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Got Snot? Part II. Exiting the whole Shebang.
“Could it be that even now our
universe is in a cocoon it has spun for itself, is undergoing complete
metamorphosis and will soon emerge as something unpredictably different? “ –
John Moriarty. “A subtle conversation. Ah! That is
the true Garden of Eden!” - Ali Ben Ali. One evening in early
February I noticed a brief, piercing pain in my throat. ‘Hmm…’ I thought.
‘Suspicious. I’ll have to get to the immuno-stimulants.’ Returning home late,
I gave the apothecary chest a miss and fell into bed, waking the following
morning to a litany of symptoms: depressed, a pea-soup of a brain fog, my
body hurting, a throbbing headache, no appetite and, emphatically, my lungs
sorely sick – indeed, I couldn’t ever recall a respiratory decline as fierce
and sudden. As I dutifully called friends to cancel appointments for the next
few days, I was told I sounded dreadful. “Yup, sick as a dawg,” I croaked.
And yet, despite my mental and physical disarray and my worries about what
was obviously an uncommonly virulent infection, I was also strikingly aware
of a mysterious sense of wholeness tempering my discomfort. As I hung up the
phone and slowly, groggily began clearing the decks, the subtle and complex
depths of this felt contradiction deepened. Cleaning house, putting new sheets
on the bed, reclaiming my hot water bottle, gathering up my papers, sweeping
the floor, collecting my tea-making tools, lifting gallon jars of herbs from
my shelves and carefully assembling them in the center of my tiny living
room, I became increasingly aware that this pedestrian sequence, without any
conscious invocation on my part, was assuming a rare and mysterious radiance.
Below the surface of my thinking mind, this particular act of medicine-making
was being elevated above its pragmatic, functionalist confines to another
level of presence and possibility. The moment was becoming luminous. Beauty
was there. I try to remain
alert to the arduous as a means for seeing things anew and I missed not a
moment savoring the appearance of what Yeats calls ‘eternal beauty wandering
upon her way’. Checking in with myself later, I was clear this gracious gift
of receptivity had little to do with any specific, deliberate personal
intention or preference on my part relating to the ‘tea ceremony’ I was
composing. I wasn’t consciously attempting to enact an inward exploration.
Inside and outside my home, I am fundamentally unchurched. I don’t ‘do
ritual’. Nonetheless, I was acutely aware as I stumbled foggily around my
trailer that what felt powerfully and palpably like genuine ritual was
emerging spontaneously out of the occasion itself. As I further pondered the
experience in its wake, the words of poet-philosopher John O’Donohue
resonated with what had unfolded for me: “What you encounter, recognize or
discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of
the ancient cultures practiced carefully rituals of approach. An encounter of
depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation and often involved a
carefully phased journey of approach. Attention, respect and worthiness
belonged to the event of nearing and disclosure…The hidden heart of beauty
offers itself only when it is approached in a rhythm worthy of its trust and
showing.” So then, my physical
and psychic distress notwithstanding, as I moved around my trailer and garden
gathering medicines I felt palpably supported in a great shelter of embrace,
woven through with a sense of immense calm, gratitude and celebration. Yes,
of course, my impression The British Columbia-based
ethno-botanist Nancy Turner reports the indigenous understanding that ‘all is
one’: “mirrors but is even more comprehensive than the concept of ecology,”
taking in “the interconnectedness of everything around us, cultural and
ecological, past and future, and the profound implications of these
linkages and relationships,” [my
itals]. The holism intrinsic to this understanding transcends the
epistemologies (ways of knowing) of scientific orthodoxy, for one, because it
mirrors an experience of Nature in thinking that is not detached from the
heart, incorporating a felt connection to things, one in which we feel the world from within – a ‘non-empirical
subjectivity’ long denied in the name of ‘scientific objectivity’, for
example. (Then again, times may be changing. Theoretical astrophysicist Piet
Hut, picking up where Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle leaves off, very
recently stated, “We have painted ourselves in a
corner, scientifically, by describing the whole world in objective terms, and
finding less and less room for ourselves to stand on. We are now reaching the limits of a
purely objective treatment. In various areas of science, from quantum
mechanics to neuroscience and robotics, the pole of subjective experience can
no longer be neglected.") Put another way, where our ability to
genuinely know anything depends upon our ability to come into relationship
with it, an active, intensely-felt kinship with the Other becomes integral to
an authentic experience and understanding of the world around us. That we should even
feel the need to clarify a profundity as central to our humanity as this,
suggests how greatly our ways of knowing have become estranged from the
circle of friendship at the heart of creation – from what the Stoics referred
to as sumpatheia ton hollon, a
‘universal sympathy connecting all things.’ In this regard, indigenous voices
are not alone in reporting that a sense of kinship or ‘oneness’ is not only
an entirely valid experience of the world as it truly is, but that the ability
to live well that the loss of this experience in our lives denies us can be
recovered if we commit to deepening and intensifying a heartfelt relationship
with the one living field of diversity immediately about us. Where might such a
commitment begin? We find hints perhaps in the original, root etymology of
the word ecology deriving from
the Greek, oikos, meaning not
‘earth’ but ‘home’. The distinction is crucial, not least because the
semantic drift appears to mirror an actual cultural point of departure and,
now, return, suggesting that a refined ecological sensibility is not a
function of a generic ‘earth science’, nor is it to be found in an amorphous
‘environmentalism’ devoid of a sense of belonging which typifies an
intellectual love of the earth without feeling an emotional connection:
rather, it is unearthed in the deeply-felt, intensely personalized,
particularized intimacy of individual home-making. Indigenous
experience has, of course, always been aligned to this integrative nexus of
being. As Denise Turner observes: “First Nations spiritual life is completely
tied to territory, to their home places.” For indigenous peoples in other
words, an experience of ‘home’ is indistinguishable from a fully-engaged
ecological conscience - one typically characterized by what anthropologists
have identified as an ‘ethic of reciprocity’ and ‘contingent proprietorship’.
Simply put, where an
‘ethic of reciprocity’ acknowledges the mutual dependence of everything
within an ecological system with the result that humans are seen as occupying
a complementary as distinct from dominant role, the practice of ‘contingent
proprietorship’ embodies this kincentric worldview within formalized social
and ceremonial structures. For example, in so far as indigenous people did ‘own’
land in the Pacific Northwest, ownership was not perceived in the European
legal sense of land ownership. Rather, a home territory’s most productive
sites were identified with families or individual owners who had the right to
harvest and to control the harvest of other people there. Crucially, however,
such rights came with a binding obligation to tend to the needs of the clan
or community by sharing with them, and to look after the land’s interest and
the interests of future generations of people and other life forms. Using
storytelling, teaching and ceremony (such as the “first salmon” ceremony or
“potlatch” of many Pacific-Northwestern groups) these rights and obligations
were constantly reinforced, inviting a sense of proportion in how people saw,
felt and acted. Respectful human attitudes towards local resources encouraged
balanced, responsible use and an imperative of restraint - as the
Nuu-Chah-Nulth’s Roy Haiyupis observes, “The idea and practices of
over-exploitation are deplorable to our people. The practice is outside our
realm of values.” Furthermore,
contradicting a century of anthropological orthodoxy, recent research reveals
that “First Nations peoples actively managed those resources through
strategies more commonly considered as ‘horticultural.’ It was these
‘anthropogenic’ or ‘humanized’ landscapes that Europeans first encountered
and mistook as ‘natural.’ ” Such habitats not only supported an astoundingly
dense and long-lived variety of human cultural forms – one distinct language
or dialect per watershed seems to be about the going rate in the PNW as far
as I can make out - but are consistently recognized as being more productive
and more biologically diverse
than ecosystems without an evident human presence. Some voices, not unwise, suggest
that such bio-cultural paradigms - upheld by a lifestyle ethic of ‘pragmatic
reverence’ as Turner describes it - hold foundational lessons for all of us,
wherever we live. Which is all very
well, but how does the coevolving complex of a society embedded in that
society’s sustaining ecosystem emerge from the dense complexity of individual
experience? Specifically, where
and when does an ecological conscience disclose itself to a 21st
century ‘white man’ homemaking in the suburbs surrounding the Gateway Mall?
My experience is that it emerges in relatedness to particulars, sculpted by
the seasons. I am discovering that it takes years to bring a
mind and life home. My credentials entering the garden some 10-12 years ago
were those of a quintessentially ‘left-brained’ city-dweller. A thoroughly
modern man with a fiercely unsettled mind, I had no prior gardening
experience, and little apparent affinity for the greenworld. I have also,
admittedly, consistently felt like a pretender in the garden in the intervening
years, painfully aware of a perceived shortfall in my sensitivity to plants.
