The Other Side of Everything - Dean Whitbread

More than two animals and plants a year are becoming extinct in England and hundreds more are severely threatened, a report published today reveals.

Natural England, the government’s agency responsible for the countryside, said the biggest national study of threats to biodiversity found nearly 500 species that had died out in England, all but a dozen in the last two centuries.

The losses recorded compare with a natural rate of about one extinction every 20 years before humans dominated the planet, but are almost certainly an underestimate because of poor records of any but the “biggest, scariest” creatures before the 1800s.

The high rate at which species are being lost is set to continue. Almost 1,000 other species face “severe” threats from the same problems that drove their relatives extinct – hunting, pollution, development, poor land management, invasive species and, more recently, climate change – says the report, Lost life: England’s lost and threatened species. This represents about a quarter of all species in the best-studied groups, including every reptile, dolphin and whale species, two-thirds of amphibians and one-third of butterflies and bumblebees. In total, the report records 55,000 known species in England.

“Each species has a role and, like the rivets in an aeroplane, the overall structure of our environment is weakened each time a single species is lost,” said Helen Phillips, the agency’s chief executive. “We seem to have endless capacity to get engaged about rainforests but this reminds us conservation begins at home.”

(Juliette Jowit, The Guardian – read full article)

Almost always I feel peaceful after meditation. I’m more focused and aware as I get about my tasks. Sometimes, I feel like I’m cruising about on an invisible Segway; at other times, I get a rush of energy which requires managing.

It’s often creative, but also, despite the ongoing and increased calm which meditation brings – and maybe because of it – I start to remember resentments, insults, slights, as my sometime wounded ego kicks against and strikes out at the very process which is keeping it from dominating my life. That’s the way of egos – they like to be in charge, and they are notoriously unwilling to let go of selfishness.

Sometimes these ‘dreadful’ insults go back years, and despite my opinion to the contrary, they have not really been dealt with. They emerge from deep in my subconscious, rusty bicycles at the back of a garden shed, which should have been recycled the day after they stopped working.

Today, in a really pleasant mood, I recalled an old, somewhat narcissistic (aren’t we all!) but reliably negligent friend who texted me at random from a train a month ago,

“Thinking of you as I listen to your album. It’s great”

Very nice I thought, but it’s meaningless except as a function of his own sentimental nostalgia. If I meant anything to him (and I once did) he’d bother to actually call, he’d remember my birthday, he’d find out how I actually was. And frankly, the compliment is loaded. He’ll like things of mine so long as he doesn’t see them as competition.

Life is too short for such things to hang on to, so….

Forgotten. Goodbye.

Until now.

After meditation today, jumping about, making tea, relaxed, happy, I had the sudden urge to text back the following mischief:

“Not thinking about you much these days..” A bald statement of fact. He has gone his way, me mine. Tell it as it is. I don’t really mean anything to you. Why the pretense? It’s only vanity, whimsy… you’re shoring up your patched-together view of yourself and co-opting me into that pointless exercise.

Oh, the harsh, vexatious temptation to destroy goodwill. Which I ignored. Except to write it all down.

…into the blood, into the blood, into the blood, into the blood, into the blood…

Posted via email from Dean Whitbread

I’m told that I’m quite brave. Certainly I am socially unafraid. However, I did spend a week climbing Cornish sea cliffs once, which I loved, except I forgot to pull out the climbing gear, and being the last one up, I had to go back down the overhang I had just overcome, pull out the gear, then make the ascent once more, leaning backwards, the sea crashing on jagged rocks 150 feet beneath me. I managed it.

There was a line of fit people all with their back against the rock, faces in Easter sunshine, looking at the spectacular Atlantic view. I slumped next to them, shattered.

“Beautiful isn’t it?” said the climb leader. I felt nothing, and burped.

“Why am I risking my life?” I thought coldly, “what macho foolishness is this?”

Then I felt afraid, not from the height, or the physical fear, but for the fact that only then I saw how I was falling into the trap of macho achievement.

Posted via email from Dean Whitbread