Our loganberry bush never ceases to amaze me at this time of year. Over the last month or so new shoots have thrust forth, now towering over my head, over 8 feet tall. At the same time, last year’s stems are prolifically fruiting, yet at simultaneously dying, increasingly showing brown and wilting leaves.

It’s all just in time, as the new growth soon begins to overwhelm the old and deprive it of light. This is life – the old life fruits and matures, giving way to the thrusting energies of new life.

Maybe this is what is happening in the Western democracies – the last fruiting of the old ways before new young energies take us forward in the direction of needed renewal.

Macron, Corbin, Sanders seem to represent this renewal, in that they’ve tuned into the life stream; the old being led by the Conservative Party and so-called Blairites in UK, superrich white men, Republicans and establishment Democrats in US, European Commission in the EU, etc. Their main fruit was economic growth – since 2008 failing in their own terms. Their bitter fruits include inequality, pollution, degraded environments, species loss, catastrophic global warming, wars, non-sustainability everywhere you look… They were the future once.