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Tuesday, October 28

I've just been re-reading 'The children of the Dust' by Louise Lawrence. It's a young adult fiction about survival after a nuclear holocaust. I first read it when I was 13 and it was one of the first impulses I got to become self-sufficient. I wanted to be able to produce everything I needed and have all the skills to do so- hence started a life times journey!
When I first began reading it again I remembered how scared I'd been when I was just a young thing. It was the end of the cold war and there were heaps of books and movies out about nuclear war. Back in the '80's governments and Rich people were building nuclear fall out safe bunkers. And I felt like my generation suffered from the fear of this but then I realised that all generations have suffered with fear. My parents and grandparents were born in the shadow of the 1st and 2nd world wars. Our children are living with the threat of an environmental catastrophe and peak oil.
You'd think we would learn! Human beings as a collective have been creating their own fears and disasters for eons. Perhaps it comes from not wanting to take control over our own individual lives; not wanting to be responsible- self determining? We decide to leave all the decision making up to someone who is better educated or suited to the job. Or to someone who tells us they have authority over us. But the only true authority in our lives is that little voice inside our heads that guides us. Whether you call it intuition or God or the higher consciousness we have it. Humans have the ability to live in harmony with each other and the planet.
We all have the capacity to love and to think and that IS enough.
You don't need school-learning or money or high-helled shoes or hand bags or fast cars: just the ability to think and to feel, will make the world a better place.
Right at the end of 'The children of the Dust' Louise Lawrence talks about freedom. She says it is not a physical thing it is

"...a mind released from worry and struggle, released from personal ambition and from the impositions of society, free to follow its own inclinations, its own thoughts."
I love that!

3 comments:

karisma said...

Very true!

Anonymous said...

A very interesting post. It seems to me that there will always be good things and bad things happening in the world - a bit like yin and yang. You need one to balance the other. But you are right, when it comes to fear - we do have a choice.

hippymummy said...

You have put into words the way that my heart feels about life. Too many of us have forgotten that want and need are two very different things. We all have a responsibility to ourselves to take charge and live a good life, blaming someone else is just passing the book. None of us will starve for the lack of a handbag but entire continents may well do so if we don't all change the way we interperate 'need'.
It's up to us to teach our kids the really important things in life. To teach by example is the only way,
'Do as i say not as i do' has brought the world almost to her knees, the 'wants' have failed, it's up to us now to teach how bountiful living with only what we truely need can be.

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