Looking at this old photo today, taken in a Marqueyssac gardens in France, I’m struck by the difference between the planting on each side of this path.
On one side is a long, straight, trimmed hedge, whilst on the other a much “looser”, almost random distribution of bushes and trees.
Thomas Berry in “The Great Work” names the two fundamental forces of the universe as “wildness” and “discipline”. Too much wildness and you have unstructured chaos, too much discipline and you have a static order. For Life to emerge you need a perfect interplay of both.
Note that it’s an interplay, or what some would term “integration”, not the kind of balance where two opposites balance each other out.
David Wade, in The Crystal and the Dragon, describes the basic forces as the moving, flowing principle, and the ordering, or structuring principle.
Iain McGilchrist describes our two ways of engaging with reality. The left hemisphere allows us to focus, abstract and represent. It seeks to “grasp” whatever it sees and make use of it. The right hemisphere engages with reality as it is, seeking out the connections, relationships and seeing what exists within its contexts and environments.
We need both. And when they integrate well together we see the most amazing examples of creation.
Heroes Not Zombies 
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