Blossom and the circle of life

I haven’t blogged for a while, I know – I do have a tendency to fall quiet when there’s so much going on.

This year, the blossom in the area where I live has been absolutely spectacular. Every year is great, but this time it’s been something special.

Blossom at the Canongate bus stop.

Apparently, the very wet first quarter of the year has had a lot to do with it.

In past years, when the blossom was due, I’ve had the feeling that nature was desperately fighting to reproduce – there was an almost feverish impulse urging the process forward against seemingly impossible odds. This might say more about my state of mind than anything else, but with plague, disaster natural and human, and the rise of cruelty, I couldn’t help but be enticed towards James Lovelace’s antibodies theory – that Gaia will seek to rid herself of the troublesome infection that is humanity.

I haven’t felt anything like that desperation this year, although arguably the global situation is worse. In fact, I’m quite calm. Are we in the eye of the hurricane? Or is this the calm before an almighty storm?

Here are a couple more photos taken by my friend Rosaly Johnstone, who is a beautiful artist:

As Keats said, truth is beauty – beauty is truth – one of those chiasmuses that actually work, in my view. If I’m going to claim that beauty is truth of course, I then give myself the problem of defining both those terms… smiles. Mercifully for you, I’ll leave that for now!

Over a wonderful slightly boozy weekend with my friend Lou, we hatched an idea for a book – Before the S***t Hit the Fan – or were things actually any better a few decades ago, or is our worsening perspective just the result of age? It’s a popular question, to which I have no answer. I think we should ‘do’ the book, as Lou’s out in the country routinely dealing with floods, winds, trees down etc where I’m observing flash floods, roof tiles scattered and the yoof behaving badly in the centre of town.

We also have the elections coming up next weekend. Are the outcomes likely to make any tangible difference to anything? Is this question at the heart of the exhaustion afflicting democracy just now?

So here’s more of the same: is the present US administration deliberately accelerating what it fondly imagines to be the Apocalypse? What will the current incumbents spend the billions they’ve earned through insider trading on, once the rest of the planet has been trashed? I wonder if they’ve thought about where they’ll get fertiliser in their multi -acre ranches in New Zealand, if they can’t produce the components themselves?

There’s the rub. What’s done to one, is done to all. No one human can cut themselves out of the picture. We’re all in a complex symbiotic relationship with everything else – assemblages, entanglements. Each one of us is a walking talking bag of bugs and we can’t survive without each other.

Someone I once knew well said to me that, as a gay man, he didn’t see why he should pay for women’s health as it had nothing to do with his own. I had real difficulty not thumping him – such a shortsighted unintelligent perspective. And yet that is the impulse driving important decision making at the moment – our attitudes towards refugees, the economy. Even the BBC.

Maybe the rot set in when we had a PM who actually believes in eugenics. The fish stinks from the head down, or the big cornflake down in this instance. I find it very hard to accept that American academe takes Boris Johnson seriously.

Does blossom help? Could I stick these people in front of the glory in those photos and hope that the truth therein would impart healing to their rotten souls?

I continue to believe in beauty. I think it’s the best form of activism, actually. See you among the blossom, friends.