the things that reconnect

Climate change. Species extinction. Trump's wall. Brexit. The UK selling arms to Saudi who use those weapons to destroy civilians in Yemen.
 
If you are at all like me, you too will have the troubles of the world sitting like existential toothache deep in your chest cavity much if not all of the time. We seem to be in a hard passage, not just for our species but for all species at our hands. This is not news, but for me at least it feels even more overwhelming than usual. We all belong in this web, so all these things affect us deeply, whether or not we're conscious of it. It can make it hard to step aside and focus on living from essential nature – arguably part of our soul-task here, and I believe a necessary step to 'saving the world'. We need conscious individuals so desperately badly at the moment.

In my case, severe flu and pleurisy, extreme backache, a move abroad for a family member and my help needed when I can't even lift a kettle and barely my head from the pillow, and yet another death in our family with its attendant trauma and, in addition, trouble in the life of another family member, and life can feel at times really overwhelming. (I don't mean to sound self-pitying! - this is just how it is sometimes.) Add to this that hares are disappearing; rabbits are succumbing to disease so we've lost 45% of our foxes in a few short years; I've seen no badgers on our land since they started culling down here. Easy then for me to lose sight of our work here, and of my own connection to my inner life, as if a pipe has been disconnected.

While I'm aware that it's easy to say this in the relatively-safe UK, this is the test of the Underworld Journey, an initiation into the little and greater deaths that will liberate, a little, if we commit to the journey, the soul from the grip of the ego so that new life might be born – in our own worlds, inner and outer, and collectively, too, if we can find the strength to keep on keeping on: not to lose faith that change can happen.

There are indisputably many apparent impasses 'out there', but slowly and imperceptibly, of course change continues to happen: change, the only constant. 'This too must pass.'

Look at the schoolchildren rising up in protest. Look at the number of people – many thousands – who gave up all animal products for Veganuary: a move towards ending suffering. Look at 17 year old Lucy Gavaghan who started to campaign aged only 12 for a better life for hens, and has single-handedly persuaded many of the supermarket chains in GB to refuse to stock battery eggs. In Bavaria, through people-pressure, farming practices that will benefit bees have been forced in. And there's good news for the Yazidi women.

The little things can help. In my own life, the news at the weekend that otters, pine martens, polecats and yes even badgers are returning brings a little weak sun back in to the beleaguered psyche. Some more acceptances for my own poetry, often neglected lately. Spending some hours in gentle February sun with many birds around, and primroses, rosemary flowers, hellebore, celandines, dandelions and lungwort offering early nectar to early bees, finally clearing the mat of buttercups that is choking my herb-and-bee-bed. Clearing one's own patch. Tidying our lives, a little.

And as for the rest: we owe it to ourselves and each other, arguably, to not be immobilised: to feel the pain and carry on trying to live a kind life, to do the hard graft of individuation, to keep the flag of protest and activism flying in whatever way we can: not to give in to the corporations, the banks, the apparent inexorability of our governments. Not to give up.

Every so often, just when things are at their darkest, I discover for me personally that something will slide in sideways that will jolt me like a lightning flash, and all of a sudden things seem possible again. I feel renewed, revivified, recharged, alive, reconnected.

My well is filling up; my electricity supply is reconnected.

It is a book by a visionary author, a much-loved commentator, that has woven me back into the web. I'll tell you more very soon.