First, the garden provides for a very basic need, food. We can intellectualise our needs, but they are also self evident. They require no justification. To eat is part of the process of life, to grow the food for eating directly supports the process of life. I never spend any time wondering why I am in the garden.
Second, the garden provides extended intimate interaction with the natural and living world. I have spend the last 25 years of my life training and working as an ecologist. I have directly managed ecosystems from the micro-scale of fungi and bacteria to the macro-scale of forests covering hundreds of thousands of hectares. The more I learned, the more I understood how little I knew.
In the end I realised that my 'scientific' framework was an inadequate and deadening conceptualisation of the reality of living systems. Anything we do with science, even the most complicated and sophisticated of our models of understanding, is simply a poor facsimile of the reality of the continuous complexity of nature.
My move to farming, a form of applied ecology, was a reaction to this realisation. I wanted to really get to know a place. I wanted this knowledge to be holistic and intuitive rather than reductive and mechanistic. The only way I felt I could achieve this was through extended and direct experience. No amount of reading and extensive but superficial experience, no amount of conceptualisation was going to help me really understand.
My increasing alignment with Buddhism was another response to this realisation. I read a small passage from D T Suzuki once. He compared Zen understanding of a flower to that of an English romantic poet. Zen was holistic. Romantic poetry was, ironically, reductionist - dismembering the flower and reducing it to the sum of its parts.
My move to farming, a form of applied ecology, was a reaction to this realisation. I wanted to really get to know a place. I wanted this knowledge to be holistic and intuitive rather than reductive and mechanistic. The only way I felt I could achieve this was through extended and direct experience. No amount of reading and extensive but superficial experience, no amount of conceptualisation was going to help me really understand.
My increasing alignment with Buddhism was another response to this realisation. I read a small passage from D T Suzuki once. He compared Zen understanding of a flower to that of an English romantic poet. Zen was holistic. Romantic poetry was, ironically, reductionist - dismembering the flower and reducing it to the sum of its parts.
It is easier to maintain the focus of my practice when I work on something as basic as providing my family's food. It is easier to understand the emptiness of concepts when I am in an environment that cannot be adequately described by conceptualisation.
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