Lecture by Alan Chadwick in New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 1: Philosophy of Gardening, Part 6
An Introduction to Alan Chadwick's Lectures and a Glossary of Terms
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The garden is for the garden. Man creates the environment. This endeavour can change the world. Economy is the family in the home on the estate. All in balance with no waste. Only fresh food is fit for the sacrament of eating. The reverse side of this is growing for a cash crop, through a lack of faith. (8:36)
Full Text of this Lecture:
New Market, Virginia, 1979, Lecture 1
Philosophy of Gardening, Part 6
This whole attitude to the garden goes with that. The garden is for the garden. The garden is for the whole of nature. It is a reflection of man’s exquisite performance of his directing of [that which is] around him, and his influence into the whole environment. You can’t see what’s going to happen. Don’t try. Dream, yes. Perceive… perceive the miracles of the stars that are going to happen. They will. They can happen overnight. Completely change the whole world overnight.
Do you see, you must realize that all those things that we call thorns, like on thistles, like on gorse, like on blackberries, they are all a participant of what we are talking about here: that when a cow goes along and does a cow pat on a thistle, the thorns of that thistle soften and begin to become parts of a leaf. Do you see there is really out of one, only. And that those other things are participant of dis-ordinance.
And here you get this rather miraculous matter concerning the word economy, which after all, is vitally important. I want us to look at that for one moment. It came about, as you know, through this Greek in the Golden Age when they came very near to a great philosophical procedure of living and were very religious in that philosophy with nature. But Xenophon, who was a great friend of Socrates, lived very beautifully with his family. And because of this, Socrates was always saying to Xenophon, "Now you’ve got to write an essay about that, that all the people perceive why it is that these results are so excellent and so beautiful." And Xenophon would say, “Well I haven’t got the time, but very well”.
Well you see he rose very early every morning. He ate a very light breakfast, almost none, and tended to his farm and the people farming it. And then as you know, he would run all the way to the Senate, twenty miles, where he would listen, possibly deliver some speeches or words, and then he would run all the way back, having gone to the market with one of the slaves whose duty it was to carry the goods, and would get back and have a light lunch, and then get back to the farm, and the life of the family and so on.
So, on this occasion—it was Socrates asked him to write an essay upon this matter of his life, his villa, and the farm. And he said, “Oh very well.” And so he wrote this essay, which you know, you can read. The book is in the library here if you want it. And it came down in a translation—and you must forgive my pronunciations to the words he used as the heading to that essay: Oikos-Nomia. Oikos being the home and nomia being the surroundings. And so in the whole essay he writes about the family, in the home, in the garden, in the estate. And that word became oikosnomia, the economy, economia, economy. And it’s the word we use today. They use it in the White House, they use it in the Ministry, they use it in the shop, and nobody knows what the hell they are talking about. And they use it in the Persian oil.
And everybody is screaming their heads off about economy. And there is no basis to what they are talking about, in comparison to what we are talking about now, at all. And in it, Xenophon goes on to show that in this balance between the family, the home and the garden, there is no waste. That everything works; it interworks. That the breeding of more livestock comes with the breeding of more of the family, and the extensions of the family, likewise, and the extension of any land, or more culture. But that what is enough is enough. And that that oikosnomia is also an economy that is shared with a family in an estate with other families in estates around. That includes the villages, that includes towns, interweaving, as in that sharing is an interweaving. But that the economy does concern the leader of the family, of the family, in the home, in the garden.
And at the moment that you go outside of that, it is no longer economical. You can do so, but it’s no longer economical to do so. You can have twenty acres of strawberries, you can have twenty acres of beans, if for some reason, which we’ll discuss, you decide to do so. And what is that reason? Well what are we doing today? We plant a hundred acres of peas, and when those peas are ready, by both the planetary decision and our decision, to consume as excellent food, fresh, and that is the only way that any food is turnable from one thing into another. Other than that it is filthy dead matter, and is not consumable. Not fit for a sacramental performance of metamorphosis. It has metamorphosed and should go to the compost.
But that growing of that hundred acres of strawberries or peas is that, supposing should they are now fully ready, you go to harvest it, and, how can you? Where is your family, and what can you do with it? You can’t eat a hundred acres of peas in three days, so they’re going to go to seed on you. So what do you grow them for? You grow it because you didn’t believe in the Archangels at all. You don’t believe in the administration of God at all. You only believe in yourself, and your machinery and putting it, the money for the sale of it, into the bank.
And so you will go to a freeze factory, or a tinning factory, and you’ll say, “Hey. This is economical, this is economy”. “We’ve got to make this, we’ve got to make it, we’ve got to hold it”. “It’s ours, it’s ours”. So you sell the whole thing at a stock price to the freeze shop. So it’s either frozen or tinned. And they buy the whole thing and they give you a check that you put in the bank. And what do you put that check in the bank for? What do you get it all frozen for? Because you don’t believe in the Archangels at all! And in the Greek Golden Age that we are referring to, at least they did know perfectly well that if they were obedient and reverent to the Four Archangels, they would be supplied. Not only with all their needs, but with all the Beatifics, and the things that they didn’t know whether they needed or not, which they did need, by guessing...