Referendumb

I'm ashamed: ashamed of our collective decision to leave the EU and even more of the "debate" we had in the run-up, so full of hate and lies. But I'm personally most ashamed that I spent last Friday bitterly bad-mouthing democracy. As if the majority of people doing the voting were somehow unworthy because they didn't see it my way.

The problem (now I've come back to my senses) is not of course with democracy. It is with time and attention poverty. I realised this when I found myself thinking Monday would be a bit late to post a reaction to Friday's news. As if the passing of three days would render that seismic moment old news. As if we should be on to the next thing now: the plummeting pound, the admissions of misinformation, the petition for a new referendum.

And these things do need thinking about. But we still need to mull over the big moments, and slowly digest them; getting beyond initial reactions. The problem is not that people are selfish, ignorant, or desperate (though some are), the problem is that people have no time to think, and indeed there is little cultural value for coming to a considered conclusion. Unsustainable claims about releasing funds or regaining some mythical state of unilateral sovereignty could only ever make much impact in a competition between sound-bites. In a considered, thoughtful discussion, they rapidly unravel.

The trouble with promoting everyone's right to be heard, is that we devalue expertise and have to do our own thoughtful research, on everything. Constantly breaking news, social media updates and incoming mail need prioritising for scarce attention. The process of choosing what we attend to in itself takes up attention. News media have to fight for our attention, and turn up the drama leaving us punch-drunk.

The pre-referendum media coverage was weeks long, but not weeks deep. Much of it was a series of stand-alone, off-the-peg, mini-stances - to be consumed in a moment. Vivid, attention-grabbing elements which implied the underlying situation was similarly simple and clear cut.

Nowhere is this fast-news, fast-opinion culture more dangerous than when making long term decisions, with decades of implications hanging on them. I have no idea how to slow down discussion to the point where an actual conversation develops instead of just waving a series of emblematic events across a battleground. I do know that on this occasion, we did it wrong and we need to work out how to do this kind of thing better in future.

And it will take a lot of thought.

UPDATE: or, possibly, just this: http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2016-17/278 (well, you never know). Find out more about the campaign at https://www.change.org/p/restore-truthful-politics-create-an-independent-office-to-monitor-political-campaigns

A Wild Life Manifesto

Are you enjoying #30DaysWild? It's the Wildlife Trusts' annual festival of noticing and celebrating the wild world around you. If you haven't come across it yet, check it out. There's an outbreak of birds, bees and beetles on Twitter, not to mention daisy-chains, bare toes and grubby grins.

Towards the end of the campaign page (where they are encouraging the doubters) they point out that "the chances are that nature is already there, but you haven't noticed it yet." This, for me, is the whole heart and centre of the point. Noticing it. Of course nature is already there - you are nature, the yeast and wheat in your breakfast toast is nature - regardless of how many flour improvers were added as well. Indeed, if a bird's nest is nature, then your house is nature too.

... and so is the toaster. And so is the internet. And just like that all meaning has drained away from words like 'nature' and 'wild'. What is it that we really mean by 'nature', by 'wild' if huge, air-conditioned termite mounds are nature, but my garden shed isn't. If the fox which poos in my garden is, but my neighbour's cat, which also poos in my garden, isn't.

We mean not-human. We mean unmanaged-by-humans. We mean 'other' to our human-built worlds. And we often sink into our human-built worlds,  getting lost, like Narcissus, in our own reflections. There's probably nothing more essential to our health, and that of the planet, than looking away: noticing and celebrating the other - and how much of it there is everywhere.

After 30 days wild, let's make every day wild. Nature is all around you. In your house, in your fridge, in you. In fact, you are part of it, and it's not other at all.

Mystery, imagination and facts

I do love a fact. I love knowing the names of things: being able to recognise them again and give them meaning. Long contrails in a blue sky tell me the rain is coming; a May sky full of screaming tells me the swifts are back from Africa. It makes the world more familiar, more predictable: my safe little kingdom.

But facts are also the opposite of that. They make the world bigger. The vague green fuzz at the roadside resolves into detail and meaning: apple blossom imply cores tossed out of windows and unexpected roses suggest visiting finches, blackbirds or thrushes.

And then the detail and meaning unfurls into more questions: who threw the apple, was it did they hope it would grow, or just want to get rid of it? Did the bird have it's meal of rose hip in a garden or from a hedgerow? Does it nest in this same verge? Plenty to muse and wonder about now. It's as if the fact gives us a mental foothold in the fuzz - making it real enough to enter and explore.

We humans are prodigiously, thrillingly, ingenious, but still just creatures. Temporary ripples in evolution, here for a brief moment in the unrolling story of the universe. However much we enquire into the world, we can never understand Everything. Facts always come with a new little mystery or two in their arms. There's always more context, more relationship, more implications. The world is a bottomless lucky dip of things to know.

Isn't that great? We can utterly surrender to curiosity, seeking answers for ever and ever without any danger of running out of questions. And the world will still have plenty of mystery space for playing around with imagination.

Facts are the cake you can really have, and eat. And still leave room for madey-uppey dessert.

Another kind of outdoors

Online: we might spend much of our time there, but - particularly as parents - we complain that it is isolating and that it can lead to obesity, although this is equally true of spending all day reading books (which I did entirely uncriticised throughout my childhood). We say it leads to shortened concentration span, but does it? Perhaps our childhoods were boring enough to teach patience naturally. My son spends just as long building a castle in Minecraft as he does in Lego - longer, because he won't run out of the blocks he needs to extend it. 