Yes, I always believed in the ability to ‘connect’ with the natural world in
heartfelt attentiveness and I often witnessed such ready affinity in the
plant-geeks I move among, but the capacity seemed largely beyond me. Instead,
for the most part, I have struggled, “sensible of a certain
doubleness…however intense my experience,” as Thoreau’s Walden describes the anesthetized heart of abstraction,
“…not wholly involved in Nature… sharing no experience, but taking note of
it…living a kind of fiction.” And during all this, there continued the slow,
simple persistence of growing up plants where I was able, and the extravagant
beauty of gardens blossoming under my gaze. To this day, I note
that the measure of my resistance to engaging with the Garden on any morning
is largely an index of how ‘unsettled’ I am. When my mind is turbulent, I
notice a sympathetic reflex to move toward ‘noise’, to run from my dis-ease
by turning toward some resonant cacophony of distraction – a visit to
friends, say, or the library, or the radio. On such occasions, I am acutely
aware that if I wish to begin recovering the shelter of tranquility which
reclaims and calms me, I must turn from the pull of such diversions,
relocating my attention toward the stark, polished echo-mirror of my unrest,
the still, shy, quiet presence of my garden. This conscious effort to relate
sincerely to the Real is surely “difficult because it is excellent.” (Spinoza). Many years ago I
recall encountering an esoteric text on Tibetan psychiatry which recommended
a first step for helping the mentally ill: house them somewhere beautiful and
feed them good food. Springfield, OR, isn’t the Himalayas, but it’s a
prescription that works for me. No matter the cognitive dissonance I wake to,
I always feel healthier for days in my garden, eating fresh, home-harvested
food. I am acutely conscious of the relationship between the quality of each
meal and my mental health. Indeed, my own lifelong, pill-shirking efforts to
live with mental illness suggests that consciously mastering these fires -
dousing the fundamental realities of fate seems not to be an option -
requires that I move without stopping toward grounding my life in as Paradisal
a context as I am able. In other words, I find myself called toward a life in
which my sufferings and struggles are actively, steadily, cumulatively
sublimated in the intricate harmony of a life attuned to ever deeper levels
of naturalness and the foundational tranquility which makes its home there.
That the impulse should find its fullest expression as, literally,
Paradise-with-a-home-address is, it is now clear to me, simply the natural
order of things, that living threshold where the harmony of Nature and my own
life meets upon a shared pathway toward ever more mutual rhythm and symmetry.
Only superficially,
then, does ‘home-making’ refer to refining our external attachment to people,
place and things, and the broad array of technes supporting the outer forms
of settling in. Ultimately, homemaking amounts to accepting a profound
invitation to explore the most vital coherence of our senses and thoughts in
congruence with the embrace of Nature, striving for a depth where the form of
our emerging growth is brought into rhythm with the concealed order of
creation. It is, in other words, an invitation to friendship with our own
essential nature. Such is the ground of primal affection mediated by Beauty.
“The experience of the beautiful,” as Hans-Georg Gadamer describes it, “is
the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things.” Which is easier said
than done, of course! You all know the cliché: life
can only be lived in the here and now. And as countless narratives, from
Dogen’s Shobogenzo to Eckhart
Tolle’s The Power of Now,
confirm, the subtleties of refining our awareness toward the locus of our present
life and our present hour, are not without their challenges. This
explains much of the specific attraction of Buddhism to contemporary
Westerners, a tried-and-tested path emphasizing no-nonsense techniques for
accessing the presentness of life where, in contrast, no matter the rich
contemplative motherlode sustained by their quieter voices, the gravity
of ‘prophetic faiths’ leans
toward emphasizing a sense of the holiness of the ought, the pull of the way things could be and should be
but as yet are not. The strengths of both approaches complement one another,
perhaps. About the nature of
the now in the ‘here and now’ –
its teleology included - we are awash in counsel. About the nature of the here,
a good deal less so. The oversight
is not at all surprising. Hardly anyone seems to understand Marshall
McLuhan’s point that a medium is not a neutral conduit of transmission that
has little or no impact on the content of communication. One glance at the
global reach of all major schools of thought devoted to making sense of the
pulse of existence – whether scientific, religious or otherwise – clearly
reveals a style of thinking that is inherently portable, a medium available
to communities of recognition everywhere. Quantum mechanics in the Arctic
Circle? World-Christianity in South-Central? Surrealism in Singapore?
Vipassana in Vegas? No problemo, friend. Have we got the lowdown, tools and
support package for you, here, wherever you are.
This is the point.
What of that part of the sum of psychological and material reality which
simply isn’t portable? What, for example, of gnosis utterly inseparable from
a slow, sustained experience of a particularized habitat? It may seem obvious
to say so, but my here, here,
isn’t your here, there. When
earth-attentive cultures assert that ‘wisdom sits in places’, they are
claiming that an experience of the world and existence as we may fully
participate in it, is not only sustained by an attunement to a particularized locale, but is specific to that place, too. Root and branch are in dynamic
interplay in a single helix of presence. This is a categorically not an
epistemology lending itself to ‘transfer-mediums’ such as sermons, books,
scientific congresses, evangelical outreach, words sent from my computer
screen ‘here/there’ to yours ‘there/here’ or, for that matter, transmission
from roshi to rishi. No matter how breathtakingly sophisticated the
ontological depth and reach of their most refined iterations, styles of
thought or non-thought which have simply forsaken their connection with the
particularized here, rule human culture, globally, and everything following
blindly in their wake – from our diets to our democratic processes to our
religious practices to our sense of personal and collective identity - is
now, in essence, ‘unhinged.’ This
begs the question: if wisdom indeed sits in places, are ‘wisdom traditions’
estranged from a sense-of-place but half-wise? Putting further flesh on the
religious word, if the supreme
personal destiny which awaits us balances the path inwards with the path
outwards, may we not safely deduce that where we are called to live the illuminated life matters
wholeheartedly? What implications arise from
enlarging our understanding of individual and communal religious experience
in this light? And what, potentially, is the shape of a Covenant in which the human community embraces a dynamic,
reciprocal relationship with the habitat of which we are an integral part? At one level the
Paradise gardening movement is aimed directly at questions such as these
because it dares to mount a challenge to the whole sensory-intellectual
tool-kit of the unhinged modern mind and the world it validates - a
perceptual contractedness, an all-encompassing enchantment, an existential
apostasy we co-operate unconsciously with, hypnotically with, and which we
maintain with immense energy. If William Blake is indeed correct when he
insists that what ails us is, “the Fall into Division”, a fracture between
external realities and our inner life, between visible and invisible worlds,
between the shell of our condition and the meaningfulness loaded into it,
then in mythopoeic terms the state in which we live is one in which, as Rilke
describes it, ‘the gods have withdrawn.’ If, then, reality is
with us in ways we haven't allowed for, in depths of ourselves we haven't
often come into, then what? Admittedly, when the Pause Button gets pressed
for the vast majority of us, an honest assessment of our condition typically
finds us in condition and surroundings not as idyllic as we might wish for.
My vision of Paradise-on-Earth involved a small, shy life, drawing water and
swinging an axe in service to a stove high up in the headwaters of a
sparsely-populated river valley, deep in the Coast Range, a throng of
children and their mother at my side and not, as it happens, confronting the
radical truth of my aloneness, three blocks off an I-5 exit, encircled by
suburbs and the permanent night-sky glow of the Gateway mall. I chose to set up
home here during an especially bleak stretch of mid-winter weather, moving
into a leaking, vermin-infested, un-insulated, battered RV parked upon a sea
of quackgrass orbited by piles of junk. The last vestiges of my reproductive
health were crashing in tatters about me, the bitter, weeping legacy of a
blameless childhood trauma, and I was over two years into a crippling spine
injury which showed little sign of relenting. Still in chronic pain,
partially paralyzed, hunched over and stumbling, I gardened on my hands and
knees between long, bedridden stretches. It was an act of home-making
heralding a free-fall into an utterly ferocious dark night of the soul. Paradise seemed a very long way away through it
all though, as Wendy Johnson, the senior Buddhist gardener on American shores notes, I was fecund
soil in the making. “Tangible paradise,” she says, “depends on beginner’s
mind, on a broken heart, and on the living earth on which we stand.” In a certain sense,
there can be no shaking off the fetters that bind us without an experience of
loss, the room made for something new, when what we have long deemed to be
solid and important falls, when the sustaining touchstones of our old
identities come crashing down, when we surrender the jealous possession of
the life we know and understand. The old wine is discarded along with the
wine-skin. To experience the totality of our reality being remade in the
image of wholeness can be utterly devastating in the immensity of acceptance
asked of us. As poet-philosopher John O’Donohue describes it, this disordered
and unpredictable transition toward deep health, “leads you back to the
garden, which is the archetypal image of lovemaking, intimacy and fertility,
but always through another garden – Gethsemane.” It is no small
matter to suffer and survive the difficulty, danger and turmoil of a
trajectory which changes the blood as well as the mind. We can expect
trouble, the necessary turbulence standing between us and our destiny, the pregnant
disorder that both heralds an end and signals a new beginning. Not one to
understate the shape of a transition in which lives are turned upside down as
well as inside out, the Irish gardener John Moriarty observes: “There was
something I knew: open the door wide enough to let in God and you've opened
it wide enough to let in the Great Malice or the Great Adversary; open the
door wide enough to let in heaven and you've opened it wide enough to let in
hell; open the door wide enough to let in the light and you've opened the
door wide enough to let in the dark; open the door wide enough to let in
great health and you've opened it wide enough to let in great illness; open
the door wide enough to let in great sanity and you've opened it wide enough
to let in great insanity”, a sentiment echoed by the Buddhist contemplative,
Stephen Bachelor: “Awakening, freedom and sanity are only intelligible in the
context of confusion, constriction, violence and chaos.” Upon this disturbing
threshold, I am reminded of Gandhi’s observation that the essential teaching
of all authentic wisdom or ‘awakening’ traditions is an awareness of what it
is to live without fear – as depicted, for example, in ancient iconographic
portrayals of the Buddha, the Christ and the Hindu deity Shiva, whose hands
are commonly shown raised in the outward-palm-facing abhaya mudra, the supreme, divine gesture meaning ‘do not be
afraid.’ It bears noting that
all the great world traditions which emerged during the historical period
which the German philosopher Karl Jaspers named the
Axial Age, grew up in the context of endemic violence and warfare. And
no matter the psychosis and brutality subsequently demonstrated by wayward
‘traditions of religiosity’ themselves, what the
original Axial sages created was, the religious interpreter Karen Armstrong
has observed, “a spiritual technology that utilized natural human energies to
counter this aggression...The fact that they all came up with such profoundly
similar solutions by so many different routes suggest that they had indeed
discovered something important about the way human beings worked.” In this regard, the
advanced insights of contemporary voices confirm the continuing relevance of
spiritual genius to the realpolitik of our age. “It would be a mistake to
approach violence with any simple idea of getting rid of it, “ notes Thomas
Moore. “Chances are, if we try to eradicate our violence, we will also cut
ourselves off from the deep power that sustains creative life. Besides,
psychoanalysis teaches, repression never accomplishes what we want. The
repressed always returns in monstrous form.” Only think of Hydra, originally
a snake with a single head. Our challenge, the sages insist, properly lies
not in inhibiting violence, but in transmuting it. What do they mean?
