Nature teaches us ways we can set up the system of our lives to promote presence and calm. We can do this by rewilding – leaving things alone, and letting them find their own course.

On this episode, Ben reflects on two gardens that have left a lasting impression on him. One garden has been intentionally given back to nature, whereas the other is crowded and overgrown.

What do we need to end? What do we need to cut back? What do we need to trample on to invite new growth and a rewilded natural existence in our lives?

Links

• Who Doesn’t Want a Little Peace and Calm? – Peripheral Thinking, with Martin Alyward
• Might Daoism be a home for you in '22 (and beyond)? – Peripheral Thinking, with George Thompson
• The Knepp Estate

Greetings, welcome back to Peripheral Thinking.

So on this episode, uh, I'm gonna do something a little bit different for you.

Um, I think to find a way to compliment the kind of myriad conversations with academics advisors.

Entrepreneurs, activists that make up the most of Peripheral Thinking.

on the very good suggestion of Mark, uh, our excellent producer, um, thought it'd be useful for every now and then for me to offer something back to you, uh, me, to offer some thoughts back to you, kind of reflecting some of the many things that I'm learning in all the conversations I've been having with people.

And maybe in part to save you.

The chance of, of having those conversations, or at least to kind of point you in the direction, uh, of conversations it might be worth to dive into.

Anyway.

The first of these, we might call these Peripheral Thinking Applied or Peripheral Thinking in Practice, the title if you like, uh, for, for this is A Tale of Two Gardens and Unlikely Sources of Presence and Calm.

Now, uh, one of the kind of really common questions I get from you and, uh, other listeners is, uh, relates to this idea of finding present and calm, presence and calm, remaining present and calm, remaining present and calm when the stuff of life is swirling around you.

Remaining present and calm when I don't know, strong men in the world are threatening each other with nuclear war.

Remaining present and calm when the stuff of your work, the stuff of your company is crumbling.

Remaining present, and calm.

When there is ecological collapse, social collapse, financial collapse, organizational collapse, all those little small things.

How to remain present and calm?

And I guess my source for that in part is two people who I've interviewed on the podcast, Martin Aylward and George Thompson.

Check out those by, uh, one talking Buddhism, the other talking Daoism, because really a lot of their work and a lot of what I get from them as teachers points me to remaining present and calm.

And of course, you know, there's a foundational thing.

There is a foundational need for some spaciousness.

There is a foundational need for meditation, essentially, that is at the heart of my remaining present and calm.

But not really talking about that today.

That's spoken about in lots of different places.

I'm interested in a slightly different angle on remaining present and calm, which of course is what this podcast is all about, finding those slightly different.angles.

And so, um, like I said, the theme for this is a Tale of Two Gardens and finding Presence and Calm in Unlikely Places.

So the first of these gardens belongs to a very old lady.

Uh, it belongs to a very old lady, uh, who lived around the corner from where I grew up.

Uh, and so truth, I don't think it probably still does belong to a very old lady because she was a very old lady when I was growing up, and that's getting close to being a very long time ago.

When we were young, we did what lots of little gaggles of children did who lived nearby, near neighbors of each other.

We would kind of wander around, we would play in the streets, we would explore, we would experiment.

We would kind of wander around alleys, around the back of houses, and we would look over fences, we'd look through holes, all of these sorts of things.

And there was one garden which really stuck in the memory.

This one garden belonged to, like I said, a very old lady.

And this one garden stuck in the memory because it was wild.

It was overgrown.

It was out of control.

It was sort of full of brambles and bushes and trees and plants in a kind of chaotic, overgrown mess.

And it really stuck in the memory sticks in the memory because in a way, whilst it kind of looked so overgrown, it looked so wild, it looked so out of control, it didn't really feel like it was full of life.

It looked like it was full of death, actually.

And maybe that is because of an association, my sort of then eight year old mind had with the idea I had of a then very old lady who owned the garden.

But there was something about it, even in its kind of wild, overgrown ness that kind of felt very unalive actually.

And I'm sure actually under the surface, under the, the, kind of wild overgrown ness.

I'm sure it was full of life.

I'm sure it was abundant with life.

Cause of course, what we know now is these kind of wild gardens are the ideal breeding ground, the ideal home ground for insects.

But that's not really what I'm talking about.

What I'm really talking about, like I said, is this garden, which was wild.

