Tree-Heart Wisdom
Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises. Olivia Laing
Questions such as this inspire me to deeper observation, reflection, and contemplation. They feed my curiosity, and thus, they feed my soul. As I reflected on Laing’s tending to paradise, I wondered ‘just what is paradise?’. And what does it mean ‘to tend’?
I saw each as having both inside and out aspects. Looking out, the dictionary says ‘paradise’ is “a place of extreme beauty, delight, happiness” and looking in it is “a state of extreme happiness, bliss”. ‘Tending’ is “to look after, watch over, care for, minister to or wait on with service.” We tend to our internal state of being, and we tend to the world where we feel our care is needed.
While much can be said about both, this thought of tending to paradise being a worthy endeavor, beckoned me to notice the many places and ways paradise seems present in our chaotic world where so much seems broken and a far cry from what one might label ‘paradise’. While on some days our world seems like Paradise Lost, I began to observe my choices from the perspective of tending to paradise, inside and out.
If you happen to be thinking ‘bah humbug, there is no paradise in the world today’, I invite you to do as I sometimes find myself doing: seek it out and, if you don’t find it, create paradise from within. Recognize that tending to paradise does not ignore or deny the multiple horrors and crises of our world, nor does it ask us to deny any angst, anger, heartbreak, fear, uncertainty, or other darkness that visits us or that we witness.
Rather, tending to paradise asks that we view and navigate the world from a different perspective. Or as Einstein suggested that we solve the world’s problems from thinking that is different from the thinking that created them. For me that begins with how I ‘be’ in my internal world as I view the world out there. As within, so without. As I view the world, so the world is to me.
Tending to paradise asks that we put attention on and care for that which is rising and wants to rise in a broken world, that we tend the sacred in all Life. For me that begins with deepening my sacred connection to place, to home the beauty of the paradise that I am blessed to inhabit. Home is a foundation from which I can reach beyond the artificial boundaries of property to community, to what is needed, what is rising, and what wants to rise. And in reaching to ask, ‘what is mine to do?’ in contribution to this.
As I reflect and observe, I begin to see that I tend to paradise with curiosity, harmony, and serenity, much like the stability of a three-legged stool. Each supports and feeds the others, not in equilibrium, but in the measured flow of life.
Curiosity often takes the lead carrying me to explore diverse topics from the relationship between soil health and the health of our bodies (and how to restore both!) to current commentaries of astrologers, cosmologists, and mystics about this time we have chosen to inhabit. My curiosity seeks to discover new possibilities, opportunities, and connections, and has only passing interest in the drama of so-called ‘current events’. My curiosity looks to ancient wisdom and to the wisdom of Nature in the woods out back to inform how to tend to paradise.
As I bring I new ideas and information, I observe what feels resonant and what does not. What feels harmonious in my being? What aligns with my values? To call forth and maintain serenity, I set aside that which isn’t resonant, harmonious, or values aligned. At the same time, I engage curiosity in inquiring whether I may be resisting something that is asking me to pay attention.
I aim to view Life in a larger, cosmic context, recognizing that this world I live in, observe, and must navigate is but a ‘blip’ in timeless time and spaceless space and that all events are part of something much greater than I can grok. For me, this perspective helps maintain serenity, especially in those times when this world’s horrors pierce my tender heart.
As I reflect more deeply on this idea of ‘tending paradise’ as a worthy pursuit, it seems simply to be an approach to this experiment call life, an approach we can each choose. Or not.
Unlike a short vacation to a tropical paradise or other place of beauty, ‘tending paradise’ is a choice we make moment to moment, day to day as our way of navigating a chaotic world where old ways are dissolving, giving way to the new. Whether that new is paradise depends on us, individually and collectively.
What do YOU think a seed does?
Paradise in the Sangres