Robin Hood - where are you when we need you?

Fern Scarf from Queen Anne's Lace

I read with great sadness the other day that Britain has decided to sell two-thirds of its forests to private developers - read expensive houses on golf courses instead of walks in the woods where fairy tales were made! There are these boundaries, that act as measures of the quality of our existence.  We can say well as, long as we have access to this or that, we haven't been compromised that much and so we tuck in and endure another encroachment to our concept of freedom.

Tree Scarf

But when "they" start taking away what we consider our birthright - huge tracts of the natural world, which we have inherited simply because we were born on this Earth, than we must protest. OK this is England and they have to sell natural resources to pay a debt of extravagance to a consumer oriented, unnatural world of "getting and spending" that fuelled an economic expansion, which is now in decline. And yes, the ones at the top, who "got in early", have reaped the benefits and have legally excused themselves and let the "devil" take the hindmost.

Stream Scarf

But we most stand up and say enough is enough! We are not prepared to live in Hell. Because, of course, once all this land is developed and the resources have been "spent"  there will be nothing left. We must stop any wholesale auction of any natural resource in any country, because all of it belongs to all of us, inasmuch as we are all children of the universe.

Fir Scarf

So what does this have to do with knitting - a lot really.  So much of Art and creative expression comes from the natural world. A world that we like to consider is not contaminated with the contrivances of man. We like to think that nature is free of  politics, economics and all the other "ics" that make for a "ikky" world.

We want to believe that there is still a purity in nature, an unsophistication - a sense of "as the leaf falls or the stem bends."  We still believe there is no cosmetic surgery; no intervention of an alien hand.  Let's work to protect this belief, so that artist can in all truthfulness recreate through their particular vision what they know to be a true representation of the natural world.

The pictures are part of the Forest Scarves Series from Queen Anne's Lace.  Dinner tonight? It should really be a picnic or a BBQ. Something to remind us that we are not that far away from living on and of the Earth - as simple as you can make it and your justification is - "remember our roots and keep them rooted"