The word violence is derived
from the Latin word vis
(“force”) which, in turn is derived from the Indo-European word wei, or “vital force”, a root etymology supporting the
deep insight that in violence the thrust of life is making itself visible. In
the inimitable delivery of a snarling Johnny Rotten, “Anger is an energy.”
Punk rock is, however, stating nothing new under the sun. Moore, again:
“Renaissance doctors placed both anger and the life force under the aegis of
one god, Mars…Mars is infinitely greater than personal expression of
anger…Creative and destructive, he is life itself poised for struggle…All
people…have an explosive force ready within them to be unleashed into the
world…When we allow ourselves to exist fully and truly, we sting the world with our vision and challenge it with
our own ways of being…Simply being oneself – letting one’s individuality and
unique gifts come forth is a manifestation of Mars…When Mars is overlooked
and undervalued he is forced to appear in fetish and violent behavior…I
suspect that anger and its expression are only a route into the force of life that has become attenuated and difficult
for people to feel in modern society…‘Repression of the life force’ is a
diagnosis I believe would fit most of the emotional problems people present
in therapy.” Rough as this sketch
may be, what Moore has seen, others have also seen. In the visionary genius
of William Blake, “War is energy Enslav’d.” To the American philosopher N.O.
Brown, ‘Make love, not war,’ won’t do because they are the same thing. “Peace
lies in finding the true war. Find the true fire; of which the fires of war
are a Satanic parody…War is war perverted. The problem is not war but the
perversion. And the perversion is a repression.” (LB X) As
Blake and Milton perceive it, “corporeal war” is the lowest form of violence,
the anti-Christ, the demonic parody, the death decreed to those who run away
from the true battle of learning to love the fire, the sacramental fire of
transmutation. “The thing then,” Brown concludes, “is not to abolish war but
to find the true war.” Look carefully
enough and you will find Brown’s transmutation imperative informing the core
teaching and practices of every authentic wisdom tradition, Axial or
otherwise, all of which must surely have drawn their original appeal, in
part, from a need to communally support the intense and sometimes desolate
psychic territory involved in consciously and skillfully transfiguring natural
human energies into their most
refined, life-affirming iterations. Consider the purifying fires involved in
the agonizing inner struggle to accept or forgive, or surrender what we most
love, for example, an unfolding in which the painful obstructions of our
fears, the admitting of the vis
or violence of our own hearts, gradually yields to the transformative thrust
of Life, to the innate and ultimately tranquil integrity of “The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,”
(Dylan Thomas) passing through us. What the sages have always
understood, of course, is that the refinement of such consciously-contained
suffering births a force for transfiguration greater than any political,
economic or media power and, furthermore, that any effort to deal with the
outer socio-political ancien regime without transmuting our own, individual inner ancien regimes in this manner is a course forever condemned to
sewing more darkness, more violence, and more of the literalism of war into
our own worlds, no matter how enthusiastic, engaged or long-lived our efforts
to shape an ideal society may be. It is a simple
enough equation, echoed by today’s psycho-therapeutic avant-garde. Where
‘religious’ psyche-technes such as devotional or meditation practices are
intended to cultivate ‘emptiness’, ‘secular’ disciplines such as
psychoanalysis aim for ‘the absence of neurosis’, “which is essentially an
interfering with the unfolding of life and the desires of the deep soul,”
notes Thomas Moore, “…nothing more than anxious attempts to prevent life from
happening.” From both religious and secular perspectives then, the
complementary intent is to recognize our defensiveness and address
‘repression of the life force’ in ways adequate to the task of birthing a
higher sanity. Awakening to the Real is never therefore a dull, repetitious
flatland of pacific mediocrity or predictability, a suppression of life in
whatever form. Precisely the antithesis. As Tibetan Buddhist Robert Thurman
explains it, “Enlightenment is not a simplified state. Not at all. It is the
supreme tolerance of cognitive dissonance,” and O’Donohue: “Real power has
nothing to do with force, control, status, or money. Real power is the
persistent courage to be at ease with what is unfinished.” This, then, is the
fierce, animating intensity informing authentic peacemaking. In the very same
act as allowing ourselves to exist fully and truly in context, by entering
the fray with our total reality, by fully risking living in meaningful ways,
by committing to a destination where experience comes alive to its truest
individual depth and destiny, we honor the supreme, passionate, creative
impulse of Life itself moving through us. Here, and only here, is Mars
appeased, and the violence of literalism undone. In this light, many
of our culture’s most entrenched assumptions reveal themselves as innately
repressive, a masquerade of ‘absolutes’, ‘knowables’ and ‘guarantees’ driven
by an unspoken but clear desire to hold at bay the troublesome emotions
accompanying an engagement equal to the challenge of a profoundly complex,
teeming, diverse, ever-changing world. Generally, our culturally-constructed
mindsets – and whether the originating sensibility is ‘secular’ or
‘religious’ matters not a whit in this regard - promise the control of
explanations and answers and the insistence, explicit or implicit, that the
world will and must conform to those constructions. (“Ours is the way because it is the way.”) We make the profound error of mistaking
the map for the territory, rational analysis for understanding, singularity
of vision for wholeness of being, and comfortable thinking for clarity of
thought - as though wisdom precludes holding more than one view
simultaneously. “The daily calculating mind works in a binary way,” observes
Richard Rohr. “Either-or thinking gives one a sense of control. The small
mind works by comparison and judgment; the great mind works by synthesizing
and suffering with alternative truths. The ego cannot stand this suffering,
and that is exactly why it is so hard for religion and individuals to grow
up.” And so, in our
small-mindedness, we subscribe to views, beliefs, ideologies, creeds, faiths
or formulas, take your pick, that spare us the anxieties of a constantly
evolving sense of self, and the accountability for our own participation in
meaning-making that keeping the eye of insight open, implies. In this way, we
pull an artificial barrier around ourselves, reducing the expansive
permissions of life to the limits of a narrow and unyielding bandwidth of
experience, snubbing our inner faithfulness and the very possibilities and
responsibilities that would free us into the promise and fulfillment of a
life fully engaged with the Real. The fierceness with
which we are inclined to defend a particular flavor of fixity tends, of
course, to be a measure of our need to self-signify and self-validate where
our foundational significance is shaky. In this regard, our immediate
challenge arises not in embracing alternative cultures, creeds, races,
religions, species and so forth – superficial attributes, in a sense – but in
the struggle for inclusiveness in our inner lives, in our own intensely
personalized efforts to engage with life’s ‘bitter’ side, its rich paradoxes,
its genuine dilemmas, struggles, imperfections, doubts, failures, agonies,
confusions and curveballs. Creation is itself an infinitude of diversity and
in denying its overarching inclusiveness, inner as well as outer, its
darkness as well as light, we cut ourselves off from a vast portion of life.
Specifically, when we demonize, push away or deny our own inner ailments,
divisions, contradictions and pain, we project them upon the world,
generating division, despair and discord. And, of course, in the absence of
‘outsiders’ to scapegoat, our communities project division upon themselves.
