Living more Simply so Others can Simply Live
Each evening before our meal, my wife and I pause a moment for a little ritual of saying grace and wishing well to all our fellow beings. Something along the lines of:
The Urban Animist
Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters and all things are my companions.
Awe
I just had a revelation about a subject close to my heart. A friend sent me an article in which I discovered that in recent times there have been various scientific studies of ‘Awe’, led particularly by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at U Cal Berkeley.
Living with Heartbreak
I used to think that grief is a very powerful emotion which visits us in times of loss, and then after varying amounts of time, depending on the degree of the loss, it would dissipate; and then we’d go back to ‘normal’. But a few years ago, I realised that there is a whole different way to relate to grief and that it is not something to necessarily get over.
Home
Hitching out on the road as a young man, I loved the sense of wandering free, with all I needed on my back. Standing on the roadside waiting, sometimes for ages, shivering in the cold, I would sing aloud to myself. One lyric comes back to me as capturing that sense of being at home wherever I might find myself:
Living in the Earth
I love gulls. I watch them wheeling and soaring, effortlessly riding the winds above the waters of the old docks where I live. Whatever the weather, the big herring gulls are always at one with the wind, responding with outstretched wings to every nuance and current of air;
Cat Consciousness
These days, it’s unfortunately the case that most of us are pretty estranged from Nature. Over fifty per cent of the world now live in urban environments and this percentage is ever increasing. As modern human beings, we increasingly live in a virtual world of abstract thinking and smartphones.
Chalk Stream
I come to your banks with reverence,
in the green serene of your cool stream
Gravel beds where golden trout lie
Waving carpets of crowfoot,
lime green with starry flowers
In shade of alder, grayling ripples a sailed fin,
holding herself in your current
Crystalline water, transparent to stony bed
I’m not really a birdwatcher
Acquaintances often tend to refer to me as a birdwatcher or a birder. On my allotment I’ve heard that I’m known by fellow plot holders as ‘the Birdman’ due to my feeding the birds all winter; though in my defence, unlike my namesake, ‘the Birdman of Alcatraz’, I’m not a convicted murderer (only a convicted environmental activist).
My Life with a Wooden Log
For a number of years now, I have made it a point to regularly spend time sitting on my bench which looks out on my vegetable plot. This is my ‘sit spot’- a favourite place where I feel (and am) part of the local changes through the days and seasons.