Children of the soil
Tuesday, 30 September 2008
I can distinctly remember as a child the special feeling that one got playing in the soil, digging into it until your finger nails were caked with the black soil. Eating handfuls of the sand and loving each brain shattering crunch as your teeth splinter the tiny granules. Sitting, dazed and in a trance watching the sand running through my fingers, or the feeling one gets when you burrow deep into the cold sand with your feet, wriggling your toes in it. I have always found it so therapeutic and gives you such a feeling of just being connected to nature. It is one of the things that just evolves with you as a child, that natural progression as you are connecting with the natural world that cocoons you not only then, but every day for the rest of your life, that delicate film that controls your very existence.
As we get older there seems to come some unnatural swing away from this as the material world seems to take grip of one and just seem to take over. There tends to be this total disregard for nature as this inherent greed seems to bubble to the surface, I have see it all around me and have unfortunately also been guilty to falling foul of its influence. The importance of our material accumulations and wealth creation seems to overshadow the delicate existence that is actually responsible for our very survival. So often on a daily basis I see how this balance is shaken to its very roots, beyond any possible way of being able to turn back the process. There is evidence of the odd cosmetic attempt of restoration of damage done, like a paint stroke on the surface, but deep down the damage is beyond repair.
As this journey has progressed and I have spent hundreds of hours in the quiet beauty of the natural surrounding, slowly I have felt this reconnection with nature and the spirituality that surrounds it. Such a delicate balance that makes one realise that there is a need to take heed to the warning signs that are constantly popping up. I still question how can we allow this to happen and how can we stop what is going on. The very problems that we need to curtail and to reverse the process of are the only source of life to so many. If I think of a simple analogy, I feel that unfortunately only the day that every persons belly is full is the day that we will look for a bin to put our rubbish in, instead of just dropping it where we are standing as our only concern is to move on, looking for our next scrap to eat, oblivious to the trail of destruction we leave in the process
Many a day I have run past a little village or just along a beach and seen a child sitting and playing, with noting but the earth around them, content happy and in sync with their surroundings. My mind just runs back to my childhood memories. The privilege that I had of being brought up in constant touch with nature and what an influence it had on me as I grew up. As I look past the child in the dunes behind them I catch the glimpse of the arm of a massive digger, ripping open the dunes, spewing black smoke into the air as it cuts away at the dune forest, dump trucks line up as the soil is dumped into them and they buzz away to the extraction plant, like an endless line of ants. Hour after hour they eat away at this thousand year old ecosystem. Ripping it apart like a carcase, down to the very bone of rock where every bit of life is extracted.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. ~Native American Proverb
