Willow continues to be harvested for basket making this Spring.
Today is yet another mild day, warm for the month of January!
The real unseasonal surprise was yet to be found…further down the gardens…
As I walked down through the gardens towards the ponds, I heard frogs, croaking…
now, this has got to be a first…
Frog’s spawn…it’s hard to believe that this is happening so soon in the year, still in the third week of January 2012!
“Is it all worth it? If we do our best to heal the Earth and make our place in her a sustainable one, is there a good chance that we will succeed?…to my mind that’s the wrong question. Even if we could answer it – and we can never know anything about the future for certain, it would beg the question How do I want to live my life? So my answer to the question..is that I want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem”.
Patrick Whitefield ‘Earth Care Manual’
Standing stones and bamboo today in the Bealtaine gardens.
Moss is slowly creeping over the top of the stone.
It was with the Industrial Revolution, as society plunged ever more eagerly into the conquest of material riches and bent all its energies to the accumulation of goods, that material poverty became a major problem. Obviously, this meant abandonment or downgrading of spiritual values, virtue, etc. To share or not to share in the increase of the collective wealth—this was the Number One question. It was the desire to acquire wealth that prompted the poor to start fighting. And the rich were hypocrites when they accused the poor (who were no longer interested in “spiritual values”) of materialism. For the rich had given the example and set society on the acquisitive path. The great business of the whole society and therefore of all its members, was to increase consumption of goods. But obviously, the moment this is the first objective, the ideal, lack of goods, is the principal drama.
-Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), Violence, 1969