MESS
“One day I suddenly saw that the sun is my heart, my heart outside of this body. If my body's heart ceases to function I cannot survive; but if the sun, my other heart, ceases to function, I will also die immediately. We should be able to be our true self. That means we should be able to be the river, we should be able to be the forest, we should be able to be a citizen of any country in the world. We must do this to understand, and to have hope for the future. That is the nondualistic way of seeing.” -Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace
My grandma passed away a few weeks ago, and I’m surprised by the vigour with which she has scattered pieces of herself across my recent wanderings, how she has sprinkled Buddhist breadcrumbs for me to delight in following. Whether they’ll lead to nirvana I can’t be sure, but the process of discovering Buddhist statues at the summit of two recent hikes, and being emailed a pdf copy of Being Peace out of the blue felt like welcome nudges from her. The language barrier between us was immense, so the wafts of incense and shrines of sweet oranges and Hennessy in her small apartment were more meaningful to me than any clumsy birthday wishes we stumbled through. Her identity as a Buddhist is one of the few pieces of her I can hold onto, the comfortable weight of this facet added to my small store of stories about her translated through my dad. I consumed Being Peace voraciously, and relished in the way it reignited my long lost flirtations with Buddhism as a teenager. Are there any earthophilic folk who haven’t developed a relationship (or brief but fiery fling) with Buddhism or another non-anthropocentric spiritual path? The nondualistic philosophy of embodying forests and rivers in the quote above would surely get any environmentalist hot and bothered…
I’ve been trying to hold this concept of nonduality up as a lens as I move through grief, through work, through the satisfying process of stirring coconut oil into a pot of daal. If nonduality could act as a prism and dissolve rigid identifiers, perhaps it could refract some of the dogmatic feelings that are elicited through disagreements with my sister, political tweets, beliefs I carry about myself and those around me. Would the result be more beautiful, or simply more chaotic? Should I continue to work diligently to create order and tuck ideas into neat, tidy boxes while the universe and my Buddhist ancestors sling back Hennessy offerings and demand entropy?
The work of wading through the swamps of my own slippery philosophies, and wrestling to tidy up my inner landscape was exhausting. But I received a most welcome push towards nonduality while participating in last week’s Argonomy Update 2021 Conference, a meeting of farmers and agronomists across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. While the conference did highlight some of the sticky ways which dualistic thinking and Othering creates distance between farmers and research scientists, there was one presentation that broke down these barriers. Dr. Paul Galpern of the University of Calgary shared his research on “messy” spaces in farm fields, and how wetlands and forests interspersed between crops can actually boost crop yield. The phenomenon is based on a “spill effect”, in which beneficial insects who make their homes in the “messy” shelter of wetlands and treed areas can spill forth and improve, through a “halo effect”, the pollination and yield of neighbouring crops. In this study, the dichotomies of good farmland/bad farmland, messy eyesore/fertility amendment were blurred. When a farmer can dissolve notions of duality in their field and allow opportunity to arise in the periphery, a kind of gift-from-doing-less is born!
The study is a moving reminder that chaos leads to growth.
Ease leads to abundance.
Life begets more life.
So I don my waders and dive back into the swamps, to embrace the messiness of loss and a long winter and a future both vast and deliciously muddy.
