Finding Work that Works

A number of important alchemical manuscripts are reserved in the Vienna Staatsbibliothek. Among them I once found one entitled "The Garden Where the Task is Found." The content of this manuscript was not accessible to me. "- Rudolph Bernoulli.

It took me a while to find the church. Earlier I had sought out the tomb of William Blake in London's Nonconformist Cemetery, the funereal lot of a Prophet, deemed too heretical in death as well as life, for the Church's embrace. Now, three hours from London, down a long, narrow passageway off a quiet city street, I sat alone in the stone-walled cell where, seven centuries before, the epiphanies of Julian of Norwich, England's most celebrated christian visionary, had transformed Europe's religious landscape.

In a sense, the attention comes as no surprise. When the great 20th century Cabbalist, Abraham Joshua Heschel, insisted that effective prayer is fundamentally subversive he was touching on the essence of the nature of right livelihood as elucidated by his forebear, Shimon ben Gamliel, some centuries before: "Do not mistake talk for action. Compassion fills no mouths, pity builds no houses." It's an observation echoed by Sages across all cultures: true prayer involves annihilating the distinction between the active and the contemplative life, between thought and action. The being is the doing, as they might say. In Christian cosmology the credo has been expressed as 'laborare est orare," - literally, "work as prayer." And in the Bhagavad Gita, for example: "What is work? What is beyond work? Even some seers see this not aright. I will teach thee the truth of pure work, and this truth shall make thee free. Action is greater than inaction. Perform therefore thy task in life. The world is in the bonds of action. Because the victory won by he man of wisdom is also won by the man of good work. That man indeed sees the truth that vision and creation are one. Yoga is wisdom in work."

Look closely and deep wisdom traditions the world over are concerned with marrying a profound understanding of vision, and creation - the nature of the world and existence, and the realpolitik of daily life. And at the heart of this transmutation of religious sensibility into being, stands the notion of a life well lived, of noble sentiment made real, of a marriage between the inner and the outer life, the sacred and the secular, the poetic and the political. Indeed, when mystics claim that "dying to the One" or "forgetfulness of the self" is the key to a satisfying life, perhaps all they're saying in secular terms is that saving the world and saving ourselves are one and the same proposition. We live, in a very real sense, to heal - ourselves, and our context, contemporaneously. Which is all very well, of course. But how on earth does one proceed? What type of work, works?

I plummeted, floundered in a sea of confusion, then agonizingly re-engaged with the System around the Californian high-tech scene, to conclude my working life as a suit with a personal database that included contact information for the executive officers of most of America's biggest companies, the White House; others. But the contradictions inherent in trying to marry the rightful duties and responsibilities of husbandhood, for one, to the reality of a world in the grip of a form of mass insanity was tearing me apart. Money-making, never a passion, slipped further down the list of priorities. I found myself drawn inexorably toward charitable endeavors that simply weren't paying the bills. I was seeking my sanity, it felt, but the financial choices the instinct demanded were fueling the dissolution of my marriage. She let me go, gently.

Now, though, I had the bit between my teeth. I began stepping even further off the money train. Offers of huge paychecks came in. I turned them down. I couldn't reconcile the type of work they demanded with what I had become, where I was going. And, frankly, I had no idea where I was headed The mystery exceeded any explanation. It was clear there was absolutely no economic rationale for my endeavors, but I gritted my teeth and pressed on. I helped orchestrate a slew of non-profit cyberspace events; clambered on airplanes to visit poets; drove deep into the hills to meet women with wolves; sweated with AIM. Then I crashed, in a mountain of debt. Within a year, I walked off a Chinese medicinal plant conservancy and biodynamic farm deep in the Oregon woods, determined to test the literal teachings of Christ. A penniless, wandering sadhu. I walked for a year and a half. And then, I came to rest among gardeners.

The English word "Paradise, comes from an old Persian word for garden - pairidaez. Pari means "around," and daeza means "wall." The Persians have long been known as the masters of the hortus conclusus - the closed gardens of the Middle East. But the idea that Paradise is a garden easily predates Persian culture. It's a very ancient one. 4,000 year-old Sumerian writings mention a Paradise garden for the Gods. The Garden archetype is, in fact, common to every wisdom tradition. Native American mythology, for one, is thick with mention of it.

