And so it begins

It’s time. Little steps will lead to bigger things and it’s only by making a start that one can find oneself on a journey.

I have a question. Why do I feel connected to the environment around me, while other people don’t? What makes me this way, living in suburban Sydney, and working daily in a concrete slab of a hospital with precious few windows?

I remember, as a child, dancing barefoot across the sparkly, dewy lawn early in the morning before my parents were awake. I watched spiders spin webs with great patience (mine and theirs), and watched how they caught flies. I imagined being a wild girl living among the animals.

Between then and now came years of growing up, education, working with people, working with computers, and all the trappings of adult life and responsibility that pulled me in other directions. But still I keep returning to the environment. I’d by a plant for my office, I’d find a space to walk with trees. Now, more than ever, I acknowledge the birds, I visit the plants, I love the bees and hoverflies, I hold conversations with spiders and skinks.

I am increasingly in awe of how little we grasp of their complex language and lives. We think we are clever because we can build things, but we still can’t spin a web like a spider or work collectively to create a beehive out of wax we have made from flowers. We are only just acknowledging the culture that wolves, whales and birds of the corvid family show, in scientific circles, although it’s been there all along. Too many of us have been blinded by the idea of our being dominant and something other than just another species on this planet – something “not an animal”.

I believe this idea of our superiority and our loss of our sense of connection with, and dependence on, all of the rest of life on this planet is a deep underlying key to our current predicament. We face an environment becoming increasingly hostile through our own doing. I believe that we have the knowledge and ability to change that.

This is my beginning, where I will learn about and share ways to reconnect to the environment, reclaim a sense of belonging to our beloved planet Earth, for she is ours and we are hers and it was never meant to be any other way.