Spring is bursting into glory in southern England, even while ecologies in many parts of the world are being torn apart by conflict and climate catastrophes. My inner heart aches for the people and biomes suffering, and the land. I know also from previous times of conflict that bringing hope into people’s hearts from afar is important as an energiser in solving how to live in the eternal now when surrounded by pain and grief. You know you are known. You are heard beyond your horizon. It helps. You have something to strive for because the seeds of life are everywhere even if they are not yet opening where you are. By working or longing together we can generate the right conditions for whatever flourishing is possible.
So when I walk in my garden, the joy I feel is not exclusive. I find myself thanking Marian, my wife, who was brought up a farmer’s daughter and loves the land and all that flowers from it. I find myself thanking the bigger picture of wholeness in which life bursts forth wherever there is sufficient stability and diversity in any ecology, from darkest deep sea to bubbling hot mud pools, for organisms to form and self-replicate and hold together in relationships that stabilise their local environments. As I have explained elsewhere I am not embarrassed to say that wholeness for me in my Celtic spirituality is a living triune relational God whose nature of grace is latent in every diverse seed and particle of the world we share.
But this is about our ability to focus on wholeness instead of parts. The sloping banks between our garden terraces, covered with pale yellow primroses, the last drooping purples of crocuses, upright blues of scilla, then celandines, camelias – diversity appears and fades in its time into memories. This year the primroses are especially vibrant. We were married in the year when foxgloves were at their best. Letting go does not mean it is gone. We can honour the memories even as we face the present reality and ponder how to act.
I find my anger stirs, not in a destructive way but in a sense of outrage at how the importance of wholeness has been lost to sight and forgotten in the last two centuries in the western way of thinking. The early brilliance of its scientific method to examine how parts fit together in the wholeness of lived experience broke loose from its healthy boundary of rational constraint, and ran riot in education to dominate life with thinking only about seeing and naming parts. Instead of learning how any object reveals its inner mysteries of movement and life through its wider context of wholeness appreciated, minds have been mostly narrowed by pseudo-science into naming parts in isolation, as if each one is a number 1, a positive thing to use its functionality in technology. I see its impact iconically when stepping off a pavement where ivy, moss and lichens adorn its dry stone wall into the gutter between parked cars to let a young person pass whose head is looking down at his or her screen. No chance of eye contact there, or a friendly ‘hello, nice day’. Only suspicion of motives and hiding the inner self.
But all that passes when groups walking home from school are chattering. I look back again from my thoughts as the anger disperses, to the garden through which I stroll. Its overall impression strikes me as one intake, as if a breath of diversified and colourful wholeness in which I am a moving feature. My seeing is no longer an observation. I share in its emergence and unfolding, just as a quantum physicist has now to accept that their intentions when setting up an experiment affect the measurable outcome. The tingling quantum fields of their embodiment in action mingle with the quantum fields they imagine they measure, and they change together. My intentions when in the garden shape its future too. Its growth, and the resonances between growing plants and the quality of soil, shape my growth to some extent. It’s as if we breathe together, and give ourselves to each other.
In the eastern way of being, wholeness is a zero 0, naught numerically, but full of an unmeasurable quality of emptiness unformed that paradoxically pours forth all light and life and substance in a diversifying wholeness that unfolds now as, here, our garden that we share and breathe in. I call that creative naught the grace of God. Others call it Tao. In the western way of thinking the garden is an aggregation of individual growths that successfully rooted from the packets of seeds that Marian once had in her gardening drawer. Only three seeds for £5.00. Shocking value! And they won’t all take… take.
The place of science in the garden is to name the seed packets and describe the best planting conditions in which to place the seeds, and then science will have given its value into the whole. The place of wholeness is everywhere, appreciated in and through our inner hearts as we stroll through life’s diversifying growth, from which appreciation we can give value to the resonances that inspire us to speak of beauty in the wholeness and healing we see.
I hear pneumatic drills start in the street beyond our garden. Fortunately no explosions in our neighbourhood. But when the bits settle and the pipe is repaired, resonances will begin again as the 0 births 1 and we feed back grace into the whole.
