Tag: nature

What could possibly be wrong with loyalty?

Is it a fern, is it a tree? Why would it be anything to me? ©2025 Bard

What could possibly be wrong with loyalty?

Loyalty is often touted as a positive emotion, something to be admired and rewarded for. Yet loyalty has been the cause of suffering throughout known history and probably long before as well.

Loyalty pressures the individual into sacrifice and suffering ‘for the greater good’. Loyalty motivates groups into discrimination, exclusionism and violence towards ‘others’. It can even lead entire nations into waging wars and committing acts of mass murder and genocide, driven by the conviction that this is the loyal thing to do.

I have always wondered why loyalty was so often expected of me in contexts I didn’t sign up for. I didn’t choose to be born where I was born. I didn’t choose to belong to the religion of my parents, grandparents, and beyond. I didn’t vote for the crazy leaders ruining the countries I have lived in. Yes, more often than not, I was told I owed some sacred duty of loyalty to my family, tribe, religion, country and leaders, to the point of being expected to commit acts of violence against others and even happily give up my life in service of those nebulous but apparently deeply sacred construct I supposedly belonged to.

It seems to me that loyalty to any particular group is always a dangerous proposition, as it automatically and unavoidably means excluding other human beings from my duty of care. Loyalty to ‘us’ always means turning away from ‘them’; the others that are a threat to us, want the good things we have, and would rob, enslave or kill us is we gave them even half a chance. Any care, empathy or concern I might feel for those others, I am constantly told, means disloyalty to those I should think of as mine. As if my capacity for loving kindness is too limited to be wasted on outsiders.

I have always deeply mistrusted loyalty as a motivator, especially as a motivator for exclusion, distrust, violence and hate. Of course, I feel a special fondness and connectedness towards those who are close to me. Of course, I feel gratitude and even a sense of indebtedness to my ancestors who worked so hard and often suffered in order for me to live the beautiful life I am living. I have no problem with being asked to do something in return; to make positive contributions to my family, tribe and nation. But my loving-kindness, my capacity for helping others, my compassion for any life that is suffering is not limited to my in-group only. I see no reason to exclude any living being from my duty of care or compassion. All life is one, as far as I can see, and therefore has an equal claim to my loyalty and love.

No living being of any kind deserves to be excluded, neglected, humiliated, enslaved or killed just for being not us.

Connecting to the Land: finding the stories

A while back I shared that I felt my Country was reclaiming me. One part of that process was reconnecting with Nature. Feeling in touch with and being welcomed by my re-discovered natural environment gave me a feeling of coming home I hadn’t expect to find.

But there is more to this process. There are the stories hidden in the land I am reconnecting to.

For decades I lived in Australia. One of the comments my European relatives and friends frequently made when visiting was that Australia has great natural beauty, but is lacking in history. They see it as a young country, lacking in monumental buildings, historic towns and the occasional ruins of past civilisations. On the surface they are not completely wrong. Compared to other continents, the evidence of long-term human occupation of the land is far less visible. The actual human history of Australia, however, runs much deeper than most of the monuments and archeological sites visited by tourists elsewhere in the world.

How deep that history goes only becomes apparent when one discovers the oral history, art, music and dances performed by Australia’s indigenous people. They tell stories that are 10s of thousands of years old. Their art contains knowledge and insights that has been passed on for hundreds of generations. And, interestingly, instead of being connected to man-made monuments, most of those ancient stories, songs and artworks are intimately connected with the land itself. Every natural feature has its story, it seems, and is, through that story, connected to many other places in the continent. To an indigenous Australian, walking through Country is never just a walk from place A to B; it is simultaneously a walk through the history of their people, a revisiting of landmarks they see as their ancestors, and a re-activation of all the knowledge and learning of the generations that went before. Every step they take is securely anchoring them to Country, telling them in no uncertain terms that this is where they belong.

I came back to The Netherlands thinking I would find plenty of visible history but little of the non-tangible story kind. As it turns out, I was wrong.

Sure, the visible stuff is easier to find. It is in all the travel guides, after all. But the land here is full of stories, too, if you know where to look for them. They are just buried much deeper than in Australia, where there are still people actively keeping them alive.

There is a little lake near our house. It is man-made. Not because people wanted to have a lake, but because they were digging out the peat they needed for fuel to warm their houses. The landscape is dotted with small lakes and waterways, speaking of people burning the soil because there weren’t trees enough around to harvest for firewood.

Some of the lakes are almost perfectly circular, which gives them an even more artificial appearance. But those lakes, called pingos, are actually a natural phenomena, caused by ice and meltwater during the ice ages that covered all of the land here. Put together, the land speaks of the slow forces of erosion and the much faster forces of surface mining, both creating and recreating a very unique landscape.

There are some ancient monuments here, too, from the time people here were hunter-gatherers. Huge boulders are grouped together and capped with even bigger ones to form hill-graves we call “Hunebedden” (dolmen), literally meaning “beds of giants”. Built long before the later farmers of this land arrived from the East, they were incorporated into local legends about the giants that roamed the land in ancient days. Some of those legends became fairy tales, others got incorporated into local lore, and some made it into religious tales of saints and demons battling it out amongst the giant stones.

It is till possible, with some research and a lot of patience, to piece together a tapestry of half-forgotten, half-misremembered storylines that were once the way our ancestors here gave meaning to the landscape around them. Doing so, I find, is another way in which this Country is reclaiming me and weaving me into its very being. The more I stumble across the ancient stories, the easier it becomes for me to not feel strange, separate and alienated but part of everything around me. The more I retell and reconstruct those old narratives while exploring the land, the more I feel I am becoming a participant and caretaker, not just a curious tourist passing through.