October

‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation’ - Thoreau

It turns out you need very little equipment to make art. The artist I studied with last week, Maxine Relton, goes all over the place sketching the most amazing pictures with all the kit she needs stashed in the equivalent of a small transparent washbag. Plus an A5 sketchbook. And I realise I need very little to do my writing. A suitable pencil and a piece of paper is fundamentally all that is required. What we need is largely in our imagination. We overcomplicate; we overthink. We have given ourselves too much choice. And still we are not happy.

When Thoreau retired to Walden to live alone he found Nature to be his refuge. Throughout history there have been times when the natural world has been an antidote against the stresses of urban living. The Romans with their idea of rus-in urbe. The Romantic poets wandering the hills, notebooks in hand. But I’m wondering now if we are not in the process of destroying even that solace for ourselves?

The news that Britain has lost almost half of its biodiversity since the Industrial Revolution and more than 400 species over the last 200 years is sad enough, but it is possible that, unless action is taken to reverse the impact of man-made climate change, a further 1,188 could follow over the next century. Quiet desperation has now given way to a continuous sense of alarm and outrage. But what exactly are we prepared to do about it?

Moral philosopher Peter Singer argued that ‘if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.’ But the cult of the individual that the Romantic movement engendered means that we now tend to prioritise the idea of self over that of society. And we leave it all to ‘someone else’ while feeling more and more desperate about the route we are taking.

I started this blog as a way of writing about the seasons and the natural world accompanied by some of my photographs and drawings but it has gradually become a bit of a rant against the perceived wrongs of the way we are living.

I no longer wish to add to the anger that seems to seethe beneath the surface of things. Life-writer Sarah Wilson, in her book This one wild and precious life, exhorts us to ‘choose love’ and I feel I must aim instead for this path. So, having come to the end of a year of writing this blog, I intend to move on with a new page of ‘Observations’ based on haiku and sketches which just observe and record and refrain from commenting, however tempting that may be.