Heed The Signs

London, 3 October, 2009

I went for a walk this autumn morning, and was greeted by a great show orchestrated by gusts of seasonal wind stirring up the abundance of leaves topping the Elgin Avenue maples. And on the ground, brown ones chased each other around, under the command of capricious squalls darting in several directions all at once. As clouds raced high up in azure skies, I couldn’t help thinking that it was great to be alive in this fantastic world of ours. What an organism! A one that goes through cycles of autumnal decay followed by regeneration, millennia after millennia, and in yet more to come. Unless we go and spoil it all.  But can we really? The stuff that are the cause of our present anxieties are themselves of the earth. The generation-regeneration cycle had dealt with all that CO₂ and methane that had once made the air too poisonous to breathe, were mopped up by trees like these maples and then locked up in subterranean vaults.  We too are part of this regenerative process in a world that is just too smart to allow any of its inhabitants to do it irreversible injury. All we have to do is heed its signals. Otherwise, it will deal with us.

Tell Fren Tru