Column | Floating and self -forgotten in life

There are some coats struggling through the duckweed in the canal around the farm, it is at the beginning of June. No more little meadows, I say, and then realize that I have not seen them this year at all. Also no crossing ducks with a string of chicks behind it, nor small scum in ditches and canals.

It is fairly quiet in the meadows and on the fields. The farmer whose field borders our garden has set up a cannon that gives a thunderous bang once in a while to frighten the birds. I hear the dog from a few houses away barking every time frightened and I have already spilled tea from shock. So lapwing will not venture there, nor will it be like oystercatchers or godwits. By the way, they won nowhere anymore.

I read the Netherlands’ Loss of Diversity ‘champion’ a while ago in the newspaper. Biodiversity here has decreased much stronger than elsewhere in the world, even elsewhere in Europe. « The main causes of deterioration are land use change, environmental pressure and fragmentation of ecosystems, » says the supendium for the living environment. I want to believe that. All kinds of well -meaning citizens leave a strip or their entire garden unaware in May, for the birds, but the first week of May I saw everywhere on the meadows large mowers that strip for strip the tall grass with everything that lived in it. A hare jumped from a still unaware edge – did she have her army there? Little hare maybe?

‘Spring Cannot Be Cancelled’, David Hockney said in the first corona year and was full of displaying the lack of nature around his house in Normandy. In her animating discussion of his large exhibition in Paris, Bianca Stigter wrote that this could be disappointing, she referred to Rachel Carson’s famous book Silent Springabout pesticides use, and wrote that ‘they’ can indeed cancel the spring.

It will really be up to me that I missed those quacking ducks. The biodiversity loss is not that fast now. With the bio -joy loss by the way; It is more difficult to enjoy what is there, if you feel it as a rest, as something that is ‘just’. It is now mainly the gardens and the roadsides where what is struggling and roars around. Now that it is almost summer again you don’t see the scent, everything seems so lush; Corns that are already soft yellow and flowering potatoes and scented elderes with their large white petal screens – every day when I walk into the garden I sniffs well -being and on the bike to the village I kick slower to enjoy that swelling fullness; Unbelievable that that will increase.

But you can hardly hear the Tepiet-Piet-Piet of the Oystercatchers anymore, the only one who has been calling for months is the cuckoo. I find it strange that everything that a person pleases creates in is lost without even a politician worries about that. Well -pleasing is very out of fashion, it is not allowed from the left, the right does not see how you benefit from it economically. But what should we start without joy of life? I recently read the bundle of Pim in Bokkel, For a moment the living beings float. The first poem is called ‘a lamb jumps’ and it is as if the lamb is being stopped for a moment in one of the many jumps that makes such a beast, and is already floating and self -forgotten alive, ‘a cloud in sheep clothes’. What a wonderful image. You want something like that yourself: sometimes forget life in a leap, how it is below ‘orphaned in the meadow’.

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