Dawnings
The trap
By Nicholas Hooper
Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in his world. He imagined all sorts of things: spirits, ghosts, Martians, whispering trees, and he lived in a garden full of adventures.
As he grew older he was taken away from his paradise to a normal house in a normal world, and it wasn’t long before he realised that this normal world was sick. Surely, if you poured nasty chemicals down the sink – chemicals that you couldn’t drink – they would poison the very water you depended on. He saw that everything we did in this normal world was damaging it, and the more there were of us and the more we did, the worse it would become.
Aged 16 in 1968, he decided that he would never have a car. He walked everywhere or, if he had to, took buses. He stopped taking sugar in his tea, and cleaned his teeth carefully, being sure that before long there would be no dentists because our system would collapse.
Fifty-four years later, he is watching this world starting to collapse in many of the ways he expected; overpopulation, migration, wars, the breakdown of small societies and ever huger cities. He thought it would come much sooner then, but it’s coming now with the unexpected dark angel of global warming!
During those fifty-two years he gradually forgot his determination to stay out of the normal world and he had children, big cars, extra houses, the trappings of his sought for but unexpected success.
Now he sees the trap. What ever we do, however we plan, we always end up needing and consuming more things, needing to travel in cars, and to escape from our trap will be so painful, it may never happen.
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About Dawnings:
“Every morning at around 5am I get up and go down to my studio. After a short meditation I write down whatever is in my head, giving myself fifteen minutes to do so. Then moving over to the piano, I improvise and record a piece of music inspired by whatever words I just wrote. It is a great way of keeping both my writing and my composing going and I call these small creations Dawnings. They are mostly unedited, like sketches, so that they keep that fresh feeling of an early morning discovery.”
— Nick Hooper