Slipping into the landscape

Work in progress - underground, a seed

The hottest day. As we bake ourselves, we continue to live as though this will all go away. I slip into the landscape under the young trees of the 'Patches', a landscape ripped and raped but now softly rewilding.

This landscape is another voice telling us how to revive, it sings a quiet song, part lament and part invitation. Revival, a new heaven on a new earth. Stop the extraction, let the land, sea and air rest.

Do we hear the voice of the land ? We have noticed the quietness of insects, the gradual disappearance of the hum and thrum of life. The insects return when the land is not intensively sprayed, cut, cultivated and dug up.

The revival is right here speaking to us from the ground. 

Carboniferous clay ironstone fossil of freshwater clam (carbonicola) from the patches coal tip

The voice of the land speaks from deep time, it tells us of upheaval from the past, events that caused freshwater mussels in ancient swamps to be buried, mineralised and layered in sedimentary rocks, to be dug up with the burnable carbon, separated by riddles and dumped to form a new hill. This earth, this mother, this generator of life from mineral to biological, has taken billions of years to become relatively stable only for humans to make it unstable again. Are we really "Building back better" ?

Buried with a clam

Perhaps there is a shift in consciousness and there are more humans realising that increasing tech, moving faster, consumerism and manufacturing on a large scale isn't in fact progress. Maybe scaling back is.

'If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear'.

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