Cyber Spirit Cafe

“Turn off the news and get in the garden!” Thanks to my Kansas gardening friend, Lisa, for sharing on Facebook this picture from the good people at Happy Gardens. Amusing as it is, I think there is deep wisdom here.

Most of us experience watching, listening to, or reading news stories as a pretty quick path to anger, depression, or both. And that’s the objective! The 19^th century newspaper dictum, “If it bleeds, it leads,” is still the media’s guiding principle. While stories of extraordinary goodness have some appeal, it’s the stories of danger, fear, horror, outrage, etc. that get our attention.

This is how we’re wired. Our mind is designed to be constantly attuned to potential threats to our safety. For life in the modern world, we are hyper-sensitive, imagining far more dangers than actually exist. And that sensitivity can be manipulated. Or rather, we can be manipulated through the intentional triggering of that sensitivity. This is the story of modern advertising, politics, and the media.

How do we know if an advertised product will do what it claims, if the danger a politician warns us about is real, or if a frightening story in the news is true? In many cases, probably most, we can’t know. Not without a lot of effort, anyway.

There is an unreality that pervades all media but which it does its best to hide. Malcolm Muggeridge was a British journalist who late in life became a committed Christian. He also became an ardent critic of his profession. He told of how when he did a BBC news story outdoors, the TV crew would roll out a large piece of bright green AstroTurf for him to stand on, since the natural ground was usually too dull by broadcast standards. A simple example but it reveals the media mindset: reality isn’t enough. Viewers must be given a “better” fantasy.

Such inclinations are nothing new. After the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, photographers rushing onto the battlefield to record the carnage rearranged bodies for “better” pictures. Cameras can reproduce great beauty, drama, emotion, and genuine moments of history. But they can also be used to manufacture such things with their limited view frame.

What looks like a near-riot on TV would be revealed, if the camera were pulled back, to be a handful of people goaded into their screaming and angry faces by an off-camera producer. Airbrushing has long made it impossible to know what an advertising model really looked like. Recently I watched with fascination as the man who took my passport picture manipulated the image on his computer screen to make all sorts of “improvements.” Who of us wants to see our image “in the raw”? With digitization, and now AI, these manipulations of reality are becoming nearly impossible to detect.

Stories are just as easily altered. The major news media have all cut back significantly their actual news gathering staffs, both foreign and domestic. Reporters often know little about the communities where events they report have occurred. The lack of staff also leads to “reporting by press release,” where it’s easier to simply repeat what a government official or other authority (often insisting on being anonymous) says about an event, rather than devote the resources to independently investigate it.

What we forget, however, is that most of what the media is telling us actually doesn’t matter. This is its big lie, its flimflam. “Hey, you’ve gotta see/hear/buy this!” No, you probably don’t. But the media has mastered all the tricks to make us feel as if we do. It knows how to push our buttons. There’s a reason TV has been called the plugin drug.

The result of all this is that our “reality” is increasingly a manufactured one. The media entertains us with endless stories of celebrity soap opera and dazzling lifestyles. At the same time, it infuriates or terrorizes us with “reports” of events and persons from around the world. In almost all case, we have no personal experience with these stories or any ability to determine their truth.

The admonition to “get in the garden” sounds like an easy way to avoid this conundrum and the stress it produces. In other words, be like an ostrich and bury your head in the mulch. But I don’t think that’s what it means. Rather, it as encouragement to find peace in rediscovering the really real.

The physical world around us is a tactile world engaging our senses. It is the world in which we live. The world of our screens is a virtual world of dancing pixels engaging and manipulating our minds. It purports to tell us of a world “out there” from which we feel separated and estranged.

The real world, however, the “garden,” welcomes us and makes us feel at home. It touches and embraces us. When we feel moist dirt with our hands, beach sand between our toes, snow flakes brushing our face, or the wind in our hair we experience a connection and oneness with the world, rather than separation and isolation.

Increasingly, scientific studies support our gut instinct. Why does walking in the woods or petting a cat in our lap lower our blood pressure? Why are “comfort” dogs now routinely brought to people in distress: at crime scenes, places of natural disaster, health care facilities, airports, schools during final exams?

Creative expression also grounds us and re-centers us. It renews our sense of purpose and worth. Whether it’s planting a garden or a landscape, knitting a sweater or sewing a quilt, cooking or redecorating, painting or sculpting, singing or dancing or playing a musical instrument—all these bring our mind, our heart, and our senses together into a harmonious purpose that we experience as satisfaction, peace, and joy.

The benefits of these activities are compounded when they are engaged in with other people. Why? Because all of these things break down our sense of separation to reveal the essential oneness of creation; what in spiritual terms is known as nonduality. When others join us in our creative work, our unity with the hearts, or spirit, of all becomes self-evident, and our greatest division is healed. We have long failed to appreciate the literalness of Jesus’ saying that our greatest need is to love our neighbor as our self.

Mary Oliver was perhaps the greatest American poet of our lifetime, winning both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A student of nature, many of her poems direct our attention to how natural world points us, in its many forms, if we will look and listen, to our true nature and destiny. As she tells us in one of her most popular poems, Wild Geese, “the world offers itself to your imagination … over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.