Spring sunlight, warmth and rain make the conditions for a particularly welcome and spectacular group of plants: the woodland wildflowers. But they can only enjoy the rich, moist, woodsy soil for a short time and that is before the tree canopy fills in. They only have a brief period for their great celebration of life which is at its best in western Pennsylvania right around now, that is the end of April or beginning of May. The Wildflower Reserve at Raccoon State Park is abundant with these wildflowers and is preserved and reserved for them, mainly against an invasive species called humans, only some of whom respect and honour the rights of wildflowers to have space and grow.

Invasive species are a big problem to the native flora and fauna and the eco-balance of the Earth generally. It is only gradually and comparatively recently that this eco-balance has been recognised as vital for the survival of all. We had a neighbour once, out in the country, a very nice man, just ill informed, who said what did it matter if you killed off a few butterflies, in relation to the infestation of gypsy moth caterpillars at that time. As has been discovered in Yellowstone, the reintroduction of wolves into the park has restored balance in all areas from elk on down to the bugs on the trees, and the trees themselves. With the wolves gone, there were too many elk in the lowlands, eating the trees that the bugs lived on, so there were less bugs to feed the fish in the streams etc. It's a bit like "this is the house that Jack built" that you may remember from childhood that had a whole string of events attached to it. Our favourite is "Pigs on Concrete". Once you take pigs out of the wild, where they root around, and fence them in to farm, they stir up a big muddy mess. So then you have to build concrete to raise the pigs on. When the mother pig gives birth, she naturally lies over and on her young, who then get crushed against the hard concrete and die. So then the farmers have to install a warm and light device to lure the piglets away from their mother where they can be raised without getting crushed against the concrete. Welcome to modern farming!

Okay, so this is all physical, not metaphysical. Even plants and their chemistry and their sharing of resources that I wrote about last week are physical, not metaphysical, which is why Science can study them and observe what is really going on at the physical level. Science, so far at least, studies only the physical, not the metaphysical, because it has not made the connection between Mind and Matter. It has not recognised Mind as the creator of the physical. And Mind is metaphysical. All of the physical world is a product of Mind. All of the physical world has "Soul" or "Consciousness" that exists on a different or higher dimension, call it the astral plane if you will. Or, go to the Qabalistic Tree of Life and you will find descending levels of consciousness or thought process that produce all that you see and experience on the physical plane. Mind explains the why of everything in the material world. It connects the dots. I'm not suggesting that it is necessarily easy to connect these dots. I'm suggesting only that these dots CAN BE connected. Nothing is random in the physical world, but has its roots and origins in the non-physical world of Mind, Source, or Creator. Yes, there are different levels of Mind from universal, to collective, to individual, but it is still all Mind.

There are some who have experienced or been witness to the Collective Mind of the plant world. They have experienced what they define as nature spirits or fairies or points of energy, what might be called the soul or consciousness of the plant. They have also experienced a kind of Over Soul to each plant species, often referred to as the Deva of the plant. There have been several examples of people gardening in conjunction with and conscious of these nature spirits and devas. This is, of course, VERY, VERY different from modern farming. Findhorn Garden in Scotland and Perelandra Garden in Virginia are two examples of such meta or spiritual gardening and farming.

Native Americans and other indigenous peoples, who have always lived close to the Earth, generally seem to have been more conscious and aware of this meta or spiritual quality to the Earth experience. You can see it in their relationship to animals, in their concept of totems, in their reading of messages and signs of the Earth, as opposed to just using the Earth for their own benefit. There is a price to pay to just using the Earth for benefit and being greedy. I was especially interested in a problem that the ranchers now have in Montana with an invasive species from Eastern Europe called Spotted Knapweed. Spotted Knapweed kills off all the local grasses which the ranchers' cattle eat. When I asked myself what is the metaphysics of this problem (and I was not unsympathetic to the rancher interviewed in the programme), I saw that the cattle too are an invasive species and only there because the ranchers, an invasive species themselves in their desire for wealth, have upset the balance of the land. Like attracts like attracts like. You might say that this is the metaphysics of an invasive species, with the humans as the most invasive. The Earth itself, which too has consciousness, or the Mother as the native peoples call her, is no doubt also invoved in the correction of this imbalance. And, no I don't have any proof of this because our scientific method has not yet connected the dots!