A Renaissance of Kindness

Parva, Magna, Crescunt

(My old school motto has never felt more apt)

The world rebuilds and repairs in a continuous cycle. The earth heals, discards, adapts and evolves. As a species, humans are adept at adaptation. Our existence has been one fraught with challenge and change. The question that needs to be asked is not IF we will evolve from the recent crisis but HOW. How will we adapt? Will we actively choose the direction of our “reinvention”? Will we be swept along with a tidal wave of power plays? Will we attempt to retain everything we are familiar with and resist the change that is inevitable? 

These choices of attitude will shape the future of humanity as we know it. We have an opportunity for renaissance on the horizon. Will we choose to innovate, become chimera-like in our ventures? Or will we let a moment for rebirth pass; maintain the status quo that has been “satisfactory” for most?

I have been getting back in touch with nature. I used to love my garden but, since returning from abroad, I have noticed that I have neglected it. 

Last summer my rosemary bush was over 6ft of spindly, aggressively lanky shrub. I asked my brothers (both teachers-turned-gardeners) for advice. 

“Vigorous pruning” and “cut it right back” was the resulting information. 

I felt guilty as I hacked through branches and limbs that scented the air as they fell. I experienced anxiety as I reduced the herbaceous giant to a short stump in the border, bare and barren. I had decimated the shrub to near non existence. Surely it would suffer? Surely it would wither and wane? 

These past few weeks, as spring emerges, I have been greeted by the most incredible, hopeful and energising sight; the Rosemary is thriving!! It has filled out in shape and, with training and gathering, is a manageable size and a pleasing feature of my herb garden. 

Why am I wittering about horticulture? Because sometimes it is only after a hard winter, thorough pruning or crop rotation that existence is re-enriched. Sometimes adversity reshapes us into a better, stronger form. 

It is worth pointing out that it is not as simple as causing destruction and waiting for things to improve. 

As with any crop or specimen, nurture and tending is required. Guidance, hard work and a dash of faith. 

So it is now, ahead of the clearing and reploughing, that we must decide what to plant, what to nurture, what to prune and what to uproot. 

Do we want to continue with self-interested, duplicitous decisions? Do we wish to live in a world controlled by a minority with little understanding of the allotment they share with others? Do we want a society that is morally or emotionally starved and stunted or do we wish to nurture varieties that will replenish and nourish the ground they grow in? Do we wish to see kinder, more ethical, more sustainable gardening methods? 

I have stretched my analogy further than needed perhaps but my key point is this:

WE choose how our world rebuilds. WE decide the values that will be the NEW foundations for our existence. Don’t let’s waste an opportunity to sow seeds of a better, fairer future for everyone. 

#keepingitkind2021