Finding the Garden's Depth

I had always assumed the Garden as Paradise was simply a quaint religious symbol, a parable for the masses. A morality tale. Then the dirt got under my fingernails, and the re-education began in earnest. As Anita Lange puts it: "The prolonged, earnest practice of tending growth and harvest finely tunes a particular quality of attention that enables intimacy with wisdom inherent in the land. With growing discernment we learn which of our human understandings are in accord with the cycles of nature; a decisive requisite to being fully at home.

Initiation to wisdom from the land lies beyond a baptism of rain and grit, beyond bone-weariness or wide-eyed wonder. It is only with senses fully awakened that we become present with ourselves within the wholeness of the world." I woke to a sense of Presence, a sense of place, a sense of destiny.

I was without a plot of my own. From the beginning, I found myself helping nurture a community garden - not a collection of individual allotments within a shared space, but a single, shared garden physically located within a co-housing community, a playground for whoever wished to participate, with no one fulfilling the role of head gardener.

Like it or not, all our strengths and all our flaws became meshed in a fresh, common framework of experience: the garden is a gentle sounding board for failure, we learned. I saw our diverse community informing the diversity of the garden, as individuals brought their own preferences to the dirt. And I experienced the garden changing the community's approach to its shared landscape and, in so doing, changing the very fabric of how its members approached their life.

And more than anything, I began to see how the depths and dimensions within the cycles of nature that for all our intellect we will never fathom became a part of us. I saw a mystery beyond mode and measure, the influence of a Harmony that fed our health - in part because its natural integrity not only responded to our love, but also defied our falsehoods, impatience, arrogance. I saw work in the garden bringing the Mystery back into us, shaping us all. We were bonded to the Spirit of Gaia, the Earth Logos, the Song of the Earth, call it what you will.

What was new was that I began to live the social implications of mixing and marrying the philosophies of the likes of Mollison, Jackson, Fukuoka, Steiner and Miles Davis. The boundaries between garden culture and community culture crumbled. And the veil that separated them dropped to reveal they had always been one and the same. And our Error had simply been a forgetting of that great ancient truth.

I began to sense why the English mystics spoke of peace with such authority: they were informed deeply by English gardens. Slowly, the apocalyptic-metamorphic dimension to deep wisdom traditions came, into sharp focus. All of them, from Hopi to Moslem, Buddhist to Christian, insist that historical time culminates with a return to peaceful cultural reconciliation and an accompanying return to an Edenic Paradise. The two transitions, one and the same. The implications hit me like thunderbolts. Human injustice hurts Mother Earth and Paradise isn't a mythic, "otherworldly" notion. Indeed, 'Paradise Gardening', as Joe Hollis refers to the creation of edible, perennial landscapes supporting "intensified foraging," is about literally co-creating Paradise, here and now, within this realm of experience. "Never mind the New Jerusalem," Martin Luther King insisted, "What about the New Atlanta?"

I'm a mendicant who is comfortable talking monetary policy with central bankers, Situationist aesthetics with anarchist neo-primitivists, compassionate conservatism with Promisekeepers. In these, and indeed in all credos I have encountered, no matter how destructive, the defining impulse appears to be an honest-to-goodness effort on the part of individuals to make sense of what do to upon falling out of bed every morning - how, in a sense, to attune ourselves to the great unifying march of evolution. That it's a quandary for most of us isn't news: as Rilke put it, "There is an ancient enmity between our daily life and great work."

But what if the clever reasonings of religious, political or academic think tanks, indeed the ancient paradigm-context that serves as a basis for all intentions, are proffering "answers" where there are no answers to be found? What if the secret to our collective truth is actually with-out explanation? What if it is to be found in the Mystery of the garden?

Nick Routledge studies tai-chi in Eugene, Oregon. Previous livelihoods include writing for Euromoney magazine and curating, A Space Without A Goal, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's consciouness archive.