In both instances, we ourselves become messengers of the devil we would
overcome. In the language of archetypal psychology: “Neurosis is always a
substitute for legitimate suffering.” (Jung.) It needs be said
that simply because whole populations are estranged, together, from an
intimacy with the Ground of life fully lived, does not make our experience of
Exile any less true. We live in the shadow of an immense epistemological
grief, a deep loneliness “which derives in large part,” O’Donohue observes,
“from the intense desire to avoid suffering and pain, and the repudiation of
commitment.” Denial, of course, is another word for this and, “The capacity
to deny,” in the words of James Hillman, “to remain innocent, to use belief
as a protection against sophistication of every sort – intellectual,
aesthetic, moral, psychological – keeps the American character from
Awakening.” That we remain
unawares, for the most part, of this vast culturally-constructed dark night
of the sleep suggests how far, to varying degrees, most of us lead lives of
dislocation, divorced from a sense of presence in ourselves and the
landscapes we walk upon, exiled from the intimacy of true unity with
ourselves, each other, and creation. Unable to read or decipher this great
lonesomeness, unable to understand it or transfigure it, much of our activity
is unwittingly designed to fill this absence with some kind of forced
presence - with distractions, things, achievements, uppers, downers,
consumerist culture, noise and, for that matter, the excessive drive towards
higher states of religious or scientific consciousness. So much of our
suffering is self-made by responding with the partial satisfactions of
maladaptive human artifice to an entirely natural longing and quest for
meaning, to the honest search for intimacy with that part of us which
secretly sustains and guides our impulses and actions. Lost in the thicket of
diversion, we have lost touch with where our sense of life is most deeply
rooted. We stand remote from ourselves, ghosts in our own lives. The condition
amounts to an immense, tragic neglect of ourselves, one in which we forgo the
unlimited depth of the here and now for a deliberate ‘experiential
homelessness’, a life lived outside itself, or, to paraphrase Kabir, the
‘throwing of intensity elsewhere’ - in an ontological sleight-of-hand our
social constructs are only too willing to encourage. In salvational fantasies
for example (“science…religion…politics…‘Daddy’ will save us”), we subscribe
to consensual assumptions shielding us from today’s deep, rich entanglements
of choice and necessity. In our reliance on hybrid food, we abandon a foundational bio-cultural dynamic to the exigencies of
an overarching economic model expressly engineered to dispossess us of a relationship with the Real.
In the cult of celebrity or personality, we abstain from own life’s great
possibilities and responsibilities by giving over the life-giving spark
within us, our own inner brilliance (or scintilla as the medieval philosophers named it), to someone
else. And so on. And all this because, Wallace Stevens noted with remarkably
succinct perspicacity, “the way through the world is more difficult to find
than the way beyond it.” As the floods of
change in our world continue to rise, so do the complexities and
uncertainties reinforcing the tendency for individual positions to polarize
around cultural extremes of thought and belief, fleeing precisely that
awkward point of tension where the transformational alchemy of Awakening
occurs. “A single idea, a fixed principle, a unifying theory or a blind
belief,” notes Michael Meade, “becomes preferable to the growing tension of opposing forces and
conflicting opinions…As things are taken to extremes, people run out of room,
become inflexible, dig in, and hold on tight. Any issue considered must
quickly become divided into opposing attitudes with one side claiming to be
completely right and the other having to be utterly wrong. The tendency to
reduce the complexities of life and insist upon an absolute way of seeing
things becomes stronger.” And as the reality of a culture coming unstuck in
the stormy seas of dissolution increasingly departs from our fixed notions
about the way things are or should be, a riot of events sweeps our perished certainties
toward a boneyard of broken assumptions and, potentially, the abiding
temptations of chilliastic madness, millennial follies or ‘the war of all against
all’ that Rudolph Steiner predicted could be a possible end for the 20th
century. The danger, of
course, is real, in that efforts to ‘liberate’ the distraught personality of
its personal anxieties with no transcendent purpose in view is the bread-and-butter
stuff of political missions which, as Arthur Koestler grimly observes,
continue to incite “the holocausts resulting from self-transcending devotion
to collectively shared belief systems.” While Theodore Roszak astutely
recognizes such behavior amounts, essentially, to “relieving the tormented
ego at the expense of murdering the spirit”, perhaps we have finally reached
a fork in the evolutionary road where murder dressed up in the name of a
social contract, whether ‘political’ and/or ‘religious’, is a reflex we are
now called to transmute. “As I have said,” George Steiner offers, “Israel,
like all other nations has to torture to survive. But is even survival a
justification?” The answer happens to be blindingly obvious to me. But if not
torture, what? Curb-recycling will obviously not suffice. “The question then
arises,” states Robert Sardello, “if it becomes possible to accept that
Sophia is behind all this change in the world, and that inviting her out of
exile seems to be accompanied by such uncomfortable results, is it not better
to keep her confined?” Funny you should ask, because where and when so very
much of our activity and attention remains unhinged from the here and now,
the upshots certainly aren’t. One sure glance at our world makes it plainly
clear that favoring comfort over the demands of conscience, avoidance rather
than commitment, ontological ‘tourism’ of whatever form in place of the diligence of tenure, and the reified in place of the real, has
propelled us not only to a profoundly torn, diminished and dismal self-image
but, as our scientific Cassandras daily confirm, an unprecedented extinction
event. Not only is the repression of consequence doomed to defeat but, as Thomas Berry notes, “the desolation of the Earth is becoming the destiny of the
human.” William Irwin Thompson is equally penetrating around
the subject of choice and consequence: “When we cannot create our destiny
through enlightenment, our fate is inflicted upon us through ignorance.”
Invited or not, Jung noted, the gods will be present. But to suppose that the
inevitable surge of natural and manufactured entropies accompanying the great
tide of awakening now rising among us (‘the cascade of accumulating
differences’ that in chaos dynamical theory leads to a new ‘catastrophe
bifurcation’) amounts to one and the same as a Dark Age in the making, is to
succumb to a fundamental failure of the imagination – and one which we simply
cannot afford. What we are now encountering is not the End of the Given the seeming smallness of our individual
trajectories in the face of such collective immensities, the messiness
naturally implicit in reorienting ourselves to a shifting horizon, and the
epic personal challenge a genuine response to this mystery implies, is it any
wonder the routine of an unlived life holds so many of us in its predictable
yet fatal thrall? We are paralyzed, in a sense, not only by the inertia of a
high culture invested in the ‘dream of realism’, but, consciously or not, by the threat of a personal salvation as
apocalyptic as the doom that hounds us. Yes, falling into the inner-outer
spectrum of a paradigm shift is indeed a fearful thing, “for beauty,” Rilke reminds us, “is nothing but the
beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so
awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is
terrifying.” We may, however, safely assume that no matter how
daunting our personal and collective circumstances appear in the face of such
a transition, no matter how baffling or frightening this metamorphosis
proves, a coherent response is nonetheless available to every one of us,
wherever we live, in whichever culture or creed we have called our own. We
can rest wholeheartedly in this assurance because, as ‘luck’ would have it,
we and the ground upon which we individually stand is not only that locus
where the here and now meet, it is also where our wellbeing and that of our
world finds its truest common ground, what we have primary access to, and
what we can do something about. Ultimately, Paradise-with-a-home-address is
simply a way of living in and with reality that enables it to work with us,
where we stand with what we have to hand. We turn back, as upon a hinge,
towards the Source of our foundational wellbeing. Admittedly, if the
makings of an Arcadian wonderland appear far removed from where you’re at
just now, it can be tempting to regard the shortfall as some sort of cosmic faux
pas, unworthy of the true in-situ you, and one best addressed by hauling off the
sofa and shovel to Edenic pastures for a nice, fresh, clean, break. Best
beware the short-cut hustle, however. As the Sages have long observed, the
view through our eyes is precisely a reflection of the state of our souls:
when the beauty of our inner country escapes us, so paradise without is also
in absence. And if the bio-cultural territories we inhabit are unfamiliar to
us, noisy, polluted, fractured, covered up, they are also a remorseless
description of what we have tragically become. When savvy contemplatives
observe that the global ecological crisis is, fundamentally, a global
spiritual crisis, this is what they understand and this, the god of u-haul
rentals cannot fix. As your common,
archetypal-variety gardener might spell it out, ‘hell’ is the ‘heaven’ we
aren’t yet able for. What’s more, arrive too soon in heaven, arrive before we
are ready for it, and it will become our hell - unredeemed nature in us will
make sure of that – and the self-punishment of consciousness going to war on
itself is, I can roundly assure you, no teddy bear’s picnic. (Nietzsche, as
corollary: “In time of peace, the warlike person attacks himself.” And Meade:
“To the ontologically lost male, peace is boring.”) If it is to be secure
then, if it is not to end in calamity, our ascent to Realization must proceed
from a prior and indeed from a simultaneous harrowing of hell, a passage
through healing darkness back into morning. (Nietzsche: “Whoever has built a ‘new heaven’ has found the strength
for it in his own hell.” And Chogyam Trungpa: “The chaos that takes
place in your neurosis is the only home ground that you can build the mandala
of awakening on.") Simply put, shortcuts don’t cut it. Paradise is not a
space we go elsewhere to find, but a space we must clear for ourselves. To soberly accept
our immediate surroundings and circumstances for what they are, the
authenticity of ‘where we’re at,’ (“Tell me the landscape in which you live,
and I will tell you who you are.” – Jose Ortega y Gasset. “I saw them eating
and I knew who they were.” – Khalil Gibran.) is the first and furthest step
we can take along the path to restoring our own lives and that of our world
to an elemental integrity. I am not being facetious when I suggest that it is
only when we fully embrace our place and role in the poverty of a denuded
context that we are paradoxically freed to experience the profound, secret
harmony lying hidden within it. At this turning point, the eco-cultural
challenges we face reveal themselves not as interferences to our deliverance,
not as ‘in-spite-of’ complications, but as initiatory thresholds essential to
restructuring our psyches and refashioning our lives in the image of
wholeness, part of our growth.
