Extended description

Alt-text: Tweet: 1/6 It was John Moriarty, a gardener at the Carmelite priory in Boars Hill, Oxford, who declared, "Jesus is our hero of integration." As he interprets it, the deep ecology of peacemaking effects and requires an integral, intra-realm response to a symbiotic eco-cultural challenge. Tweet: Not escape then, but arrival. Moriarty: "The Second Coming is but a better understanding of the First Coming...It is an apocalypse of mind and eye we need, an apocalypse that opens the veils of mind and eye, not an apocalypse that pulls down the stars, that obliterates the sea.” “But how self-exiled we nowadays are from all great gates, great openings into other worlds, great openings into this world. Nierikas, the Hoichol indians call them. The sacred, great and dangerous earth regained might yet turn out to be Paradise Regained.” - John Moriarty Excerpt from: At one level the Paradise gardening movement is aimed directly at questions such as these because it dares to mount a challenge to the whole sensory-intellectual tool-kit of the unhinged modern mind and the world it validates - a perceptual contractedness, an all-encompassing enchantment, an existential apostasy we co-operate unconsciously with, hypnotically with, and which we maintain with immense energy. If William Blake is indeed correct when he insists that what ails us is, “the Fall into Division”, a fracture between external realities and our inner life, between visible and invisible worlds, between the shell of our condition and the meaningfulness loaded into it, then in mythopoeic terms the state in which we live is one in which, as Rilke describes it, ‘the gods have withdrawn.’ From this viewpoint, organizing religion’s paramount incoherence lies not in the strength of its robust attempts to recover the invisible foundations of culture but in what James Hillman clarifies as ‘its menace in how it proceeds.’ Where the ‘transcendent function’ in individuals may indeed mark a sublime aspiration, the forms of its sensibilities and the categories of its understanding remain, by and large, locked within a consensus of reality that does not as yet embody our magical bond with our immediate world and the One thread of meaning which unites us. But, as A.J. Muste observed, “there is no path to peace, peace is the path” and it is precisely the dynamic communion of path and peace that deep gardeners restore in an act of Reconciliation which heals the fracture ‘between’ interior and exterior landscapes, in the natural sequence of a concrete journey into Beauty’s deepest ground, Paradise-regained and, as N.O. Brown portrays it, ‘the return of the gods.’ [] Tweet: "Could it be that even now our universe is in a cocoon it has spun for itself, is undergoing complete metamorphosis and will soon emerge as something unpredictably different? “ – John Moriarty.