A MANUAL FOR PARADISE
Someone asked me, I couldn’t read the tone, why I had called my new newsletter ‘A Manual for Paradise’.
This is my answer. I have not widely shared it; I am not entirely sure why. Maybe it felt like one of those things that just sounds better inside one’s head. Maybe I am worried about being cancelled for the cultural appropriation of a religious concept.
But this is the gist.
Modern life goes so relentlessly forwards. We hurtle headlong towards self-induced Armageddon, towards hotter deserts and rising seas.
I, for one, am not here for it.
There has got to be a way of stepping off this Kafka-esque merry-go-round. There has got to be a way of discovering and rediscovering (all the best lessons are learned more than once) a place, not of consumptions, exploitations, and existential anxiety, but of peace.
In my mind and in my heart, this place is a garden. Strip away the pinging phones, the social media, the noise, the pressure, the fear and the endless endless, demands of modern-day life, and what you have is the earth beneath our feet. The sky above our heads.
In the vernacular of my own cottage, to step back into history is to inhabit a garden around which life revolved. A crammed abundance of plants for eating and plants for medicine. A true cottage garden sits at that place between wild and gardened, with both nature and the human hand adding their magic. Alive with vines and fruit trees, as well as bees and birds. Maybe even a pig or two. An ecosystem upon which a family relies. No supermarket deliveries or amazon prime. Strawberries in June. Kale in the winter.
But there is a garden that exists in our collective unconscious too. A garden where we have everything we need for joy and sustenance, although maybe not as full. The human mind needs both riotous abundance (Great Dixter plantings, frothy English roses, explosions of cow parsley) and organising structure (box hedges, hazel hurdles, chestnut paling) in the same way as children need love and boundaries.
In this mythical and perfect garden, there is balance here, and calm. An idyllic and idealised place, somewhere long forgotten but which we can always come back to, to find again a simplicity and innocence robbed of us by life. A garden, as Sue Stuart Smith says, is a place that “gives you quiet, so you can hear your thoughts”.
The name for this garden is Paradise.
As a word, Paradise comes from Persian for a walled enclosure, and then came to mean a garden (and walled gardens are a different level of wonderful in my eyes). It was not initially a religious concept, although almost all religions involve some form of Paradise, a place of fulfilment, contentment and bliss that contrasts with the drudgery of human life. It is either the place from which we come (the Garden of Eden) or it will be the place that we will go (for the Celts, Magh Meall, a beautiful island realm reached only through death or glory. In Greek mythology, Elysium Fields.)
From the beginnings of human time, there has been a need to believe that is something and somewhere better to be found. That maybe, if we get this bit right, we will be allowed to open the gate and enter the garden of our dreams.
But if we, as human beings, feel hard done by because of the rapacious march of capitalism and the fast and unremitting pace of modern urban living (another Sue Stuart Smith line), the earth has come off worse. It is dying. Fertility is dropping as the microbes and creatures that bring life to the skin of our planet are damaged or killed. We spray and we dig. We expose and we poison, and every step takes us further away from the sort of soil that we need to survive. To heal, we need to bring the reality of how things are and the idea of Paradise a little closer together. To create a paradise on earth means to create a place of abundance and contentment in our own spaces, to grow happiness in our own gardens, to nourish and build up our soil health rather than drain and deplete it. Plant seeds. Eat fruit that we have picked ourselves (although we all know where that one ends).
I am a writer, and I write to share how abundance and beauty can flourish in the smallest of places, and in the most unlikely of circumstances. I want to tell you how much flowers will change you, how much joy and pleasure is to be had, even amongst the trying times. But I also want to share what I have learned (and continue to learn) about soil. Because without us coming to see soil as something other than dirt, then there is no heaven to be had, only the hell of climate change.
And that is why this is called a Manual for Paradise.