As Michael Meade explains, “The conditions in which we find ourselves are the conditions through
which we must find our true
selves.” In a very real sense, the paradise gardener does not simply remake
Eden, here and now, in this very realm of existence, but is herself remade by
the landscape, by the work itself. Ultimately then, psychological and
ecological integration coincide: Paradise is an emergent, co-evolutionary
phenomenon. Crucially, our
trajectory as homemakers is profoundly reinforced when the compass we follow
marries our deepest needs to those of the landscape of which we are a part.
Sightseeing, while agreeably awe-inspiring, barely dips its tootsies in the
Heraclitean riverrun. Rather, we are asked to live the resources and associations of the landscape
upon which we stand. Not to live upon it, but to live it from within. Otherwise, paradoxically, we may be born and live
out an entire life in one location and, in essence, remain surface-dwellers
there, outsiders to the locale and therefore, ultimately, not only to its
depths but our own. For my part, I have found through the years that each
step I take toward supporting my deepest needs for health and sanity has
entailed a corresponding intensification of my engagement with the natural
world, the measure of which is my interrelatedness with the habitat
immediately about me. The conception of ‘survival of the fittest’ is now
re-envisioned, at a deeper more fundamental level, as a foundational
resilience deriving from our ability to integrate with the mutually dependent
processes we are nested within, our ability to ‘fit’ in. There is, I have
also learned, no keener incentive to care reverentially for a plot of earth
than relying upon it to sustain a life deeply through time - and by ‘rely’ I
do not mean yoking the land to the mediated, disembodied imperatives of an
economic eye but, rather, relying upon our immediate surroundings as our
primary, unmediated source of essential everyday necessities, such as food,
medicine and shelter. The essential foundations of our life are united to the
care and wellbeing of our immediate surroundings in a conversation indistinct
from the ‘feedback loops’ essential to co-evolutionary dialog. We recognize consequence and relationship, and
the place of mystery, and build on what we observe. The effort to determine
where, when and how to give and receive so that we and our gardens continue
to flourish, invites us to a sense of proportion in our seeing, feeling and
actions. Our own lives and landscapes thrive or deteriorate depending on our
ability to live reciprocally in ways that simply cannot be lived vicariously.
As Hundertwasser states, “Paradises can only be made with our own hands, with our own creativity in harmony with the true creative
spirit of nature.” However refined our
souls may be when we arrive at the Garden threshold and commit to cross it,
Revelation has its own cadence and will not be rushed. The shelter of new
belonging gathers itself about us only slowly. Subtle presences in a
landscape are discreet and reveal themselves only shyly and indirectly, and
certainly no faster than the clockspeed that Nature’s own patterns, rhythms
and cycles afford. Whereas our gardens are at once profoundly personal and
intimate extensions of our own selves, they are also co-creations, expressing
the character of the place itself. An incommensurable array of biotic and
other influences, far beyond our ken, but inseparable from the harmony of
this symbiotic unfolding, pours forth into our lives. When we return in
this way to the embodied acknowledgement that we are incontrovertibly
creatures of Context, and a co-evolving Universality at that, we yield to
what secular voices call “the irresistible march of evolution”, and the
religious, “the integrity of beauty straining towards goodness and completion.”
Put another way, we ‘go with the flow’, allowing the energy back of Life to
re-orientate us to a destination where experience embraces the totality of
the complex biological and cultural process we call life or, described in
religious vernacular by the gardener John Moriarty, “there comes a day when
we are happy to flow not just from one to another identity but from identity
as such, back into God.” The surprises and ramifications of a life gradually
deepening into this enigma measure out the many years it takes to bring a
mind and life home. “This mystery,” as Rumi-Barks
explains, “gives peace to your longing and makes the road home home.” No matter how
unsettled our minds, sick our bodies, or estranged we may be from the wisdom
of our clay, with the first, small step of surrendering to the larger
influence of natural patterns and rhythms, we begin moving out of our
self-contained limitations, harmonizing the music of our lives to the
‘bodying forth’ as Shakespeare described it, of the universal into ‘a local
habitation and a name.’ This capacity arises from our willingness to risk the
danger of difference by relating genuinely to the particulars of the Real. As we entrust
ourselves to a richer profusion of more natural influences, our lives naturally
assume a deeper authenticity. On the one hand, the Garden does not lie. Where
our minds and, indeed, many of our most cherished, sacred beliefs have
succumbed to epistemological caricatures of reality, the Garden is not in
exile. It rests in the sureness of its own elemental integrity. As a primary
revelatory experience therefore, its truths can be relied upon completely. On
the other hand, the Garden is alive. It creates just as we humans do and as
we share ourselves with it, so it embraces us out into pastures of authentic
promise and possibility. We encounter an Ally lurking behind what people call
‘the real world’, who was waiting for us here, all along. Fundamentally, when
we consciously step toward an integral, co-evolutionary relationship with the
Garden, we do nothing other
than take the full, vital force of an ecosystem by the helping hand, the
genius of the Universe localized into a genii loci, the genius of place. We work with, not against
the world, assimilating our lives to a vast supportive process. Life (or, in
mythopoeic terms, the ‘soul of the world’ or Anima Mundi) in all its hidden fidelity, nearer than the
nearest, rises to meet us. An abundant universe shows its realm. Initially, we all
struggle with the challenge of settling into the genius of place – knowing,
for example, where and how far apart to space plants is a mystery engaged
only with the practice of settling in. Nonetheless our experience,
perceptions and abilities evolve surprisingly quickly to embrace more complex
concerns, such as how to support foundational natural dynamics – cycles of
fertility, for example - in ways that emulate the inherently regenerative
patterns of Nature, of life ongoing. As this co-intelligent dialog picks up,
the accelerating biodiversity of our own gardens and the logarithmic
intensification of life which accompanies the emergence of cascading,
self-supporting synergies within them, lends cumulative impetus to our
efforts. Nature fills in the gaps. ‘To those who have shall be given more.’ It all happens at
once. Sardello again: “Sophia is accompanied by an archetypal helpmate [who]
does not offer stability but functions as one through whom it becomes
possible to enjoy instability and navigate in it, though not to control it.”
In so far as the shredding of sense and meaning in our lives issues from
having abandoned the living world, desolating the earth, desecrating the very
matrix out of which higher states of understanding and expression emerge and
are themselves nourished, every supportive step we take toward restoring the
health and bio-cultural diversity of the living fabric in which we are most
intimately embedded, engenders the regeneration and renewal of paradigms we
need to read meaning into our lives. As ethno-biologist Gary
Paul Nabhan observes, restoring and re-storying the landscape-cultures
which posit, sustain and guide our lives occurs simultaneously. “What are we most
essentially?” asks Theodore Roszak. “Before all else we are meaning-seeking creatures. As fiercely as our flesh needs bread,
our activity in the world needs a justifying purpose…The way forward is
inevitably the way inward.” Pouring our own narrative into root Nature’s,
enfolding our own story within the integral, evolving Story of the Earth and
Humankind, we therefore not only restore the foreground we call history with
its regenerative potential, but the imaginal backdrop essential to providing
this extraordinary adventure in beauty and truth with instructive order. In
this regard, life in the garden is not a mediate ‘allegory’ pointing to the
‘proper business’ of human culture; nor is it a narrative sideline remote or
distinct from our essential destinies. Rather, it is where ‘world-making’
itself finds its truest, literal ground, where the ‘holy, open secret’ as Goethe
called it, of the marriage of our own individual lives to the world occurs in
the native, unifying experience of raising Paradise, the singular integration
of a regenerating totality. Individuation and archetypalization coincide. When our own
autobiographies take on the epic stature of Paradise-making in this way, we
make the transition from the limiting, anxious ground of self-imposed Exile
at precisely that point where our inner resourcefulness graduates into the
larger, inexhaustible resourcefulness of Anima Mundi. In other words, when we embrace the genii loci we ourselves assume a genius beyond our
limitations. We awaken, in a sense, to the greatness of the earth coming
alive in us. And where our lives were previously caged within a severe
censorship of experience, within the meaning-impoverished strictures of a
correspondingly unlived life, we are now set free to romp in a harvest of
consciousness where dimensions of meaningfulness, previously denied us, are
redeemed. We gift ourselves an opportunity to live life to the full. The
disenchantment and disillusion born of ‘the great enmity between daily life
and the great work’ as Rilke sees it, dissolves in a radically altered
conception of ourselves, our primary needs, our place in life, our sense of enduring
purpose. Ultimately then, wholeness is liberation. In accepting an
invitation to let the whole of life into us, “that passage of another will”
to use Thomas Moore’s phrase, we move further toward trusting life’s wisdom
rather than our own. Often, harmonizing the music of our deepest needs and
aspirations to the larger symphony of Life involves surrendering to a destiny
we hadn’t planned or maybe even wished for. Tell me about it. But no matter
where the pilgrimage and privilege of growth carries us, the clearer it
becomes along the way that the striving to bring harmony to our lives is, in
essence, a homing instinct - and one which ultimately requires a deepening
and intensification of our life on earth at that “one good place” (Thomas
Merton) where, Anita Lange observes, “we may become present with ourselves
within the wholeness of the world.” Coming to wholeness
emerges naturally out of what coming to ourselves asks of us. “Living in place is something that takes practice,”
affirms Gary Snyder. “Practice...means doing it, and doing it a lot of times.
