the purity of pure despair,  My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.    That place among the rocks—is it a cave,    Or winding path? The edge is what I have.  A steady storm of correspondences!  A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,    And in broad day the midnight come again!    A man goes far to find out what he is—  Death of the self in a long, tearless night,    All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.  Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.    My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,    Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?  A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.    The mind enters itself, and God the mind,    And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Wishing you Love (and Grief) in 2019

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me

and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting for their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry

Perhaps you will think it a cruel thing to say - I wish you, with all my heart, a 2019 that begins with love and with grief. Not just any old grief, I do not wish bad or sad things to happen to you, but I do most sincerely want you to understand the bad and sad things that are already happening to all of us. That will get worse and worse if we don't act now.

I hope you will forgive me. There is no malice whatsoever in this wishing - it comes from love and only love. I wish most of all that you fall in love with our beautiful planet, with your world, our world. I wish for you to love it passionately, with all of your heart. All of it, or just your own little patch - either will do. 

Then my wish for you, dear friend, without the slightest hint of bitch or witch, is that you grieve. I wish that your heart will feel like it's breaking with the pain of our broken world - because if you feel like that, it's because you understand what we have done; you know about the sixth mass extinction, about global heating, know about the storm and starvation scenario that our children have to look forwards to. Know that those who are children now are going to be living in a world which will be effectively habitable for humans, or not,
depending upon our choices right now. 

If you feel grief, then perhaps you will know that water is sacred. That water is life. That if we carry on polluting the water in the way we are currently then our descendants will inherit a planet in which there will be wars over water and in which even we, the rich ones, the ones who currently have everything, are quite likely to be starving, wanting for even the basics. 

When your grief spills over, and tears come, then my wish for you is that anger follows. Anger at what we have done, what we have allowed to be done in our name. 

And that out of anger, comes action.

My dearest wish for you, for me, for all of us, is that we start ACTING, right now. We know what needs to be done. We know that much of our current life style is totally unsustainable, and it's very clear that our Governments are not going to do anything like enough. So it has to be us. We have to be the ones to choose what our future looks like. Each one of us has power, especially as a 'consumer' to make a difference. If we keep buying chickens who have been raised in sheds where they see no daylight, have hardly enough room to turn around, are fed growth hormones and penicillin routinely, are smushed into a machine to be plucked while they are still alive and are then placed on a plastic tray and wrapped in more plastic - then that is what will be in the shops. If we keep buying washing powder, or water, or sugary drinks, or even yoghurt in plastic bottles and tubs - then we will live in a world where the seas are dead and the beaches are covered in plastic.

If we keep buying more and more and more and throwing the 'old' one 'away' then more and more and more of our land and sky will be full of these things, either buried exactly as they are or burned and released into the atmosphere or washed into the sea. There is no 'away'. There is only a place you cannot see from where you are standing.  Someone else's door step.

If we do not chose to reduce, re-use, re-cycle, re-purpose, re-invent, redress - who will chose it for us?

Every single one of us needs to give our very serious consideration to -
not getting on an aeroplane,
not buying anything sold in the kind of plastic that doesn't stretch when you push it with your finger - this is the stuff that's easy to recycle,
not taking the car if there's any alternative (walk, bike, bus, train or even - don't go!),
not leaving the lights on, changing to a sustainable energy supplier,
not turning a blind eye when our office/shop leaves the lights on,
not buying another one, a newer one, a better one of something that works just fine, buy only what we really need, and then consider buying second-hand/used/vintage/antique,
or from a local artisan maker who's creations are ethical and sustainable.
Not washing our clothes unless they are actually dirty or smelly and then washing them on the shortest, coolest cycle that will get them clean.
Not using chemicals - on our bodies, in our homes, on the food we buy, 
Not endlessly updating our wardrobe.

 If what stops you from buying organic food is the cost then I most respectfully suggest that you need to ask yourself what you mean by 'cost'.  Is £1 more or less today worth trading your future for?

Is the palm oil in your convenience food worth the destruction of thousands of lives half a world away?

