In a previous podcast, we spoke about bread and roses.
Bread, because everyone needs the means to live. Roses, because life should offer more than survival.
But perhaps roses have another story to tell.
In 1957, the French writer Maurice Druon published Tistou les pouces verts, the story of a little boy with an extraordinary gift.
Wherever Tistou placed his thumbs, flowers began to grow.
They bloomed in prisons, hospitals, and even in a factory producing weapons.
Tistou could not make suffering disappear. But he could bring beauty into places where it seemed to have been forgotten.
And sometimes, changing what people see can change what they believe is possible.
We often speak of the environment in terms of resources to preserve, risks to manage and damage to prevent.
All of this matters.
Yet nature offers something that escapes our calculations.
The quiet beauty of a flower beside a road. The shade of an old tree. The unexpected colours of a field in spring.
None of these needs to be owned to be enjoyed.
And beauty need not be the privilege of wealth. Sometimes it asks for little more than a patch of earth, a little care, and the freedom to grow.
In his song Le tasche piene di sassi, the Italian singer Jovanotti evokes flowers blooming and freely giving all they have.
They do not choose who may admire them.
They simply bloom.
Perhaps that is their most generous gift: they make the world more beautiful without asking anything in return.
And perhaps we have something to learn from them.
Caring for the environment is not only about protecting what exists. It is also about allowing life to flourish, sometimes in places where we least expect it.
We may not all have Tistou’s green thumbs.
But we can all leave a little beauty behind us.
We once asked for bread and roses.
Perhaps it is now time to learn how to grow the roses.
And sometimes, simply to let them grow.
Not only for ourselves.
But for everyone.
The Thinking Watermill Society