There is no substitute for that.” Lange: “The prolonged, earnest practice of
tending growth and harvest finely tunes a particular quality of attention
that enables intimacy with wisdom inherent in the land. With growing
discernment we learn which of our human understandings are in accord with the
cycles of nature; a decisive requisite to being fully at home.” And Wendy
Johnson: “Growing food and plants and preserving the seed and diverse
genetic inheritance of those plants is an ancient human practice or moral
custom. ‘Moral custom’ or what I call ‘moral presence’ is at the root of the
word ‘ethics,’ the study of those principles that govern the conduct of human
life…True moral presence in the garden gives room to experimentation, risk,
and strong lessons from danger and failure.” Our direct, daily, grounded
baptism in the faithful laws of nature and the timeless rituals of birth,
life, death and renewal, the ancient and elemental patterns which sustain nature
and human culture but which carry none of the false burdens of self-conflict,
progressively shape us in an image of the
foundational integrity at the heart of Life. As our intimacy with
the Real deepens through time, so does our experience of relatedness.
Increasingly, as we walk toward the unity between all things, we find
ourselves in the shared territory of common experiential ground. “The waking have one world in common.
Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each to a darkness of his own.” Paradisal perception,
then, embraces an experiential realm where Reality comes to fullness in us
both individually and together. We come in from the grasp of a culture in
which the pale, abstract dimensions of Simulation are taken for ‘objective
realities’, in which the intense transience of a manufactured foreground and
its crippling chains, connections and false priorities hold us captive, at a
distance from life and each other. For all the
eccentricity of my own trajectory, I am not attempting anything that
countless others aren’t also undertaking, many locally, and many of you
around this listserv, who are, in so very many ways, ‘further along’ than me.
Dostoevsky’s suggestion that perhaps the world will be saved by beauty
repeatedly comes to mind among the plants I move among, and the friends and
acquaintances whose passionate and courageous examples are my great
inspirations. In raising Paradise, we homesteaders
and the landscapes we inhabit support and teach each other, with such great
willingness to give and to receive. I recall a puzzled voice approaching me
among the scion wood at the enormous, free, self-organizing, volunteer-driven
Spring
Propagation Fair at LCC this year, no institutional advertising in
evidence. “Who does this?” he asked. “I mean, who are you?” “Oh,” I replied, “We’re just a loose-knit
group of friends and acquaintances who like to do things for free.” Such
bio-cultural mutuality is the
natural territory of homecoming. Whatever language –
secular, religious or otherwise - we are comfortable using to describe a
wordless experience which unites us beyond the differentiation of our own
distinctive and uniquely precious personal and cultural forms, the territory
of homecoming spreads out in the heart-stretching particulars of our own
utterly mundane, messy, imperfect lives. This is no abstract shift. Nor does
any praetorian guard, here or elsewhere, sit between us and the keys to the
Real stuff. To paraphrase Abd-ul-Jabbar Niffari,
“Why do you look for Truth up there? It’s here! Here!” The concrete,
vernacular, humdrum, ordinary, unadorned particulars of a life available only
where we stand, here and now, is the Great Door through which we return to
the ground of Beauty’s unifying embrace. In the words of the Kentucky
farmer-poet, Wendell
Berry, “And the world cannot be discovered by a
journey of miles, no matter how long but only by a spiritual journey, a
journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive
at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.” In workaday terms,
this may involve staggering around an Oregon garden on a chilly winter
morning, gathering fresh roots from medicinal plants - with a healthy, good
ol’ fashioned dose of headachy, squinty-eyed, fuzzy-brained misery thrown
into the symptomatic pot for good measure. Not, however, that my experience
this past February precluded a depth, grandeur and refinement that moved me
to my ecstatic core. Completely
unexpected though this remarkable visitation of grace was, it nevertheless
issued from a deliberate, lengthy approach. The plants I moved toward were
not strangers to me. They were herbal allies I had deliberately introduced to
my garden and which I have now spent years in conversation with. Through the
course of a long engagement, I am becoming familiar with these plants’ unique
ecologies, their distinctive characters, the manner in which they continue to
interrelate with their world and, increasingly, the manner in which their presence
in mine shapes my trajectory through life. Indeed, where my cultural ecology
and those of these plants begin and end I can no longer tell – their and my
patterns of embrace have become deeply intertwined, seamless. The veil which
stood between us has fallen to reveal our wellbeing is interdependent, our
need for one another, entire. And as the roots of these plant allies have
gone down into my garden, so mine have gone down deep along with them. We,
and the modest little demi-Eden where my tent is pitched, are ‘homeys’. I see now that the
shape of my homecoming was destined long before these plants and I found one
another. The emergence from my trailer into the wintry embrace of my garden,
the fall to my knees to brush aside plant debris from the base of the
desiccated, brown foliage marking the earth where the hibernating medicine I
sought lay hidden, marked the grounding of an arc which first catalyzed
almost five decades earlier, high in the sky, on vapor trails crisscrossing
the globe, as a babe-in-arms, a scion of the multinational pharmaceutical
industry – riding a pendulum swing marking the epitome of a ‘homeless’
therapeutic modality. A global education funded by and pledged to that
builded world’s sustaining perspective and imperatives, its source and
continuance, propelled me soon enough to its most reified, non-local summits
- the offshore international financial markets, the leading edge of the
advanced internetworking industry and the mandarin classes of corporation and
state whose raison d’etre I
helped ‘wire’, and then onwards to an engagement with cyberspace’s most
far-flung reaches before I fell through the world-wide-web into the
‘greenness incarnate’ of Noti’s embrace, there to slap off the city grime and
sniff the air. Did you ever catch the Simpson’s 1995 Halloween episode in
which Homer falls through a hole in space-time
into the ‘real world’?
Hilarious. Apt. As John Perry Barlow once remarked to me, of the web, during
its earliest days: “What’s that sucking sound?” Consequences,
consequences, as they say, and Goethe implied, when he claimed there comes a
point where our lives and autobiographies inevitably meet. In returning to
the exquisite bondage of our fate on and with the earth, the sprawling
narratives of our life synthesize in a concrescence of identity-making. In
the homey wisdom of Terry Tempest Williams, “There
is no place to hide, and so we are found.” To come to ground and truly settle
in is to assume the Reckoning of arrival and tenure, the stuff of salvation,
the stuff Integrity
then, is a measure not of a flawless but an integral life, a coming to
wholeness which fully embraces the rich, daily entanglements of life and
ourselves ‘as is’. Oregon poet Bill Stafford expresses this memorably: “In
the imperfect,” he says, “is our paradise.” And to the degree the profound
personalization of ourselves integrates with a particularized habitat - the
fullest, integral expression of a ‘homecoming to wholeness’ - the
co-ordinates we inhabit are no longer true to falsehood. It is here, at this
cornerstone, this immanentized bridge between the ideal and the real, the
Word and the flesh, that “Mercy and truth will meet, justice and peace will
embrace each other, truth will spring up from the ground, and justice will
look down from the heavens.” (Psalms 85, 10 – 11). Thoreau’s dictum takes manifest shape as a matter
of course: “If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations
under them.” Because this realm
of perception and liberating activity exists, literally, beyond the
ecological reach of the mindsets, cosmologies and social forms which largely
dictate what Allen Ginsberg names ‘the official version of reality and
history’, the unfolding Garden Conversation remains invisible to the ‘Expert’
State which, accordingly, attaches little or no significance to it.
Overlooked, it remains disregarded: conceived naively, it appears naïve.
“Hidden enfolded immensities,” Hakim Bey notes, “escape the measuring rod.”
