38>Stop the Dance

Those lazy, heavy drips on my roof.
 The hills tucked snugly into a duvet of mist. Grass slumped across the path, heavy with seed and rain.
A kettle simmering on the stove.

On the radio, the forecaster is apologetic.
 Today promised a bright start, and there was a celebratory air.
Like a coronation...

The earth itself is gloriously warm.
I pulled my garlic and some shallots last week. They are now drying in my cold frame. Neither are big, but their stems were shrivelled and yellow, and all that lay ahead was rot & mold.
So I trowelled the soil, like mixing a cake, and sought seed to sow. Spinach, turnips, and beetroot. And some onions. I love growing little encampments of onions.

Gardeners hold hope in their hearts. They dabble and sow and hoe and weed, in a perpetual cycle of hope and love and trust and stubbornness.
A lot of long-suffering growers are near despair this year. Not just the small dedicated nurserymen, but even mechanised, magnate supermarket suppliers.

Its not the rain. Or those wild blustery winds.

What's missing is assured Masculine Power:
that great, assertive male energy, the Sun, to come in enough to dry the Earth's tears.
The fusion of his assuring brilliance with her emotional expression is the magic that lights the green fuse, initiating that natural firework display of growth and flowering and the setting of seed.

So think Sun. Sing Sun. Dream heat. Send Love to the Earth, to help calm her tears.


Let the Raindance come to an end

37>The Simplest Thing.

 It should be a fundamental assumption in our culture that all technologies are optional, but it isn't.
Once available, we aspire to it. Whether we approve or not, technologies change the nature of things, our geographies, economies, sense of ourselves, and lifestyles.  States without nuclear weapons, children without Xboxes and households without fridge-freezers can feel equally inadequate.

 Progress is still depicted as a linear and upward path, towards a better future, which is implicitly derived from an urbocentric, industrial system.

There are doubters and disbelievers. Their hesitance is often attended by belief in lost, more spiritually aware and advanced civilizations, or a time when mankind lived in noble harmony on a planet not far removed from Eden.
Some see Utopia in the future, others in the past.

 I love technology. I use cordless tools & click away on my laptop & phone and feel an alpha confidence in monkey Man's curiosity overcoming all obstacles. Design as solution. I am quite happy or at least resigned to our mutations and blunders as we pursue our insatiable enquiry. I do not believe that Design is Intrigue.
Chaos and Cock-up feel more plausible than Conspiracy: At least they are a more nourishing seedbed to germinate dreams in. Better Compost.
  
Solutions ultimately seem simple, often in retrospect. Truth will out. Good prevails. I feel that like a Law of Physics.
 We rent the cage we want. From them we interpret and invoke our realities.

 I want to live with my great mistress, the Earth. To sleep with my hut wide open to the breeze, and eat from my garden, and light my stove with wood from around me to heat water and assist my cooking supper and feeling cosy as it grows dark. 
It took me a long time to get here: Fifty years to even realise that my choices and actions were driven by this consistent yearning.  I feel that I belong in the story now. That the Earth loves me, and responds to my love of her. I am happy.
 If there is anything worse than feeling worthless or irrelevant or unheard, it is never knowing your own plot!

Our Culture is a web, a gauze, a box of tricks and precedents and assumptions. I love that too. The babble and the intrigue.
Our realisations and scandals and consensual morality.
We are all carry the same crumpled genetic song sheet in our bones and in our mother tongue's inbuilt wisdom. Our technology is connecting and detaching us as I write. Even nation states are starting to feel provincial in this Global Village.

 But then that's human stuff. Fireside Babble.
As such I don't regard its judgement as ultimate. I am not denying that I am its child, but my ultimate loyalty is to my birthplace, the Earth, and to her well-being.

The simplest tasks often take the longest to achieve.
 Maybe that comes from the serpent part of our consciousness that likes to writhe and beguile with sweet words, our intellect, and our restless, unfocused ambition. Their clamour is trained up by our modular schooling, that touches lightly on everything, but engages with nothing.

Civilization is a continually changing neurosis. Our sensibilities are constantly being wheedled and triggered by new  stimuli. Sometimes this comes from a breaking trauma, such as a natural disaster, war crime, or system failure, sometimes real or contrived information, such as a scientific paper, statistic, scandal, or a need incited by a manufacturer.
 Look back through our kaleidoscope of film and audio footage to witness our shifting body images and awkward intonation. 

No wonder it can take a lifetime to hear your own heart. Your song.

That simple thing.