Lecture by Alan Chadwick in New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 8: Fertility, Part 2
An Introduction to Alan Chadwick's Lectures and a Glossary of Terms
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Conservatoir created by plant growth as soon as possible, preventing seizure at collar of plants. Thermal control. Warm, moist gasses retained. Acceleration of growth. Inclination and declination. Atmosphere. Transformation of soil, which becomes more fertile after every crop. Degree of fertility indicated by the weeds that are composted from the bed. Compost becomes more and more effective. Obedience to a higher artistic order. Increase in variation of animal and plant life as fertility increases. Analogy to the story of the Nightingale. Surprise and magic that the gardener discovers. The giving and forgiving of plants. Connection of man to cosmic through the sacramental activity of the garden. (10:29)
Full Text of this Lecture:
New Market, Virginia, 1979, Lecture 8
Fertility, Part 2
…the six houses of fertility and the six houses of destructiveness.
And that you will plant or sow that bed in such a manner that the plants will cover that bed, either bee plants or weed plants or other plants, will cover that bed as instantly almost as germination can take place. By this means you will have breathing pursuing with the revolutionibus of each day with the cosmic forces, and you will have an in-flow and an intake and an outflow of breathing that is of the utmost fertility that at present you can produce in this area. And that those plants will almost immediately cover the area of discontinuity, the skin of the earth, with an exquisite mantle. And that will prevent that seizure of the topsoil, which is so dangerous, and a seizure of the collars of the plants, which is so dangerous for there will now be a little area in there of a conservatory, of a glass house. And if you put you hand in on a very windy day, it will be protected, and if you put you hand in on a very hot sunny day, it will be cool, and on a very dry day it will be moisture.
And you will find you have come into a conservatoiree. And as those plants grow, those warm, moist gases are being retained inside, and that the foliages are performing their duty of protecting that bed and the plants and that area which is dangerous with them. Therefore, you will get this acceleration and this beautiful growth whereby those plants will remain tender, young, succulent and full of nutritives, and gentle. And so they will grow faster and faster and happier and happier, and they will breathe in and out with the inclination and the declination, applying it into the bed through their numerous planetary governments, minerals, and breathing into the air, into that atmosphere that aurora is creating each day, those mineral atmospheres. It will be taking place ad lib, ad infinitum.
And suddenly, you have got a whole bed full of exquisite lettuce all ready for the salad bowl, or carrots or young turnips or turnip tops, or whatever the bed may be. And now it will be taken and utilized in the kitchen. And when you collect that crop, you will perceive that soil, and you will perceive what has happened. That within its contents, and even deep down, a change has taken place. That although you have what vulgarly the agricultural world says "taken the food values out of the soil and into the plants," you have not. This adaptation of the purport of fertility: that soil in that bed is better now since the plants dealt with it, than when you prepared it and put the plants in and left them to it. It is superior. It is more fertile.
And each cycle this will take place, and out of that bed, what weeds you take, what roots and green matter you put to the compost will produce a secret. That secret is all connected with image, with ideé for it has come out of that, out of a pre-thought. For you were given this thought, not from your thinking mind of words. You were give it through your poise, through your breathing, through your diaphragm, from the cosmic, from above, from the stars. That’s where that ideé came from. And that it belongs to totemism.
And now that compost heap will go through the dormancy of winter, and when you place it in the beds next year, the approaches are the same. You thoughts are from above. Your thoughts are to fertility: not fertility for your use, not fertility towards a crop of a thousand pounds of tomatoes or five hundred baskets of strawberries; that calculation would get you nowhere now, to turn a thousand pounds of beans into a thousand dollars to put it in the bank as a cash deposit. It didn't come out of that thought. It came out of a thought that was not given you in words, an order to which you were obedient.
And now out of that compost come seeds and plants and soil and matter and nutriment and humus which you are putting in the soil, and you will notice that this spring the worms are different. They may be bigger. They may be a bit more moist, but they are changing. There's a lot of wiggling going on. There is fresh color that you didn't notice before, and suddenly you see a butterfly. Oh, there were those little white ones last year, but that one’s got orange tips. And suddenly you will see all sorts of new variations of snakes and lizards and snails and birds. And they are new! Why did they come?
Was it like the nightingale? Did they go when they knew they were not wanted and had they come back up the river and were waiting in the tree for the emperor to come and listen that he may sleep and dream? And so something will happen now that is the greatest secret concerned with the garden and fertility and the gardener. The magic comes out of your surprise, for there is in nature always surprise. You don't know anything. You can go through a little woodland, a little alpine area, and you will think you have seen what's growing there. And you can go through it for three months, and each day you will find it incontestably new. It is not static. Every bit of it is new.
And now, suddenly, new weeds have come up. They weren't here last year and you also notice that there is an appearance of more succulence, of probably more intense color, of scent and form. It may not be size. And you will certainly notice a difference in nutritivies and flavor. And this is the gift of the plants in their giving and forgiving, that through their spiritual image now relate to our spiritual image and have come up to where we were led to lead them to enter, when our thoughts were given to us from above. We were above that elevé and were thinking of a new pear, a lettuce more wonderful, a flavor more exquisite, or a walkway that did something that no walkway had ever quite done before, or a tree bough which held atmosphere underneath in a manner that never happened before. They are all leadings of that matter.
And now, suddenly, this coming up of nature, of the garden, enters your diaphragm and connects again with the cosmic. And your spiritual image is lifted again into a real that no verbosity, no ordinary study through words, through books, can give you. It's new! It's out of the atmosphere. It’s out of the birth of the hands of God, that are flowing in this area in which you are constructing and fulfilling and being obedient and performing. That surely can proceed ad infinitum. And is this not, then, the word fertility? And does it not conjunct with all the birds in the trees, all of the things that you can't comprehend?
So many people at lectures, Montalvo Villa, three dear old ladies got up and said, Yes! Yes! Yes! But what do we do about ants?