In the last few days I’ve revisited Darwin and a theory of evolution which requires aeons of very gradual change. It’s similar to the slow evolution of our solar system which we were - and probably still are - taught in school.
The solar sytem evolution 'as taught' in school isn't at all similar to that which proponents of an electrically active Universe portray.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of evolution inasmuch as we certainly evolve during the course of our lives.
I’ve been exploring the moon - courtesy of ‘google’, looked at UFO’s - courtesy of NASA. Revisited myth and legend - courtesy of written knowledge.
So we know that - as of the news today - there’s ‘significant quantities of water’ on the moon.
The lazy sound of a small plane buzzes through the brilliant blue of sky and somehow transports me to childhood holidays where lying on the grass to watch the clouds was commonplace. The sounds of cricket being played on the Oval and 'Howszat!' - lawnmowers in the distance.
The battle, at work, for which I’ve ‘girded my loins’ is over with the unexpected resignation of my nemeses. While I feel a little ‘lighter’ I take no joy in this resolution. Ultimately, a problematic situation festered for a decade with no-one taking responsibility and while ‘our’ Group Home benefits, the underlying situation is systemic.
One large task left in the garden and it’s at the boundaries of ‘the Empire.’ I don’t know that I’ve absorbed much of the wisdom available within Chinese culture but the parallels in respect to ‘the garden’ are clear.
An Empire prospers when the boundaries are not only secure but are locally ruled by ‘able men’. Neglect because of distance away from the centre of power is a poor option.
Translated to my garden it works thus. Over a decade of so, nature and I create a woodland garden. At a certain point the garden beds get so big that the effort required three or four times a year to keep the weeds at bay becomes too much and so I make concrete borders. It doesn’t sound beautiful but the beds are in undulating shapes and the effect is more like a Mandala.
At the far end of the Empire I built a fence and because a particular weed runs rampant from the ‘other side’ I also made a concrete barrier. I made a costly mistake by placing the barrier on the other side of the fence. This would require my neighbour to keep the weed at bay which is unrealistic and places a burden on their resources in order for my concern to be addressed. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a neighbouring country or my next door neighbour, the principles are the same.
The weed has run rampant and now I need the concrete barrier on my side of the fence. I’m quite happy to do it and learn from the mistake but the matter is complicated by plants that we want to keep which ‘live on the border.’ It’ll just take more care and I’ll get to know the neighbours in an amiable way while I get some exercise.
War and peace at the edge of the Empire.
I guess the wisdom to be extracted is that to take the right action at the right time benefits all round and it does so with the least amount of resources expended. I now pay the additional price of re-doing earlier work which was poorly thought out.
I realised that my grumble about a ‘songwriter night that wasn’t’ could have read as a different story if I’d had the presence of mind to realise that I’d arrived an hour early and that there were only a few people there so why did I need to be invited into a process involving microphones when I had an acoustic guitar and a voice? I could have just got up and sang a few songs and left it at that.
That’s personal evolution in process and maybe I can read it as little leaps rather than a slow crawl but I still don’t know how the spark of life itself generates from a primeval soup or how a whale ‘evolved’ a fully functioning nipple with which to suckle its young and without the young drowning in the process.