Bindweed

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I’ve always been a benign but neglectful gardener, so bindweed does tend to get the upper hand in my garden from time to time. I was just getting my hands in the soil for the first time in a few months and, noticing how the leafy white-trumpet-flowered creeper had spread since the last time, I exclaimed to my partner “Bindweed! The most successful of plants”. And then I stopped and thought again in the midst of teasing those soft, brittle white roots out from the stony soil, and said to myself out loud “Actually, is this success?”

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Certainly, if you leave bindweed to its own devices, it grows and grows and outperforms other plants. Certainly, it has its own beauty: spreading dark green shapely leaves and trumpet-like white flowers as it winds its way tightly and tenaciously around every single object it encounters. Plants, garden tools, fence posts, furniture, tree stumps. Everything it touches it clings to and overcomes. It progressively covers the garden in an uneven carpet of undulating foliage concealing everything beneath, strangling those weaker than itself. That’s a kind of success – but with great limitations!

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If only bindweed did not have to take everything over! If only it could keep its own dignity, yet live alongside other plants and contribute to the diversity of the garden! But once rooted, bindweed is almost unstoppable. If you chop it down, the smallest piece of root remaining in the soil forms a new plant. That kind of success is a failure for the whole garden.

My son, seeing me struggle to remove the roots of the bindweed quipped “Why don’t you just poison it?” – “It’s an idea”, I replied, “but this would also poison the soil, and kill off the insect life, which will in turn poison the birds. I would then become responsible for the way I have sought to deal with something I consider a problem”. “Couldn’t you just poison the leaves of the bindweed?” he persisted, watching me do the back-straining work of intensive weeding. “Yes,” I replied, “but then the poison would go with our garden waste to the green waste dump and turn up in whatever compost they make out of that…” In the end, I think I convinced him that the only way to get rid of bindweed is to patiently, gently and painstakingly remove every single root by hand and dispose of it in a big, hot compost heap. This, for those of you who have never attempted it, is a labour of love!

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Labours of love cannot be rushed: this one requires sensitive hands a skilful trowel. If you go at bindweed with annoyance and impatience you will lose. Removing bindweed from your garden is a job that cannot be done in anger. You have to make peace with the pest of a plant.

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All living systems thrive on diversity. This diversity is not a static, stand-offish, treading-on-egg shells. It is earthy, and requires us to get ‘down and dirty’ and do business with the stuff of life. Diversity is dynamic, symbiotic, synergistic, syncretic. It thrives on inter-relationship which is mutually beneficial, mutually regarding, mutually defining. The job of a gardener is to foster those inter-relationships that reveal our inter-dependency and inter-connectiedness – and which allow each part to show its beauty, make its contribution a way that sustains and supports the whole. The gardener who, to save time, money or effort uses poison to grow a beautiful garden does so at the expense of the earth’s bigger garden which sustains us all. Beauty is only as deep as our commitment to appreciating the source and the destiny of beauty. When we think only of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’ the beauty we foster is superficial, because underneath, ugliness is being generated.

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A wise leader is a good gardener. A good gardener is an inclusive leader – a leader who listens to all those under her stewardship, and works for the benefit of each and all. That benefit is not just now and here, it is all round and into the future. He pays attention to the soil their plants will grow in, the elements – sun rain wind and air - the other species, next door’s garden, and the future generations of plant and animal life – not just the plants he is trying to grow and show now. He understands his plants are not just there for his glory, but that their growth provides habitat and sustains the life forms that depend upon it: the bees the birds the bugs the butterflies the crawling insects, worms and the creatures that will eat them.

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The good gardener listens to the needs of the living beings – those in her team and those who depend on them and upon whom they depend. She looks to the overall purpose of the garden, its wellbeing and sustainability, and how it can contribute to the wellbeing and sustainability of the systems in which it is embedded. If there is a sickness or problem in the garden, she does not take the quickest, cheapest course of action to address it. She pays attention to the consequences of her interventions. She takes account of time.  

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The human race is capable of being a good gardener to the earth. We have the abilities, faculties, instincts, knowledge, technology, organisation. What we seem to lack is the wisdom and the love – wisdom to make the best use of our fiendishly clever brains and love to ensure we do so with real care and kindness to ourselves, each other and other species on the planet.

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There are many bindweed equivalents in our systems – workplaces, communities, societies, the globe. On the earth as a whole, much of the human species looks rather like bindweed – taking root all over the place and smothering other species out of existence. We have left the lofty position of good gardener vacant and engaged in slashing, burning, laying waste, exploiting, defiling.

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In teams, groups, communities, families, organisations, nations and on the planet as a whole, diversity and inclusion are the most valuable of assets. Diversity promises creativity, adaptability and innovation, and inclusion brings moral balance through ensuring the dignity of interrelated parts. Together they foster dynamic, synergistic, interr-relationships.

