№5. 86 Heart-centred Possibilities

Sue Michael, Bay Side Bowling Club, Eyre Peninsula, 2015, digital photograph.

This discussion continues to look at hazy knowledge, with an emphasis on heart-centred instincts to lead us to future ideas.

I began my considerations of this topic by reading through a 1975 book called The Landscape of Man: Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day, written by Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe. Its pages are brimming with old illustrations, photographs, and hand-drawn maps of the natural world that had been shaped to form a new surrounding for people to use. Raised burial hills, aligned stones such as Carnac in France, loggias that look out onto groves of trees planted in lines, avenues of pines that lead past palace walkways, walled kitchen gardens and hills terraced for tea plantations are all documented. Even ancient vegetables gardens, seen in their astounding geometric formations, give a clue into the ways and extent that people have reformed nature to their purposes.

This book shared a warning, back in 1975, that Earth was being disturbed by human activities, with the urging that through our own exertions we may restore a balance and ensure our survival. We first needed to come up with ideas…and imagine new possibilities.

Since my years as a teenager in the 70’s, I have not, in my experience, seen a restored balance of nature. Instead, I have seen housing that precludes gardens, woodlands cleared, seaweed fields dying, and the plight of plant pests, all striving for food.

“Until the 1700’s landscape design, with notable exceptions, was predominantly metaphysical,” states the Jellicoes.

In the epilogue of this quite large book, it shares further advice:

As the man-made world grows increasingly superhuman, so the concept of a meaningful middle ground must be extended and deepened. What abstract form will this middle-distance take? Man’s new relation to the environment is revolutionary and the landscape designer, unlike the artists, is conditioned by many factors that debar immediate experiment. We must therefore turn to the artists for a vision of the future , gaining confidence in the knowledge that the abstract art that lurks behind off at the lives a life of its own , independent of time and space.

………………………..

For the first time in history, the shape of the world that is unfolding expresses collective materialism rather than prescribed religion. In the advanced countries, the individual is evolving his own personal beliefs within his own home. The greatest threat to the existence may not be commercialisms, or war, or pollution, or noise, or consumption of capital resources, or even the threat of extinction from without, but rather the blindness that follows sheer lack of appreciation and the consequent destruction of those values in history that together are symbolic of a single great idea.

Great ideas…this is where we are separated from the animal kingdom. It is also where the future beckons the creative thinkers.

And so, I ask you to look to your local surroundings, past the private homes where people have scope to create their own restorations with nature, to the wider, local, man-made landscapes. Use your heart to find a subject to explore, such as those where the nature is crucial for a man-made landscape. Seek landscapes that fill your heart with possibilities, or joy. Perhaps there are sorts of landscapes that you know can bring that sort of reverence for nature. Examples of people being dependant on the plant world’s presence include:

Golf course

Croquet and lawn bowls grounds

Dog parks

Soccer fields

Playgrounds for children

Zoos

Outdoor respite areas in hospitals

The site where circuses come to town

Racetracks for horse racing

Airports

Display homes

Lawn may seem a common presence in these listed locations. It may be you sketch people attending to activities on public lawns.

There may be other locations that see flowers, shrubs or trees as vital for the location.

The earlier 1975 book expounding how man had been able to command and control the natural world, may need to be revised to consider how we can befriend and more respectfully interface with the natural world.

Do some drawings and imagine a golf course with a more natural landscape, a soccer field with undulations, dog parks with endless trees, racetracks with forests, and airports with fields of self-seeding wildflowers.

Can you imagine new landscapes within our urban areas?

Let your heart lead you into these ideas.