THE ISLAND OF HOPE
February 9, 2014 · by jonoboyle · in Stories. · Edit
The Island gave me hope. It was paradise, a natural landscape free of anyone overly prying or caring, bits of the place were lost, behind tangles of under or overgrowth, with dilapidated fences and hedgerows, depending on where one placed the camera it could resemble a scene from Neolithic or mediaeval times. I learned many new skills and met a carefree, soulful girl, we fell in love but her likes were fashionably convenient, where mine were strictly sublime and earthy. Just this. A creating force for good, was my only hope for mankind, and my criticisms of modernity grew wildly. I have lived according to the tenet I picked up in those few summers, talking and learning from some seriously well informed minds I met. From this I formed a basis for my life’s opinion and followed it. On foot, mostly, I became a true supporter of Gaia when the theory was unknown, perhaps still just a disjointed idea, it was an innate theory in me, it came to me naturally as a philosophy, as a continuity to religious thought, of science as a tool and as a means to acquire a better future for the earth.
Consumer culture came to Britain, as religion left it, many hold the message of mass media culture as central to their beings, save for fundamental values of family and other sublime concepts. The Island offered a grateful escape from this ever increasing pace of the world. It’s wonderful sunsets, glorious mornings, enigmatic evenings watching stars and meteors, grasping firewood for dear life from the darkness of the woods, lost in the wild – until the van came back in the morning. I had joined a group offering escape from the urban world, cheap working holidays protecting forgotten parts of the natural environment. It was serene week away from normal civilisation offering the feeling of achievement from acting to a worthy task and surviving frugally, and laughing, a bit tipsy, through it all. I went for the week but its sirens called me to live there all the way through the prime of my young man’s years. How lucky that push from Brighton had been, for the next two and a half years I dwelled in beauty, with trees, long grasses and the birds. Such meditation, such long moments away from all distraction. I began to read all knowledge. I wished just for wisdom, now, and of course a conscientious though comfortable existence. Here the only electrical gadgets were the inadequate lights of the Ark – Noah’s Ark, a strangely named, now isolated, National Trust cottage, that had been an almost ancient pub, beforehand two separate cottages in the village of Newtown Isle of Wight. It languished in rustic splendour in a forgotten hamlet in a hidden nature reserve.
My friends abounded, for the first time ever I was popular in a boiling pot of idea’s and lust for the natural life. I met Buddhists, a homeopath, philosophy dropouts, I loved a teacher, I met and heard virtuoso’s render classics, I mingled with folk bands and discussed stuff after stage; anyone joining the group already came intact with their own bundle of inspiration. I had these good few years before I married, learning everything, reading in long and staged periods; I had discovered much before this period led to university. It had begun with the sublime in action, it ended with the pursuance of nothing but sublime wisdom. A lifetime’s quest only rendered a conclusion on feeling our own self passing. I worked at a few other places later in the environment group, I knew much before I realised it was again a trick of modernity. I was questioned by a group of conservationists on the truest way we could hold the landscape for the environments sake; it unsettled me as I went through the itinerary of learning and the tasks to which I was involved. I discovered that it was only when teaching the kids or the unknowing about the earth’s workings that my path to environmental warden would hold the meaning I sought. The rest was human tailoring, and worse there was an accepted direction towards reminiscent landscapes in Britain. We took the countryside back 500 years in our schemes and held it there, arguably for romanticism, when it was a petri dish of earlier agrarian science. The truest environmentalism would be to buy vast tracts of land and keep them safe from intervention for as long as possible, even if intervention is after all part of the natural inescapable makeup of our existence. It was a reflective decade. We watched apartheid, seclusion in east Europe, and unfair business led government, fail, whilst charity was on the rise, protest was a weekend activity, we accepted the devotees of causes, from tree huggers to eco warriors. The decade ended with the finality that third world poverty was put in place by colonialism and its evil master, debt. Much changed in attitudes through that decade, when I set out to learn about all these confusing things I was hearing and some adhering to. Much to learn, more to do. For the time being I was filled with hope.
