The cows come to visit our trailer

Eternal life. Singing loudly my whereabouts to the bear and her two cubs, dragging electric lines through a brushy swamp. Linked into the network of eternal life. To be subject and peer to nature.

The sound from within the herd of the cows munching, freshly arrived into new pasture. Like the time I swam within a pod of dolphins, their squeaks enmeshed with my very thoughtwaves in the air and water around me. An un-choreographed chorus of contented creatures. Hearing it at night through our open window, too; the cows never sleep.

Why every serious gardener should spend a year farming. Blazing down long rows of transplants with my new japanese planting hoe. The learning advantage of doing lots of one thing: perfecting it. Cultivating technique. One never gets very efficient doing a thing once or twice a year. Of course, for many this doesn’t matter. Fair enough. For me, it does.

Tractor work. Successfully driving the spader down a long row and not leaving a heap of soil at the end. Pretty straight, too. And using the dibbler correctly. Hell, just mounting the spader last weekend to prep my own garden, Erick informing me his “grandmother could have done that quicker, and she’s been dead for 30 years.” I smiled. No wit. It was a compliment. I’d put the damn thing on myself, without fault. Last Sunday spading my garden: coordinating the rpms, the drop, engaging the PTO, staying straight, and then reversing it at the end of the row, over and over again back and forth across my small plot. A rear-end workout.

A front-end workout last weekend, too, picking up the bins full of used potting soil, bringing them out to the compost pile and dropping them without dropping them, rolling them around to empty them without letting them roll down the side of the pile. Like a cat playing with a ball. A little manual help to get them back on the forks. Then a fall from grace this week as I skewered a bag of potting soil instead of the palette below it, and proceeded to dump the whole palette.

Beautiful weather, but I’m not used to the sun. I get much more fatigued in the afternoon in the heat, toting around armfuls of stakes for the cow pens, strands of white electric wire tied around my waist trailing out behind me. Gravity-burdened Godzilla parched and land-weary, smashing clumsily through unfamiliar terrestrial vegetation, tiny arms clutching his unweildly load, strands of seaweed dragging me back toward the depths.

Morphic Seeds

I just finished Rupert Sheldrake’s The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Memory of Nature. I buy it. Not hook, line, and sinker, but with an evolving curiosity arising from its intuitive appeal. I was already beginning to think we interact with the past literally rather than figuratively. A lucid encounter with the spirit of my young self at the bluffs, the site of many childhood adventures, felt also by my wife in a shared moment of goosebumps and welling eyes. A vivid dream of my brother as a child, awaking with the realization that it is only my belief that contends it is just a memory – nothing disproves the possibility that the young spirit of my brother or my own childhood self exists still in the fabric of the universe, latent but ever ready to manifest in response to the attuned mind.

Like the idea that one’s grandfather is still with him, not just inside in his memory, but as a primary member of a pantheon of forces that exist independent of him yet have a direct bearing on his life in the day-to-day. The past is alive in the current moment, as a field of accumulated once-having-happendz which influence the development of things now, for organisms and non-organisms alike. Sheldrake contends that genes, brains, and most biological architecture functions to receive and transmit, rather than to create. Genes are not the source of evolution, but the intermediaries between the field of a species or a family heritage and its manifestation in a particular individual. Brains are not the source of our memories when we call them up, but the transmitter that is able to call them up…from the field. These fields are probabilistic fields, bestowing habits and tendencies upon those organisms which are tuned to them. The extent to which we tune to a field is based on our similarity to it. For example, I am most closely tuned to my father and the field which is our lineage, but also to my race, and to the field of human beings as a whole. When I begin to use traditional methods in farming, I begin to attune myself (and the farm) to the morphic field of traditional farmers and farms, which will serve to support, guide, and possibly problematize my efforts.

Importantly, a field does not just influence an organism, but is influenced by organisms. This is called formative causation, and is a departure from what most current evolutionary scientists care to consider a possibility. Yet I have always been inclined to believe that nature receives feedback.

A child from an alcoholic family is more likely to become an alcoholic. Fact. But if he or she does not, she changes the probability that the next generation will, if only by a fraction.

Meditation and simply living one’s life well take on considerable power in this scenario. Ashlyn said to me in a moment of conviction at that pub in Buffalo every one of us that spends this time meditating drags all of humankind with us in spiritual growth. Conversely, we are aided in our endeavors by those that have put in the work before us.

I once encountered a Buddha statue in an Asian art gallery that breathed. No matter how many times I blinked or shook my head, I would look at it again and it would be breathing with the same regularity that it had been last time I’d looked. A rhythm established by a hundred thousand serious devotees over a thousand years had imbued it with a life of its own – that was my theory, the only one that made sense. I am not a woo-woo person by nature (my working maxim is one woo, not two). But I’m telling you: I blinked, shook my head, slapped my face, it made no difference.

I was noting my breath during meditation last week and suddenly I locked onto the breathing rhythm of that statue. I know it was the same rhythm because it took over my breathing, and the feeling I’d had when I encountered that statue returned to fill me entirely. It occurred to me that the energy of that statue existed outside of it, and was not constrained by the dimension of space. It was accessible to me. A morphic field to which one might attune oneself.

And later in the week I was observing my sensations during meditation when I had the realization that simply observing something makes it light up. Awareness activates things, but it does so with little or no controlling impact. Think of a teenager lighting up when they really feel heard. I remember that feeling from being in the presence of my high school teacher, Mary Red Clay. A sort of attention she gave me that lit me up from the inside, allowed me to be more fully myself.

What is the role of this in the world? What power does it carry? Untold power. The power of un-meddlesome change. Morphic power.

I am dreaming up a seed company called Morphic Seeds. Lavish attention on the little uns, see what it does. Magic plants. Perpetuity, adaptation, genesis. And I am beginning an investigative love affair with evolution. Next on the reading list: Lynn Margulis.

This week at the farm