Its Sunday today and finally some time to do some thinking and writing - mainly the Green view on Camden Council's environmental proposals: a new Sustainability Plan and a Transport Implementation Plan. Both major planks of a path to turning Camden into a greener society with a lighter footprint on this earth. We mustn't lose sight of this whilst the battle to protect the post-war welfare settlement continues.
But first, I look for some spiritual sustenance and pick up Stefan Harding's book on Gaia. We met him last year at a book festival in Keswick and I remember still his ability to marvel at the mountains in front of us and the flight of a bird of prey above us. His thesis is the Gaia hypothesis - the physical world and the biological world are not seperate and distinct but part of a system and it is by being in balance and the biological world sustaining this equilibrium of gases that the whole earth lives on.
He goes beyond James Lovelock and asks us to recognise this in our lives. He refers to the original Greek ideas, not so different from Indian (vedic) theory which see all matter as one.
"Gaia, mother of all,
the foundation, the oldest one,
I shall sing to Earth.
She feeds everything in the world.
Whoever you are,
whether you move upon her sacred ground,
or whether you go along the paths of the sea,
you that fly, it is she who nourishes you from her treaure store"
There are even better lines and words:
"From the eternal voic, Gaia danced forth and rolled herself into a spinning ball. She moulded mountains along her spine, valleys in the hollow of her flesh. A rhythmn of hills and stretching plains followed her contours. From her warm moisture She bore a gentle rain that fed her surface and bore life".
I like Harding's recommendations for one's personal life: "..find a special place outside where you can go on a regular basis to connect with the animate Earth....search for a place where you can spend time exploring and deepening your relationship to the great living being that is our planet. ...It might help to have several Gaia places, some less wild perhaps, closer to home, and otehrs further out in wilder country for extended visits and overnight communion under the sparkling light of the stars".
I resolve to walk up to Waterlow park when I am done and to sense nature once again, and to look for a summer holiday place that allows one some overnight communion under the sparkling light of the stars!