But don’t let the cosmic oversight of the august academies of big media, law,
education, religion, science
or otherwise, fool you,
friends. The sense of import or significance integral to our culture’s
defining ethos is as cockamamie as the distorting mirror from which it
derives – powerful yet unspoken values beholden to an ontologically-hamstrung
version of the nature of the world and existence, an image-driven Spectacle
‘which commands us to be fooled by appearances’. From a deep gardener’s per-spective then, ‘seeing-through’
the levels of reality well-lit by our dominant cultural arbiters not only
confirms the existence of measureless personal and communal potentialities
lurking in wait beyond a world contracted to a shadow of its co-creative
possibilities, but accelerates our subtraction of allegiance from the old
sensibilities and forms which are, as Blake observes, “by reason of narrowed
perception…fix’d into furrows of death.” Where we are headed upon this shore of new
invitation, we may only intuit, but we can be confident, for one, that
‘political economy’ as we have long understood it, is done with. “There is
one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea
whose time has come” (Nation,
15 April, 1943.) Wallace Stevens may not have been far off the prophetic mark
when he proposed an Exeunt Omnes
for almost all our old institutions and epistemologies: Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, Certainly, the sheer
enormity, in its consequences for consciousness and culture, of an emerging
“new intelligence” in league with the Real and, irrevocably, the Truth,
simply transcends foundational axioms and assumptions sustaining current
notions of legitimacy, leadership, strength, power, health and freedom.
Immense pastures of promise and possibility, previously withheld, are now
released to us, where so very many of our current obsessions and ‘intractable
problems’ are simultaneously freed into redundancy. (N.O. Brown: “the real
fight is not the political fight, but to put an end to politics. From
politics to metapolitics,” and Heschel: “…not to reject but surpass civilization.”) If Gary Snyder was indeed
prescient when he once described the challenge ahead of us “as a revolution, not of guns, but of consciousness,
which will be won by seizing the key myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and
ecstasies so that life won't seem worth living unless one is on the
transforming energy's side", then the work of our prophets is now
essentially complete. The fight to fight is lost. And as efforts to
embrace the epiphany of earth loyalty now gather critical momentum, it seems
not premature to claim that no matter the rigidity and recalcitrance of the
old order within and among us, we are already upon an evolving trans-cultural
shift from world economy to ecumene, which will inevitably take on the
incarnation not of a ‘united nation-states’ nor a world church or religion,
but a ‘global ecology of symbiotic consciousness’ - peace-on-earth or,
perhaps more precisely stated, peace ‘on’, ‘of’, ‘with’ and ‘through’ the
earth. Blessed are the peacemakers for they are
inheriting the earth. Blessed, blessed, blessed are they. The origin of the
word dwell is “to dig deep.” In
settling down and settling in, the experience of deep gardeners suggests some
key, initial pointers to keep in mind. Crucially, ‘to be free is nothing: to
become free is everything.’ The territory of homecoming, already spread out
upon the earth, awaits a personal invocation. It will not come by waiting for
it. ‘In order to inherit your freedom, you need to go toward it.’ We cannot
learn to swim and hold on at the same time: there comes a point where we must
brave a dunking. In this regard, we may have consummate faith in the
subversive beauty and profound consolation of Life itself in which, Thoreau
notes: “Nature is as well adapted to our weakness
as to our strength.” My own salutary trajectory, for example, strongly
confirms that serious impairments and the lack of a prior inclination for the
green wavelength, are by no means disqualifications for beginning, or for
learning, to settle in well in time - indeed, that our challenges, falsities
and blunders gift us with the makings of compost crucial to the ongoing,
glorious adventure of raising Paradise. As we might expect,
our first compost pile is the hottest - the initial ‘hump’ our toughest
stretch. I recall well, a decade ago, one of the first occasions I resonated
with the wry aside of transpersonal psychotherapist John Welwood:
“As one spiritual wag put it, ‘Self knowledge is
always bad news,’ at least initially.’ ” A children’s gardening
workshop I helped arrange not only marked one of my earliest, fumbling
horticultural forays, it was also the first occasion I had attempted to ‘work
with’ or ‘teach’ children. On both individual counts I was timid: tag-teamed,
I was scared silly. And that afternoon, when a towering western epistemology
and its corresponding sense of control, identity and self-esteem met the
harmonic bio-cultural chaostrophy of little ones in the garden, the garden
gate swung fully wide open before me and I tasted the bitter, ego-shattering
immensity of inner transformation that would be required of integral
gardening: I simply could not settle in and
continue to be who I was. My falling through
the web, in other words, did not come with the affinity, skills or
heart-stretching propensity for ‘earth-inheritance’ attached. It’s a
shortfall that has been a tough one to swallow. In the decade or so I have
been using phtyo-medicinals, for example, deep herbalists have repeatedly
assured me that ‘a connection with the plant’ informs the true essence of
herbal medicine-making. Others have also suggested that the harvesting of
medicinal herbs is an act appropriately marked with due reverence - and, if
indigenous practice is a model to abide by, properly accompanied by formal
acts of recognition, such as prayer or gift-giving. Frankly, it has been
disconcerting to repeatedly encounter such lofty mantras in the face of what
has so very often felt like my constitutional inability to connect in a
consciously heartfelt manner with the greenworld - in the harvesting of my
medicines, a heady thanking of my own good fortune was typically the high
point I could ‘naturally’ muster. Where others clearly appeared to feed off a heartfelt intimacy with plants, whatever ‘it’ was, I didn’t appear to have it. But here, where I
was most unsettled, I knew best my need for peace. And I held my course,
reconciled to the ignominious and unsolved, slowly and patiently persevering
with an unshakeable conviction in the integrity of this profoundly humbling
trajectory. Rilke: “We must always hold to what is difficult, then that which
still seems to us the most hostile will become what we now trust and find
most faithful.” O’Donohue: “As with all manner of spiritual discipline, we
gain most when we are willing freely to choose what is difficult.” No
journey, they say, is too long when you are coming home. Increasingly,
my efforts to properly inhabit a life keep me home. I am a home-based
nurseryman: my watering wand and I are rarely more than minutes from my
charges for a large part of the year. My daily activities and relationships
reflect this coming to ground, as does, critically, the food I eat. I wonder
if Peter Bishop was alert to the centrality of the Brassicaceae or Cabbage family in Pacific Northwestern
year-round diets when he wrote in The Greening of Psychology: “What
better way to touch the ground than through cabbages.” What’s my
favorite fruit or vegetable? That depends on how my garden grows, and the emerging
peak taste and availability of the day. During June, it’s more than likely
peas, favas, and strawberries, then cherries, sweetening with the heat, the
beginning of the fresh-fruit tsunami; in high summer, sweet-corn minutes from
harvest, and mixed salads dressed with borage and nasturtium flowers; in
mid-winter, keeping-varieties of apples and pears, canned plums and peaches,
and a cornucopia of fresh greens; in January, kales, sweetened by bitter
cold; in February, it’s Brussels sprouts in my favorite, simplest recipe, an
Anglo-Asian hybrid reflecting my culinary
lineage; in March, freshly dug carrots before they finally succumb to the
rigors of winter, grated into fresh, red cabbage ‘slaw; in April,
over-wintered leeks and chard and sprouting broccoli; in May, a
bolt-resistant, superfast-to-maturity, spring-planted bok choi I am currently
de-hybridizing; and so on, each local day gifting its own particular, delicious,
healthful, downward pull. Gradually, cumulatively, my life and my context
share a common bio-cultural integrity. With each passing year, I deepen the
conduit to the source of my life, breathing more naturally and easily for it,
relishing the profound meaningfulness of a trajectory made all the more
extraordinary for its intensifying ordinariness. On a cross-country seed-swapping
trip almost a decade ago, I recall the wise words of an Oklahoma
backwoodsman: “There ain’t nothin’ simple ‘bout simple living, Nick”,
echoing, perhaps, an insight of Thomas Merton: “the age of miracles is but
the age of naturalness.” And occasionally,
the continuum of experience, the groundwork carrying me forward, enfolds into
a miracling-point when a veil parts the day-to-day particulars of growing and
being grown by my world to proffer a Report-Card on what it is to become more
Real. It was thus with no small measure of reverence that I opened to the
surging mystery coming radiantly alive around my act of medicine-making this
past February. In an exquisite crystallization of meaningfulness, each step I
took into my garden became a stroke of my heart, where the darkness of my
illness and worries, and the bright star of a vital reciprocity, dwelled
together. In the grounded, groggy ordinariness of a visit to my living
pharmacopoeia, every cell of me wholeheartedly identified with a
particularized Intimacy dynamically supporting my foundational wellbeing and,
as I approached each plant, an immense, singular, giving presence met me. In
a rapture of celebration and gratitude, my body and the precious shelter of
my little garden home were united in the unlimited depths of an indigenous,
primal kinship. The geography of my heart, life and destiny, and that of my
garden were held as One. Ultimately, the
infinitude of influences which shape an individual moment and world asks of
us a respect for a mystery that lies beyond our understanding and control. We
surrender to the overarching veracity of a vast, mostly unseen, energy event.