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In our time, a certain class of people, certain nations, certain giant corporations, certain racial and religious groups, languages and one gender dominate our common life in such a way as to outdo the others. This creates the systemic sickness of homogeneity, which weakens our garden. It may seem dramatic to talk about us in terms of smothering, strangling and laying waste, but let’s consider for a moment the perspective of a Martian looking down upon the activities of humans on earth: would they see the current state of affairs as very different to how I look upon bindweed – one species driving activity which smothers all in its path in a way might initially have looked like success, but soon became catastrophic for the common life of the planet? When the Martian looks more closely, they may well see that this catastrophic activity is driven by a small proportion of the species, even if the vast majority is implicated.

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Careful inspection by our Martian friend will also show that there are members of our species trying to address this problem: everywhere on the planet there are people of all kinds trying to be good gardeners. From nomadic peoples to subsistence farmers to permaculture communities to organic and biodynamic farms, there are humans trying to listen to the needs of the soil, the elements and the species that depend upon plant life and upon which it depends.

Even close inspection of human cultures will reveal that everywhere there are pockets of people – in families, communities, farms, workplaces, movements for social justice, creative arts, entertainment, science, sports and industries – really trying to lead wisely: bringing together people across differences to address common problems and aspire to common goals.

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Homogeneity and the dominance of a homogenous few is an affliction, not just for those outside of the homogenous bubble of privilege. It is a sickness in the whole, from which all ultimately suffer. For a time it looks like success. For a time only the weak suffer. But in time, the shadow of privilege eats away at the health of the whole community, the whole society, the whole of humanity; the adverse affects of the dominance of a type spread to all corners of a system, and in the end will swallow up the privileged as well.

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The competitive individualistic idea of success as the ability to outdo others and get ahead at others’ expense is itself a kind of bindweed. It has overgrown the garden of western civilisation, spreading into cultures globally, overtaking other ideas of success, affecting and infecting everything we do or turn our hands to. Nothing is immune to its reach – not health, not education, not housing, energy, transport or defence. And the latter grows exponentially in value, also as a result of this hyper-Darwinist logic.

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The establishment of profit and endless growth as our ‘bottom line’ and ‘top aspiration’ cannot help us grow a healthy garden. These twin pillars of so-called ‘advanced’ societies are repeatedly celebrated as a ‘good thing’ as if there were no planet earth, no minerals, plants, animals, breathable air or potable water sustaining us. The inability of our dominant economic theories to place any value whatsoever upon what the earth freely gives us which is the true bottom line of life is a sickness from which, in our eagerness to outdo others, we may not recover.

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Similarly, the pursuit of national, ethnic, religious, racial or gender advantage without regard for the interests or wellbeing of the ‘other’ has produced moral ‘bottom lines’ which are equally bankrupt in terms of promising us a future.

None of this is inevitable. As a species we have the wisdom and love do it differently. The teachings of many wisdom traditions – whether or not we choose to take them on wholesale as our religion, belief or spiritual path – have plenty of guidance for the wise leader. This will be the topic of another article. However, I can furnish just a couple of examples as food for thought.  As someone of Muslim heritage I have always been struck by the verse in the Holy Qur’an, 49:13 which states ‘O mankind! Lo! We have created you male and female and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another. Lo! the noblest of you, in the sight of Allah, is the best in conduct’. Just as the Sermon on the Mount says Blessed are the Merciful and the Peacemakers – not the judgmental and the war mongers, this Qur’anic verse does not say that humans have been created male and female and made into nations and tribes that we may outdo and oppress one another; nor does it say that the noblest of us is the one who makes the most profit or has the biggest army. Whether or not we believe in the Divine provenance of these teachings, they are part of our cultural heritage, our bank of knowledge and guidance. They are not just for the Friday or Saturday sermon. They are for life.

We can be good gardeners, but we have to start believing in ourselves and each other. There is a lot of work to do. If our idea of success could be the ability to collaborate with others, including others different from ourselves, for common goals that serve the whole and benefit us, we could gradually address everything that is wrong on earth. It would not happen instantaneously, but it would happen.

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In the process of changing our idea of success, we will find we have to change our idea of who we are: both in terms of our brilliance and in terms of our shadow. We have to face both – to know we are good enough to steward the earth and lead good lives; and to know we will always have to work to confront those parts of our nature of which we are less proud. Doing this means healing wounds of the past which stalk our best intentions; it also means accepting the mantle bestowed upon us (whether by God, fate or accident of evolution) as the pre-eminent species in this fragile biosphere and the makers of our own destiny.  

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This is the work of wise, inclusive leaders: people who understand the brilliance and the shadow of the human character, including their own psyche, and can work not only to bring people together, but to help us bring together these sides of each of us. Wise and inclusive leaders have to learn to accommodate all of who we are and help bring out the best in us. They can only do this if they are also working to achieve this in themselves at the same time.