Save the planet!

So, whilst all you trendy young things were out saving the planet and rockin' with AL Gore, I was doing my bit for Mother Earth by not doing anything in particular. There is a divine natural paradox - a sustainable system is one that is static - well, in evolutionary terms, something that is perpetually evolving is not static and, therefore not sustainable. An example would be the Khoi San of the great and bushy Kalahari desert. Hunted to near extinction by their "brothers" of every other colour and complexion they have lived for eons in the Kalahari and lived in what can only be described as symbiosis with all other living and organic things that are found there. We, cannot do that. For us there is no golden age, no going back. We are all too fat and greedy and if one thinks that going to a concert will bring redemption and change the world one is terribly mistaken. Geldoff didn't save Ethiopia, Archer couldn't save the Kurds, poverty has not been made history and Al Gore is not going to save the planet. As I have plaintively bleated before, it is not about saving the planet, but about saving a spoilt and bloated part of humanity.

The Khoi-San could be an example to us all, but and it is a big BUT we are content to follow examples more relevant to our own sense of sustainability. A couple of klicks away from the Khoi-San is the great Makgadikgadi salt pans - an old lake bed which was once larger than the now lake Victoria. Whilst "we" were bopping to reduce emissions the BBC were getting into trouble by driving fast and silly cars across the pans and leaving their own marks in the great book of global awareness. This is important because after all the noise and litter from a few concerts has faded away the tyre tracks left in the soda ash will be there for a while longer. Drive, sorry walk, across to the Namib desert just a bit to the East and you will find ox cart tracks amongst others that have been there for well over a century. Voila! The tracks of our follies are left on the Earth long after the tracks of our sad apologies and crocodile tears of awareness.

Seems to some of you that this is just a bitter and jealous old man who is just whining because he wasn't invited to Wembley of Tokyo or what. True. But what was i doing to save the planet?

I was at a rock concert of course!

Great sky spider of summer

Well, it took a while but eventually summer arrived and the great sky spider descended on a sunbeam - Sheeeeeeet! Who writes this stuff?

Two spiders

With all this wet and unseasonal weather at least one has the chance to get out and about in wellies and look at the shape shifting sky. I like skies. Skies are proof - amongst everything else in the known universe - that gods and/or goddesses come in groups, or, at least, pairs. Nothing like a bit of dualism before breakfast and after a night with Heraclitus. Let's admit that monotheism is a bit boring and far too one sided. What we need in religion is more tension and less strife. There can be no harmony in monoface, monastic, monosyllabic, monoglot, monotheism - even if they pretend to be dualists by proposing the devil or shaitan, the West or the East as the other face of their reality.

Where does all this drivel come from? Well, the sky. We've been having a few storms lately and wanting to get out to take the air meant that one is, naturally, caught up in one or two. When the rain is not too heavy, sneak out an eye and then a lens and see what a wonderful dance the impression of dualism makes on the retina, or two.

Rumour has it that there are two great spiders continually at play above our heads. One weaves webs of light and the other webs of cloud and rain. There is no war; this is a weaving of the chain of being, a harmony of tensions - the resulting dance beauty for the eye and grace for the soul...

... and if we are but flies playing around the shit of human endeavour our escape is to be caught in the web of becoming, devoured by the great sky spiders freeing our souls to fall as rain or sunlight. Either that or just get wet...