Flowing with Life

DARA from Bulgaria ‘defeated’ the singer from Israel at the last minute with her pop song Barangara, winning both the jury vote and the popular vote – a rare event. Before the win was announced, she told us that worrying about winning wasn’t her job. That was up to others. All she needed to do, she tell us, is keep her heart chakra open and play her part on the stage.

In the beginning of her story suite, Five Ways to Forgiveness, Ursula Le Guin offers us a window of hope, of possibility. She reminds us that many cultures have dedicated themselves to peace. Scholar Luke Kemp echoes this, telling us that throughout humanity’s long history peace and relative equality has been the norm. And yet today we are told that are told again and again that war is necessary, whether that’s war between nations, war between neighbours, or even war within ourselves. Perhaps it’s only necessary for the profits of certain industries.

Many of us have a visceral reaction to the word anarchy. When we consider it’s just a label, we might wonder why we have such a strong reaction. And we might also ask ourselves, does our reaction stop us from looking more closely at what’s behind the label? I’ve been noticing in myself how often I’ve put people or ideas in boxes which I unconsciously assign to various mental categories of ‘Interesting’ or ‘To be Ignored’, among others. Could I be missing out on some great stuff this way?

While the official government of the U.K. is caught up in the fear-based mentality of scarcity and austerity, ordinary people are quite happily tending the seeds of a much happier and healthier society. As the Labour party threatens to sell off allotments in their ideas of a ‘realistic’ economy, groups in Fife are demonstrating how gardening and radical self care offer another way of being.