December 19, 2007

Why and what I’m doing in my garden is an altogether more convoluted tale - the countercultural impulse fueling my arrival and continuing horticultural approach is somewhat unorthodox...

Let’s begin about ten years ago when I decided to let go of all my possessions, housing and money and go walkabout. One set of clothes, a pair of Doc Martens on my feet, spare pair of undies and socks in one pocket, diary and toothbrush in the other. Surreal as the notion may sound, there was actually method to the madness. Trained originally as an investment banker in the City of London, the intervening decade had seen my trajectory carry me through the executive suites of many of the world’s largest companies around a whole slew of endeavors increasingly related to the uptake of advanced internetworking technologies. With hindsight, the common thread uniting these efforts was a personal attempt to reconcile my sense of who I essentially was, to the culture in which I was nested. Nothing unusual there. But an unceasing roll-call of personal crises confirmed that something was very clearly wrong with my world. Furthermore, from every quarter, I was being told that the blame was entirely mine – not least because I couldn’t shake off an inclination toward the type of work that no one wanted to pay me for. What spoke to my heart was, realpolitik consistently suggested, an unreasonable course.

Committing to the Mystery

Joining a monastery was not an option – I was an old punker, after all, fiercely distanced from religious exemplars. My twenties passed: a nightmare of discontent. Then, around the cusp of my thirties, frolicking by then with the cyberspatial avant-garde, and meditating upon the ontology of the world wide web, a serendipitous surge of support left me wide-eyed in astonishment and curiosity. Suddenly, it appeared, the universe had moved toward me. Evidence abounded that I had stumbled into an astoundingly interactive mystery, and the questions it posed invited a closer looksee. But what to do? No one was going to bankroll this excursion. In a furnace of criticism, anguish and concern from friends and family, and not a little nervous myself, I decided to throw economic caution to the winds once and for all and commit to the whodunnit. Going walkabout not long thereafter was simply a continuing, if the most radical step I had taken yet, in exploring David Bohm’s sage counsel: “Take a coherent approach to reality and reality takes a coherent approach to you.”

I was, as you might expect, not a little intimidated by the prospect of sashaying forth, without a safety net, into the wildlands of houselessness (not least because to be homeless in America is to be a profit target). But I sensed I had reached the borders of a 'premature closing of an account with reality,' as William James describes it, and I was keenly aware that if a coherent personal and cultural territory did indeed lie beyond, it would reveal itself only to an authentic, full-blown commitment to the Real, wherever it carried me. So I girded my loins and off I dutifully toddled, centless, sniffing, curious about how the Universe would respond.

Walking toward the Real

Life, already fascinating, became more so once I literally stepped out the door one sunsplashed afternoon - and kept on walking. Radically shedding the skin of a dominant cultural epistemology, I found myself suddenly loosened from the omnipotent demands of industrial living. Freed from the synthetic clutches of economic time, for one, I was free to explore cracks in the ontological sidewalk, so to speak, to surf a serendipitous wavelength of experience that exists, I found, out of view of the modern consensus of reality.

This countercultural stepping ‘away from’ was an aesthetics of disappearance only in so far as it was an aesthetics of reappearance. As the inherited forms of my understanding unraveled, I found myself stepping not so much into an alternate dimension, as toward the current dimension alternately perceived – this world ‘rightly seen’. This was no simple shift in attitude: the revelation was fueled in the literal immanence of actually living an alternative, testing it, making the understandings and skills befitting an alternative my own, holding them to the purifying fires of native, hands-on experience. What is Real? What is authentic health and where is it found? What might a world look like when Mammon holds no sway? What happens when the natural as distinct from the synthetic reasserts itself as the defining experiential touchstone? How might a culture based fundamentally on an aesthetic of sharing, work or not work? How can I take no thought of the morrow and meet my own long term needs and the needs of the world of which I am a part? I walked solidly for almost two years. Settled a while. Walked a couple more years. Began settling in. And all the while, I was led, inexorably, toward the garden.

It was a trajectory demanding, yes, a modicum of chutzpah, but no superman I. Nor were impeccable moral credentials a prerequisite. I learned early on that shaking off the false accretions of a dominant epistemological paradigm is nothing other than shaking off our individual, small selves, and the destruction and remaking of a willful soul in the image of the Real is very often not pretty to experience or witness. Such is the apocalyptic-metamorphic nature of ‘healing crises’.

Paradise within and without

These days, I remain home and I garden. Not that I perceive there was ever a fracture between my life as a walker and my life as a gardener. The transition was seamless: the two forms lie on precisely the same arc. As I walked toward the Real, toward a truer sense of myself and my world, so in the very same breath I literally walked myself into the landscape. Tending to my own salvation, then, was always destined to be an ecological act, an analagous balancing of inner and outer experience, the communion of two journeys as one. Paradise within and without, one and the same world. This, then, is the essence of what 'paradise gardening' can gift us, a dynamic pathway into the literal rebirth of Eden here and now, the integrative nexus where the deepest needs of self and the world meet in Beauty. As Scott Russell Saunders describes it:

"It has taken me half a lifetime of searching to realize that the likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground. I mean the land itself, with its creeks and rivers, its weather, seasons, stone outcroppings, and all the plants and animals that share it. I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one; I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place. In belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, an at-homeness, a knitting of self and world. This condition of clarity and focus, this being fully present, is akin to what Buddhists call mindfulness, what Christian contemplatives refer to as recollection, what Quakers call centering down."