We have done silly online quizzes as a family and ended up learning something new in the conversations they prompted. We race each other across a virtual moon on our separate mobile phones, shrieking and complaining about unfair tactics. All these activities are just as unifying as playing a board game which nobody means when they complain about 'gaming'.

The unacknowledged fear at the heart of anti-online parenting is that the confines of the home are no longer confines. A door as if to Narnia has opened up in your child's bedroom, and witches as well as fauns can come through. Anxiety about house-bound, nature-disconnected children bundles up nicely with this into a single mission to get your children off the computer and into the woods, where they can have a proper childhood making dens and mud pies and getting into the kind of trouble that calls for nurses and first aid, instead of police officers and therapy.

However, through that online door is a genuinely magical world. The world of ideas. A world of other people's minds which was previously only available to small groups of intellectuals living in particular times and places. The internet offers a kind of digital outdoors. Like the real outdoors it has discovery, wonder and danger all jumbled up together.

It's not safe for unattended children, so attend them: teach them digital bushcraft. But it's not a bad place just because it's not a safe place. Online is just like the real outdoors, except that you don't get physical exercise, or fresh air. So you might want to make sure they get into the woods too.

My body is not my temple

You hear it all the time: my body is my temple. But a temple cannot be home. The point of temples, shrines, churches is that they offer a place away from the ordinary business of life, somewhere to withdraw for reflection.

Life is - and must be - just full of things not generally acceptable in temples: eating breakfast, going to the bathroom, doing the laundry, laughing immoderately, falling in love, falling apart, falling asleep. Step away from this and reflect, sure, but then (and this is important) step back again into the fray.

The idea that it would be good thing to keep ourselves, and our lives, permanently temple-pure is poisonous because it recoils from engaging with the complex muck and magic of existence. While there is value in withdrawal and reflection, it is there to season a life, not to replace it. Just as monastic traditions season their supporting culture rather than offering a complete alternative.

We need to engage with all of life, perhaps especially with those of whom we disapprove. There's no other way to understand them or to make ourselves understood in turn. We are all standing together on this increasingly small world, and it does no good to judge and turn our backs. The people and behaviours we judge are still standing right there behind us: if they extinguish species, poison the seas or start wars, we don't get an exemption from the consequences.

We cannot sweep away the dirty world but we can infect it with our own outlook, if we get off our soapboxes. We need the courage to wade through a somewhat compromised life, putting aside the comforts of purity and blame.

Can we please drop this impossible aspiration to the temple? Without someone to translate and interpret, your temple life of purity and good example is unintelligible, unattractive, unattainable. Irrelevant.

Breath and tide

We are tidal creatures, all of us on this planet. Tides come in many kinds: a tide of light flows from day to night and a tide of warmth flows with the seasons. The tide which describes how we fit into our world is: the breath. In, out; eat, excrete; listen, talk.

A strong hunger for air, food, information, drives our in breaths, and those of us living in the comfortable strata of the developed human world tend to find these hungers easy as well as pleasurable to satisfy. I know I'm not the only person who regularly devotes hours to a snack-food-and-information combo on the sofa. Intake intake intake. It's a real privilege and I love it.

The out breath is often more problematic. I'm sometimes aware of a sensation of being mentally over-full. My mind jostles with ideas and projects: things to make, things to write, new techniques to learn, new experiences to have. I can't do - or even think about - all of them, and pulled in too many directions at once I'm quite likely go to bed and sleep it off. In the morning I'll be hungry, ready to breathe in again.

But breathing out is essential, and to do that we must - just for a minute - stop breathing in. The out breath of the lungs stimulates the calming, rest-and-digest responses which is why pranayama yoga breathing patterns tend to spend longer on the out than the in breath. The mental out breath is creativity and communication.

Having taken in a day's worth of new sensations and concepts, we must breath out again by making, dreaming, thinking, communicating. We hold our breath for fear that the contents might not be up to standard, but that's not the point. The point is to breathe out, so that you can breathe in again, and out again and in again. Waves wash to and fro: some are beautiful, some just wet, but each one is part of the next. They are all needed.

Breathe out as well as in: so that you can ebb and flow with the tidal life of this little world.

Balancing act

I'm writing this ahead of time, just after the equinox: when day and night are roughly equal lengths. There was an instant of equality, but it hurtled past.

Today is going to be four minutes longer than yesterday, and by this time next week the daylight will have grown nearly another half hour. On the other hand, the day after the winter solstice was less than a minute longer, and even after a week it had still only grown three minutes.

We rock from day to night like a child on a swing. At the solstice we seem to hang suspended in a moment of weightless, timeless astonishment before gravity breaks in and rushes us back to, and then past, the ground.

Equinox isn't a peaceful balance between opposing forces: equinox isn't stillness. Equinox is speed. The energy gathered up in the long night propels us through equinox towards the longest day, where we will hang motionless again for a charmed instant. The solstices are our homes and we stop a moment to refresh our inner and outer worlds. Balanced at the extremes, we pause before changing direction.

The moment of equal night and day offers no such pause: the road is clear and we thunder by. Everything is pulling the same way. Equinox is no destination; it is a milestone. It says 'Take heart: we're on the homeward stretch'.