abtw777

There’s something deliciously exuberant and indulgent about sunflowers! They are flowers to the max! The uber-flower! No wonder insects get dizzy with ecstasy when they visit flowers! There’s a field of sunflowers near my house. Some of them have spilled over into a little hollow in the ground next to the field, beneath a tree. In summer it’s a wonderful place to lie down and read or sunbathe or just look at the sky. A bank of moss, short grass and tiny daisies sits amongst the rogue sunflowers that have escaped from the field. I lie down on it with my feet pointing upwards towards the sky. It’s a steep bank so it’s almost like hanging upside down. Sometimes it’s good to see the world the wrong way up. Because there’s something wrong with the world, I’m thinking on this particular day. It has too much knowledge perhaps, or too many ‘facts’ or people who think they know the facts. Everyone has their own myth, and that’s okay. But why can’t we just leave other people with the...

It’s always black and white with you. Yes and no. True or false. Fact or fiction. Everything is a competition. But at last you have realised that co-operation is an alternative to all that competing. But I must tell you that even that wider distinction of competition or co-operation is just a myth. For a forest, these distinctions don’t mean very much. What you think of as truth today will be myth tomorrow. And tomorrow’s truth will likewise change into myth and then be forgotten. Some of you sit amongst my trees. And if you are wise you listen closely and hear the big thoughts about the past and the future and the purpose of it all. There’s some wisdom there. The wiser amongst you choose to live among trees, even in tree houses. And here you learn that there are other ways of knowing, other ways of being in the world. You learn that the connections in a forest that you thought took place underground are really extended outwards – even outwards into space. You learn a great...

It’s a familiar phrase: Boys will be boys. But a horrible phrase, when you stop to think about it. An excuse for acting like an imbecile. An assumption of privilege. An invitation to break the rules. A suggestion that some particular boys are ‘proper’ boys, not girly boys, not soft, gentle, peaceful, still boys, or, God forbid, boys attracted to other boys! So when little boys hear their parents saying this phrase with an indulgent smile – boys will be boys – they know it’s okay to be a bully, a thug, a vandal, a cheat. That, after all, is what their parents are endorsing. And what better recommendation to bad behaviour can you get! Forget gentleness, sensitivity, caring, art, fashion, reading, writing – mother and father have already given the signal that such nonsense is beneath them, that these things are only of interest to girls. And girls are inferior beings. Well, you may say, things are changing – at least in a few countries of the world. Boys who like boys, girly boy...