How curious it is to discover that life thrives in the underworld, even when all seems cold and dead. The pandemic had its own effect, perhaps extending or intensifying the darkness of winter past, but it also brought benefits for many. One of them was an increased focus on gardening and plants. For me, this extended to soil health and ecology.
We humans moved the world out of true, beginning with the Industrial Revolution. We drove many living things to extinction and continue to do so. Natural systems were disrupted wholesale. Widespread disease and the deaths resulting from coronavirus are a loud warning: We can easily do the same to ourselves. The individualist’s defiant cry, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul,” is merely delusion.
Humanity’s teeming billions are as nothing beside the unnumbered microorganisms around and within us. In winter, when all the surface plants have died off and the trees are leafless, the ground seems barren, cloaked with death. Yet beneath the surface, microbes and bacteria, roots and fungi are all active, preparing for a new explosion of life above ground.
In my darkest hours, I feel as dry and dead as weed stalks in November. Yet within, the ecosystem of my subconscious is active, building connections, patterns, relationships; repairing wounds, incubating ideas, preparing for growth. There is transformation taking place through no intention of mine. It is a process that requires a slowing down that wouldn’t otherwise take place.
In my garden in winter, the soil has its own slow time. While I read seed catalogues and sip tea by the fire, those myriad, microscopic life forms are building more soil. While I plot the course of spring planting, they are preparing nutrients for the plants to come. Just as they are hard at work making the garden possible at all, I must consider their health and an environment made optimal for them.
Learning about soil biology has given me a new appreciation for the web of life on Earth, where humanity is only one participant and not necessarily the most important one. With climate change, all living things are under greater pressure to survive. Less snow in winter seems like a good thing, until you wake up to the negative impact it has on the garden and surrounding woods, right down to the invisible organisms at root level.
Humans who lose sight of the big picture of existence are a danger to everyone. The illusion that you can control nature or its effects through technology leads to poor decisions and not much else. Belief that individual will is more powerful than circumstance is useful only until it meets the circumstance that overpowers it. Existence is not a gluing together of parts, but the solvent that makes the parts a whole.
Fate, the idea that the physical world has a fixed, unchangeable order, shows up in many areas of human thought and action, but is it real? Can you truly “master” your “fate” and alter this order? Nobody knows the answer to this question, including me.
What I believe is that God is the ultimate master of my life, but he allows me the freedom to make my own decisions. I also believe that he is in constant interaction with me and every other living being to move us into alignment with his will to good. There are frequently tragic or unpleasant consequences for being out of alignment with God’s will, not because he is malevolent, but because, being wholly good, he will not will anything less.