Wasps have a bad rep in our house.  I think it might have started when the boys were playing with a friend’s sons, in her garden and one of them poked a wasps nest with a stick.  It didn’t end well. The wasps won.

The wasps didn’t help themselves when we went out to celebrate GCSEs with a cream tea at a National Trust café and had to eat our cream and jam standing, moving, dodging and ducking.

So I haven’t told the kids that there is a wasp nest in the bird box.  I watched them build it. It is beautiful. So far we are respecting each other’s boundaries.  I have left them alone and they are avoiding the house and all humans.  Peace.

You see, I do viscerally understand that this isn’t my world, that I don’t get to decide who lives and dies, why should I?  I’m just another living being like the wasps. Look at the photo. A wasp drinking. What you can’t see is the tiny movements it made, that looked like swallowing, as it drank.

Just like me, it needs to drink.

Back to good old popular, although disputed Maslow and his hierarchy.  We all need, food, shelter, water, safety and people around us we love.

So simple. For us all.  Plants, birds, wasps, fish, humans. Simple.

If one of us is lacking, then we are all lacking because if I have food and you are hungry and I don’t share it, there is tension, conflict, division.  If I cut down all the trees in my garden then the birds can’t nest, the insects don’t pollinate so then my fruit won’t grow.  We all just need enough.

When we want more than enough, when we want more, we tip into greed, we push the natural systems into distress, we push human systems into war, poverty.

None of this ends well.

But what can we do? We aren’t people who war-monger, over-fish, use pesticides, log and clear cut old growth forests, harm children and babies. That’s not us. So what difference can we make?

We can share what we have

We can know when we have enough and stop buying, spending, grasping, wanting

In our work and families and lives we can practice gratitude for what we have, rather than focusing on what we don’t have.

We can watch swallows gather on the high wire, watch butterflies, watch wasps drinking water and allow ourselves to be filled with these connections so that our wanting subsides.

 

We still have a couple of places left on the Permaculture Design Certificate Course, 6 weekends across 10 months, starting in November..Get in touch to book or find out more.

Farmotherlands is my award winning collection of poems about nature, farming, community and family. You can buy a copy here.

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Thanks for being here.
Julie

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