Dopamine fasting or teaching your grandmother to suck eggs!

Apparently needing the constant dopamine hit of fast food, all the films, series, games, music, social media contact and shopping in the known universe doesn’t actually make you happy.

Well, who would have guessed that one!!

It turns out that our screen fried lives actually need LESS stimulation not more and that the Silicon Valley gurus are actually reducing their over stimulated fried time and ( take a deep breath now! ) trying to remember what day dreaming and just looking up actually feels like.

They call it dopamine fasting.( I call it watching the grass grow.)

Astoundingly it has now been proven that  you need quiet time on your own to have Errr……. thoughts……..!

I am so glad to have lived long enough to see common sense become cutting edge fashion again.

It is sunny today and the dust is dancing in thermal columns of household indolence. I think I’ll contemplate it for a  while as dusting would be to be break my fast with too much exciting activity .

How wonderful it is to see the wheel turn. Pass me another egg!

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The bare truth.

I love the shape of winter trees.

Now the tattered remnants of autumn have blown away, the filigree beauty of the trees is revealed shining in a steady cool rain.

In summer all is the soft fur of green leaves, snuggling promiscuously over one another, almost indistinguishable in the pulse of sap and growth.

In Autumn there is some individuality of colour; the different varieties of vines on the hill side are briefly visible as each line of leaves turns a different shade of red in its own time before falling to the ground. Beech and hornbeam flare orange in the woods, before scattering each dry, curled leaf into the wind like sparks from a wildfire.

But in winter, there is no summer hiding, no autumnal showmanship: this is the real shape of the tree. Each limb is smooth, or broken, pruned or leaning slowly out into the sunlight. Each silhouette tells a tale of genes and weather and often the hand of man.

Winter trees are honest, bare and very, very lovely.

 

Brouhaha in a pear tree.

The fieldfare are here and the starlings too. They have a lot of catching up to do since last autumn and they never stop talking.

I thought brouhaha was a children’s word for a lot of noise until I watched a film with French subtitles for the hard of hearing and saw the noise of many voices in a crowd rendered simply as brouhaha. It is the right word to also describe the racket coming from a pear tree laden with ripe fruit this afternoon. No one had bothered to pick it, the fruit was too small, but the birds were loud in their appreciation of the owner’s forgetfulness.

There seems no limit to the variety of sounds that starlings can make. They pop, wheeze, exclaim, whistle and shriek and they shout over one another with a wonderful lack of inhibition. Add a flock of fieldfare, half drunk on the fermenting fruit and the result is as cacophonous as a bar when the football is on. I love this raucous  sound of autumn; everyone has something to say and are determined to say it.

The first snow has fallen on the Black Forest in Germany and on the Grand Ballon in the Voges; tonight there will snow here in the Jura, but today the sun in shining and the birds are making merry in the pear tree!

 

 

Having Hope : 11.11. 2019.

In the forest yesterday we were so close to a deer that I could see the thick, soft fur of her ears; the dark, black iris of her eye and the wet, delicate saucer of her nose, upturned to smell us, to register us and to walk delicately away, unconcerned into the yellowing brush.

A friend sent me a photo of a kingfisher, jewel bright and improbable from the bottom of her garden and suddenly everything is possible, the good and the bad at the same instant, all is lovely and innocent and there is always hope.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/11/mouse-deer-not-seen-nearly-30-years-found-alive-vietnam?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

 

 

I am not a vegetarian…

I am not a vegetarian, but sometimes I think I should be.

I love the taste of meat, but am disturbed by eating fellow sentient mammals.  Then I consider the fowl and the fish; decide I shouldn’t eat them either and then I am left with the plants. Plants are alive too and are killed so we can eat them. If we eat neither flesh nor fruit, we are left with nothing at all, except our own extinction .

I grew a magnificent  pumpkin from seed. I fed and watered it and then I picked it, sliced it into mighty  chunks and made it into soup. The slices wept moisture and were so beautiful I could hardly bring myself to hack it up. But I did: I cooked it with red lentils, cinnamon and spices , pureed it to creamy perfection and ate it with relish while the rain fell outside. Oh to be human!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/02/trees-have-rights-too-robert-macfarlane-on-the-new-laws-of-nature?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other