OK, so, here's the thing: I'm doing a course about ECOCENTRISM. Putting the environment, to which we are all connected, at the centre. It's a course about the intrinsic value of all life. It's a course about the wonder of the natural world and the need to stop destroying it.
It should tick all my boxes.
BUT, there is the idea that this Azoth mandala is a gift from the mind of Gaia. Now, who could use such a gift? Who could meditate on or puzzle through seven processes of alchemy and archetypes and the planets and the metals? Tardigrades? Dolphins? Slime mold? Bees? Parrots? Pedunculate oaks? Tigers? Pangolins? Sphagnum moss? Lesser spotted woodpeckers? Stag beetles? No, of course! It's a gift to the Wise Ones! Homo sapiens!!
Anthropocentrism. We are shoved right back to the centre of everything.
We may not have a soul; we may not be the only animal with consciousness, intelligence, tool use, language and culture, but we have a mandala.
Wait. Maybe it's otherwise. Do we suggest that all species have some special esoteric gift like this? Something beyond fangs to bite and chlorophyll to photosynthesis and sonar to locate and communicate and colour to disguise and petals to attract pollinators and tongues to lick and tails to balance and all the multitudinous qualities that make up a being? It seems not.
I am being unfair in that both the tutors have the most noble of aims: to see this beautiful world given a chance to retain the beauty it still has now, to rediscover some of the lost richness. They are not only cleverer than me, but have done and do more good in the world than I do. And they could probably explain to me why I am misinterpreting part of their message.
I hope so. And I have an inkling that they could. One of the other attendees told me she attended a different course last year and one thing that she took away from that was that it is our job to be that which we are - and no more. This article, by a friend of the tutors, does indeed express what I hoped to experience as a result of the course... in fact, what I do regularly experience on my wanders.
That encourages me for I feel this yearning to find a path that isn't all about 'our development', 'our consciousness raising' - for that ends up with, I feel, just more focus on the ego, more narcissism. Less connection. Less interest in others. A further inclination to see our personal psyche glorified in the wider glory of the connected but distinct otherness of all existence.
I acknowledge that the human-induced destruction and climate change are terrible. That there is something dreadful in one species benefiting so long from the exploitation of all else. Of course I do! And that any means to redress that is fantastic.
But, Gaia will always survive - as the system has from meteor strikes and volcanoes and ice ages and so on. It's just that it will be different.
I resist this insistence that we have some potential to be saviours through Gaia's intervention in handing us this... secret. It's like we can't resist the vision of being the heroes (some of us at least, those of us valiantly battling in a hostile world of capitalist greed and wicked environmental despoilers with no conscience, feeling or sense of connection) thanks to some magical capacity. No... always thanks to some mental capacity: our smarts, our compassion, our intuition, our ability to transcend. It's as bad as the tech dream in its hubris, though, I admit, far superior in its heart. It's as bad as that horrible claim that we are the pinnacle - as the universe is finally able to have consciousness of itself, through us.
That makes me sick.
Here's an example. In looking at this tree, I could see how the holes and hollows fitted my feelings.
I have noticed our tendency, all of us in the group, to read ourselves into all we see. Or to seek a mirror. We want these trees to teach us or guide us, to show us what we are and what we could be.
What is it about us humans that makes us so sure that everything should teach us about us? We justify research on animals for what we can learn about human psychology, diseases and death. What slime mold can teach us about organising transport routes. What ants can teach us about hyper-sociality. What bacteria can teach us about genes. All this grasping and grasping for knowledge about us. So we live longer and prosper. Bollocks to everything else.
Maybe it’s not all about us.
Maybe a tree is enough as a tree and not as a way to know more about me.
Why should I seek a tree that reflects me back rather than see the tree as this one tree that it is?
So let me think about this tree.
This one unique tree.
This tree is the alchemy of environment, genetics, seasons, soil which has some nutrients and not others, surrounding trees who may share nutrients but battle as much for the light, prevailing winds, fungi, bacteria, moss, lichen (all of which provide maybe more benefits than costs), deer browsing some other sapling, squirrels and jays eating some other acorns, the gamekeeper who wanted cover for pheasants, the estate that paid the gamekeeper, the shooters who paid the estate, the veteran oak nearby that drops so many thousands of acorns in a mast year that the squirrels and jays can’t eat them all, the changing climate that ensures its roots are seldom now waterlogged, the people who didn’t pull it up for no reason other than to have fun, the laws that make this private property, the fossil fuels that mean people aren’t fighting over firewood, the metal ships that don’t need oak timbers, the jay or squirrel who buried the acorn, the labourer who put up a fence to show that this tree was growing on private property, the other saplings that lost the battle for light, the weathered rocks that provide the nutrients, the people whose actions ensure there’s plenty of carbon dioxide, the sun whose light is critical, the surrounding agricultural land which ensures this area is not ripe for development, the worms who aerate and drain the soil, whatever it was that fertilised the flower, the rain that hydrates it and the spores that seeded the rain, and the weather systems that carried the rain clouds and the land or sea from which the water was drawn, the trees that dropped around it but did not crush it, the trees that shed their leaves and fed the soil via the detritivores that decomposed them and the birds and mammals whose bodies and faeces added to the mix....
This tree is about so much. But it's not about me at all.
All I do is look at it. My role is first to appreciate it in its otherness and then to resist other humans who might seek to destroy it. Which means worrying about climate change and using my votes, my consumer choices, my free speech. I leave the woodland's wildlife free to follow their own courses.
But I do this for the tree. Not because the tree represents me.
Back to the hollow ash at the wood's edge.
There truly is no ME at the centre of its being.
Oh wait... isn't that just what I have been saying?!
Thanks for this post.