This morning I was thinking about the image of how powerful ideas can be when received into “fertile soil”, which is ready for “planting”. As usual, when I start to use an image, it began with one particular aspect, namely a sense of expectancy or even excitement when there is this possibility. However, that became a more extended meditation on this image as time went by.
One of the things which came to me was remembering that there can be more complex dynamics at work. I was reminded that when planting a wildflower meadow, there can be another way of going about it from planting into bare earth.
A plant called yellow rattle reduces the amount of grass that will grow which stops grass outcompeting other flowers which may be sown. I then started to wonder what the equivalent of yellow rattle would be in our minds – what can stop our existing ideas “outcompeting” new ones which are “sown” into them?
I think that there are probably a number of answers to this question. The one that I want to concentrate on initially is a desire to see a bigger picture. In writing about the activity of the left hemisphere of our brain, Iain McGilchrist suggests that it tends to be far more open to ideas which fit into a pre-existing structure or set of structures for us than to ones which are outside that structure. Our right hemisphere is better able to respond to that sense of something new to us.
Part of the reason for this is that the right hemisphere operates by building up as complete a picture as possible. Whereas the left hemisphere offers us the opportunity to focus in on something (and even to dissect it), the right hemisphere has a more global perspective.
But I wonder if there is more to it than that? Another thought that came to me is about the word “humility”. Its origin lies in the Latin word for earth, “humus”. This brings me back full-circle, back to the fertile earth.