there is another way

haymaking 2
holy waterWet and windy Autumnal days in the not-very-populated Northwest of Ireland : I have just started tucking into my half of the 88 bales of hay L and I managed to save this year : in the long warm days of August, in the shorter days of September and—by the skin of our teeth—in the pretty short days of early October. I hope this will be enough, along with the saved dried branches and nettles and the fresh green briars (ronces) that I will cut every day, to see us—the goats and I—through to the other side of the Winter. Worrying would not help.

So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can’t tell you how much this offends me. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don’t ; it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes gone global. If chimps used money and we didn’t, we would not admire it. We’d find it irrational and primitive. Delusional. And why gold ? Chimps barter with meat. The value of meat is self-evident.

A quote from Karen Joy Fowler’s We are all completely beside ourselves that I have just finished reading. I have found it really wonderful, it moved me and made me think. I was reading it on Friday when I was alerted to what was then happening in Paris, the city of my birth.
Violent deaths. Violent deaths every single day in one place of the world or another. Precious lives all. I trust there is another way. This crazed misguided quest for power—fuelled by what ? fear ? greed ? desperation?—takes varied forms in places of human settlement and in domestic settings. We are not often given such an unavoidable crude spectacle of violence in our safe (?) Western world. But how did the Western world come about if not in that very same manner that we are able to find unjust, distasteful and barbaric?
We all carry pain, fear and trauma in our bodies and sometimes—if given the power—we transfer it to others. How much violence is dealt out everyday—for instance—to people at the lower end of the social spectrum in our “civilized” “Western” world. How much violence in the exclusion of the many for the benefit of the few ? How much violence for our “limitless” supply of goods plucked and produced out of our sight ? The very “comfort” and “safety” of our Western existence that we are able to take for granted, comes at a price that we choose to ignore. Until we no longer can. This is a great opportunity to ponder and change.
There is another way. I will always choose to be optimistic.

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