We are the Dead

The peonies are blooming. First come the tree peonies, and then the more traditional ones. Singles, and doubles, and layered beauties of bounty. White. Purple. Pink. Red. Yellow. A fragrant rainbow of delight. We have more than a dozen peony bushes and trees scattered around the property here at FoxHaven. I wait with delightful anticipation for the short but bursting beauty of the blooming. I pluck the marshmallow soft smaller buds and force bloom them on the window sills. The culling allows the energy of the blooming to concentrate into the larger buds. Some of these dedicated ones are as big as my face, and heavy with their burden of beauty, they bow down to the earth. Especially after a rain. I have learned not to cage them, or even truss them. Too crowded they attract mould. They need to stretch out, to their full unfearful size. I allow them the freedom of the full expression of their abundance. We are truly blessed to witness this.

First, Lilly of the Valley, then Lilac, then Peony, then Wild Roses, then Hydrangea, then Sunflowers. FoxHaven has its order and its seasons. There is something so miraculous and beautiful about each full faced bloom. While I have failed miserably at poppies and wildflowers, I have achieved success with the more cultivated flowers. I still spy with a twinge of envy and disappointment, the ditches and roadsides that are purple, pink, and white with phlox, daisies, poppies, sweet pea, and chicory. It should not be such a mystery to grow such variety. Such multiplicity. But, it seems the singularity of each bloom is more my story at present. With a wider lens and perspective, my gardens are a riot of colour and beauty, but that which eludes me, seduces me.

I listened to a fabulous podcast today. It was a discussion with prominent scientists about the surprising resurgence of a belief in God. By God they mean Logos, Intelligent Design, and Teleology even at the cellular level. This resurgence may not be theistic, but it is mathematical, patterned, and cooperative. In less than two decades, the promises of New Atheism have proven shallow and empty. Richard Dawkins and his Selfish Gene and God Delusion, is no longer the gold standard. Since the Royal Society meeting of 2016, a Fellowship of many of the world's most eminent scientists and the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, the rational materialism of Darwinism has begun to cannibalize itself.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. —Richard Dawkins in River Out of Eden, 1995.

The blind and pitiless indifference is, I’m afraid, Neo-Darwinism. Even with their best science, they cannot explain the inexplicable emergence of life. They can explain how life evolves, replicates, develops in complexity, but they cannot explain the phenomena of the emergence of life itself. Science will never be a religion despite its zealots. Trust the science. The science is settled. Really?! The scientific and political fundamentalism of the CoVid era shows that the emperor has no clothes. Sam Harris, still a herald for the rational materialists, uses fractal religious tropes to argue the nonsense of religious patterns. We are surely embedded in patterns. It is inescapable. These patterns are not random. They are ordered, purposeful, and even at the cellular level, have agency. It has been proven that this agency is not driven by natural selection, but rather, driven to adapt, include, and re-code in the service of something inexplicably greater than survival. Greater than itself. Self sacrifice may well be the underlying intelligence. Not slaughter, but sacrifice. Making sacred. Sounds like the greatest story ever told to me. Lung cells taken from a cadaver begin to re-code themselves along mysterious patterns and are capable of correction in replication that defies logic. Cooperation and not competition is the core tenant of existence. Science is catching up to religion in this sense.

So, what does this all have to do with peonies and poppies? Stay with me. I think it is about the dance between singularly and multiplicity. When diversity is dedicated to an underlying and even mysterious unity, more is accomplished. Multiplicity leans towards unity. Singularity leans toward diversity. It is surely a dance. When the unity breaks down, entropy ensues, and the diversity is chaos. And, unity without diversity, is tyranny. There is a systolic and diastolic flow to reality. We all know what makes a good peony. It is not about morality. Good is the full expression of the signature of the genome. A poppy is a bad peony, and a peony is a bad poppy, but neither is a bad flower. Despite the perspective that some would see the lowly poppy as a weed, in Flanders Field they are good. They are the full expression of poppy. They tell a story greater than themselves.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

    That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high.

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

Singularity is refined by exclusion. Exclusion has a beauty because of its diversity. Its multiplicity. All the rainbow flags and dedicated months or seasons will never capture this deeper truth. I can cultivate peonies, hydrangeas, and sunflowers, but the multiplicity of the rest of the bouquet remains wild, uncultivated, elusive, and perhaps more random than I am currently able to comprehend. With each attempt, with each season, I am leaning into what these flowers are teaching me, telling me, stretching me toward. We are the Dead. We are the decomposition. We are the multiplicity. The ancestors. The entropy. The disavowed lineage that defies time and place. I invite you to lean in with me. To take up the torch. To hold it high. To not break faith.