The human is a contortionist
Bending and folding into boxes
Dissecting the world into words
Trying to communicate to…
Who? no one really knows
We just do it because we do
And in our prisms
With ink spilled
With erroneous conclusions to come to
we share a shared unknowledge that we are not who we are
but some other
Becoming restless
We all conclude
We should go ‘back’
Whatever that means
As if we left somewhere
When we get back to nature
It is said
We will understand
To which I must ask
When do you claim we left
That to which we are intrinsically attached?
It’s the words we use that built these walls
Language, a microscope to help communicate
About the world
But we forgot to step back from the scope
And see we are within
all the things we point to ‘out there.’
Nature
The Dragons Tail
The waves crash
and things erode and clash
A fierce dragons tail
Eking out a living with every thrash
Ramshackle homes built upon the ash
All for man who was so brash
casting spells all upon the land
with words that shrouded kingdoms
A mixture of illusion & delusion
The vultures clean our words
In the morning when they get to work
Pecking away at the remains
Of our yesterdays
If not for them
We’d be in up to our knees
Wading through the aftermath
But when all is said and done
There will be a bigger backlash
For us as one
The dragons tail
that we can’t help but become.
Time gone by
An explosion of thought
Ideas tunnelling
Early birds collecting the words
Beaks snapping
Butterflies smashing
Mammals cracking
A whirlpool of dreams
Steaming from teacups
Of time gone by
All a reflection
In a dinosaurs eye
All of this streamed by
A river
In my minds eye
A flicker
A flash
A kingfisher
A silhouette
A shadow
A stick figure
A wood preserved
In a prism
A lens
Capturing
Natures gems
Upturned umbrellas
Collecting confessions
Handles up toward the sky
In accusation
Of time
gone by
Meditation diaries: On ‘rewilding’ the ecosystem and disability.
I’m here again with questions no one wants/ is willing to answer, hell I don’t think people are willing to even consider the questions.
I understand the fear of asking them.
But I ask again, as I did in a previous post
From my point of view, I can’t see myself existing in the ‘rewilding’ vision of the world.
But I also can see the logic to it, the idea that we stop interfering with everything and just let it be.
But of course we’re like any other animal on this planet and our existence as much as it relies on every other creature, it also interferes. To think we can somehow no longer interfere in nature is to say we no longer exist as a species.
But again I’m nitpicking the language and the illusion of our separation from nature and that isn’t really the topic I’m supposed to be going on about.
What I want to ramble about is these ideas in my head that I’m struggling to align with how I live my life.
Having come across more and more information, with suggestions about how we can halt, slow down, or in some optimistic circles even reverse the decline of wildlife I’ve begun to feel more and more uneasy.
The more I read, listen to and watch on this subject the more I see myself falling behind, becoming non-existent.
Moving further and further away from the idea I should even have continued to exist in the first place.
I can’t see a place for me in this world where I’d be able to fit in.
I’ve spent much of my life not fitting in.
But this is fundamentally different. I see myself no longer fitting in with the very existence of nature. What I mean by that is that while I am by nature of existing a part of nature, it feels as if I’ll have to become a part of history.
Because my survival seems to depend very much on too many things that are ultimately, within an accumulation of other things, damaging to the planet.
The very thing that I feel gives me some semblance of little wellbeing I seem to have, and stability, it feels, should/would/will be taken away from me.
How can I continue my hobby of watching and photographing wildlife in good conscience?
Using a car (driven by someone else, I don’t drive), then a powerchair and then a camera. All these things, my camera especially, being things I love… Yet a part of me can’t help but see them as…indirect weapons of destruction.
Writing this blog on a laptop also comes with similar questions. I can I continue to use all this power knowing I’m just helping destruct? Yet with my social problems, being online is one of the main sources of anything social I have and to some extent want to have!
The people I talk to within the week are all support workers.
It feels like everything I do on a daily basis is just destruction.
And to go to nature reserves to see wildlife seems…odd to me these days as much as I still enjoy it. Because who am I to say nature reserves should be kitted out with wheelchair friendly paths? I know why emotionally, “Because it’s fair and disabled people have lives too,” But logically, coldly, who am I really to say? Surely ‘rewilding’ and disability (specifically mobility problems) can’t go together?
Meditation Diaries: My brain hurts and other rambling
I’m not to feed the birds…
My brain hurts.
Everything else is a disappointment.
I started reading a book called the “The way home: Tales from a life without technology.” by author Mark Boyle.
There is some irony to me reading that book on a kindle isn’t there?
I’m enjoying it and hating it at the same time.
He’s one of those “We need to get back to nature types,” and I always find myself somewhat cringing at that idea of getting back to nature.
Because nothing can exist without nature.
The idea that ‘man-made’ things are not natural has always bugged me.
What does that say about man? That man isn’t natural? So what is man? Supernatural?
But even ‘super’ natural has the word natural in it.
So are humans supernatural?
A strange phrase really, ‘supernatural’ isn’t it?