And, to the degree we align our vision, understanding, values and choices to
a foundational harmony wholly and uniquely available and intelligible to us
(only) at precisely those co-ordinates we geographically inhabit, we enter a
new level of existence, crossing the bridge between what we can accomplish on
our own, and that which requires help from beyond us. From the perspective of quantum
physicist David Bohm: “If we have a coherent approach to reality, reality
will have a coherent approach to us.” In this regard, a co-evolutionary
relationship with our immediate habitat harkens back to the Deus humanus described by Renaissance philosophers, the wedding
of earth and heaven, human and divine. As Stewart Brand framed it in his
down-to-earth introduction to the original Whole Earth Catalog, “We are as
gods, we may as well get good at it.” Getting good at
paradise-making is not, however, a quest for an ossified cultural fantasy of
a bug-free Utopia populated by lifeguards and swimsuit models with flawless
abs, pecs, metabolisms, fashion sense, grade point averages and social
skills. Rather, the territory of heaven-of-earth reveals itself in the
ongoing effort to engage fully with life ‘as is’, including the inevitable,
named and unnamed, unredeemed (and, in many cases, irreparable) deficiencies
that round out a Real life. Here, we are called to shed the tenacious grip of
a pervasive psychological charade – ‘the thought that you are so exalted that
in your refined state you would be perfect’. As the quickest of glances at a
magazine stand confirms, this illusory, ego-driven ideal of ‘normalcy’ fuels
the impetus of much of modern life, reducing the tolerable and deeply
ennobling burden of necessity in our lives to the intolerable, excruciating
confines of a cultural viewpoint which perceives failure and imperfection as
aberrant, a dysfunction or abnormality. If we can only cure ourselves and others of the darkness, we tell
ourselves, then our foundational happiness will be realized - in an as-yet,
hoped-for, promised ‘fix’. All told, the inclination amounts to a tragedy of
epic proportions: in our inability to see and accept the mystery of ourselves
as life makes us – a blindness reinforced, of course, by an unprecedented
flow of commercial images schooling us in unattainable images of perfection –
we stand back from embracing our wholeness, the discovery of our foundational
well-being, our unique and essential beauty. Many of us are no
strangers to the truth that beauty is not all brightness; indeed, that it is
usually only in life’s most awkward rooms that the special blessings and
healings are locked away. As such, challenges such as illness, especially in
its serious and chronic forms, can offer a path to profound, otherwise
concealed treasures to be unearthed only in the art of deep suffering - “the
exquisite crystallization of soul in the midst of turmoil,” as someone in my
notes put its. The immense riches to be unearthed in this fecund territory
remain largely unacknowledged by contemporary medicine and psychology and,
for the most part, religion, which perceive the flaw, fundamentally, as an
enemy, to be overcome. But if we remain faithful to the secret light and
vital energy found in this deeply challenging force for growth, we are called
to an ethic of authenticity and integrity enabling us to peer through and
beyond the literal, temporal facts of our limitations. Here, we may encounter
a deep purpose and harmony, a level of self-acceptance and integration, a
dignity and peace, a letting go and coming home, to be unearthed only in the
conflicted Darkness where we ourselves become a light burned for its
luminosity. As Keats describes it, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains
and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” Now please don’t get
me wrong. I’m categorically not proffering a paean to indulging in suffering,
masochistic narcissism, going to war upon ourselves, nor indeed to ascetic
mortifications, none of which are quite my cuppa herbal tea even as I have
flirted outrageously with them all. The difference between seeking pain and
accepting suffering is vast. I am, however, echoing insights which suggest
that in perceiving life’s limits and deficiencies as a natural unfolding in
which our understanding and will are step by step defeated by life itself
transforming us (Meister Eckhart: “we are made perfect by what happens to us
rather than by what we do,” and Rilke: “Winning
does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings”), we put down a simplistic view of human
life, opening to the rich, transfiguring potential of Beauty’s complex
fullness, transcending the shallow confines of a favored portion that looks
and feels superficially positive or is physically healthy and emotionally
together. As Thomas Moore, whose work has elaborated extensively around this theme, explains: “In a very real sense,
we do not cure diseases, they cure us.” And, of course, our curative diseases
also embrace the deficiencies of our context - the psychopathologies of
delusion and their associated behaviors, for example - and the profoundly
challenging and sometimes harrowing demands of learning how to meet them with
discernment and compassion as they present themselves. Sometimes, it is all
we can do to hang on until time ripens, the winds shift and the flow of life
is renewed at another level. Hence the supreme dictum of the Buddhist sage,
Shantideva: “There is no discipline as effective as patience.” Perhaps such
courageous persistence is what the Christian tradition understands,
elementally, as faith, “the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things unseen,” (Hebrews 11:1), and a core
teaching of the Gospels as interpreted by the Sufi master, Pir-O-Murshid
Hazrat Inayat Khan: “What Christ came to teach was faith.” A practice through
death. Fully embracing the
Real, therefore, is a maturing process, an intensification of life and
feeling, in which we dwell longer and more deeply in life’s challenges as
well as pleasures. In effect, we do not so much restore
suffering to our lives – it and the consequences of its repression are with
all of us, no matter how numbing our denial - but the art of suffering, an aesthetic which allows us to
recover and revitalize an understanding that links suffering with beauty and,
as innumerable observers from the Buddha to Keats to the contemporary
surgeon-writer Richard Selzer have described, beauty’s finest light with
truth. Ultimately, then, it is not suffering itself, but the powers elicited
by consciously assuming and transmuting the troubles and pains of existence,
complementing the glad, that prove integral to the birth of paradisal consciousness. True
homecoming, then, encompasses an interior coming-to-terms mirroring the outer
requirements of settling in. In accepting the fragile barque of our
mortality, we embrace a life lived within humane limits, “Or put it this
way,” Georges Bataille notes, “humanity is divine when experiencing limits.”
And it is precisely at the locus where our essential humanness comes to
ground in communion with the functional cosmology of life-on-earth that
integral-gardeners have stumbled upon the emergent phenomenon of
heaven-of-earth. Upon this threshold, the apparent
divisions between now and here, inside and outside, self and other, local and
universal, rest and motion, psyche and world, meaning and chaos, our individual
autobiographies and the story of the Earth, dissolve in the unifying embrace
that metamorphosis effects and requires. In the integrity and fullness of a
vital coherence in which the passionate complexity and intensity of our
everyday lives find inclusion and compensation with the deep ecologies of
landscape and all that lives, Paradise arises. “Perhaps
the magnetic tension of beauty,” suggests John O’Donohue, “issues precisely from the threshold where
passionate extremes come into balance.” That the tabernacle
of homecoming is emerging as the crucible for a gathering, synthesis and
integration at the heart of reality should, in a sense, come as no surprise
because home, after all, is where we live. At this nexus, home-centered
healing defines an incarnational apex of sorts. “Illness,” as Mircea Eliade
observes, “is the point of departure for the process of personality
integration and for a radical spiritual transformation.” Where this process
identifies with our immediate habitat, our experience transcends the
scientific sense of therapeutic methods of cure and treatment to assume a
care in which the act of healing and journey of homecoming reveal themselves
as one and the same - our primary pathway into Awakening. Here, our most
pressing and greatest vulnerabilities reveal themselves as our most precious
strengths, pathways freeing us fully to the native generosity of what most
deeply nurtures our health, happiness, sense of wellbeing and meaning. Here,
the philosopher Frederick Turner’s definition of beauty as “the highest
integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for
effective action, enabling us to go with, rather than against, the deepest
tendency or theme of the universe,” confirms the ultimate pragmatism of a
life surrendered to a heartfelt bridge between two solitudes, Beauty’s
homeland and ours. Upon this living altar, Rilke’s
passionate invocation to the metamorphosis of lovers, “Let them into one
another sink so as to endure each other outright”, garlands our entry to
Paradise and the perfection of a moment upon a garden path where the June
scent of freshly-harvested peppermint, held in the hand and inhaled, fills an
immensity. “You may grow old and trembling in
your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your
veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you
devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of lesser
minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world
wags, and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never
exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and
never dream of regretting.” - T.H. White, The Once and Future King. “Well, I can only teach you two
things - to dig, and to love your home. These are the true ends of
philosophy.” - T. H. White, The Once and Future King. “Shamanism is not, in these
traditional societies, a terribly pleasant office. Shamans are not normally
allowed to have any political power, because they are sacred. The shaman is
to be found sitting at the headman's side in the council meetings, but after
the council meeting he returns to his hut at the edge of the village.
Shamans…are called on in crisis, and the crisis can be someone dying or ill,
a psychological difficulty, a marital quarrel, a theft, or weather that must
be predicted.” – Terence McKenna. -- Phew. Long one,
that. In the third and concluding chapter of Got Snot? I hope to focus on the integrative particulars of
local native and non-native respiratory anti-virals, and the bio-cultural
ecology of paradox. Until then, please take a looksee at the recently-updated
guide
to winter cropping in the Southern Willamette Valley. It’s prime seeding
time, friends. July 4, 2009 Got Snot? Part I is here. |
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July 4, 2009 |
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