The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D.,
Ph.D. (5/7/2014)
In his book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace,
Nikil Savala recounts a conversation with an executive at Google in which Saval
asked the executive about the “favorite hangout spot” in their complex of cubed
offices. Saval guessed that it would be
the fresh juice bar. The executive replied
that it wasn’t the fresh juice so much as it was to the juice bar’s floor-to-ceiling
windows, letting in a glimpse of “the green and the California late afternoon springtime
sun” and also “It’s the proximity to nature.”
The cubed office
workers at Google experienced the same thing that animates gardeners, a
proximity to nature, only the folks at Google were looking through “a glass, darkly,”
not savoring a “face to face” taste of a fresh tomato. As with so much of our modern digital life,
it was second-hand.
The fact is that
human beings were hunters and gatherers for a much longer time than they’ve
been cubed in offices. Human systems are
more attuned to the natural world than the unnatural. God designed us to live in a garden with its
fresh air, grass, flowers, vegetables, fruits, and trees, not sterile,
colorless workspaces. This connection
with nature is even built in to our shoes and boots. Many of them have a thin, soft layer in the foot-bed
replicating the feel of walking on grass.
Human feet were not designed for concrete or asphalt but grass and soil.
It’s not only the
cubes, but it’s also the bland colors of the cubes that make modern offices so
harmlessly ominous, putting distance between modern human beings and their
psychic and physical nature. Sitting in
a downtown restaurant, two young women were having dinner together, not talking
to each other, but diddling with their i-Pads.
I wondered if they’d lost the ability to hold a conversation, much less
say hello. One of my first assignments
while interning at UCLA’s Neuro-psychiatric Institute was to take five or six
patients out onto Westwood
Boulevard
The “reality” with
which they had lost contact is the stuff of a garden. It was the reality of the hunters and gatherers. This contact with reality is also one of the
reasons so many people have cats and dogs in their homes. Stroking the soft fur on a dog’s back is a
far more spiritually rewarding experience than staring at a screen and mashing
keys.
Cicero,
the great Roman orator, said, “If you have a garden and a library, you have
everything you need.” He probably
should’ve added a bed and a kitchen, but there it is, a garden. Gardening, amongst other things, is a
proximity to nature, and without that proximity we lose our contact with
reality. This is why it is so puzzling
to see yards covered with gravel, bearing a dreadful similarity to the cubed
office, harmlessly ominous, devoid of reality.
It’s
not that anyone wants to return to the marginal life of the hunters and
gatherers, literally living from hand to mouth every day of their lives. It is that in the evolutionary scheme of
creation our souls and our bodies developed to respond to a reality we call
nature. One of the corrosive effects of
civilization, in addition to its many artificial splendors, is a gradual
alienation from that reality. The cubed
office is a prime example. As I sat in
that restaurant watching those two young women, the word “android” came to
mind.
A garden, along
with cats and dogs, connects, not approximates, us with the reality that makes
us human. No romantic “return to nature,”
a garden is a necessity amidst all the faux alternate virtual realities
enveloping of souls. A floor to ceiling
window is not enough. Along with the
pathos of the fall of the man and the woman, the idyllic “hunters and
gatherers” theme embedded in the story of the Garden of Eden is a profound
metaphor for an understanding of our humanity.
Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2014
Dana Prom
Smith and Freddi Steele edit
Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona
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