is a bit strained I would say.

There are the devastation occurring (and yet to occur) in the American south and, of course, in many places of the world. As our climate shifts it will get harder for us because the patterns we know and depend upon are being upturned.

It made me think of the Land Army women of Britain and their stories. All those women; all the dead men who would have been their friends, husbands, co-workers.

These are the women posted to Hulcote Moors. The caption says they are waving to visiting American soldiers. Their men gone, these others come to take their place, temporarily.

But really, many of these women were on their own after that war. So many men died that it must have pushed at the ways women handled their lives. How they thought of themselves, how they met their needs, much had to be negotiated anew, I suspect.

This isn’t a marriage, or at least not a traditional one. The woman in white – a May Queen. I really do wonder how much of our current feminist spirituality came from these women (and those like them) meeting their needs as best they could.

We can never really know all the consequences of those things we do. I wonder, if the male leaders of that time could have foreseen the vast changes in women’s power and the cultural shifts toward all things Gaian, whether they would have been so eager to foster women’s labour and give them the notion that they were, in fact, a female army?