My double helix, a sugar-phosphate backbone runs the course of a few special rivers. My Walian DNA is a lotic flow winding South towards the sun and into the Severn Sea. Prokaryote, eukaryote. We are one and the same, and yet different. We survive in all things.

All things are connected.

~~~

Mother River

My mother’s mother, borne by the Ithon Headwaters, Kerry sheep and curlew. Her mother, Jinny, of the Upper Severn Reach, dragonflies and lapwing.

My mother’s father, the Upper Lugg Reach, his father, the Upper Lugg Reach, his father, the Upper Lugg Reach, and so on into deep time. Horse and bracken. Wolves, hunted to extinction.

My mother and I, both borne by the Middle Wye Reach. We are of blossoming orchards and red-white cattle. My daughter too. Yet we all swim the Arrow.

The Ithon flows the Wye.
The Lugg (and Arrow) flows the Wye.
The Wye flows the Severn
…and into the Severn Sea.

We are together. All life.

~~~

Father River

My father, borne by the Middle Cynon Reach, of black coal and shire horses.

His father of the Ebbw Fawr, of heath and pit ponies.

The Cynon flows the Taff
The Ebbw flows the Taff
…and into the Severn Sea.

My father’s mother, of the Lower Tawe Reach, of sea trout and dogs.

The Tawe flows the Severn Sea.

We are together. All life.

~~~

My freshwater super-coils, stress-strained, have carved through rock-time: Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous and Triassic have reached saltwater.

We are all the Severn Sea now, in atomic suspension, sucked along vast tidal beats to beaches below Liassic cliffs.

I am Monknash, I am Dunraven. I am Jurassic coastal life.

We are together. All life. All things are connected.

~~~

 

~~~

Emerald Damselfly by me 2015

Who includes diversity and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth and the equilibrium also,
Who has not look’d forth from the windows the eyes for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing,
Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover,
Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the æsthetic or intellectual,
Who having consider’d the body finds all its organs and parts good,
Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body understands by subtle analogies all other theories,
The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States;
Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and moons,
Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.

Crinoid fossil in the rock, St Donats. Photo by me, 2016

~~~

Having relied so much on wifi to express my love for family and friends recently, I have been considering the comparative values of the internet. By extension, I have realised I am considering the worth of the inanimate; the cables, the silicon chips, and the raw materials like oil and copper derived from Earth’s rocks and deep wells that constitute much that is ‘man-made.’

I watched the film “Her” recently. The story-line centres around a man falling in love with his artificially intelligent operating system with female voice called Samantha. ‘She,’ meanwhile, is learning the meaning of human relationships and love. Hardly an obvious connection to the axiology of geodiversity, but amid the interplay of fictional characters, I realised that the hardware (and therefore the rocks), were integral to Samantha’s developing personality, her consciousness. She seemed not to represent anything artificial in this sense, but something more tangible. Ourselves.

Nearly 3.5 billion users globally connect to the internet (and to each other), every day, and these blistering connections constitute not only a new era in technological communication, with issues of equity and speed of access also prescient, but perhaps a kind of manifestation of human intelligence outside of our physical bodies.

If all humans dropped their devices and switched off the energy sources, the internet would quickly become inert, of course ~ just a series of cold cables and silent mainframe computers. But the same could be said of ourselves when we die. Cut off our energy sources and what is left? Our bodies, as biological husks, would revert to dust to become part of the biosphere’s elemental flows or absorbed into other organic life forms. There is a difference, of course, in the internet’s favour. A dormant internet has potential to be re-energised and operated once more given restorative maintenance and materials. We humans, so far, cannot be brought back to life.

The internet forms a kind of protection in unifying those with a cause, although it is fallible without policing, abused by hardline capitalists, malicious hackers and in hiding evils. None-the-less, billions of connections are made every second. How could consciousness exist within the system, when the materials used to transmit information and data around the globe are perceived widely as inanimate and simply tools? There must be more to it.

There is something of an extension of ourselves in the mass of cables stitched across Earth. Our personalities, our consciousnesses flow through the ether, as Einstein would have it, a fabric woven of both matter and time. Make a gesture, and like ripples, you’ll find union of consciousness with others and in some form, by an extension of your thoughts and physical touch. All things are connected.

My brain formulates a thought, which I communicate through using my body to type (or speak), into my electronic device. It is translated by the computer into bytes and pulses sent along through wireless (radio waves), cable and mainframe until it reaches my friend’s computer and translates into typed words, which can be displayed and then read by his eyes and transmitted to his brain. Brain to brain. The brain is a powerful organ and is constantly filling in gaps, a pseudo-reality of company in the absence of direct contact. Instead of the handwritten ink words of a paper letter, that we may touch, smell, even taste, we now have an exchange of photographs, text, even video to facilitate the brain in strengthening connections. Our imaginations do the rest. Perhaps in future, all our senses will find ethereal connection. Mind altering stuff.