We say supernatural to mean something not natural, don’t we usually? Something ‘beyond’. Yet the word super suggests something is MORE natural not less natural or beyond the realms of nature.
I was looking up some birding humour the other day and I came across an article that was trying to say how “bird watching,” and “Birding” are different. I wasn’t interested in what they say is different or not about it. But what did catch my eye was this “Birds are natural; birders aren’t.”
Everything a human does we deem not natural.
So I ask, what exactly do people think humans are?
Is it a mass delusion of grandeur or is it an odd sense of self-hatred?
Obviously, the truth is it’s a bit of both, because some people in the population of humans certainly have delusions of grandeur about their place on this earth as a species, and then you have the others that hate humans and hate what humans are doing to the planet.
Anyway back to the book I’m reading it’s a somewhat painful read for me.
He’s done something I could only ever wish I could.
You don’t live this long with my medical conditions without technology, for one reason only: I’ve been kept alive by machines while they operated on me.
It’s not just the electrical technology stuff.
I don’t have it in me mentally, I’m not tough enough to do what he calls ‘get back to nature’ as much as I pick at that phrase.
It’s like reading a reminder of all the things that I have to some degree aspired to be, maybe not as extreme as he is. But certainly the idea of living in a cabin in the woods, pissing up against the trees in the morning while the birds sing and squark the morning away.
Yea that’d be my thing.
I don’t think I’d completely discard technology. I do after all use a powerchair, and I wouldn’t get fart without it. Then again right now I get nowhere because it’s broken.
After feeling dejected by everything I started searching for ways technology can be used to help the environment. Only really to reassure myself that technology isn’t as evil as the writer makes it out to be.
But when he talks about the machines that come along to knock down a whole load of trees and essentially driving animals out of their habitats it’s hard to argue that humans and our technology aren’t bad.
To some that is enough to argue that we’re ‘not natural’ but it’s not really a good argument for that because nature is as destructive as it is creative. The fact humans do some bad things doesn’t argue against the idea we’re natural at all.
But people will use that fallacy all the time.
If we don’t like something about humans we will say it’s unnatural and that we need to get back to nature.
Sadly that mirror you’re looking in that you’re trying to change to look ‘natural’ was natural all along.
yes, that means our destructive force can’t be singled out as something not natural.
Sometimes the more I find myself involved with environmentalism the more I find myself feeling we’re just chasing our tails.
I get to wondering that maybe we’re too self-aware for our own good. But then a little voice niggles in my head and says, “It’s an illusion of self awareness.” And I think that voice may have a point.
We think we’re self-aware.
To me the very fact people seem to separate us off as another category away from nature suggests we have no idea.
Sometimes I get the feeling that we’re aware that there is something we should be aware of but that we can’t quite put our finger on it.
Or maybe it’s just me. I often find myself aware of being aware of something I can’t quite put my finger on.
Eurasian jay
The Jay
One may say
Is a moustachioed magpie
Or it may just be I
But I see wisdom deep set
In his pale blue eyes
Garrulus glandarius
What significance comes
From such a noisy name
Matching the moustache
Which should surely bring him fame
His covert feathers flash by
a blue flame
In the blink of an eye
Red
I’m in a whimsical dream
Where a House Sparrow is eating a raspberry
Wearing a top hat and monocle over his left eye
A twirly moustache above his beak
Plotting revenge against his brother
Who put beef in an apple pie
And a blue tit in a tabard
Fighting off potential suitors to his beloved
And a nerdy looking Robin cursing the Blackbird
For eating his book worms
“Stop eating the book worms!” He cries
And then a nightmare looms over
Like clouds in the sky
Shadowing over the scene
A human bean
Throwing toxic waste
In a stream
All silence takes hold
And even though the sun is out
A sudden chill turns all wings to doubt
Suspended in motion
As gun shots clamour
A reminder that nature isn’t glitz and glamour
An apex predator stampeding
With machines and light beams
Rubbish taking over green scenes
Till all appears obsolete
A crescendo of footsteps
Out of blocks of concrete
Birds flocking together
Their beady eyes
Wandering and observing
From up high
Alarm calls trill
As they forget their beef
For a moment of togetherness
As one species defined only by ‘bird’
Protecting one another
For this moment of war
Till peace time resumes
Red in tooth and claw
If you liked this post you may also like my short story here
And if you specifically like birds and also enjoy weird humour you may like my short story here
Birds soar
Birds soar against the wind
Retelling myths
Once believed
We’re so tiny in reality
The world doesn’t care for you or I
Deep in this monster
We’re just little drone bees
Coming home legless
No longer qualified
Poetry inspired by nature:
Honey bees like a treat sometimes, sap from lime trees. This sap ferments and they get drunk. And if they make it back to the hive, the ‘guard bees’ will take their legs off for punishment.
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New posts every Tuesday.
We are nature
We are not the voice of the world
For we’re part of a choir of other animals that can be heard
To plant a seed and watch it sprout
Is not unique to us my friends
For with nature
We are not without.
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