Reflections on the beach and the future of humanity

We’re very blessed, living as we do on the edge of woods with a choice of walks. Spoilt, I’d almost say when I get bored with the same paths, the same old friends, the trees; when I long for more distant, less familiar places.

Recently, they began harvesting some of the trees. It’s thinning, not clear felling. I can see it’s needed to make space for the remaining trees to grow on to maturity, and open up the ground to the light and allow the monoculture plantation to diversify. And it will raise funds to manage these public lands. But I hate the destruction; the uncaring savagery of modern logging; the indiscriminate tracks of heavy machines going hither and thither; the broken young trees, and shrubs; the churned and compacted soil; the scatter of trashed branches, the severed stumps, and the sad stacks of battered trunks awaiting sawmill or chipper. There is no love, or compassion.

It’ll be long before the scars heal, and then it will be time to start over.

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I cycled to the beach on Sunday, picking up stones for Christine to decorate with Celtic symbols as gifts for Thai hosts. The tide was low, a wide expanse of drying sand glistening below the bank of varicoloured glacier-worn stones.

Dark and cloudy at first; rain forecast from the south-east. Then the cloud cleared. Blue sky, sunshine, breeze warm for winter.

Task complete, I wander along the sands. Pebbles nestled in their water-sculpted hollows - eyes with laughter wrinkles where the water ebbed. Stems of storm-torn kelp, waiting for the rising tide to sweep them on again to who knows where. The low winter sun casting long, longing shadows towards the freedom of the sea from every stone, and kelp stalk, and sand ripple.

Gulls wheeling, plummeting into waves, bobbing. Footprints in the shining sand - sea birds amongst the stranded weed, and humans taking their Sunday stroll. Kids running, shouting on the wind.

And always the white-noise continuo of waves against the shore; the white-lace foam washing the soul clean and leaving virgin sand. The wind sweeping the cobwebs from my mind, and drifting the smoke of drying sand into silvered hollows.

I feel my legs, reluctant to stretch at first. Then hips relaxing, stride lengthening as I tune in and let go. It’s a while since I’ve been here, close though it is. Always nourishing. Especially when the seals are basking. Why so long? Immersed in my self-created busyness, forgetting the truly important things in life.

My thoughts drift. Surfacing from the depths come sadness, anger, grief at the destruction we have wrought, are wreaking, will wreak on mother Earth. Is it time for humans to leave? Or Gaia to remove us? I often comfort myself with the thought that Gaia will survive no matter what we do; that it is beyond even our destructive power to kill the Living Planet; that within a few millennia of our demise, there’d be little left to remind the aliens or newly evolved consciousnesses of our existence.

But it’s cold comfort. What a tragic loss if all humanity’s striving came to nought. All our passions, loves and hates, our suffering and compassion, our joys and despairs, our creativity and hard-won knowledge ... What a tragedy to lose the wisdom of the Buddha and Jesus, the insights and cadences of Shakespeare, the celestial sounds of Mozart, the imagery of Michaelangelo and Picasso, the science of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, and all the myriad humbler shoulders these giants stood upon. To lose all this in our foolishness! Is it all in vain?

And yet, in time, it is bound to be. Whether through our own greed and blindness, or through the passage of evolutionary time, there will come a day when humanity as we know it will be no more. Will we transcend our current selves, shed our shadows, and rise into more glorious light? Or will we sink deeper into the dark mire? Surely, it is worth the struggle, worth the effort, worth all we can give to the effort to steer us onto the transcendent path.

As I mount my bike, the wind has risen and I battle homewards into the teeth of the gale.