I was wondering when we would get a gardening article. And a Terrence McKenna shoutout to top it off! Are you familiar with Simone Weil's thoughts on agriculture? She has some pretty interesting things to say about agriculture's capacity to function as Christian/religious symbolism, allowing for the transformation of labor into a kind of mystical contemplation. I sometimes think the modern person's isolation from nature makes it very hard to understand a great deal of religious, particularly biblical, language.
"Such nostalgia is, to reiterate, a fantasy, as anyone acquainted with rural life...."
Well, yes, but I've grown increasingly suspicious of the constant warnings from city folk against romanticizing life in the country. It often seems selective and self-justifying, especially given how pervasively romanticized urban life is in our popular media. These critics often target skeptics of the capitalist machine and consumer lifestyle, and they implicitly or explicitly rely on inflated and one-sided claims about the benefits brought by these institutions.
My personal experiences play into my perspective here, of course. My mother grew up very close to nature. Our family's move from countryside to big-city suburbia, when I was a teenager, was hard on both of us, and I don't think it was just about cultural adaptation: it was also losing something fundamentally good and human. As an adult, I lived for two years in a rural part of a developing country, and while I am well aware of the social issues that haunt rural communities (many of them, frankly, the fallout of modern economic reorganization), I treasure the memories of living with less of a buffer between myself and the rhythms of nature.
There's a certain fascination with the spiritual significance of plants in heavy metal culture, which is one of my stomping grounds. Besides the proliferation of stoner metal bands (most of which have delightfully punny names, like Cannabis Corpse or Weedpecker), there's also the "green metal" band Botanist, whose entire musical corpus revolves around plants and their place in the cosmos.
I'll have to re-read this again to get all the nuances and the hyperlinks, but it's quite providential that you're writing on this now. My brother and I recently introduced some plants to our condo, which I've wanted to do for a while, to have some other living things around, and they were quite stressed out. I nearly did a double-take when, after some attendant watering, time, and some classical music, they went from wilting to perked up - they moved - practically overnight. I'm not used to observing plants that closely - I'm not much of a green-thumb, alas - so experiencing the "vegetative/motive soul" was kind of startling.
I loved your hyperlinked article on the memories and cognition of plants - which made me think maybe you could have Rupert Sheldrake as a guest sometime (I know DBH has interviewed him, and he was a delightful interviewee). My other recommendations for an interview, unrelated to this article, would be either R. Arthur Green or Elliott Wolfson.
As a medievalist of sorts by training, I am intrigued by your comparison of "pilgrimage site wars" in medieval Europe and the Buddhist world with regards to sacred trees, which, of course, got me thinking of the conflict between holy sites in the Hebrew Bible (the holy sanctuary-tree of Shechem in Joshua 24/Genesis 12, the diptych of the Hexateuch with Genesis 2, vs. the sanctuary-tree of El Olam of Beersheba vs. the (possibly?) the holy tree of Mamre). One thing I was wondering out of all this on a practical level: at least as I understand it, the Catholic Church forbids, generally, wedding liturgies outside, though I have been to at least one (non-wedding, an "ordinary-time mass") liturgy outside. Is this true for Orthodoxy or the other ancient Churches as well? And should it be otherwise?
Also, just for a related recommendation, following up for your mentioning Yhwh as a God of vegetation, Dweller of the Bush, in Jon Levenson, "Sinai and Zion" (1985), Othmar Keel wrote a wonderful book called "Goddesses and Trees, New Moon and Yhwh: Ancient Near Eastern Art and the Hebrew Bible."
I was wondering when we would get a gardening article. And a Terrence McKenna shoutout to top it off! Are you familiar with Simone Weil's thoughts on agriculture? She has some pretty interesting things to say about agriculture's capacity to function as Christian/religious symbolism, allowing for the transformation of labor into a kind of mystical contemplation. I sometimes think the modern person's isolation from nature makes it very hard to understand a great deal of religious, particularly biblical, language.
"Such nostalgia is, to reiterate, a fantasy, as anyone acquainted with rural life...."
Well, yes, but I've grown increasingly suspicious of the constant warnings from city folk against romanticizing life in the country. It often seems selective and self-justifying, especially given how pervasively romanticized urban life is in our popular media. These critics often target skeptics of the capitalist machine and consumer lifestyle, and they implicitly or explicitly rely on inflated and one-sided claims about the benefits brought by these institutions.
My personal experiences play into my perspective here, of course. My mother grew up very close to nature. Our family's move from countryside to big-city suburbia, when I was a teenager, was hard on both of us, and I don't think it was just about cultural adaptation: it was also losing something fundamentally good and human. As an adult, I lived for two years in a rural part of a developing country, and while I am well aware of the social issues that haunt rural communities (many of them, frankly, the fallout of modern economic reorganization), I treasure the memories of living with less of a buffer between myself and the rhythms of nature.
There's a certain fascination with the spiritual significance of plants in heavy metal culture, which is one of my stomping grounds. Besides the proliferation of stoner metal bands (most of which have delightfully punny names, like Cannabis Corpse or Weedpecker), there's also the "green metal" band Botanist, whose entire musical corpus revolves around plants and their place in the cosmos.
I'll have to re-read this again to get all the nuances and the hyperlinks, but it's quite providential that you're writing on this now. My brother and I recently introduced some plants to our condo, which I've wanted to do for a while, to have some other living things around, and they were quite stressed out. I nearly did a double-take when, after some attendant watering, time, and some classical music, they went from wilting to perked up - they moved - practically overnight. I'm not used to observing plants that closely - I'm not much of a green-thumb, alas - so experiencing the "vegetative/motive soul" was kind of startling.
I loved your hyperlinked article on the memories and cognition of plants - which made me think maybe you could have Rupert Sheldrake as a guest sometime (I know DBH has interviewed him, and he was a delightful interviewee). My other recommendations for an interview, unrelated to this article, would be either R. Arthur Green or Elliott Wolfson.
As a medievalist of sorts by training, I am intrigued by your comparison of "pilgrimage site wars" in medieval Europe and the Buddhist world with regards to sacred trees, which, of course, got me thinking of the conflict between holy sites in the Hebrew Bible (the holy sanctuary-tree of Shechem in Joshua 24/Genesis 12, the diptych of the Hexateuch with Genesis 2, vs. the sanctuary-tree of El Olam of Beersheba vs. the (possibly?) the holy tree of Mamre). One thing I was wondering out of all this on a practical level: at least as I understand it, the Catholic Church forbids, generally, wedding liturgies outside, though I have been to at least one (non-wedding, an "ordinary-time mass") liturgy outside. Is this true for Orthodoxy or the other ancient Churches as well? And should it be otherwise?
Also, just for a related recommendation, following up for your mentioning Yhwh as a God of vegetation, Dweller of the Bush, in Jon Levenson, "Sinai and Zion" (1985), Othmar Keel wrote a wonderful book called "Goddesses and Trees, New Moon and Yhwh: Ancient Near Eastern Art and the Hebrew Bible."