This morning, standing out in the garden, listening to the birds sing, watching the dew glisten, feeling the spring sunshine on my face i was overcome by it all. This old pantheist's heart "soared like an eagle", as Chief Dan George said, understanding in that moment of bliss that we are all-flora, fauna, microbes, minerals, forces and faeries-in this together.
Thinking, that's what gets us in trouble. Thinking is a two edged sword, a yes/no, either/or, sorta sword that leads us down the destructive dualistic path we're on now. Looking at the one, undivided, reality we're immersed in through the reductionist rationality of science can never lead to the Great Mother. Yet reductionist thinking and methods form the basis of modern science. From the ridiculous perspective of reductionism the totality of this morning's wonders can be determined by analyzing the participants chemical constituents.
Reductionism is bullshit. A contrast to the reductionist approach is holism or emergentism. Holism is the idea that things can have properties, (emergent properties), as a whole that are not explainable from the sum of their parts. The principle of holism was concisely summarized long ago by Aristotle in the Metaphysics: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts". it's the Gaia principle. The Gaian worldview sees organisms interacting with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.
We are all in this together despite anthropocentric delusion of human dominion over creation. The illusion that certain humans have a 'special' relationship with "God". The illusion that all of creation was created as a resource for the true believers of some self-serving creed is at the heart of our abandonment the The Great Mother and the wanton destruction of our environment.
Not all scientists buy into this delusion. For instance in UBC Forestry Prof. Suzanne Simard's work on the 'Web of Life That Supports Us All' she talks about Mother trees and the implications of the invisible interconnected nature of all forests. Suzanne Simard feels the love of The Great Mother.
So does Terry L. Brown, The Amphibiographer, who recently welcomed the herring back to Palm Beach. In Terry's video, 'Herring Spawn at Palm Beach' , he marvels as he watches "the ocean water turn milky and frothy with milt from the pacific herring males and get a fishes eye view of seaweed coated in tiny white eggs, like tapioca." He goes on to explain, "Herring are one of the keystone ‘forage fish’ (along with sand lance, eulachon and smelt) which feed salmon, lingcod, humpback whales, sea lions and seals, ducks, loons etc. Even Orca benefit since they feed on salmon or marine mammals, which feed on ‘forage fish’. More forage fish means more salmon, seabirds, and whales."
We are all in this together. The miracles happening around us and within us go on whether we pay attention to them or not. The video below, 'The Beauty of Pollination', shows some of the miracles happening in the garden when we're not watching. Be sure to watch closely (around 2 min 40 sec) and see the baby bat clinging to its mother as she flies and feeds. The bee hives and wasps are amazing. The hummingbird doing rolls chasing a bug, what a wonder-filled world...The Great Mother abides.
