Rediscovering Jasmine
The following is an entry from my journal.
This morning I went on a four-hour walk deep into the mountain. My goal was two-fold: (i) do my regular physical exercise and (ii) search for naturally occurring herbs that I am still missing from my house. Whenever I find a plant I can maintain, I check whether there is a surplus of it and, if so, carefully extract the specimen for transplantation around the hut. Thus far I have successfully cultivated oregano, thyme, rosemary, lavender, and caper, while I have preserved cistus and stachys that were already growing here.
At about half way through my walk, I noticed some small white flowers struggling to get sunlight amid the overgrowth of competing vegetation. At first I thought those were the flowers of a rosa canina, though I quickly corrected myself by bringing to memory the fact that those plants bloomed almost a month ago. As soon as I inspected the flower, it became clear that I had discovered some jasmine, jasminum sambac in particular. It has a characteristic sweet aroma that I find especially welcoming for a homestead. My immediate task is to prepare a spot for it and bring it to my land.
Our senses provide points of entry to highly detailed memories. As soon as I touched the jasmine, I travelled back to the time when I was a pre-school kid, growing up in the Greek countryside. A jasmine shrub existed right outside my grandparents’ house. It must have been over two meters tall. I had my toys there and would play around it for hours on end. I was an inquisitive and highly active child. Most of my play time happened outside. This was not the plan though. My grandmother, who was the extended family’s matriarch, tried to keep me indoors and teach me how to be a good boy. But she failed to contain my exuberance. I would rebel in my own childish way by upsetting whatever order she would set up, until I earned my spot around the jasmine shrub.
My grandmother used to maintain the place in a pristine condition. The living room had a couple of nice chairs that were intended for guests, which typically were the ladies of the neighbourhood. They would all have coffee together, play cards, gossip, and “read the fortune” of everybody they knew of. This was their way of socialising and of developing their shared intelligence; “intelligence” in the sense of smartness but also of vital information that contributes to situational awareness. I used to have a negative view of gossip and the sort of superstitions my grandmother would entertain. But I realise now the important social function they perform in developing trust among the people whose duty it is to manage social reproduction. It does not matter whether the cards can predict the future or not. The point is that these women would gather to deepen and broaden their knowledge of all the people they had under their care, as well as all those around them. When you maintain a household, you need to know what is happening within it but also in its surrounding community. Anything less is irresponsibility writ large.
Child me did not understand any of this. All I wanted was to play until exhaustion. Those fancy chairs were in my eyes but raw materials for my makeshift tent. I would flip them upside down and use their covers to form a roof. My imagination would fill in the blanks. Grandma was not happy, but she did not punish me. Not once. I guess there was a certain charm to my mischief. At other times, the chairs and their accompanying coffee table were simply obstacles in the way of my ambitious game. I would place them at the sides of the room to make a clearing in the middle. Then I would take a bucket filled with soap water and throw it on the floor to make it all slippery. Then I would happily slide around, pretending to be a penguin. It was incredibly fun, though I did hurt myself a couple of times by crashing against the walls.
Grandmother did not receive formal education. She did have common sense though and a practical way of dealing with life. She successfully raise several children and grandkids, after all. As a response to the chaos I would leave in my wake, she said that I should be allowed to play outside. “He will behave himself once he gets tired”, was her point. This is what I know as a truth about dogs. Give them an outlet for their energy and you can handle them nicely. But keep them confined to a room and you will soon deal with whatever mess their uneasiness creates. And so I earned the right to have fun outside the house where the jasmine was. I stopped being mischievous as I had no need for it. Nature provided an outlet for my seemingly boundless energy. I would play around with all kinds of vegetation as well as animals. Those were happy times because I was allowed to be myself.
The only period in my life that I was genuinely miserable was when I tried to become another person. I thought it appropriate to be more like my peers and carry out my prestigious office job in as unassuming a fashion as I could. I did manage to give off that impression for a little while, at the expense of suppressing the energetic boy—the dog, if you will—that never left my being. Until I realised how unsustainable my endeavours were and corrected my course before it was too late. This is how, in short, I ended up in these mountains. Expending a large part of my physical energy empowers me to remain focused on my intellectual pursuits. It is the best form of meditation I could ever do. Thanks to it, I keep writing at length on a daily basis, publish almost as frequently, and enthusiastically perform the work I am committed to.
Grandma understood an important truth: you go with the flow of nature, not against it. If you try to force a child into a mould, all you will get is bad results. Sometimes those will manifest quickly, in the form of some maladjustment in behaviour, or they will come to the fore later in life once the now grown up faces difficulties and has to discover who they are. Let the kid express itself and use your knowledge as an adult to guarantee a safe environment in which the child’s personality grows into a stable force for good.
Social reproduction is a skill that the modern family is losing or not practising well. Unlike little Prot who would explore the in vivo world around him, little Billy is trapped between apartment and school walls. Whenever Billy feels the need to make sense of the world around him, his parents handle him some tablet to keep him distracted and quiet. Billy will eventually get a personal computer, while continuing to live in confinement. At around the age when he understands what his dick is for, he will discover all the nasty stuff available online. Billy will thus develop the familiar computer related addictions. Not because of some frailty of character. No! He simply is the victim of a society that has misplaced its values; a victim whom we ought to treat with compassion.
Parents have to work all day to make ends meet. The apartment life does not allow them to grow any vegetables or raise animals. All their vitality goes to wage labour. This means they cannot provide high quality parenting. The grandparents are somewhere far away, in large part due to the dogma of individualism that incentivises young adults to live away from their relatives and to ultimately loosen their ties with them. Instead of a robust community built on mutual trust, children are raised in the hostile environment of the megalopolis. Neighbours are not invited to read the fortune with the house’s matriarch. They are anonymous shadows of people. One day they are there, the next they are gone. Such is the precarious condition of living on rent.
Women entered the workforce en masse out of a belief in their liberation. While they did make some inroads on that front, they largely got capitalism’s middle finger, forced into the unnatural and unhealthy environment of urban centres, and made to pursue mostly unfulfilling careers, typically involving plenty of bureaucracy. Men were shafted as well. They lost the familial ties and organic communities which helped them the most in their moments of weakness. Instead of relying on the men around them for accountability and on tutelary figures such as the matriarch of the family for emotional support, men were left to deal with loneliness and to seek their pack in imaginary groupings, such as football ultras, as well as social media bullshit like the “alpha male” fantasy. Like little Billy who is addicted to pornography and gaming, men and women are the victims of a world that cannot appreciate the little things of this planet simply because they are too far away from them.
When I recognised the jasmine earlier today, I also gained a renewed appreciation of the rural lifestyle that city folk dismiss as “backward” or, in yester years, as “pagan” (paganus is the Latin word for “villager”). I am physically active most of the day and remain laser focused on the things I care about. The pace of my experience is consistent with my actuality. It thus is benign for my being. The colours around me are harmonious, as are the odours and the sounds. They inspire me to learn more. They are not a source of stress the way the incessant hustle and bustle of a town is. The natural setting all around me keeps me calm, while providing an outlet for my sense of adventure. The forms of life in my milieu remind me that I am not the epicentre of the world. There is nothing special about me. I am just another animal who does not need to be the “real deal” in any way whatsoever.
I shall transplant the jasmine here. May it be part of another’s future memories.