One of my sublime joys is seeing my delphiniums bloom, the seeds of which I planted in the spring of the previous year and which I transferred from pots to the ground that fall. Another is looking at my masses of New England asters flowering in early autumn. After enjoying my coneflowers, I delight in watching goldfinches pluck seeds from the dried heads. The final joy I will mention is that of sensing the morning awakening of life in my garden. These are all joys of fulfillment – of things achieving their purpose: producing the flowers which I desired to see when I planted the seeds, providing food for beautiful goldfinches once the flowers have died, the daily re-creation of life.
What is this joy? In the first place it is a certain awareness of life: with the delphiniums it is awareness of the lives of myself and the plants which became conjoined with my planting the seeds and remained linked as I followed their growth over more than one year.
I first planted the New England asters over thirty years ago. They’re native perennials that reseed prolifically, regularly coming up every spring and blossoming in the fall. As we have shared our lives for decades I look upon them as old and dependable inhabitants of the garden.
The goldfinch plucking the coneflower seeds is an additional fulfillment after the blooming of these perennials whose population sometimes shrinks and must be restored in early fall with new plants started from seed in the spring. Accordingly our conjoined lives occasionally begin again.
My flowers’ growth is teleological – advancing toward the goals of flowering, seed production and dispersal, feeding wildlife and more. Conjoined with them, my life advances toward the goals of seeing them do these things which brings me joy of fulfillment.
Each of the plant varieties has a certain spatial extension and place in my garden. Like them I am also a spatially extended body, and our lives are spatially conjoined as well. This is obvious in the simple act of seeing a flower: I, a seeing subject over here, am functionally conjoined with the flower, a visible object over there. It is also evident in my feeling of joy which is spatially extended over the flowers and myself, immediate evidence of our functional connection which embodies our conjoined intentions.
The joy I feel in the morning is rather different from these examples in a few respects. As I look at the tree branches outside my window I am conscious of the tree as a part of the whole living garden in which all the things in it, including myself, are functionally conjoined. The quality of my experience is therefore complex, reflecting the conjunctions of these myriad things. In the morning as the garden and I move into daytime action I am further aware of this complex life recreating itself, springing forth anew to its diverse individual and collective fulfillments. Life is a process of continual and teleological self-creation along with self-re-creation, matters which I will explain shortly.
For the present I shall continue to analyze my joy, borrowing criteria of wine tasting which distinguishes the flavor of a wine as well as qualities that include complexity, light or full body, intensity, persistence and connectedness. Every different object of joy lends the characteristic quality of its essence to the experience – delphiniums, asters, goldfinches and so on, and these correspond to the flavors of wines. Awareness of the whole garden is obviously complex compared to that of individual plants or stands of single varieties. An example of the contrast between light and full-bodied experiences of life is that of saplings versus big, old, especially ancient trees. Intensity refers to how striking the object is, like brilliant colors in flowers. Persistence refers to how the object holds one’s attention, and connectedness pertains to the degree to which it recalls past experiences or includes present ones of other senses.
My discussion of experience and life has blurred the distinction between objects of consciousness and things, particularly in affirming that consciousness is extended in three dimensions, a self-evident fact of experience. It is true that things and the awareness of them are different, and this is manifest in the perspectival quality of visual perception, how it and other sense experiences are private to a conscious subject and exist only when the subject is awake, has their eyes open and so on. So I conclude that the material world and consciousness are different dimensions of a single world in which consciousness constitutes a certain function of organisms that, as Henri Bergson demonstrated in Matter and Memory, is continuous with bodily motion, being such motion in a potential state. Ultimately, therefore mind and matter differ not in kind, but in degree of the vital action that constitutes life itself.
Life extends spatially, as we see in the growth of organisms, and this does not only mean becoming larger, for they form functional conjunctions with things around their bodies: Seedlings root in the soil, draw nutrients and water from it as well as sunlight and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. All these relationships are reciprocal, as the soil stabilizes itself, discharges moisture, renews its fertility and more through the presence of the plants.
What is less familiar than the extension of life in space is its full extension in time. While organisms grow from the present into the future they preserve their pasts with the persistence of their physical bodies. As at every moment they self-create their new present selves, they recreate their pasts as their bodies that nevertheless undergo changes that continually accumulate. We see this in our own selves: as we have grown up and older, everything that has ever happened in or to our bodies has had an impact and left a mark that remains. Our adulthood is literally the culmination of our infancy and youth, thus our past younger selves haven’t gone away but have matured into our present adult bodies. So as we grow in size and spatially extended functional conjunctions, we also grow our histories – the accumulated record of everything we have ever experienced.
The recreation of life in the morning in my garden that I sense can now be seen as having two parts: self-creation in a new present moment and self-recreation of the past. These are not separate, for temporal existence is continuous, and in our experience the past, as conscious and bodily memories, continually interpenetrates our present. Above I referred to the qualities of wine that include connectedness that arouses remembrance. We especially appreciate the aspect of age in wine – the quantity of past time that it contains and the rich maturity that it confers.
So I return to the joy of fulfillment in my garden: like the experience of wine, it is enriched and fortified with memories and a lengthy past – over thirty years of planting, replanting, weeding, trimming and sharing in its seasonal and long-term progress. As I have performed these activities to obtain my own experience of pleasure I have served the lives of the flowers, the bees, butterflies and birds, ultimately the world as I support these species and the benefits of photosynthesis to the planet. I have been a vital participant in all of their service to the world as well, and my contribution and impact remain embedded in them.
At a certain point organisms cease to live; they are killed and digested by animals or undergo decomposition by microorganisms. While the chapters of their histories as whole organisms then end, their sagas continue in the substance of their dead bodies. It is impossible to determine when individual organisms’ histories finally end and are succeeded by those of their residue, for these overlap. Still, both the direct and indirect effects that they have had on other objects continue while those remain in existence, after which they may persist in objects that the latter have touched. Indeed, transmission of the original effects may go on indefinitely. Ultimately all of the past is always present at least in the universe as a whole which includes all organic beings and inorganic things that do not die and therefore may, like geologic features and the atmosphere, preserve their histories within themselves for a very long time.
Our lives leave an eternal legacy that is our personal immortality. John Hausdoeffer’s book What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? poses a crucial question. By nature each life continually creates and recreates itself for the purpose of serving all life in the present and the future. It is a deep mistake to imagine that temporal existence is a series of discrete instants like beads on a string radically disconnected from all past and future moments. In our own ways we embody the past and determine the future, having an incredible heritage as well as an obligation to seek our greatest joy of fulfillment through action with other humans and nonhuman nature in pursuit of life fulfillment for all.
