The Lost Gardens of Our Youth
The Basket and the Standing Stone
The twentieth century changed everything.
The Lost Gardens of Heligan, restored to glory in the last decade of that time, bear witness to a typical C19th rural community within which everyone identified with their place. Whether as gardener, house staff or craftsmen, each lived their role within a functioning system that kept all healthy. At that time, the son of the carpenter became a carpenter. The daughter became a wife of someone at her own social level, and few rocked the boat. We were all like strands in a basket, drawn from the same stock and woven together to create a beautiful, stable, useful aspect of the world.
World war destroys such systems. The first one drew all these ‘staff’ away and the basket broke. Those who came back alive also found the telephone had reduced distance, and therefore the safety of their isolation as a self-functioning system. The motor car came next, stables became garages, distance reduced further. National radio, another world war, then television turned people’s minds away from local needs. After this, every household of a once a codependent community, now had its own phone, car, television, – and a traumatized father. Today, the internet sucks everyone into its screen, and we have traumatized children too.
Individuality is a painful state of pride in one’s capacity to cope alone. And yet it is in such states of pain that we develop strengths we would not develop, were times easier. The ills of community – co-dependency in the emotional sense being one of them – could only be overcome through human beings developing this strength to stand alone, to think for themselves. The C20th put us through that.
Today, everyone is aware of the state of the world, globally – and cares.
When Heligan was at its prime, the state of the world meant how the crops were doing in ‘my’ parish. The independent spirit of the modern human being is a precious spiritual achievement – yet also a handicap to our further development. Many call for a return to the glory, few want the loss of independence they now take for granted. Where do we go from here?
Thousands of years before European society developed the wealthy-estate model of community, hundreds depending on one owner/leader/decision maker, we lived in different circles altogether. Within a couple of miles of my house, on the high edges of Dartmoor, there remain circular mounds of stones gathered by human beings before the times of Christ, to form walls and huts for their families. These fierce, warrior-herders built other circles – ritual spaces, with standing stones so large we still do not understand how they moved them. Within these circles, a form of community was practised that draws the imagination of millions. The image of the tall, silent, stones, keeping guard today, over secrets they revealed to the people of that time, can remain with us as an image of strong community. In place of the basket in which we are all woven together, a circle of strong silence is a resilient circle. Where the basket weaves every strand into a group-consciousness, the stone circle holds the space between them through the upright strength of each individual member. The right-ordering of this stone circle also aligns with the stars. By the strength of holding their rightful places, the stones create an instrument that resounds with the song of the stars, marking the seasons, bringing order into consciousness, celebrating our place in the great cosmos that creates us in each moment.
The practice of Saturn Path Enquiry offers this opportunity, to hold your inner silence, your upright independence, in such a way that you become part of holding a circle-of-awareness that takes in the whole cosmos, that feels the presence of spiritual strengths that alone we can only think about. The emergence of the awareness that we are part of a singing-circle of silent inner voices, each finding their own tune, each adding their own truth to the harmony of our co-consciousness is the step we need, to recover what was lost in community, without losing what was gained in individual strength.
The next opportunity to join such a circle of practice is here
Read: Enquiry as a Saturn Path technique
Image above: The Garden team at Heligan, circa 1912
