I took this photo one winter in Scotland. It’s a particular kind of image which really pleases me. There is straight line running across the entire scene and splitting the image into two parts, but the two parts, at first glance, don’t seem enormously different.
However, there are clear differences. The foreground field is flat and the earth beneath the snow forms parallel lines running up to the border from the front of the photo. The field over the border is on a hillside and it’s markings are like contours of a map of a hill. The snow on the hill is whiter than the snow on the field and, somehow looks deeper.
Between the two there is a border zone. That appeals to me. There is not a solid wall or fence, more a rough line of stones, containing an unworked area of land partially marked off with a fence. In fact, as I look more closely now, I think that line of stones is the top of a dry stone wall and there is a dip in the land just beyond it.
Apart from the trees at the bottom and the top of the image the only “Life” in the picture is one sheep and one tree, both in that in-between zone.
That reminds me of the fact that Life itself exists in a kind of in-between zone. The zone between order and chaos. Thomas Berry describes this beautifully in his “The Great Work” where he calls the two forces of the universe “wildness and discipline”.
When first the solar system gathered itself together with the sun as the center surrounded by the nine fragments of matter shaped into planets, the planets that we observe in the sky each night, these were all composed of the same matter; yet Mars turned into rock so firm that nothing fluid can exist there, and Jupiter remained a fiery mass of gases so fluid that nothing firm can exist there. Only the Earth became a living planet filled with those innumerable forms of geological structure and biological expression that we observe throughout the natural world……….The excess of discipline suppressed the wildness of Mars. The excess of wildness overcame the discipline of Jupiter. Their creativity was lost by an excess of one over the other.
For Life to exist there needs to be an ordering principle, something which builds and creates, turning small, apparently disconnected pieces, like atoms, into elaborate complex networks, like the multicellular human body and the astonishingly interconnected human brain.
But too much order is counter to Life. Rigidity isn’t much good without flexibility. We live in a changing universe. Year by year, month by month, week by week, day by day, even second by second. We have a word for that kind of phenomenon – dynamic. The universe is a manifestation of a dynamic, living, breathing, integration of order and chaos, of discipline and wildness.
All of Life exists in this dynamic, “far from equilibrium“, zone. It never stands still. It’s never “complete”, “finished” or “done”. It’s a flow, a process, a complex, vastly inter-connected network. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to pin down definitions of “Life” and “Health”. They aren’t fixed objects.
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