The courtyard, liminal zone.
Tricksy east wind. Sun alighting restless, strobed through leaves, on my face in morning meditation.
Stillpoint; and today not so still. Too many challenges on too many fronts.
A little despair, here, today, glittering off the leaves, pooling on the flagstones.
And. It's not just personal.
So the government is going ahead, despite independent scientific advice to the contrary, with a badger cull (this threat has been rumbling on for years. Theory is it's badgers transmit TB to cattle. Likelihood is it's just as probable the other way round, and the real culprit is agribusiness and intensive and inhumane farming practices.)
I know there are (also) bigger global things to worry about; but this, globally speaking (but also because this has knocked me back personally on top of loads of other stress) is the shoelace breaking when you're running for the train on top of marriage breakdown, job loss, house repossession (I'm speaking entirely metaphorically here, and not personally!). The little last straw. And it's one of several campaigns I've been personally committed to, for a long time; and for a little while it looked as if the tide was turning towards vaccination. But now we've lost it.
Scapegoating. The demonisation again of the wild.
How we humans love to blame.
When are we going to learn to live with heart?
Walking the Old Ways : nature, the bardic & druidic arts, holism, Zen, the ecological imagination
from BARDO
The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way
Is it a consolation
is star-stuff too?
– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –
Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.
Roselle Angwin
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this is very sad news. unnessessary 'culling' (killing). If only we could recognise that we could live with more wild and less farm. This mad world of yogurt and meat, the dairy industry. It's awful the way farming, once an honourabe occupation as a steward of the land, has now become an industry to be milked and for the customers to be duped into actually wanting 'cheese string' for instance. All I can say is that we will get our come uppance. But I don't want to belong to the 'we' but to the sharp smell of badgers dens and the paths through the hedges...
ReplyDeleteI am so with you. Animals as cash crops. The whole planet - and even other people - as cash crops.
ReplyDeleteI first wrote a great long angry rant. This is the very heavily edited version!
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If we are going to demonise, we should have something big and powerfully archetypal - some mythical creature to carry the demon for us. The pity of it - a badger cull.
ReplyDelete