A couple of weeks ago we had a talk at our camera club from members of Dalston camera club. When the first speaker said his talk was going to be on the life in his garden during the Covid lockdowns I yawned internally, expecting images of various insects and maybe the odd hedgehog. And that’s precisely what we got, but I found myself utterly enthralled. Ian was hugely knowledgeable about insects and the way he had captured the life in his garden was extraordinary.

In just one example he had a ‘house’ of long tubes built for bees which had been taken over by solitary wasps, the side of which was clear so that you could see what was happening inside. The female wasp paralyses caterpillars, carries them down to the end of the tunnel in the bee house, lays an egg on top, then seals the opening with mud or clay, repeating this until the tube is full. The egg eventually hatches and the emerging wasp then feeds on the caterpillar before pushing its way out of the clay and the tube. He’d created a video of events which was mesmerising and as I drove home I thought about every single thing which went in to the life of that one solitary wasp. The sheer intelligent brilliance of it, not to mention the magic.

That one solitary wasp is only one of a million formally described insect species here on our beautiful planet, although estimates place insect species anywhere from 5 to 20 million. There are 1.5 million catalogued animal species, though again estimates vary from 7 to 10 million. There are 400,000 species of flowers alone, let alone all the other plants, fungi, mosses and algae. And these are just a few of the wonders which make up life on earth. In addition, there are 2 trillion galaxies ‘out there’ in space containing an estimated septrillion stars. Every organism is different, with a different genetic make up, different social structures, different survival strategies, different functions. Each needing its own eco system merely to exist, let alone thrive, and yet we are all co-existing together – me as different to a star as a star is to the ocean. The whole thing is so vast and complex and wondrous to me I can’t even wrap my head around it.

How can anyone wake up on any given day and not have a heart bursting with gratitude? For the sunshine, for the rain fall, for the air we breath, for the water we drink, for the food we eat? For the sheer abundance and delicacies and intricacies of life? And don’t even get me started on the complexities of human life and the fact we are conscious of our consciousness.

The entire thing is way beyond explanation to me. There are those who say every living thing has simply evolved from something else and can be explained by science, even the fact that nothing can come from nothing, and I just shake my head. So much remains unexplained. Not only that but it misses the sheer awesomeness of it all.

I’m now off to make a cup of tea, with water which falls from the sky and heated by energy from daylight via human technology I can’t even begin to understand, from a plant grown under our life giving sun in a far off land, in a mug made from earth, topped with milk from animals which graze on perpetually growing grass. I’ll stir it with a spoon mined from the ground, my brain coordinating all the subtle movements my body makes. I’ll drink it without thought as to what happens next. Digestion, the sorting of nutrients from those which need to be kept to those which need to be discarded and expelled, the entire process taking place without conscious thought.

To anyone wondering what they can be thankful for today, make a hot brew in awe.