Nature’s Heritage

Note: in Neo-Paganism there is a debate amongst some group, between “eclectics” and “traditionals” for instance. And this was my response to that, a feeling that I wanted to transcend those and get to the basics of life. In fact, of “Truth, Love and Life”, which made a sort of trinity for me. There is also mention of ecosystems and “foreign” introductions. Something with which I was familiar in my studies on ecology and conservation.

I don’t want traditional or eclectic,
I want Truth.
I don’t want old or new,
I want Love
I don’t want foreign or native,
I want Life.
If Truth, Love and Life are not the greater
Then let me die now!

Never mind my ancestry!
What about my love for ALL humanity.
Never mind the land’s spiritual traditions!
What about our ignorance of the land’s ecology?
Never mind about foreign gods!
What about our foreign intrusions?
Those domesticated plants,
Which have no meaningful existence within local ecology.
And worst still are the foreign species
That do flourish and conquer;
The mink, japanese knotweed or grey squirrel
That do suffocate our native life,
Delivered to these fair land’s by our own sinful hands.
I look upon the countryside
And wonder upon it brutal acceptance
Of these things.

It sees the foreign not as right or wrong
As we do.
The mink on one hand thrives so well
Destroying our wonderful water vole.
Yet a wallaby seen in the New Forest lives wild
Yet dying as its body fights the cold.

You see, nature cares not for the traditional or eclectic,
For old or new,
Foreign or native.
It cares only for change,
Revelling in the dance of it
No matter what its form.

Thus it has been
Thus it is
And thus it shall be ever onwards.
Change is Nature’s God,
Not the many gods of Old
Or the one God the Christ.
Mere human futilities there are
Before the universes power.
Mere spits in a vast ocean.

Laugh, laugh, laugh!
Traditional or eclectic, old or new, foreign or native,
None of these shall succeed
Before the all-consuming change
That is the crown, throne and kingdom of Nature.