Life

It was itching around in me all day long, nagging beneath the surface of my consciousness, like a barely noticeable shadow .Troubled by the cross currents of thoughts and emotions swirling around within, yesterday it made me tired . A needling presence bringing a sharp intake of breath every time it broke through. It wasn’t conscious avoidance , more like one of life’s small daily irritations. Snapping under its admonition, plunging into surrender knowing it would reveal itself through writing, I aquiesce, switch on the laptop and begin to write, glancing at the clock and smiling wryly, three quarters of an hour beyond mid night .

Was it one tiny part of a single conversation yesterday, a word , a phrase, or was it the low water mark at the end of a year of campaigning, a year of “being a somewhat reluctant conscientious protector” of the living world ? Who knows? But to use a cliche, something rattled my cage . All day today I wondered why I care ? I ask myself why is the natural world so important to me, beyond being a location that provides me with a place to call home with stuff to live off. As someone pointed out to me in the last 24 hours, “sure at the end of the day it does not matter, we probably won’t survive as a species, the biosphere will shrug us off and continue on , changed in so many ways, it may recover or not, or simply become a dead planet unsuitable to support life, and what did it matter what happened to the earth? It is irrelevant it’s going to happen anyways.” Factually that’s correct, eventually the sun will burn out and the earth will no longer be able to support life.

Why does it matter indeed? I remember as a young child about three or four years old watching a cat give birth to kittens. Even at that very baby age it felt like a precious gift to witness this life giving event, though I would have been completely unable to verbalise it. I just recall the feeling, I also recall even more vividly the surprise on hearing the kittens weak meows and knowing intrinsically and deep within my own being it was the very cry of Life. Those tiny scraps of Life were more precious than all the dolls or toys I would ever own. Why was this ?

Gradually I begin to identify what my current existential crisis is, and that it is somehow related to Life, that is my concept of Life. Life energy has chosen to show up in this, my body, it’s also given this body a conscience and the ability to communicate plus a lot of other perks .

That’s the same Life energy that is in the smallest teaspoon of soil which conservatively has about (1 × 10 to the power of 9) microorganisms or the same as the number of humans currently living in Africa ( Numbers taken from Nature magasine article Microbiology by Numbers) who say “the example numbers are mostly based on 'back of the envelope' calculations and should therefore be viewed as they were intended: ballpark figures aiming to inspire.”

But the Life in a teaspoon, or fist of soil is also much more . Ask any farmer about the Life in her soil, she will describe it first, using a number of terms such as claggy, glaury, mucky, clarty, clayey, heavy, crumbly, loamy, boggy, stoney . All of these local descriptions in a way point directly to the fertility of the soil, and to the corresponding presence or lack of the vital microorganisms, that is the Life of soil itself .

Life in my body manifests itself initially through my breath, without breath I am a lifeless cadaver. So how do I respond to the responsibility of Life choosing to show up in my body ? These are things I notice I tend to look after the body, to nourish the Life. When the body is hungry I feed it , when the body is tired I rest it. (Me) as a body has a responsibility to care for the Life that has shown up in it, if I am careless with my body, Life will choose to leave it. My body has also been given the extraordinary privilege, responsibility and choice of bringing precious new Life to this astounding planet on which we live. If I choose to, by association I now get to care for other small bodies with their own precious cargos of Life until such a time as those bodies are able to nourish their own Life energy.

So going forward there seems to be an inbuilt systemic way of being for us all, that we have a responsibility to nurture Life in all its forms . At this point opinions will diverge. Some of us believe that the Life in our bodies is unique to the personal body and unrelated to the Life manifest all around us, so these bodies think that the best way to care for the Life that they have responsibility for, is to accumulate resources, far beyond what is needed to maintain Life. This is achieved at the expense of many other manifestations of Life and at this point in our time, this comprehension of how Life energy should be nourished has been the dominant culture of our world for the last few generations. The impact of this way of nurturing Life for the resource rich threatens our natural world like never before. The diminishment and total destruction of irreplaceable resources and natural Life systems is the by product of dualistic thinking and our ultimate separateness from nature, from Life. We are out of balance and Life is becoming precarious for us all because of theses beliefs. Us with our resource rich body support systems do nothing to nurture the Life in the bodies of those who are resource poor .Those who are barely clinging on, whose struggle is a gargantuan daily task to merely maintain Life in their bodies, should those bodies be made of just one cell or many millions of cells.

Before that though, for millennia we knew the presence of Life to be something greater than our mere mortal bodies . Again and again it has been shown that indigenous peoples had no separate word for Nature, no conception of being apart from Nature. Why is it we have forgotten we all come from some indigenous people somewhere? Where have we lost the memory or the knowledge that all Life is the same Life energy? That we are all manifestations of Life and deeply connected to that Life. From the lowliest single cell amoeba to the great Leviathan whales of the deep, from the extraordinary cathedrals of the Amazon rainforests to the magnificent kelp forests of the ocean floors, from the aching dry Atacama desert to the glaciers of the Himalaya. That the life extant everywhere is us all, the very state of being alive means we are connected one to the other, to the sentient and the non sentient, the living rocks beneath us being the foundations of our biosphere.Connected to and part of the mystery of Life.

Life is a treasure a precious jewel, awaking this morning to a sunny day I am immensely grateful that I am alive a witness to Life. The whispering Maples outside my bedroom window were singing their song of Life. The noisy cockerel and his four ladies getting themselves ready for breakfast, looking after the Life that had shown up in them . Walking with a cup of coffee around my garden, checking out some new plants I had recently planted. I noticed that some of the blue eyed grass had not yet opened their tiny little faces to the sun. I noticed the young bull finches searching for dandelion seeds purposefully left to grow so that they could eat the seeds and nourish the Life within them.

It is impossible now to live without impacting Life on earth, for us not to impact on it, we would need not to have been born. However we human beings are beginning to realise that if we continue to use our resources in unsustainable ways, both our geo resources and our bio resources, we are going to end up in trouble . Life will gradually leave, first in small ways but in ever widening circles until we too, Homo sapiens are abandoned by Life and maybe that’s a good thing. I say this because of the wealth, depth, variety of non human Life is so huge and so varied that really Homo sapiens only makes up tiny percentage of all this vibrancy but has such a huge impact on the whole, that in truth Life, the whole of, would be better off without us .

So is this what is bugging me and the ultimate source of this essay, survival of the human race, my own investment in it because of the Life I brought to bear? I suspect it is, without Life we are nothing and the important stewardship of Life that we were blessed with has been wasted. Nonetheless in the future when folk approach me with irritation, at an awareness raising event in relation to the impact of toxic mining on our Life here in Northern Ireland , calling me a disgrace; When those who are farmers who have a stewardship of the land, who should know better tell me I am wasting their time and that the environmental damage is irrelevant; When people I know well, pass me in the street and are unable to meet my eye because they feel the beat of Life throbbing in their own deep hearts core, I ask you all whats it like in the small hours of the night?

.