“Weeds in the Garden”, oil on canvas by frankences
Talk delivered at Philosophers’ Camp, State University of New York, School of Environmental Science and Forestry, Newcomb, NY, October 6, 2019
This essay contains several Christian references. They just happened to be handy. This painting is not about religion. In fact, it is my belief that a religious version of dominion as human domination is problematic. Feel free to replace the word God with Universe or Source or Origin or whatever you wish.
“Weeds in the Garden” is the title of this painting. It was originally inspired by the Pope’s Encyclical on the environment, titled; On Care for Our Common Home* (Laudato Si’ translated means “Praise Be to You”). Praise be to our common home! In this document the Pope clearly states that environmental justice is social justice and that allowing the globe to warm up further, endangers the world’s most vulnerable people. After reading the encyclical I was weeding in my garden and as I tossed out what I believed to be weeds I considered that we do this to people. We dismiss other humans as being ‘less than’ and toss them out.
What is a weed? In the following definition I have replaced the word plant with the word human. The result is truly horrifying:
weed: A human not valued for use or beauty, regarded as cumbering or hindering the growth of superior humans... An unprofitable, troublesome, or noxious growth. Human control is important on earth. Methods include hand cultivation with guns, powered cultivation with armaments, smothering economically, lethal discrimination by the media, bombing, or chemical attack with poisons.
We label plants and humans when they don’t serve our purpose. Our inability to perceive the value in a plant or human does not mean that individual has no value. Should we toss certain people aside based on our bias and judgment? Contrast this approach to gardening with that of St. Theresa of Avila (1):
“Beginners must realize that in order to give delight to the Lord they are starting to cultivate a garden on very barren soil, full of abominable weeds. His Majesty pulls up the weeds and plants good seed. Now let us keep in mind that all of this is already done by the time a soul is determined to practice prayer and has begun to make use of it. And with the help of God we must strive like good gardeners to get these plants to grow and take pains to water them so that they don't wither but come to bud and flower and give forth a most pleasant fragrance to provide refreshment for this Lord of ours. Then He will often come to take delight in this garden and find His joy among these virtues.”
I think St. Theresa is referring to original sin in the beginning of this prayer but she goes on to talk about reconciliation which I will discuss later. Like weeds some people truly are trouble makers and cannot be allowed to continue to harm themselves and others. They must be separated but not tossed into the compost.
Early last summer I decided to stop weeding; mostly because of ticks. As a result of this ‘neglect’ some interesting things happened. Surprising plants appeared like viper’s-bugloss, evening-primrose, and bee balm. Where did these things come from? I didn’t plant them.
I took lots of photos of my garden to use as resources for this piece. One of the image files became corrupt when I loaded it onto my computer. When this image appeared on my monitor I thought it was beautiful! It has all the colors in my palette. This picture was reduced to its smallest parts in the form of pixels and serves as a perfect metaphor to describe how we all come from the same source and will return to this source. The following is a passage from Genesis:
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
(Genesis 3:19, King James Bible)
Outside of religious tradition materialists agree on the conservation of energy. Materials dissolve, they are transformed - one form dissolves into another form. Physicist Aaron Freemen expressed it this way in his essay titled “Physicist’s Eulogy” (2):
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got. And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.”
Freeman doesn’t go far enough. Photons and neurons scatter but then what? Freeman is only describing the physical disintegration. He is describing only what we know at the present moment; what we are able to measure with our feeble instruments. That’s not the end of the story. The physicist David Bohm (3) wrote about this in his papers about hidden variables that “depend both on the state of the measuring apparatus and the observed system.” Mr. Freeman probably thought this eulogy was comforting and there are parts of it that are beautiful, but the way he described our physical disintegration is part of a larger problem. The scientific method dominates our thinking. The way we look at the world is fragmented. We believe that everything is measurable and we often mis-measure. We don’t fully understand what happens when we genetically modify food. We don’t fully understand how some medications work. We artificially categorize people into races and classes. This is destructive. In his book, “Down to Earth, Politics in the New Climate Regime” (4), French philosopher Bruno Latour suggests that the people in power who are saying that climate change isn’t real actually know for a fact that it is real but choose to further the narrative that it is false. They understand that land masses are shrinking and are hoarding resources. They don’t care that indigenous people are especially vulnerable and are tossed aside to make way for money making opportunities. The Amazon is a perfect example of this.
Now I will circle back to the idea of reconciliation that St. Theresa referred to. “Weeds in the Garden” is a painting about migration which will be exacerbated by climate change. In it, each plant is portrayed as an individual. They are looking toward the Omega Point, or Source or Origin or however one wants to describe ultimate reintegration. Our poem “Dust to dust’ refers not just to physical death but to reintegration. We were once integrated and now we believe we are fragmented but there is a growing movement towards reconciliation and it takes on two forms. One form of reconciliation includes philosophers who have reconciled to the idea that we are near the end as a species. The philosopher Jean Gebser for example, wrote that fragmentation taken to the extreme would bring about our eventual demise. In his book “Ever Present Origin” Gebser states:
“If the mis-measurements are not stopped by fulfillment of the task assigned to us, they will lead to relinquishment of ourselves, and the final loss of mankind through atomization and dissolution.”
