OUR EARTHBOND
This essay, 'The Declaration of Interdependence', won the Earth Vision Nature Writing Contest in 2009.
THE EARTH'S PRAYER - An Ode to Gaia
ELEMENTS OF EXISTENCE - Seven Ways to view Earthcentrism
This article was published as a Web Exclusive with Resurgence Magazine Issue 274 September/October 2012
EARTHCENTRISM MEETS GREEN ECONOMICS
This forms a chapter in 'The Strategies for the Reform of Economics' to be published shortly by the Green Economics Institute
This forms a chapter in 'The Strategies for the Reform of Economics' to be published shortly by the Green Economics Institute
SWIMMING WITH SEALS IN THE OUTER HEBRIDES
This article was published in Outdoor Swimming Society Newsletter June 2014
A big group of seals are just offshore. Today, conditions at Gress Beach are ideal. No waves or wind, the sea's surface just ruffling. I can't wait to get into the water and swim with them.
The overcast sky is an asset - it's easier to see seals without the sun's eye-watering glitter. It's high tide, the water up to my waist in seconds. I suppress a gasp. This is necessary for the seals are wary, dive and disappear at any sudden movement or sound. As with any wildlife encounter, patience and stillness are chief requirements.
I wade out towards the seals in my half wetsuit, trying to count seal-heads as they dive and resurface - twelve at least. I swim here when weather permits so these seals and I have got to know each other. Today, they are braver than usual. Already, two of them position themselves between me and the shore, completing a big circle around me. I recognise some familiar faces.
Initially, these were high-adrenalin encounters. But, having been towed by a wild dolphin at Amble in Northumberland one Christmas Day and met a basking shark the first time I swam in Orkney waters, seals seemed less scary from the start. (Psychologically, this process is called 'desensitisation'.) Over the years, I've sung to the seals, talked to them and given them names.
Claudius and Roman, two large Grey seals with their gorgeous mottled neck-markings check me out. Their innate curiosity means they lift themselves high in the water, move their heads from side to side and peer like owls, to get a better look. I want to giggle, but suppress that too.
The Gress skerries host a mixed colony of both Common and Grey Seals though telling them apart is hard, even for experts. A young Grey seal is easily mistaken for a Common Seal. Colour is not a defining characteristic. Their size (the Grey seal is larger) and head-shape (the Common seal has a dog-like profile) are more reliable guides.
Close-up too, another distinguishing mark is the seals' nostrils - v-shaped in the Common, parallel in the Grey. With my wetsuit acting like a buoyancy aid I just float, busy admiring them all, their large limpid eyes and long, cat-like whiskers. Without warning, a seal flashes past me underwater, and touches my leg with his flipper. Predictably, I shriek. He surfaces close by, a good match for a wet black labrador. This third seal, Snubby, stares at me in surprise, his nostrils dilating. I can hear him breathing. I feel enormously privileged for that's the first time a seal has risked physical contact in ten years.
It's been suggested that tempting seals with fish would bring them closer. Maybe I could have had this kind of encounter before if I fed them. But I have never tried it because it might prompt unwanted behaviour - I've heard stories where taking their fish promoted aggression.
Fear separates seals from people on both sides. People are sometimes wary of them. But to me, seals have more reason to fear us than we them. Even raising a pair of binoculars must look, to them, like a double-barrelled shotgun. (Else why do they instantly dive?).
When seals don't feel threatened they are, by temperament, curious. It's their territory; they take the initiative. To enjoy their wildness, their existence, is enough. In certain mood the Gress seals will follow walkers along the beach, or even swim parallel to them on the headland. One of their most endearing habits is to sky-point - stare for ages into the wide blue sky. They look like they are meditating.
Today, as always, I leave the water reluctantly, make my way up the short path to the car-park gate. There I turn to give the seals my usual goodbye wave. They are all staring after me and I feel a familiar pang, along with the connection to the great seal-woman mythology of these islands.
A tourist, fresh out of his car, witnesses this, looks at me as if I'm mad. There's some species-gaps you just cannot bridge!
THE REBIRTH OF COMPASSION
When does compassion seed itself in the human heart?
The joker might say – 'When the passion of the night gives way to the com-puter screen.'
For me, it is when the line of the song – the songline – 'There but for fortune go you or I' resonates deeply in the psyche. Not followed by the toss-off 'Yeah, there's something in that'.