The Ghost in the Machine, or the replacement of ones own being, even temporarily, into radio waves and electrical impulses reminds me of the Theseus Paradox, an ancient thought experiment. Plutarch asked whether The Ship of Theseus (restored by replacing all single wooden parts), remained the same ship. Does an object, or ourselves transmitted digitally through the ether, with all parts replaced over time, stay fundamentally the same object/subject? Heraclitus looked at this question by asking whether one may step into the same river twice. There is a unity of opposites. Hegel similarly wrote, “Identity is the identity of identity and non-identity.” Is the fossil in the rock still a crinoid? Could we be ourselves and, at the same time, not ourselves, because we are also the cables, the mainframes, the rocks?

And more, there is an extension of the self and community, like the mycelium hyphae connecting trees of the wood-wide-web. Laptops, routers, cables and mainframe computers may not contain our DNA, but they contain our social evolutionary equivalent, our inventive fingerprints, broadcasting seeds of thought through ripples of nutritious data potentially for the collective good.

I wonder how all nature, if it were somehow plugged in to our internet, The Ghedeist in the Machine, may gain or lose from this intense stream of information. I have a bold suspicion that we humans would gain far more from the sum of other life-forms than we could ever offer. But the rocks themselves, in situ, the geo-diverse epochs of formation and incremental movement, might well be one of nature’s original foundations for exchange of information. Heat, static electricity, H2O, sounds ~ all transmitted through rock, our species requiring high-tech gadgets to perceive, though other life-forms may well already have the biology to sense. There is so much we do not yet know.

Let me bring in again the concept of Albrecht’s ‘Ghedeist’ and whether it is life alone which constitutes ‘aliveness’ as interconnection or whether there are what are considered inanimate (by Western standards), elements integral to it. If all life ceased, and what is left are rocks, would a universal Ghedeist still exist? On the basis that the rocks have the potential to hold a form of our consciousness, our identity and non-identity as one, and could possibly already be integral to the consciousness of other life forms, I have come to the conclusion that it would.

This has been a revelation to me, because so far I have only found solid reason enough for inherent value of life. That we are made of ‘inanimate’ star dust has always to me been fascinating, yet secondary, in that the inorganic could not merit the same hierarchy of value as a miraculous collection of evolved cells and life-force that constitutes an individual being. I still cannot assert that I would ever choose bare rocks over existential life, if there was ever the slightest cause to make that choice. I can’t simply let go of my biocentric leanings. Life and the will to flourish, both individually and collectively, is miraculous and precious. But neither can I now detach from the idea that rocks are integral, not simply utility, to our existence and consciousness, old and new, even via the food and water we absorb. There is a profound intrinsic worth in the inert and alert. All is the Ghedeist. Even the internet, when we connect for the common good.

