Page 81 - ECOlogic Book

These edge-place happenings show us that anything is possible. If bobolinks
can hop up and down at the edge of a forest, there might be more to the
human than we think as well.

The key to the aesthetic experience, I’ve read somewhere, is that it
combines an appropriate balance between the familiar and the novel.
Dissonance takes on new meaning, as it fulfills its aesthetic role as the
breaker-up of old patterns. The English composer and theosophist, Cyril
Meir Scott, recognized this role” “the whole purpose of dissonant music . . .
was to break up thought forms, which, settling over whole countries and
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people, turn them stagnant with lethargy or rampant with madness.”

This is what happens in an edge place. The birds, who love trees, are bored
with fundamentalist deep-forest trees. They find excitement and delight in a
non-tree place, but still not too far from their beloved trees. The sunshine
invites them out of the woods, to adventure, to the unknown, to experience
the life of the meadow lark or the red-winged blackbird, riding a cat-tail in
the wind. “How do you do that?” the nuthatch asks.

We too are invited to experience new dimensions of ourselves as we enter
an edge place, a neither-here-nor-there place. (I should know.) Such
places are loaded with possibility, fecund with what might become. Birds
know this, and peepers, and crawfish. Are these edge places cracks in the
world where the divine can enter? Places of invitation to new kinds of being?
I suspect that this is so, and this is the reason for the enchantment of such
places. They are places where, like Cicely, anything can happen, and usually
does; where you or I might become a fox or an ancient tree, or a fuller
human than we were before. Where the “something more” of who we are
breaks through in the human as in the natural world.

99 Thompkins, peter, and Bird, Christopher, the Secret Life of Plants, (Harper & Row, New York, NY, 1972).

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