Seasonalight

Tag: death

  • Bees to seed, and Black Lives Mattering.

    Image by me ©2020

    The nature of nature, is where blooms transform to seed. It’s not an ugly process, far from it. It’s life-process. Does it begin with the egg of the solitary bee who pollinated this flower?

    It’s not a catastrophe, but a sacred process. Look further to ecological death, and life. It’s love. We may look at our own bodies in the same way. Don’t fret about flowers ‘going over’. They are beautiful.

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    Anxiety grips me again, during just a handful of days this time. Matter builds as crystals from the process of evaporation, and all the little thoughts become sharp and transparent.

    I have been observing my balcony flowers going ‘over,’ their delicate petals beginning to wither and curl, as if kissed by poison. As the draw of their shapes and colours fade, it would be easy to cut them off to keep things in check. The beauty, or love, is ever more enduring than the colour or scent of the blooming flower. The work of the bee or the fly has set in motion deep changes within ancient organs that sustain life. Nothing is going over, moreover, everything is beginning.

    The fertilized seeds are beginning to swell, the baha sucked back through the veins of each petal, and up from the roots, to grow new seeds. This flow, this transfer of love in the form of metabolites from flower to ovary, is for-newal.

    When a flower is cut dead for the sake of what we humans deem tidy, or aesthetic, or out of place, what worth are we assigning to the plant and seed? Or the bee and her egg? Life is growing inside, at first shy, but then erupting to ripe moments of genetic and evolutionary potential.

    Black Lives Matter. Three black women founded this now global movement. Two identify as queer, and one has worked for a long time in the field of domestic abuse. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi. Remember their names.

    Like bees, all three have set in motion a beautiful but painful blooming, of instilling the will of justice and love inside so many more. Ripe seeds of empathy are broadcast widely. With sunlight, good soils and pure water, these efforts are growing into powerful new relationships in the face of many wrongs.

    Every black life matters. The oppression endured over this last 400 years has forged survivors like diamonds. Their lives materially and spiritually matter to us all. George Floyd and hundreds, thousands, millions, of black lives have been cut dead, stolen from their loved ones and buried deep. Millions have lived in fear, incarcerated, and disenfranchised.

    I want to acknowledge that pain, and my white British ancestral role in its coming. It must now leave, as it should never have been. It’s a personal and public struggle in which we all need to be willing and able to participate, from bee to seed.

    I’ll end with Professor Cornel West’s words said in public discussion this last few days, still raw from the death of Breonna Taylor, a medical carer herself, who was shot to death by a militant police force, in what was supposed to be safe sanctuary ~ home.

    “We can’t bring her back, but the memory will empower all to keep fighting.”

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  • Ghostlight of the Anthropocene

    Sepia light seeps into my consciousness.

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    Monday morning came and went. I expected wind-lash Ophelia to clip us hard here in Cardiff and I battened down in readiness. Instead, thick clouds loomed and a strange sepia tone infiltrated every corner of my being. In my eyes, across my forearms, inside my head.

    I looked up at white exterior walls, knowing them to be white, yet they were not. The uncanniness altered my mental state. There was an ominousness to all and yet I felt excited. I looked out across the rooftops and towards the hills and felt disrupted, deeply distracted. I couldn’t work so observed the birds as they too observed the skies.

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    That this could be Saharan dust swept over the sea in the periferal surge of Storm Ophelia tricked me into feeling sanguine. If it nurtures the Amazon Rainforest, I considered, it might even enrich our soils. Such is our interconnected biosphere.

    But forest fire smoke is different. Forest fire smoke is the carbon atoms of the recently dead, like the carbon atoms that rise from the crematorium chimney. Forest fires, fanned by Ophelia, killed 40 people or more, and countless wild lives in Portugal and Spain, including hundreds of thousands of sentient trees. These atoms filled a whole sky, from horizon to horizon. Online, I gazed at strangely ironic, chromatic radar maps. This was continental, as was my realisation.

    Ghosts.

    The sepia light is still distracting me, long after it has blown away in a stiff northeasterly. The hurricane, the wildfires sparked by arson, all anthropogenic in magnitude. And even the Sahara itself:

    “Humans don’t exist in ecological vacuums,” says Archaeologist David Wright. “We are a keystone species and, as such, we make massive impacts on the entire ecological complexion of the Earth. Some of these can be good for us, but some have really threatened the long-term sustainability of the Earth.”

    We are each keystone beings, potential fluminists.

    We cause, and we effect. Everyone of us, agents.

    Collectively, we can do better than tone our world with the ghosts of our kin. I hope I never see it again, but I have given it a name ~ Esranebulous.

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