*50 copies limited edition* A cry. Woodsmoke drifts across a field and into the forest, an acrid smell haunting it, and the sound of distant cheering, chilling those squatting wide-eyed among the underbrush. It could be anywhere in Europe in the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries - a woman being literally burned alive, outwardly for being at one with Nature, but more prosaically and to many in the know, for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The deafening, hateful voice of patriarchal religious piety that found service subjugating the masses, then justifying massacres, wars, invasions, colonisations and genocides still does so today. But now it has added habitat destruction, corrupt legal systems and endless capitalist ‘growth’ to the list of its clients. The godless using the religious as a fig leaf for their obscene deceptions and plausible deniability in the increasingly precarious house of cards we call civilisation.
Dominium Terrae - rulership over the Earth as it had been conveniently interpreted up until recently, may become an epitaph of mythological hubris. The original archaic desert texts from which the latin was derived can alternatively be interpreted as denoting humankind’s responsibility - the guardianship and husbandry of the planet, but once again, that voice was not heard. Those who would seek to commune with Nature rather than dominate; who meet her with their soul and their senses, with sacredness and awe are similarly silenced and sidelined, even in the face of a now vast volume of inconvenient truth.
As the city of myths burns, hurricanes and typhoons bellow and the waters rise over rich and poor alike, who is crying out now, and who listening? Humankind, like a lost and desperate child in the rubble, now cowers from the vacuum within it, now squats wide-eyed in the underbrush unable to see what it perceives; believe what it knows or hear love in Nature’s word.
But that voice never went away. Cannot go away. Over the centuries it has grown, found harmony with Science and now has swelled into a roar from the forest. A hortus is a garden. A garden that we might dwell longer in or that may grow over our graves. In the words of Derek Jarman, ‘…paradise haunts gardens’. Will that paradise be ours… or the Earth’s?
