I was recently prompted by events occurring in many parts of the world, including here in the UK, to return to a song I recorded in 2019 – Tooth and Claw.

‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ is a line that might be familiar. It’s from ‘In Memoriam’, a long poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson that I read (a little dutifully as I recall) many years ago, about the sudden death of a young friend. That line, from the ‘dinosaur section’ of the poem, seems to be saying that Nature doesn’t really care about any species of life as so many have gone extinct, and that Nature is essentially therefore brutal and cruel. It doesn’t care about whom it strikes down.

And yet… what I don’t recognise in Nature is the intentional damage and hurt to others, or at least a reckless regard to it, frequently demonstrated by humankind. We share the planet with other sentient creatures and, whilst some of them might also be motivated by greed and hatred – the survival impulses being what they are – unlike other animals that are conscious we have the potential to transcend this way of being and to find a way (to quote from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address) to ‘the better angels of our nature’.

Looking around the world there are numerous examples of leaders leading with ‘tooth and claw’: hungry for power and wealth and caring little about anyone or anything other than satiating their appetites. And if we examine our own lives, might we see some tooth and claw behaviours showing up every now and then? I know I do… How do we learn to rise beyond the jingling and jangling of our old impulsion?