A winter wonderland of snow and ice…
Once more, the weather disrupts my plans it seems. I was supposed to be teaching the first weekend of my course ‘A Year of Herbs’ today. But the season, and the weather has conspired to cast uncertainty on everyone’s arrangements and it is now a toss-up between running the course but at 11AM, or cancelling all together. It all depends on what the weather does. Yes, the full power of modern communications are being put to co-ordinating what to do with the day due to small pieces of ice falling from the sky.
This uncertainty is both comforting and infuriating at the same time. This is not frightening weather, as the storms were earlier in the month. It is actually quite gentle. Though it is in some ways frustrating after what feels like a long, hard winter that’s brought (for us, warmed by our coastal location) a decade’s worth of snow. It is also unusual that it is so late in the season for this kind of carry on!
It serves as a gentle reminder to all of us that something as simple as a bit of frozen water-powder can change our plans: Which also serves as a nudge to remind us just how small we are in compared to the in which we live!
Whenever this kind of thing happens, I think that we have about as much control over the nature of the world in which we live as the flees on a dogs back have over the dog… …Although I don’t see humanity as parasitic; it is nice to be reminded that we are still nothing but small cogs in a large and complicated machine that we still don’t fully understand!
Categories: Reflections
I think you could argue that humans certainly are parasitic!
Yesterday I read about ‘the microbe’s dilemma’: ‘in the church, he drew away from me again… I traced a streak of blue on the white marble floor, meandering like one the of the veins on the inside of his arm. We’re like microbes, I said, we’re in the same dilemma as microbes might be, trying to wave to the person looking down the microscope.’ Sue Wolfe, ‘Leaning Towards Infinity’
That’s a pleasingly amusing concept. Well, I’ll be waving up the microscope if I can. I suppose what differentiates us from a microbe is that we’re conscious and intelligent… in theory…