But the nanosecond when you know you've gone a layer deeper into life. Taken that step backwards into oceanic oneness. You don't sympathise. You identify, empathise. Mean it.
But this still plays on the surface. We're an own-species-restricted species, we of the Anthropocentric Age. Reductionist to the point where global consciousness is off-the-map. Focused primarily on 'them-and-us' as a defining mindset in its millions of contexts. The thought the Earth is a whole, and therefore gives us the primal model of wholeness, likewise bites the dust before we stick our collective heads back in the sand of generalised 'don't want to know, not my department'.
This is harsh. But how easily we disconnect.
All around us, we have nothing but examples of inter-relatedness. How one thing affects another. How interdependent we are, living within the Earth's ecosystem. Not just on the continuum – or spectrum if you like - that stretches from family and friends out to all the races of homo sapiens currently existent on Earth. But to all other species, including inanimate matter and the invisible quantum stuff.
For many, this is a bridge too far for com-passion. The com-prehensive view of passion that embraces everything. Sages used to call it love before it got hijacked by those who promote romantic love to the Number One position in the Love Stakes. And then, like the rogue cuckoo chick, proceed to shoulder out all those other forms of love, not much seen or talked about these days. Those forms of love based on altruism, the common good, the expanded mindstate, doing our bit with a glad heart. Not confined to a peer group or beer group.
I love trawling the past for words, ideas and phrases well past there up-for-reinvention date. Bill Oddie gave me the Day's Eye as the origin of the daisy's name. What a treat that is to contemplate!
I believe there is a way forward more harmonious and happy; less hyped by media and hung up on materialism. First we have to go to a special place. Stand at the intersection between ourselves and the Earth, and all its amazing micro-ecological systems. This is a crossroads too. For if we insist on the Ego-Self as our greatest life-ally; in other words, choose personal power and aggrandisement as life-drivers, we are likely to find Nature proves us wrong in our assumptions.
Com-passion is the passion of the common people who never lose their deep relationship to all things. And still know it by the name of Love. Or perhaps Awe. Or the mega-miracle of life, simply being alive.
When does compassion seed itself in the human heart?
The joker might say – 'When the passion of the night gives way to the com-puter screen.'
For me, it is when the line of the song – the songline – 'There but for fortune go you or I' resonates deeply in the psyche. Not followed by the toss-off 'Yeah, there's something in that'.
But the nanosecond when you know you've gone a layer deeper into life. Taken that step backwards into oceanic oneness. You don't sympathise. You identify, empathise. Mean it.
But this still plays on the surface. We're an own-species-restricted species, we of the Anthropocentric Age. Reductionist to the point where global consciousness is off-the-map. Focused primarily on 'them-and-us' as a defining mindset in its millions of contexts. The thought the Earth is a whole, and therefore gives us the primal model of wholeness, likewise bites the dust before we stick our collective heads back in the sand of generalised 'don't want to know, not my department'.
This is harsh. But how easily we disconnect.
All around us, we have nothing but examples of inter-relatedness. How one thing affects another. How interdependent we are, living within the Earth's ecosystem. Not just on the continuum – or spectrum if you like - that stretches from family and friends out to all the races of homo sapiens currently existent on Earth. But to all other species, including inanimate matter and the invisible quantum stuff.
For many, this is a bridge too far for com-passion. The com-prehensive view of passion that embraces everything. Sages used to call it love before it got hijacked by those who promote romantic love to the Number One position in the Love Stakes. And then, like the rogue cuckoo chick, proceed to shoulder out all those other forms of love, not much seen or talked about these days. Those forms of love based on altruism, the common good, the expanded mindstate, doing our bit with a glad heart. Not confined to a peer group or beer group.
I love trawling the past for words, ideas and phrases well past there up-for-reinvention date. Bill Oddie gave me the Day's Eye as the origin of the daisy's name. What a treat that is to contemplate!
I believe there is a way forward more harmonious and happy; less hyped by media and hung up on materialism. First we have to go to a special place. Stand at the intersection between ourselves and the Earth, and all its amazing micro-ecological systems. This is a crossroads too. For if we insist on the Ego-Self as our greatest life-ally; in other words, choose personal power and aggrandisement as life-drivers, we are likely to find Nature proves us wrong in our assumptions.
Com-passion is the passion of the common people who never lose their deep relationship to all things. And still know it by the name of Love. Or perhaps Awe. Or the mega-miracle of life, simply being alive.
Copyright text Gaia Dance 2015 Header photo Copyright NASA
