There are ways and ways

We have been enjoying a rare spell of rare weather, really the best spring in years, although it took long enough in getting here. There is to be more of the same for quite sometime, so maybe this year the big poppies will have their time in the sun without getting washed out.
On these sorts of days it’s good to get out and about, walk miles, enjoy the air, meet people on a similar mission, folk who’d squirreled themselves away to wait out the cold and wet of the last seven months, and who might have expired for all one knew, not the sort of fact one wants to discover.
Being outdoors, light-hearted, and free of all care is tough on blogging, which is a park-it-and-punch-it-out activity. But with the fine days, the priority list rewrote itself in a hurry, for the yard called for trimming and pruning, not to mention planting and setting up flower baskets. Usually those projects are long since attended to, but not this year. Not to worry, all is not forgotten. With the sun rising so early in the morning, I pop awake and spend time happily reading blogs and marvelling at the diversity of human endeavour, interests they contain and the many locations around the globe they come from. The world really is a small place, easy to reach and not expensive when viewed through the immediacy of a WP blog!
Alas, there are always downsides to enjoyment; cyclical responsibilities, i.e. keeping level with the fact that this is a big tent caterpillar year, that the wasps and the crawly critters get into some sort of symbiotic dance, which ends with the new leaves of fruit trees and others located in the full sun, getting eaten clean away. The whole neighbourhood looks very moth-eaten at the moment. Spent hours yesterday removing tents from critical trees; of course if I gone out in the cold and wet I’d have found the hard, brown plaques on the branches that would later explode into the problem we have now, but I didn’t.
Another appropriate step nature takes, truly, but it does seem a bit too severe. The wasps lay their eggs in the heads of the caterpillars, and from that unlikely spot new wasps emerge and dine on the corpse that had hosted them in life – which reminds me I must try not to get stung, or it’s a trip to the Emergency to monitor the reaction.
Insect populations are failing due to excessive human intrusion into their habitats, use of chemicals, getting smucked on car windscreens, overuse of WiFi equipment and a host of other things we do. Soon we can only hope that the wind and a few flies will be able to carry the responsibility of pollination, so critical in the production of food and the continuance in the chain of life.
Enter Monsanto and similar, thinking to do it all on their own and bypass the ways of nature that have worked the problems and balances out over millions of years; thinking, being a BIG corporation, of diabolical ways to make sure the company profit margin stays high and healthy for the shareholders. Forgetting that they know nothing of how delicate the systems are, and by their selfish efforts, contributing furiously to a failing natural order. There are billions of people that need fed, but Monsanto doesn’t have to do it for them, they should get out and do it for themselves, and along the way discover the wonders of life and become humble for the knowing of it.