There seems purpose in the formation of phenomena, dynamism and pattern in the natural laws that appear to count (so far) as universal. So much is invisible to our senses and, perhaps, even more to our technologies. But there is deep interconnection and runs unbroken if the spirit of the advancement of co-existence and evolution of all species on Earth is conserved and protected. Conflict and disturbance, we know, may result in evolutionary traits emerging and surviving. One cannot assume that all life will ever be at peace. But what we may find is that, as the Ghedeist flows, and we are fully connected with and aware of it, there will be less suffering. And so, more on this from me, in time.

~~~~~~~~

A dipper, Cinclus cinclus, flies to her nest site above a weir on the River Ely.  Photo by me, 2016.

A short post today, but for me none-less vital. By typing, I find clarification.

These words were said by the wonderful Maya Angelou:

“Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”

A childhood spent in relative rural remoteness meant animal companions and wilder kin were the ones I felt I understood and, more importantly I guess, the ones who truly understood me. I also loved plants in a Victorian glass greenhouse and spent way too much time in their attendance for a normal teenager.

It has been difficult for me to find like-minded souls. I am largely an introvert in the company of other human beings. Mother-distress, parentohol, a family split, sibling separation, financial instability, Ursuline nuns, and an overwhelming sense of responsibility for others, including my nephews and a niece, were all features of my young life. I struggled with the idea of true friends. At 21, I lost my Aunt to brain cancer. With her to the very end, mortality has always seemed quite close.

All my life, I’ve found great solace in my connection with other species in wilder places. In fact, I think I have always perceived myself as just another species alongside fox, cat, wren, dog, bee, sheep, butterfly, horse. I’m amazed I ever found a man to love me. But he did find me in student digs, and we had Bendog and then Gracie.

Place is such a loaded word, much noise made of the ‘sense’ of it. Although my childhood home in North Herefordshire remained in the family for forty years (now sold), my life’s oceanic currents have washed me around from place to place with an almost predictable frequency. My siblings’ address books are black with lines drawn through my temporary addresses, international postcodes and landline numbers.

I do feel rooted around the River Wye somehow, and miss it, but it is not ‘place’ that draws me. The Wye is some 134 miles long and even the most knowledgeable of river experts could not know every mile so intimately. But I do feel a strong sense of understanding those that live in and around it. I identify with them. Moreover, I love them.

Last year I moved to the outskirts of Cardiff.  But this time I became worried about abandoning loved ones (non-human), for living so near to the City. I thought to myself, “there will be more people, more litter, more traffic, more intense recreational use of nearby areas normally in the realm of the non-human.” My worries were all borne out, of course though, it must be said, rural pressures are equally pressing upon wildlife, just in different ways.

None-the-less, a year of being here and if I am called away, I miss the wild community to which I have recently been so warmly welcomed. I admire the community here because it exists despite human calamity. I miss all the individuals of the many species that I have spent time with, even if we’ve met only once. Dippers, brown trout, hedgehogs. I miss them because I now care deeply about them. It is love.

Having once studied architecture in the scale of ‘human’, I am acutely aware of the homogeneity of ignoring ‘place’, and witnessing the melding of cultural nuance to the universal symbol as dull and colonial. A similar wrecking ball is that nature can be treated with one scientific masterplan and conservation enacted to a single manual of value and technological application. Regionalism was my study area, and at the time it felt radical. But now it’s wholly inadequate to describe my sense of being. Regionalism could be vast, especially to a bee or a wren. My sense of place is now almost microscopic. Wherever I am, I use all my senses to find the wilder beings. Sometimes, they find me in the nightly track of a bat, or the beat of an otter along the Ely.

The fact is I am not constrained by place at all. My sense of place is hugely superseded by my sense of belonging to community, and this community is largely non-human. In retrospect, I suppose I have felt this wherever I have lived and now I see it as a blessing. I am not tied. I can roam, yet still feel I belong. If I were to be washed up anywhere on the planet I will belong because I know to commune with life.

The courage to find new individuals, new species, new homes, is also the courage to trust love one more time and always one more time. I open my heart to all, despite the losses I may incur in future as I inevitably move on again.

For this love is the union of myself and the Ghedeist, a Heraclatean Unity of Opposites in that it is both one and many. Along with my close terrestrial human loves, not least my Gracie and my Ben, there cannot be anything more comforting.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A dipper, Cinclus cinclus, flies to her nest site above a weir on the River Ely.  Photo by me, 2016.

 

A short post today, but for me none-less vital. By typing, I find clarification.

I discovered these words recently, written by the wonderful Maya Angelou:

“Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”

It has been difficult for me to find like-minded souls in my life. Family and close friends aside, and especially social media, I am largely an introvert in the company of other human beings. I have found great solace in my connection with other species in wilder places. In fact, I think I have always perceived myself as just another species alongside fox, cat, wren, dog, bee, sheep, butterfly, horse. A childhood spent with older family, but mostly on my own, meant my animal companions and wilder kin were the ones I felt I understood and, more importantly I guess, the ones who truly understood me.

Place is such a loaded word, much noise made of the ‘sense’ of it. Although my childhood home in North Herefordshire remained in the family for forty years (now sold), my life’s oceanic currents have washed me around from place to place with an almost predictable frequency. My siblings’ address books are black with lines drawn through my temporary addresses, international postcodes and landline numbers. Yes, I do feel rooted around the River Wye somehow, and miss it, but it is not ‘place’ that draws me. The Wye is some 134 miles long and even the most knowledgeable of river experts could not know every mile so intimately. But I do feel a strong sense of understanding those that live in and around it. I identify with them. Moreover, I love them.

Last year I moved to the outskirts of Cardiff.  But this time I became worried about abandoning loved ones (non-human), for living so near to the City. I thought to myself, “there will be more people, more litter, more traffic, more intense recreational use of nearby areas normally in the realm of the non-human.” My worries were all borne out, of course though, it must be said, rural pressures are equally pressing upon wildlife, just in different ways.

None-the-less, after a year of being here, if I am called away, I miss the wild community to which I have recently been so warmly welcomed. I admire the community here because it exists despite the human calamity. I miss all the individuals of the many species that I have spent time with, even if we’ve met only once. Dippers, brown trout, hedgehogs. I miss them because I now care deeply about them. It is love.

Having studied architecture in the scale of ‘human’, I am acutely aware of the homogeneity of ignoring ‘place’, and witnessing the melding of cultural nuance to the universal symbol as dull and colonial. A similar wrecking ball is that nature can be treated with one scientific masterplan and conservation enacted to a single manual of value and technological application. Regionalism was my study area, and at the time it felt radical. But now it’s wholly inadequate to describe my sense of being. Regionalism could be vast, especially to a bee or a wren. My sense of place is now almost microscopic. Wherever I am, I use all my senses to find the wilder beings. Sometimes, they find me in the nightly track of a bat, or the beat of an otter along the Ely.

The fact is I am not constrained by place at all. My sense of place is hugely superseded by my sense of belonging to community, and this community is largely non-human. In retrospect, I suppose I have felt this wherever I have lived and now I see it as a blessing. I am not tied. I can roam, yet still feel I belong. If I were to be washed up anywhere on the planet I will belong because I know to commune with life.

The courage to find new individuals, new species, new habitats is also the courage to trust love one more time and always one more time. I open my heart to all, despite the losses I may incur in future as I inevitably move on again. For this love is the union of myself and the Ghedeist, a Heraclatean Unity of Opposites in that it is both one and many. Along with my close terrestrial human loves, there cannot be anything more comforting.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~