Our sweet dog Lizzie died this week. Death of pets affects us very deeply for they are all unique and much loved. Even non-mammals have different characters and can establish a relationship with us. Sometimes we see pets and farm animals as separate from the big canvas of nature; we have removed them from the wild and could think that it is our taming and our interaction that leads to these relationships. But let us look at it the other way round. Our relationship with pets shows us that we can respect and relate to other aspects of nature. All of nature is a network of ecosystems, and in an ecosystem all the diverse elements interrelate and affect each other. We too are part of nature. Let us use that knowledge to ensure that our relationships and interaction with our planet are positive elements in our ecosystem.

Summer

I can immerse myself in the bowl of summer, feel its edges around me and sink down, down into its unfettered abandon. The sun is loose and free, it soaks through the air, through the ground, through my skin like caramel. The clouds are friends scattering the sky with white or bringing the rain we need to maintain the green and to open up the earth. The days stretch into the night like a house with extra rooms added each summer, rooms to fill with all we want to do in the light and with all the occupations of nature.

Nature fills summer like an Indian wedding, everyone here, everything so full of colour and life. Flowers follow the sun, bees and seeds follow the flowers, and birds follow the seeds. There is so much, a plenitude, so many insects, so many grasses, so many plants with their own colour and form. So many trees sculpting the shapes around us for light and birds to fly through, filling the earth at their feet and the sky at their head, sounding the wind for us when it blows.

We are part of nature and fill each summer with our open bodies. We cannot escape it, cannot avoid responding to its light, its heat, its pollen. We are changed by it, we are part of the great cycle that spirals through the seasons, carrying us all in its loops. This year I am going to live in it fully, greet it each morning and enjoy its embrace. My mind likes hurrying away to the future and holding the summer in my plans, holding its transience and so anticipating its demise. This year I’m not holding the summer, the summer is holding me. I am grounded in the grass, I am blooming like the hawkbit in my lawn with bright heads of yellow florets and fluffy heads of waiting seeds. I am not yesterday or tomorrow, I am here and now, I am turning with the sun, I am happy.

Do you like grass? I love it. I love the green carpet in my garden that is soft on my feet and eye. There are approximately 11,400 species of grass which include wheat, barley, oats, rice, maize, sorghum and millet so grass provides nearly half of all human food and even more when you consider it as the food of the meat that we eat. Grass covers a quarter of the land surface. And it traps carbon dioxide, stabilises the soil preventing erosion, improves the soil keeping it cooler and moister, it helps clean the air and reduces noise pollution.

Lawns were only owned by the rich initially, using grazing sheep on the rolling pastures of Capability Brown, and highly paid sidesmen to scythe them short near the house. Lawn mowers were invented by the Victorians opening the way for any of us to have a lawn in our modest gardens. Yet we have not lost the image of the perfect lawn being a work of art with no weeds, no moss and no untidy edges. We sculpt nature by eliminating most of its natural components so that it looks nice, whereas not applying poisons, letting it grow longer and including the wild flowers that blow in is so much better for our environment.

Let us work with nature, with our lawns, and with our wild flowers aka weeds. And let us hold in our prayers and hopes the deliberations of the G7 summit meeting in Cornwall this week, from 11-13th June, as they are looking at how to build a greener future for our planet. Here is what they are doing:

The G7 Leaders’ Summit in 2021 is presided over by the UK and aims to unite leading democracies to help the world build back better from the COVID-19 pandemic and create a greener, more prosperous future. The UK Presidency of the G7 aims to build back better from the COVID-19 pandemic by:

• leading the global recovery from the coronavirus while strengthening resilience against future pandemics;
• promoting future prosperity by championing free and fair trade;
• tackling climate change and preserving the planet’s biodiversity; and
• championing global shared values.

Lawns

I don’t envy
lawns with stripes.

I like mine full
of flowers,
growing up again
each time I mow.

The buttercup and hawkbit
are tall and yellow,
the daisies short and white,
and hidden in the grass
are self-heal, clover
and the cushioning of moss.

My lawn isn’t just grass
it is ecosystem,
it is community.

Our ancestors’ lives were entwined with the land and its seasons. For this they needed an accurate knowledge of the sun and moon, the timing of the solstices, equinoxes, cross-quarter days, full moons, new moons and eclipses. And their stone monuments were precisely aligned to give this. The annual position of the sun is regular and easy to align with. But the moon’s arc around the earth varies from month to month. (That is why we get supermoons that look bigger than usual when the moon is nearer the earth, such as our next full moon on May 26th.) The arc is slightly tilted and so the moon varies in position over a period of 18.6 years. It also has a slight wobble with a cycle of 173.3 days or half an eclipse year. Amazingly many of the stone monuments in Britain were built to calculate these such as the Aubrey holes at Stonehenge which mark the cycle of the arc. Knowledge of the moon’s wobble, known and measured by the Neolithic people in Britain, was then lost until observed in the 16th century. The moon measurements obtained were engraved on markers of stone, bone or antler from 30,000 years ago and possibly as long ago as 300,000 years.

Living in tune with the moon, sun and seasons meant that our ancestors saw their own lives, and time, as cyclical whereas we tend to view them as linear. This has lead to us expecting and wanting a steady progression of growth, and viewing anything that deviates from this negatively. We struggle with what we might call dark times whereas the dark, the time of the moon, was recognised as a generative time of insight, healing and transformation that was particularly important. We do not view aging well but for our ancestors the older generation were the wise elders. This is particularly apparent with women after their childbearing years who were called crones. The word derives from the word for crown and she was the wisdom keeper and healer, guiding others through hardships and transitions. Now crone means an ugly, withered old woman. And we see death as an enemy to be fought rather than something to be honoured as part of the natural cycle of life.

Much of the harm we have done to nature has been because we have not understood or respected its cycles. This is the time for us to find wisdom in the old ways and learn to honour the cycles of the earth for their sake and for our own.

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3.1-8

Spring is here at last, and more welcome than usual this year as we start leaving behind the winter of lockdown. Our planet has been damaged by our activities and neglect but still the spring sings in all its colours, lifting spirits, bringing hope for us and hope for it. We need to change our patterns that are causing so many problems, but we need to be undergirded by hope, hope and the reminder of beauty that awaits.

Violets

The sun shines, I come. I sit in the gentle air, in the waiting warmth, in the bowl of blue and am welcomed into spring. Spring, and holiday. It is still and timeless like memories of summer. The birdsong is all encompassing, no longer in the background it fills centre stage with murmuring, cooing, and sharp, sweet trilling. The trees are opening their arms to the sun and you can sense the surge in them as buds are fed ready to burst with green. They are swelling from the grey bark like remembered dreams, ready but not rushing.

It is the daffodils that cheer the heart, even when the sun is slow to show. How wonderful that the first colours of spring are the colours of sun, so bright against the lawn, just-mown for the season. Daffodils, celandines and primroses, and yellow mahonia blossom, just opening to release its scent.

But there is more. Scattered through my garden are wild violets, dark purple hiding from first sight, and white and mauve too, the only flower in the rainbow. There is something thrilling about noticing the presence of something I haven’t planted, like a gift, like angels visiting unawares. We take it for granted that weeds blow in, but here is a bounty of beauty I didn’t expect.

It’s so easy to notice the weeds along our way, and they will always be there. But scattered between in cushions of colour are violets – nature’s gift.

The earth or nature and all its systems and life forms is sometimes called Gaia, a term encouraging us to view it as a living complex entity functioning as a whole like a self-regulating organism, rather than seeing it as a static resource for us to use.  But we are not separate from Gaia although many live as if we were.  We too are one of the life forms dependent on and affected by the others.