Is the beef in your burger (especially if you are in America) worth the loss of the Rainforest? Is it worth the loss of the lungs of the world? Is it worth the carbon that won't be sequestered by those trees, now that they are gone? The spiralling temperatures, the storms, the floods, the famines...

Do these questions not fill you with rage and grief? If they do not, you have not been paying attention. Please go and find out why they should - on our children's lives, I beg you.


My prayer for 2019 is that we pay attention, remember the next generations, change the ways we are behaving.


Most of all, I wish you love.

May 2019 be full of it,
for all of us.
And all our relations. 

The Power of Beauty

He and I have been courting one-another for about three years. I saw him first as a young fawn, nosing around in the sparse grass under hazel and oak, ears twitching at flies. I saw him again as the small herd made it's way up and down the hill; more grass at the top, more shelter at the bottom. He was more visible still as the leaves started to fall and I caught a glimpses of him and his fellow bucks (a male fallow deer is a buck, not a stag) tangling antlers in play, scratching the soft down off them on the trunks of the patient trees, and then this year he clearly fought for the right to mate. About a month ago I saw him following an exquisite little white doe, my heart danced for joy at the sight of her, and then leapt still higher as I heard their mating, which was surprisingly brief and surprisingly grunty!

This morning he simply stopped and stared at me; not running, not moving, just watching with those beautiful soft eyes. Then Druid dog ran up to see what was keeping me and the moment was over, he didn't see the deer at all (he's very small and the undergrowth is quite tall, a fact that obscures much of life from his view!)

Walking with a glad heart I was then taken with the beauty of the trees, stopping to simply admire the extravagant gorgeousness of autumn leaves in sunshine. The south westerly wind rustled his fingers through the branches and for a moment it was raining red and gold. I tried to capture tumbling leaves with my phone but had missed the moment, and I stood remembering how as a child I had run around after leaves, believing that I would be lucky all year if I could catch one. I always got one in the end, and I've always felt incredibly lucky.

I remember hearing the Dine elder and wise woman Pat McCabe speak about 'trying an idea on' - thinking something and wondering whether it's true or not, thinking it and seeing what happens when you think it. So there I was wandering along the lane, feeling full to the brim with the beauty of autumn, and wondering if actually this was the correct way to be feeling at this time. How can my heart be so happy, singing with the trees here, when trees in the Amazon are being cut down at a rate of more than 150 acres every minute of every day and 78  million acres ever year? How can I fill my lungs to sing when the lungs of the Earth are being destroyed? 

I looked at the trees and the leaves and the sunshine and the words "Changing Woman" came to me. I saw that the Earth herself is 'Changing Woman' - there are only two things that are certain in this life, one is death, the other is change. Everything changes, everything must change; life is dependent upon change.

So perhaps it's utterly appropriate to be happily in love with the Earth, with all of it, and in particular with this little bit that I have the honour and good luck to live upon. Not to spend my time in grief, bemoaning the loss of things I cannot see from here, but to wander - heart-full - in my own place, and to sing out that love, and live that love with every thought and deed. And as I had this thought a beautiful leaf landed on my heart, and the sun came out.

I feel I have my answer. I know that grief immobilises me, that when I attempt to face all the horrors of the cataclysmic changes going on in the world I can come up with nothing more useful to do than what I already do: I'm trying to be zero waste, I don't buy plastic, I do buy organic, I try never to drive my car for only one reason, I haven't been on an aeroplane since 1998, the list goes on. And the more I walked this morning the more I became absolutely certain that unreservedly loving and celebrating my patch of land is the best, most useful, thing I could possibly do.

I'm not suggesting for a second that this is something to do instead of trying really, really hard to be a blessing not a curse on this land - I'm suggesting that the more we fall in love with Earth, the more we celebrate our indivisibility from all else that is here, the the more we (or I, certainly) will feel able to do what I already do and find the strength for more, and more, even knowing that it makes the very small difference that it does. I will remember also that the difference between life and death is a moment, or a millimetre, and so each small choice by each person counts - could be the difference between life and death for all of us.