It was out of control, but it felt somehow dead.

It felt somehow devoid of life.

Maybe it felt overcomplicated, strangled.

And I compare this to the second of the gardens in these tails.

Now the second of the gardens is quite different in almost every regard.

The second of these gardens is actually a place called the Knepp Estate, which is here in Sussex, where I am now recording this.

Um, and the Knepp Estate, you know, is only a garden in the lust sense of the word.

The Knepp Estate is a big old farm.

Huge, I don't know, hundreds, maybe even thousands of acres of farmland buried in the Sussex countryside.

Uh, when the current farmers, uh, current tenders of the land, the people who were responsible for the Knepp Estate took it over about 30 or so years ago, they were faced with a conundrum.

A conundrum which many farmers, as I understand it, are faced with today, which is how to make their farm profitable, how to make the land profitable, how to create land and a company, and a business which worked, which was full of life.

Now, I think the, the challenge which lots of farmers face is it's kind of easy to get stuck into a cycle of pesticides being necessary to tend the land being necessary to farm the land and the kind of costs associated with that, the cost of the soil, the financial cost, meaning that actually at best you are just about able to kind of eek out a living just about able to kind of make the farm work as a kind of profitable business.

And, uh, rather than sort of descending into that cycle of just about making things work and tending land in a way which isn't maybe healthy for the land, they took a different route.

They went a different way.

They decided that rather than just have this kind of farming by holding on approach, they would actually give the land back, give the land back to nature.

So they embarked on what was then a very wild experiment to rewild the land.

To give it back, like I said, to nature, to let nature run its course.

To let nature decide what would grow, when, what would die, when, how things would kind of, you know, nature would decide, nature would choreograph the thriving of this land.

Not the farmer, not the machinery, not the companies who sell farmer's equipment, but nature would decide how and where this land would flourish, how and where this land would thrive.

So in giving the land back to nature, um, of course, you know, like the old lady's garden, things are free to grow as they grow.

Things are free to sort of run wild as they would choose to run wild.

But there's a real fundamental difference between what was happening at the Knepp Estate and what was happening in the old lady's garden.

Because with the old lady's garden, like I said, it was overgrown.

It was wild.

It was sort of crowded and complicated, but somehow felt it was kind of dead.

It wasn't alive, it wasn't abundant with life, albeit, like I said, maybe with life that was hidden from sight.

The Knepp Estate is quite different, so yes, they gave it back to the land.

Yes, the, the flowers, the plants, the hedges, the bushes, the grass, the trees, they are free to decide their own journey, free to decide their own kind of the, the, the path that they take.

But where, like I said, the old lady's gaden was kind of crowded and overgrown, the Knepp Estate is a place abundant with life.

It's a place where kind of bird life has returned to, bird song has returned to, where flowers have returned to.

Many, many kind of creatures, flora and fauna, which had been lost to the countryside finding its way back to this land.

So what has happened here, essentially that means that this place is so abundant with life?

One of the key differences, of course there are many with the old lady's garden, not only a difference being, few thousand acres, uh, and, uh, one being in a corner of the city and the other being a sort of corner of a county, one of the big differences is in run, in letting the Knepp Estate, giving the Knepp Estate back to the land in rewilding that land, the, the farmers who tended the land understood that they also needed to kind of bring livestock back to it, who were traditionally have been on that land, and needs to bring animals back to it, who were traditionally on that land.

Because it's really the relationship between all of these things.

Yes, there's the trees, the bushes, the plants, the hedge, the grasses, the plants, all of these things which are kind of free to.

But of course instrumental to that growth are the pigs who snuffle around the place, the deer who eat grasses back cows who trample on sort of on grasses here or plants there, and again, eat things back.

The relationship between all of these things, the relationship between some aspects which are kind of willing to growth and other aspects whose job is to kill things off, to trample things down, to cut things back.

You know, in these, in this kind of stomping things down and churning up the ground and you know, constantly kind of breathing new life into the soil, in the relationship between all of these things, you start to find an equilibrium.

You start to find a balance.

You start to find a symbio symbiosis, a symbiosis, which invites life.

A symbiosis which invite.

A positive energy.

A symbiosis, which invites a healthy and right growth.

And I think that is the interesting thing for me.

The reason why the Knepp Estate is so abundant with life is that there is this mix.

