Heroes Not Zombies

Two gardens.

Could they be more different?

The first is the Hanbury Botanic Garden in Ventimiglia, Italy, and the second is Marqueyssac in the Dordogne, France.

Thomas Berry, in The Great Work, describes the two forces of the universe as wildness and discipline. David Wade, in The Crystal and the Dragon, describes them as the moving, flowing principle, and the ordering, or structuring principle. You get the idea? One tends toward expansion and one towards constriction. Empedocles wrote about Neikos and Philia, the forces of repulsion/separation and of attraction/combination.

Our left cerebral hemisphere is great for sorting, labelling, and ordering. The right seeks out the new and makes connections.

There is no right or wrong here. Both forces need each other, like the yin and the yang. As they interact with each other, as we produce integration (the creation of mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts), we create.

These two gardens are examples of this. In the first case, the Hanbury Garden, there is a glorious “far from equilibrium” quality brought about by encouraging diversity and a light touch on control. In the Marqueyssac, constant pruning, trimming and shaping brings this astonishing spread of geometric and repeating forms.

Is one more beautiful than the other?

I suspect each of us have certain preferences…..drawn towards the wildness, or drawn towards the discipline.

Isn’t it great when we can have “and” not “or”? It just requires the will to explore and to stand back and see the view from Sirius.