Sunday, 23 August 2015

55> Learning from It (2)

The first lesson is that I Must get help on the hill.
I knew that all along really , but somehow enjoyed being the heroic lone  scyther.
Cutting the bracken and tending the garden are way beyond my physical capabilities at present. So I need to make and install a volunteer hut. Then when the bracken is really going for it, to organise a "bracken camp", to get a group of people to tackle the main clearings. The best time to cut the bracken is July, when it's invested a lot of its energy into growth, and hasn't got a lot of growing season left ahead of it to recover. It's also when people like to come on holiday, and this is a perfect place for that, being close to the sea. The growth rate this year, and last, has been amazing.  Now is getting to be too late. The stems are browning, and starting to go over.  Now I must go round and find the trees I planted this spring underneath before they get squashed by its collapse.

The second is more esoteric, but related.

My perspective of time is changing. In part I think, this stems from the nature of this pain I've been feeling, which has been a pulsing, neuralgic type, in my arm and shoulder, but not equating to any immediate physical activity. This has allowed me to think of myself as an impulse rather than solely as a being woven into a set of narratives.


I'd already been considering our individual mind sets within the past, present, and future, and what was the most nourishing balance, seeing for instance, friends for whom everything worthwhile derived from the past. The present is bad news.
Others put their lives on hold, until the weekend, or retirement, or an inheritance, or they eventually met their soulmate. The present was for them effectively, a waiting-room.
I concluded that the ideal was to be informed by the past, and inspired by the future, but embraced firmly in the present.

I came across some first edition Ordnance Survey maps last year, that show a pre-oil, pre-suburban, pre-forestry commission, pre- industrial landscape. Rather than just bemoan its loss, I find it exciting it was only two hundred years ago, and that what we do now can have just as rapid and radical effect on the landscape of the future.

But your impulse has firstly to let itself gain confidence, to overrule the rigour of precedent and conformity.
To some extent I've done that. 

Getting others to help me here could help them to get it too..

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