There is the kind of plants which are willing to grow, but there are animals whose job it is to stomp things out, whose job it is to cut things back.

So ensure that nothing, nothing grows that isn't supposed to grow,, or nothing grows too much to the detriment of other.

And like I said, I think it's in this symbiosis that something is really interesting for me.

When we come back to this point of how to remain present and calm, how to remain present and calm when the stuff of your life is swirling around, how to remain present and calm when the kind of worries out there are kind of big and broad and imposing themselves on my life here, how to remain present and calm when my company is crumbling or any of these kind of big or small things.

And you know, yes, as we said, there are other things you can do.

There are practices you can have which help you remain present and calm.

But one of the interesting things which comes to me as a way of remaining present and calm is about the system of our life.

In the same way that there is a system in the Knepp Estate, the relationship between these things, which mean, which means things thrive in the right way.

There is a system of our lives too.

There is a system of your life.

There is a system of your work.

There is a system that you kind of plug into a social system, an organizational system, an ecological system, an environmental system.

We are still subject to the same pressures that the Knepp Estate is subject to.

So in a way, one of the ways I remain present and calm is by ensuring that the system of my life mirrors, as much as possible whenever possible, some of these lessons, some of these teachings that we might get from somewhere like the Knepp Estate, as contrasted to somewhere like the old lady's garden.

When we fill up our life with too much stuff, when our life is kind of crowded out, it starts to feel like the old lady's garden.

Busy wild out of control, but somehow, dead, somehow suffocated, and it's in this suffocating, in this suffocation that actually we can feel the need for presence and calm.

But when I contrast this to my life, if it is, if it's set up on the principles of the Knepp Estate, which is not too busy, it is left to be wild.

It is rewilded.

it is, I leave my life alone, the stuff of my work, the decisions, all of those things find a way of letting them find their own course.

But importantly, understanding that there is a symbiosis, there is a relationship between things.

What am I killing off?

How am I churning up the soil of my life?

What am I stopping doing?

What am I ending?

What am I cutting back?

What am I killing off?

So that I keep the system of my life abundant, I keep the system of my life alive.

This for me feels like one of the key lessons from somewhere like the Knepp Estate.

The idea of kind of rewilding appeals to me a lot.

I don't really know in practice what rewilding my work life might mean.

But I understand there's something, there's something in this idea of rewilding appeals a lot.

As does this idea of regeneration.

As does this idea that I'm continually making choices or actions or behaviors which are breathing new life into my work, breathing new life into how I kind of, how I live my life.

And it feels to me that this idea of regeneration, this idea of rewilding, you know, we could all do well to try and learn more from nature.

What is it that we learn from how nature organizes?

What is it that we can learn by the patterns and pathways of nature that's kind of, that might inform and point to how we might better set up our lives too?

You know, this all comes back, like I said, to this idea of how to remain present and calm.

And maybe one of the unlikely ways of remaining present and calm is to ensure that there is the equivalent of the pig in your land, the equivalent of the deer, the equivalent of the cow.

Something, animals, ideas, actions, which stomp on something sometimes, which are churning up the earth, which are forcing change, which are cutting back ideas which need cutting back.

Cuz it's in this, in the cutting back, in the stomping things, in the churning up the earth, always an offer that actually we invite a natural kind of growth.

We invite a natural kind of flourishing.

And in this natural growth and this natural flourishing, there is a natural presence and calm.

So I offer that to you.

Maybe today you can think about what it is you might want to end today.

What it is that you are gonna do to trample on the soil of your life today.

What is it that you were gonna cut back today?

Because it's in these things that we will invite new growth.

It's in these things that we kind of live a bit more of a kind of rewilded natural existence.

And it's in living in this rewilded natural way that there is the natural presence and calm.

So I leave that with you, you know, if you want some kind of proper pointers on remaining presence and calm, check out the conversations with Martin Alyward, uh, and George Thompson, both of those were worth a listen.

And keep checking back in for these podcasts because I'm hoping also to speak to a couple of peoples who actually are genuine authorities on this idea of regenerative farming, regenerative agriculture, how you breathe life continually into land.

And also so we can help us understand how it is we might learn from these to borrow on some of those principles.

So if you're interested in what we are doing, also search up peripheral-thinking.com.

You'll find all the information about the podcast there.

Uh, and I look forward to you joining me on the next one.

For now, thank you.