An incredible storm has raged all day long and continues into this dark, cold night.
The wind has howled around the cottage, shaking the trees so fiercely that the ground has trembled!
Thunder and lightning, hailstones rattling the windows and snow…this is the worst storm I have witnessed in over ten years at Bealtaine Cottage!
The scary aspect of this biting cold, storm-ridden, night is that only two nights ago, it was positively warm; in fact the dramatic rise in temperature woke me up before dawn.
As the weather becomes more and more wild and extreme, so everyday life is affected.
Even as I write this blog and upload photographs, the power has cut out twice, leaving me to start over…though some of the writing is automatically saved.
It is past 9pm here in the cottage and the storm has not let up all day.
Still, I have made the most of the time, moving the beginnings of my Blackcurrant wine into demijohns, where it will bubble and work away in the coming months.
The back of the cottage is a little more sheltered…indeed this storm is raging from the north of the country.
Temperatures have plummet by 10 degrees over the past 48 hours.
Despite our best efforts to ignore it, climate change is fast turning into the crisis of our present time…and looks likely to be a problem of growing enormity.
Mother Earth has endured over two hundred years of industrial impacts, as well as an ever-intensifying human population, all demanding energy, food and an ever-increasing standard of living.
On the day my mother was born, there were just over one billion people living on Planet Earth. 
On the day she died, this had increased almost sevenfold, to over seven billion!
As the natural world is plundered, many species are in sharp decline.
The sustainability crisis is second only to climate change, as the greatest threat of our times.
I have kept diaries over the past ten years and have noted rare, extreme weather events become the norm!
This is not going away.
We have to face into this problem and start developing solutions.
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I write to encourage, help and inspire mindfulness for our beautiful world and have photographed and written over 870 blogs on the Bealtaine Cottage site, as well as over 110 videos on YouTube…all free from advertising!
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Blessings