 Tessa Strickland is the co-founder and publisher of a wonderful children’s publishing company, Barefoot Books. Unique in its approach, Barefoot provides books that open the hearts and minds of children from all walks of life, inspiring them to read deeper, search further, and explore their own creative gifts.
Dear Friends,
I’m writing this at the close of the first Saturday in April, the close of as perfect a spring day as anyone could wish for. I’ve spent it absorbed in the unfolding wonders of my garden – preparing seed beds, weeding my somewhat chaotic flower borders, taking more cuttings from the now huge lemon-scented geranium I was given some years ago; watching the vivid green shoots of my favourite flower, lily-of-the-valley, push up through the black soil.
But as well as being happily absorbed in these activities, the air around me saturated by the blossoming fragrance of hawthorn bushes and apple trees, the sky as blue as Krishna, I’m overshadowed by thoughts of all that is not well in this beautiful world. I’m thousands of miles away from the Antarctic, yet I can hear the glaciers melting; I have this morning visited the local farmer’s market and made sure, as I try to each week, that none of the my money is spent on GM products, yet I sense the noose of multinationals such as Monsanto tightening around the throat of farmers and peasants everywhere; I have refilled my car with unleaded fuel and wished I could do without a car altogether. So while I have rejoiced in the glory of spring unfolding around me, I have also been oppressed by our society’s failure, and by my personal failure, properly to care for the natural world. And it has again occurred to me, as it has increasingly in recent years, that the worst war of our age is not the war of man against man, but the war of man against nature.
What can I do?
So what can I do? I wonder if this is the right question. Could it be wiser for me to ask, how can I be? Be what? You may wonder – what does being have to do with it? Perhaps it’s almost too simple a distinction, but I believe that how I am is the ground for what I do – to apply Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance, I believe that by being open to and recognising spirit in nature, and living accordingly, living with nature rather than setting out to dominate, control or manipulate it, in my own small way I am walking more lightly on this earth than I might otherwise and that somehow, something joyful and intrinsically healing radiates out of this. I don’t know where it goes or what it does, but in my more lucid moments I sense it happening.
Being open to spirit in nature
What does it mean, then, in day-to-day terms, being open to spirit in nature? For me, it means valuing what is revealed to me through dream and through the mysterious darkness of the night; learning how to relate what happens underground to what happens above the surface; learning how to risk going deeper; learning how to trust. I sometimes stand in my garden under the light of the moon and ponder on all that is happening there, hidden and in shadow. Last year, my mother gave me a magnolia tree, and I recently transplanted it from a pot, which it did not much care for, into a more permanent position. Its growth upwards and outwards will be in proportion to the reaching of its roots downwards and outwards. It will only flower for a short time each spring, but flower it will, and each year its branches will increase and its great, chalice-like blooms will be more plentiful. I can think of few more beautiful images for the life of the spirit and, within this, the journey of the soul.
To kneel at the feet of a tree
It’s common among those who tread the path of conscious living to associate ‘darshan’ with seeing a guru or great teacher from one of the major religious traditions of the world, and being blessed and transformed by the encounter. I have knelt at the feet of great teachers, but I have also knelt at the twisty branches of the hawthorn hedge. And when I plant a rose, I marvel at its intricate root system, respecting the pungent manure from which it drinks as much as I know I shall soon rejoice in the heady fragrance of its blossoms. Of course, it’s particularly easy in springtime, when rebirth in nature is all around us, to feel almost palpably invigorated and alive, but I set out to honour the unfolding miracle of the natural world, and the unfolding of my own life as a small, rippling part of this unfolding, across all seasons of the year and across all of the activities I pursue.
Soon it will be summer, and like anyone with a connection to the land I’ll be marvelling at the way in which the tiny seeds planted in hope and trust a few weeks or months ago have sprung to life. Summer will turn to autumn, and it is in time to this rhythm that I contemplate the seasons of my own life – early summer is approaching for my three teenage children, while for me, it is time to consider how I want to spend my autumn years, how I might best share with others the fruits of my experiences. Then winter will inevitably arrive – bringing apparent death in the natural world and in due course, for me too as a mortal being, but bringing rebirth as well, into the next, as yet hidden stage of my soul’s journey.
But for now it’s springtime, and I let myself rejoice. I drop into the daytime and night-time mysteries of my garden, surrendering to the dance of spirit and nature in every cell of my being. And as I drink the mingling fragrances of the many spring flowers that are carried to me and through me on the early evening air, I invite you too to celebrate the season with the words of the great Cretan poet, Kazantzakis:
‘I said to the almond tree,
“Sister, tell me, who is God?”
And the almond tree blossomed.’
With much love,
Tessa Strickland
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