Sacred Messiness

I’m delighted today to publish a guest post by Marian Van Eyk McCain, editor of a new book GreenSpirit, Path to a New Consciousness. Marian has long been one of my favourite writers and I was happy to meet her in real life a few weeks ago and spend time in her beautiful corner of the English countryside. Over to you, Marian:

Another of those gardening catalogues just came. I am forever taking myself off mailing lists but somehow it keeps happening. This one is from the firm that sold me the little fig tree I blogged about last year so they have my address again.

I leaf through the pages as I eat my breakfast. Colour co-ordinated flower beds…shades of blue…or would you prefer shades of pink? Eeek!! Forget it! This is my garden, for goodness’ sake, not my living-room. (Mind you, my living-room is not exactly colour co-ordinated either, I have to tell you. Well why should it be? It is a living room, not a showroom.)

Nature, where I live, is not colour-co-ordinated. Yet everything Nature creates without human intervention, like this tangle in the hedgerow, this glorious, riotous, multi-hued tangle, goes together perfectly. Nature is messy. Life is messy.

Was it because those 19th and 20th Century philosophers had fantasies of ‘taming’ Nature that they so admired the neat and tidy? Think about Victorian gardens, their straight paths, their topiary, their forced, unnatural symmetry. No, that’s not for me. I don’t see beauty in that. Just a misguided desire for control: an overweening arrogance. It is the arrogance that brought us to where we are today, on the brink of environmental freefall as the strain on our ecosystems takes them to a tipping point from which they may never be able to recover.

When I look at the tangle in the hedgerow I see beauty, vibrancy, the life force made abundantly manifest. Messy? Sure.

In fact, as we now know, the process of evolution has always needed—and still needs—messiness.

Complexity theorist Jean Bee, one of the contributors to the new book GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness, writes:

Complexity theory has arisen, over more than half a century, out of the work of many scientists and social scientists who seek to investigate the implications of embracing the world as messy, interconnected, open to influences and change, able to learn…Essentially, this work tells us that:

• Things interrelate, affect each other in a messy, complex, systemic fashion
• Variation and diversity are necessary for creativity, change, evolution, emergence
• Things build on the past, but not with clear one-to-one correspondences and cause-effect relationships
• There is more than one possible future; the future cannot be reliably predicted from the past
• At key moments or tipping points, radically new features and characteristics can emerge
• Top-down design and control will certainly have an effect, but may lead to unintended outcomes

Systems which are diverse, richly connected and open to their environments can evolve a sort of form, or patterning, and this may be more harmoniously in tune with its surroundings that one imposed from above.

This emerging worldview, which seems more in tune with our personal experience of life, creates a powerful new image for all sorts of institutional thinking, including spiritual traditions. It is itself paradoxical and uncertain in that we are less clear how to act, how to intervene. Does it mean there should be no design, no leadership, no control? Is emergent structure always helpful and generative? Might we not just sink into chaos and disorder? Indeed, are our current problems the result of too much control or not enough? It raises issues of ethics, of the politics of participation, of power and domination. There are no easy answers. But imagining that the world is predictable and controllable when it is not is not helpful either; our current economic, social and environmental crises are, perhaps, ample evidence of that.

So we shall, as the contributors to this book suggest, try new ways of being in this 21st Century. We shall search for solutions to the problems that beset us. We shall build new infrastructures. With any luck, we ourselves shall continue to evolve, at least in terms of our awareness, our consciousness our understanding of who and what we are in relation to the rest of Nature. We shall, I hope, finally rid ourselves of the arrogance that has led us so far astray.

Who knows what interesting tangle will result? Let’s hope it is green and lovely and full of vibrant life.

All images by Marian Van Eyk McCain

About Marian:

Marian Van Eyk McCain is the author of three non-fiction books, including The Lilypad List: 7 steps to the simple life (Findhorn Press, 2004), a primer for living simply and lightly on the planet.

She is Co-Editor of the GreenSpirit Journal and Editor of GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness (O Books, 2010), a new anthology with a Foreword by Satish Kumar and contributions from Brian Swimme, Matthew Fox, David Korten, Stephan Harding, Cormac Cullinan, Chris Clarke and nineteen other writers. (The book is being launched in London on Wednesday July 14th by Jonathon Porritt – click here for details.)

Marian’s main website, which reflects her keen interest in ‘green and conscious aging’ is at Elderwoman.