A bumble bee

I should have known it was coming, but like always in the heady rush of things you forget.

Two Fridays ago that beautiful morning, sunshine glinting off Cardiff Bay, a crowd of schoolchildren buoyant with homemade banners and placards outside the Senedd, smiling and laughing, singing and chanting. They were calling on the politicians inside – not one of whom showed their face – to listen up. They were calling on all adults everywhere to act their age and confront climate change. It was impossible not to be moved. Not to feel almost giddy with the sense of possibility. If you were there in Brighton, Sheffield, Berlin, Sydney or any of hundreds of other towns and cities where the same was happening that morning and in the days since, you’ll know what I mean.

You’ll also know what I mean if you’ve seen YouTubes of Greta Thunberg talking. A small, slight figure, softly spoken, reticent, not a hint of arrogance, holding an audience of big shots spellbound with her simple, honest, indignant message. For a moment the bluff and bluster that mark success in our crazy upside-down society melts away. The small, softly spoken person inside all of us holds sway. There’s hope. A new vanguard emerges, uncomplicated and instinctively true, seeking like a dog’s nose for some hint of a way forward. ‘We are nature defending itself’ said one of the schoolchildren’s slogans. I believe it.

But then you know how it is with feelings. You open your heart a crack, cognitive defences are down, and something else slips in to hijack your spirit.

Just over a week later we experienced the hottest February day ever in the British Isles, towards the end of what was the hottest February ever. 20°C across much of the land, quite a spike in a month where the average temperature in past years has been 7-9°C. The weather news was all about people sunbathing in city-centre parks and queuing for ice lollies at the beach. I briefly voiced my unease, in quiet conversation with a colleague in our over-warm office and was batted back with “the climate has always changed” and “we exaggerate our own influence”. There was no talk of climate in any of the sunny conversations around me that morning, only great weather.

At lunchtime I wandered out to the patch of bare ground across the supply road from the building where I work, and followed a muddy path into the strip of scrubby woods which lines the expressway. No question, the weather was gorgeous up there on the edge of the Brecon Beacons under an alpine sky. There was a bumble bee, fat and furry, zig-zagging among the slim tree trunks just above the leaf-fall. What’s going on, I thought. I’ve never seen a bumble bee at the turn of winter. What’s it looking for? Nectar, surely. Flowers. But there aren’t any flowers. None whatsoever. The trees are bare and nothing has poked through the mulch. Has it been warmed from its winter resting hole by the premature heat? I once read that bumble bees can manage only about 20 minutes of flight without a slurp of sugary energy. How much longer did this one have left? I placed a bite of apple on the ground close to the bee when it settled at the foot of a tree, but that spooked it and it promptly zig-zagged out of sight. The traffic roared. I pushed on, but the thought of the bee wouldn’t leave me. Imagine emerging on cue, primed by the eternal waltz of life for a summer of buzzing, to find yourself in a wasteland of dead leaves with 20 minutes to go. The image fused in my mind with a recurring scene from Tarkovsky’s Stalker: a man stepping slowly, expressionless, through a forest of blasted birch. Post-apocalypse? You never find out. But something bad.

And that’s how it happens. When you realise you’re feeling shit again.

The nadir, certainly, was this. One evening in the kitchen, after washing up and all that, the kids readying themselves for bed, I’m scrolling through Twitter and stop to watch a 10-minute video of Greta addressing an auditorium of European Union political elite. My daughter steals in behind me to watch over my shoulder and I’m pleased that she’s interested. Greta stresses the “less than 12 years to act” message, says there will be uncontrollable chain reactions if we don’t, and at that the daughter retreats upset, later to be found in a far corner of the flat, eyes red-rimmed and wide as she says to me: “…but it can be fixed, right? It can be stopped, yes?”

I can write this now because it’s passed, that stumble. I guess it comes in waves. I guess it’s like two sides of a coin. Some days what the kids are doing is hugely heartening. Other days it may just break your heart.

(Image from a postcard by Peter Reason)

5 Replies to “A bumble bee”

  1. Fierce, Chris, and honest. You are raising some good kids there.

    The other day I talked with a politician friend of mine who has been at the frontline of getting our state to set some of the most ambitious goals in the country in terms of addressing climate change. He said that the most effective way to get people behind such goals is to present them as ways to save money in the long run. It was good strategic advice, but also depressing. I’m not sure I’m up for it. He, on the hand, can make that argument and make you believe it. That’s the difference between a born politico, as he is, and a bumpkin like myself.
    I hope that Greta Thunberg and all like her can change the conversation such that money can be transformed back into the means to coordinate ourselves and not, as it is now, wretched blinders which limit what we think we can do.

    1. It’s a difficult one isn’t it? Moneythink seems to atomize and move us further from the rest of nature but as you say if some people can use that appeal to make a positive difference…

  2. Chris,
    The hardest part of opening your heart is the pain. Once your eyes see what is happening it is impossible to be complacent, to dismiss the news, or deny what is happening. Yes, our emotions come at us in waves lifting us up and crashing us down. Perhaps it would be easier if we didn’t feel so much.

    After my father died I felt as though his spirit touched me and that he was happy to let go of his failing body. I really think he was glad to move on and I was happy for him…my grief was less sharp. But then comes those moments when I realize that I will never be able to call him again, to talk to him, to greet him with a hug and a kiss… and my heart breaks from the pain of loss. The tears flow. The emotions are intense and sharply painful. Once the pain and tears pass I feel my heart is less empty.

    This is what it means to mourn the loss of what we love and hold dear. This is also what it feel like when we realize what climate change is doing to our planet. We are losing so much. But I think it would be so much worse if we couldn’t feel this, didn’t mourn this, if the plight of the bumblebee and the monarch butterfly didn’t break our heart. For in our loving, in our open heartedness, we are most capable of being human and seeing what makes life most beautiful. I agree with Michelle, you have raised your children well.

    1. Thanks Jody, and Michelle. Expressing and sharing these feelings does seem to take the pressure off a little.

  3. Chris – have these same feelings of powerlessness in terms of leaving an seemingly unsolvable potentially fatal mess for the kids, grandkids, and generations on down, to deal with. And that i cannot honestly say i have given my all toward protecting them looking ahead. And backing away using the argument that most all parents have done what they could to foster their young, all the way back protecting their offspring from sabretooth tigers and bears just does not cut it with this issue.

    Many years ago while visiting the Grand Canyon i stumbled across accounts of roving bands of hunters exploring the caves in the region with the specific goal of killing the last of the large cats that inhabited these remote areas. They had no direct monetary reward beyond the pelts, but acted with the stated objective of eradicating them in order to make the region safer for the settlers, the early ranchers. But this situation we face is so widespread, so intertwined with core of modern “civilization” that for the last hundred years depends on burning something to provide the things we want, from hot food cooking over brush and dung fuel fires, to power plants, trucks, ships, automobiles, and home heating.

    Found a spark of hope in an unexpected place last week…


    Am still skeptical, both of the law as a vehicle and of the reaction time or speed of progress given the enormous human population, in the same way that i am not convinced that we can solve major economic inequities by throwing more money at them, or that we can change the arc of millennia of bigotry with a “civil rights act” but it is a start.

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