What the World needs now is love sweet love,

It’s the only thing there’s too little of,

What the World needs now is love sweet love,

Not just for some but for everyone.

I’m designing a Utopian world, somebody has to! I’ve been ‘inspired’ by recent blogs, wherein happenings seem outside our control, but could have been less disastrous if more effort was put into ‘good management’ at a local level.

BrumMum had the devastating experience of her house being flooded. Global warming is the catalyst, long, exceptionally dry, hot periods shattering into freak storms.But there is ‘First Aid’. Plenty of data exist on the effects of mass building and extensive concrete. Ditches and storm drains are filled in, the water has nowhere to go. In the ‘good old days’ farmers and local councils in the UK would clear their ditches of matted grass and other rubbish (household quite often) well before winter rains arrived. The plethora of water authorities never agree about basic management.

Leah’s appalling tragedy in the Australian fires, when she lost everything, made huge headlines, but little seemed to transpire except acrimonious blaming of ‘authorities’. Rumour says that ecologists would not have the brush destroyed because of the habitat for small animals. But brush is often the catalyst, and when the fires came the animals could not escape the speed of it. Often fires are deliberately started – difficult to get into the mind of arsonists. Sick? Attention seeking (bit useless, they can’t broadcast the conflagration they have caused)? Often, like mass shootings, the perpetrator is sick in mind, and is seeking vengeance against a society he (usually he) which has mis-used them. People are always ‘wise after the event’. ‘He was such a nice young man’ or ‘Always thought there was something wrong about him’.

Trying to be sanguine on how Covid19 has changed my mind, I have been doing a Future Learn course ‘Demystifying Mindfulness’. It is a very good course, claims not to be orientated to any religion, but distinct Buddhist leaning ‘Mindfulness is a therapeutic practice rooted in the meditative traditions of Buddhism’. Doing a course on the latter at the same time, totally lost. The course advocates, naturally, how much better a mindful world could be. But it is very elitist, presumes you are well read – the millions who might benefit are not going to have access to, or competence to follow, the teachings.

In my degree studies much impressed with Rousseau, the ‘General Will’, a ‘collectively held will that aims at the common good or common interest’. In my town, I have, and still am, giving pleasure to residents and tourists alike of my mass flowering of the house exterior. I have tried, desperately, to generate what the French call ‘esprit du clocher’ pride in your own little corner. I have produced plans, a window-sill will cost 20 euros, why can’t the town encourage this pleasure to all? No way. The virus has disturbed us all, what have YOU found positive? A new interest, not just time-filler?

The Gardener

A Moodscope member.