Mother earth
As all our wealthy presents to ourselves crash down from the credit Christmas tree should we be afraid of the future? Shall we all have to grow our own vegetables, keep our own pig, knit our own socks?
No more junk food, junk mail, junk toys? We seem to have been sunk by our own junk. We have become greedy, no longer needy. Lurking deep inside our subconscious, difficult to find in some 'tis true, are the answers to recessions, obsessions, and mental depressions.
Not those of the zealous demagogues like Pol Pot whose back to the fields ideals were not so much to do with tilling as killing. Within us all are the ancient memories of growing our own food, caring for our soil, feeling the fertility of our earth from which we came.
Our ancestors craved the need to understand who this mother earth being was and what she wanted to keep on being active on our behalf. No wonder echoes of the ancestors persist even to this day in rituals like Mothering Sunday, whose date each year is linked to the spring full moon. The Venerable Bede sorted that.
When she was alive, my mother truly looked forward to what had become the very simple ceremony of Mothers Day. For her it would mean cards, with pretty flowers on them, from her children.
These would give her a picture of what her little garden would soon be showing. It would mean I suppose that her children, now all over the globe from California to Tasmania, had thought enough about their mother to want her to experience this awakening of spring feelings once again.
Then those of us still in England would wander slowly around the paths looking at the first grape hyacinths, the bugling daffodils, the garden centre rose bush with its buds about to burst.
Taking our arm she would slowly lead us from plant to plant, ending up with all due reverence at her vegetable plot. It was all of a couple of metres square.
Carrots with little wispy shoots, a line of lettuce with leaves as big as a mouse's ears, a dozen broad beans whose flowers would send scent signals to the bumble bees, and a couple of earthen pots with runner beans coiling out like snakes already.
Mother had known the famines of the First World War, then the thirties' depression when she had five children to feed, and then the Dig for Victory slogans of yet another world war. None of that fased her whatsoever. She knew the value of her little patch of soil and how it had to be cared for. Father on his Norfolk farm and his calls in books, broadcasts and national dailies for our need to feed ourselves inspired the likes of Harry Ferguson and his neat little grey tractors which would take the place of donkeys on our smaller farms.
With German U-boats putting a strangle-hold on imports, our economy almost in ruin, father virtually worshipped the earth and spoke often of its mother whose fertility needed to be guarded.
Until nuclear fusion solves our energy crisis in 2035, let us hope Eve, Helen, Sophia, Beatrice and Mary, all the old names for the earth deities, will come back to help us to survive. By her nature, she epitomises revolution, which is after all only a full turn of the wheel back to the beginning again.
There is nothing new under the sun. Starting again to respect our environment is just part of this. Another is to see soil as a turning from former life back to new life.
Just having leaf mould in your hands again and imagining its potential is highly satisfying. It kept mother alive for nearly a hundred years, she was never depressed in three depressions. The present crisis ain't so bad as we think; we just need to keep calm.
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Weather for Chichester
Monday 13 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 3 C to 7 C
Wind Speed: 22 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 6 C to 8 C
Wind Speed: 21 mph
Wind direction: North west
