Continuing my countdown to my blog’s 10th Anniversary on 27th September this year, I’m revisiting what I posted on or around that date each year.
In 2016 I actually posted on the 27th of September. It was the third installment in my series about our adventures at Otter Lake.
Otter Lake was the second, and unfortunately the last (so far) of our ‘big’ adventures in our travel trailer. (the first was our epic cross-country, 10,000-kilometers-in-31-days peregrination from here to Niagara Falls and back the previous year – the archive reads chronologically from the bottom of the page to top)
There’s many sad things in this world but perhaps one of the saddest is seeing great swathes of Mother Nature decimated by the meddling of humans. In this instance I’m referring to the pine-beetle infestation that is as a result of the original forests being plundered for timber and never replanted properly. The rich bio-diversity that exists in a natural forest was replaced with a cash-crop of endless rows of pine trees.
Well, add to that diversity-desert an increase in global temperatures and the pine beetle became the apex predator in no time at all. (it’s taken decades for the penny to finally drop for them’s wot’s in charge of the forests, on both sides of the 49th parallel, to contemplate changing their business practices, but the damage has been done)
Wildfires love all that dead and dying wood, and when the wildfires are done the bare earth is washed away and mountainsides collapse.
Well done, humans.
(As we drove to Otter Lake along the Crowsnest Highway we saw attempts to mitigate this carnage by the establishment of ‘protected’ areas of bio-diverse treel-ings. (tree-lets?) If they survived predation and successive wildfires those trees should be mature enough by now (4 years later) to have grown fruitful and multiplied. I hope so)
Underneath our adventures at Otter Lake rested this sadness of the trees, which reflected in my writing at that time … which brings us full circle to today, doesn’t it?
So great are the changes to the human environment we’re living through right now, the one thing that has driven men of power since the times of Gilgamesh, the acquisition of ‘more’, (whatever their definition of ‘more’ may be) is being irrevocably, and painfully, extinguished.
The corona virus surrounds us all, whether we like it or not. The knowledge that the underpinnings of almost every society are being exposed for the anathema they are, sits with us all, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we’re even aware of it or not, and it is what drives us now … it drives some of us to be and do better, for our Selves and others, and it drives some of us to resort to violence when asked to wear a mask.
These posts are about looking into a snapshot of my past to see if they connect to my present and have any influence on going forward.
By the time I wrote the story about Kerpy, I’d found a place of peace within the sadness of the trees, there was certainly nothing I could do about it other than to witness their lives.
My task in the present is to find a place of peace within the sadness, (and madness) of humanity, because there’s certainly nothing I can do for them other than to bear witness. Like so many of us, I’m not in a position of power to change the path humanity seems so bound and determined to follow.
What I can do, is appreciate humanity’s bio-diversity, live within my beliefs, do something really hard once in a while, love a few humans, have compassion for the majority, and hold accountable those dishonourable cowards who have shown their true colours.
Widdershins Worlds 
These are sad times indeed, Widds!
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And not going away any time soon. 😦
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Certainly looks like that, Widds…
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Reblogged this on Anita Dawes & Jaye Marie ~ Authors.
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That pretty much sums up the position of many of us.
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Yep.
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Sad alright. I suppose the best we can do individually is to do what we can not to contribute to the blight on the world that humanity appears to be.
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And right now that’s a very big and important thing.
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You are doing much more. Your writing throws a light into the darkness. By speaking up you plant a seed into the minds of others and hopefully they pass it on in some way.
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That’s my hope. We seldom know how far the ripples will go.
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They can travel quite far!
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Four years on – now Nature is getting her own back – will we learn
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Yep, she sure is.
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Love your last paragraph. If only we all did that, our world would’ve been much saner.
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Yep, we missed the boat there.
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I like that you have found a way to find peace in the sadness and have some principles to live by.
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Thanks, Audrey … some days I manage to get there, and some days I don’t … and that’s the sort of days we’re living through, eh? 🙂
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Trying times indeed, but we keep trying!
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Well said and enacted Widds. What else can we do? Humans in general seem so dumb at the moment, & those in power just hell bent on destruction. We can but bear witness, & live as lightly as we can 🙏🏼
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Thanks ‘bones’ 🙂 … it’s probably why we love our ‘superhero’ movies. Things are so bad that only someone who’s ‘better’ than us can untangle the mess … but then, they can’t be too powerful, can they? Because we’d have to destroy them … we really are a very twisted-out-of-shape species.
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This: ‘..hold accountable those dishonourable cowards who have shown their true colours.’
Spot on, Widds. I’m reminded of the parable about the twigs or sticks or whatever they were called. There’s a whole story around the parable but all I can remember is that one stick can be easily broken, but when you bundle a whole lot of sticks together, they become very strong. That’s us, little sticks, but enough of us can save the world. Maybe.
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Maybe, indeed … or more realistically, our little corner of it.
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Got to start somewhere, right? 🙂
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🙂
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I like this thoughtful post a lot. I hadn’t heard of the pine beetle before – how tragic. Like you I am currently attempting to find the inner peace and strength to keep on going through these tumultuous times. It seems like the wisest thing we can be doing at present.
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To become islands of sanity.
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You’ve summed it up for me! I’m getting better at it, too.
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🙂
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Tell me if you find the peace you are seeking. It’s so tough these days! Hopefully we can use this as an opportunity to address some of our glaring societal issues.
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I have my moments 🙂 but they’re mostly when I’m not engaging with the world, at least the main-stream media version of it. Smaller stories, about individuals getting things done in spite of – fill in the blank – gives me hope, and some breathing space.
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