As a young girl, walking the fields and woodlands of her Devonshire village, Beeja Loxton buddied up with nature. It was a friendship that helped ease the demands of her evolving sense of place in the world, and later the stress that now many of us may feel, living as we do in a compromised environment. In The Miraculousness of the Ordinary no idea is off the table, from what eucalyptus seeds have to teach us about our relationship with time, to Japanese farming methods, to compiling a dictionary of lost words, to flying a hot air balloon the breadth of the UK. We join Beeja as she returns from a year's travelling, and although she longs to be with her backpacking companion, Luca Fabiani, set against her heart's desire is a prior commitment. A big decision has already been made - to teach ethics, to help others develop an understanding of the planet's ecosphere, and the interaction between its living and non-living components. Beeja's happy-go-lucky approach to life has produced a fast moving story that is psychologically astute and embracingly sceptical. The grand sweep of Beeja's young knowledge enables her to complete a restorative journey of reconnecting, and to become aware, over time, of how one person can forever shape another. However, there's a question for Beeja. With the documented rise in Nature Deficit Disorder, effectively an ignorance of the natural world adversely affecting the young, can individuals be helped by Beeja to develop an ethical relationship with something actually unknown to them? There is also a worry - with the swelling obviousness that it's de rigueur to commit consumerist thuggery, to dis plant based diets, to carry on buying fast cars and taking long-haul holiday flights - is teaching ethics really the way to go?The Miraculousness of the Ordinary is an invitation to come fly with Beeja, and the wind - stand with her in a see-through laundry basket at 6000 ft, alongside Adam Adamski, a close friend and an award-winning investigative journalist whose next scoop is about to become headline news.
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