Lushness

A wet summer with some high temperatures here and there... the recipe for serious garden growth. It is a jungle. Everything's gone crazy. so much so that I have asked two friends to devote a day in October to helping me hack in back.

The jasmine's nearly over (I'm writing early in August) but there are still flowers on the geraniums, daisies, honeysuckle and of course the roses.

This is apparently - as I write, not as you read - the time of Lammas. It's the time of the first harvest. Ally Stott - my guide in the Croning ritual - suggests some practices for this time of year. I particularly liked this question: "Take some quite time to reflect on which people, places or animals have inspired and guided your life.  What qualities do these beings embody that you appreciate?"

As it happens, I had done just this in a journey, where I was with the animals and beings who feel especially significant - hare, stag, robin, crow - and asking them about who they are. The oak was all wisdom, guidance, a Grandfather Spirit. Offering a safe haven, a home, as well as counsel. The stag seemed to embody a certain chutzpah, a masculine energy and drive. The hare embodied wildness, eccentricity, freedom. With the crow, there was humour and defiance, talk and a kind of stoical get-over-yourself and get on with it! Then, the robin. I saw the robin burst from the mind like Athena born from the brain of Zeus. The robin as the song of creation, the thread of song that weaves the world together.

Funny, that about Athena. A woman born of no mother. Sprung born.... In another journey, I was beset by hundreds of green and red snakes. I asked the guides what I should do? Were they dangerous? Yes. Should I kill them? No. So... I was told to capture and hold them. The Guides said, "They are the motherless ones. Of course they are angry. They need mothering." I asked if I were to mother them. The Guides said, no - that role would be taken by Sissy, the snake I'd already met. She held them in a bundle, a snake-knot, and took them with her... presumably to inside me where the Guides had extracted that spider thing some time back.

I'd now like to see a snake. A slow worm, even.

Alas, it's unlikely.

Recent reading: The Sheltering Desert by Henno Martin about two German geologists who decided to spend WWII in the Namibian desert. they became hunter gathers, but as there wasn't much to gather, they became hunters, basically. And they spent a lot of time thinking about humanity, about life. They decide that imagination is what allows a being to exceed itself. That love is all important:

Only the preservation of all our attributes, including our weaknesses, can carry us safely through into the uncertain future. But how can it be done? Certainly not by force which does not preserve but destroys. There is only one thing which preserves all things, including the weak, and that is love. The truth which we had felt vaguely all along had become a reasoned certainty—man could command the future only by love.

It turns out that it has been made into a film that's free to watch on YouTube.

Having finished that, I started The New Wild by Fred Pearce. This is really interesting. He's arguing that we scapegoat invasive species when often they are simply taking advantage of an already destabilised if not destroyed ecosystem. Of course I like it: he's basically arguing, with evidence, what I already thought. I'm glad not to be alone.