Philosophers like Sean Kelly, from the California Institute of Integral Studies (6) believes that we are at the end of the Anthropocene. Humans will become extinct. He suggests we take action as one would with a diagnosis of a terminal illness. We should use the time remaining to love and comfort one another.
This is sad but there is good news. There are those who are making peace with creation. The Quakers in Australia are committed to having an integral relationship with indigenous people. The Quakers recognize their role, not only in Australia but globally, that has led to genocide and ecocide. They are willing to recognize their past belief in their own superiority and to embrace a new idea of interhuman relationship. They strive to understand and live by the Aboriginal law of love that they refer to as “that of God.” In her essay titled, “To Learn a New Song” (7) the Quaker environmentalist Susannah Brindle describes a mysterious experience in her own garden:
“Some years ago we rented a suburban property which was impossibly choked with oxalis weed. With greater knowledge of this gardener's nightmare than I, (my husband) Ray took a powerful weedicide to it and, when that had no effect, I spent weeks systematically removing each little nut-like root from carefully marked areas. Our efforts netted an oxalis crop surpassing that of our neighbour's in determined virility. Only then did I remember ‘that of God’ in the oxalis. In less than six weeks not one oxalis could be found, although their acid-yellow flowers could clearly be seen on the other side of the fence. Our garden was free of them for over six months until we moved out. Then they began to creep back. We have a peace-pact, too, with the rabbits where we live. In spite of several warrens among the rocks and stories of devastation to everything planted by our neighbours, the rabbits cause no damage to our tree plantings or kitchen garden, and although we occasionally see them, their warrens seem no longer open for business. You may be wondering how an environmentalist can feel compassion for introduced pests, particularly one that has caused so much devastation to the soil of this country. When I consider the damage done by us whitefellas - invaders just like the rabbits and the oxalis - I am reluctant to get too self-righteous. As I have never heard Aboriginal peoples suggest that we vanish from their land, I feel obliged to look for less violent alternatives to eradication of other introduced pests.“
Susannah suggests that to know is to love and to begin the process of reconciliation we must get to know “that of God” about one another. In summary, humans are not weeds in the garden, nor rabbits to be exterminated. I offer no external solution. My wish is that the viewer will look within, to the inner garden, to clear blocks to receptivity. Our work is to cultivate what is beautiful. We must not struggle to pull the weeds. That is not our job. We cannot always foresee how a person will grow. It is hubris to assume we can predict what anyone will contribute. The fact that a plant or human exists is enough evidence of their worthiness.
* United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (2015). On Care for Our Common Home: Laudato si: encyclical letter. Washington, DC.
(1) Teresa, Kavanaugh, K., & Rodríguez Otilio. (1987). The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications.
(2) Aaron Freeman, born 1956, physicist, journalist, comic
(3) David Bohm (1952), Wholeness and the Implicate Order and A Suggested Interpretationn of the Quantum Theory in
Terms of “Hidden” Variable. II
http://physics.nmsu.edu/~bkiefer/HISTORY/BOHM_1952.pdf
https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.85.166
(4) Latour, B., & Porter, C. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
(5) Gebser, J. (1997). The Ever-present Origin. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Gebser on dissolution (pgs. 536 and 537 EPO): “If we surrender to the destructive deficient powers, if we ascribe to rationality a character of exclusive validity, if we continue to measure time with inappropriate measure, then we shall have indulged in mis-measurement, a … hubris, presumption which is not only inadequate but runs counter to the task.” P538, “Today, while the integral is over determining and dissolving the mental-rational consciousness, the mental capacity of thought is being mechanized by the robots of calculation - computers - and this is being emptied and quantified. Prayer wheels, the fragmentation of myth, and computers are expressions of man who remains confined in his familiar consciousness frequency while the necessary “tide=turning” new consciousness mutation begins to superimpose itself over the exhausted consciousness structure. Each excess of quantification leads to powerlessness, vacuity and helplessness. Wherever this is evident it is an indication that the inadequate consciousness structure is already surpassed. In this light, the computers are a negative omen of the new consciousness structure and its strength.” 1973
(6) Sean Kelly (2019), Living in End Times: Beyond Hope and Despair, California Institute of Integral Studies
(7) Susannah Kay Brindle (2000), TO LEARN A NEW SONG A Quaker Contribution Towards Real Reconciliation with the Earth and its Peoples, Published by the Australia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), PO Box 108, Armidale North, Victoria 3143. Copyright 2000 by The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia Incorporated. 2nd impression 2001. .
