One World

34) The Garden of Thorns

Posted 26th August 2016

The World is like a garden. There are beautiful flowers of all colours, sizes and type in the garden. Sometimes surprising, rare and beautiful flowers spring up in the most unexpected of places, like a beautiful little blue flower I once saw growing on a small ledge on church wall.

But there are also thorns and nettles in the garden. They grow and claim more and more territory. They harm those who try to encroach within their boundaries, and persecute those flowers who get in the way of their expansion. The thorns and nettles are ugly and dangerous. As time goes on, the powerful and aggressive thorns claim more and more of the garden, and there is less and less space available for the beautiful flowers to exist.

I walk along country paths frequently, and often there are branches with thorns reaching over the path, presenting a danger to eyes, as if trying to close off the path to hikers. I often carry a pair of small hedge cutters so I can cut back the thorns so that when I or another pass by again the threat is gone. Alarmingly, sometimes public footpaths frequented by mothers with babies in buggies etc. are similarly blighted with overhanging thorns. It seems to me as if the council are good at collecting council tax, and attending to aesthetically displeasing litter, but not the far more serious issue of thorny branches across public paths. Similarly, many private gardens have overhanging thorns - I don't know if the house owners don't care or don't know. I once put a note in a door about dangerous branches and the owner did nothing, which is when I purchased the small hedge clippers to clip the thorns myself. Another time I put a note in a door, and that same day the offending bush had been severely cut back. Sammy, who I've mentioned previously, loves gardening. However, on two occasions he had to receive hospital treatment for thorn damage to his eye - caused by his own rose bush. After Sammy passed away, I uprooted all the thorn bushes I could find in his garden so others wouldn't be similarly harmed.

I despise thorns. I not only want to cut them back, I want them uprooted so they can't ever grow again. But to ensure they don't come back, I need to understand the reason they took hold in the first place. In the wild, thorns and nettles thrive where others don't because they are strong, aggressive and weaponised. They have evolved their weaponry so as to safeguard their claim on the local soil and its nutrients, and their access to sunlight and rain water. They deter grazing animals with their thorns and stingers. They are so successful in this, that they are able to progressively claim more and more territory, denying living space to any plant or flower not able to stand up to them. Only when the thorny plants meet other thorny plants is their progress checked. The opposing thorn bushes push up against one another and intertwine, their branches reaching out in a war-like struggle to grab as much space as they can. And so, in time, a dense homogeneous matrix of equally matched thorn bushes becomes established over vast tracts of land, giving little, if any, room for animals to pass and any other less well equipped flowers to live. It's survival of the fittest - and it's ugly and brutal.

Now, what if a gardener comes along? He pulls up all the hitherto dominant thorns and nettles and throws them on the compost heap. He locates the rare and beautiful flowers that have somehow managed to survive in hidden niches here and there, and carefully gathers them up and puts them in a safe place. Then he turns the ground over, until it is completely tilled. He then builds rockeries, perhaps a little pond on a stream, incorporating little waterfalls. The gardener also makes the garden safe so that animals that might attack the plants cannot get in. Then, when the structure of the garden is built, the gardener plants the few beautiful flowers he has been holding safe. He nurtures these plants, and encourages their reproduction. He then distributes their offspring around the garden. Sometimes, a new type of flower is born. If it is not harmful to the other plants it is nurtured, reproduced and distributed amongst the garden. The gardener loves variety. Sometimes thorny or stingy plants appear, that could eventually dominate the garden if left unchecked. The gardener cuts back the thorns and stinging nettles, exposing the beautiful flowers they guard. For these flowers do not need their own protection, the gardener is their protection from grazing animals and other plants. In time, these thorny and stingy plants evolve to not waste energy in growing thorns and nettles, to not follow an anxious territory grab lest its competitors might, but instead can safely focus all their efforts in producing beautiful flowers. And so, the gardener guides and protects the growth of a beautiful and richly diverse garden, where no plant harms another, and all plants have all the nutrients, water and sunlight they need. With the gardener's ongoing care and maintenance, the garden remains in peaceful and beautiful harmony.

Thorns and nettles are weaponry. They are the exploitation of others. They are the suppression of beautiful things and bringing suffering to all for the sake of self-interest. A garden of thorns is a world of war, suffering, danger, intimidation, exploitation etc.

I want humanity to become a gardener, uprooting thorns: systems of oppression, exploitation, etc. and nurturing beauty: education, creativity, the arts, research into improving the quality of life for all the beautiful and varied life in the garden of the World, etc.

I want humanity to cooperate to provide ongoing care and maintenance of this global garden we all share. To change it from a cruel, torturous place into a safe and loving paradise for all her richly varied residents living here now, and to arrive in the future.