The design of this heading–Ecology–is to highlight several key concepts that are keys to how John Moriarty saw the relationship between humanity and nature.
“More often than not now, I’d go off through the fields on my own. There were fields that I loved. Fields with a sward of natural, wild herbs. In the Hill Meadow I saw hints of Paradise. It was the only name I had for the flowers that grew there, primroses and cowslips in the dry parts of it and in the more marshy parts, buttercups and orchids.
And I wondered.
How could something so yellow as a buttercup come up out of brown soil? How could something so purple as an orchid come up out of it? How could something so perfect as a cowslip come up out of it?
Where did the colour and the perfection come from?
And what else was down there?
What else was I walking on?
To me to inhale the fragrance of a primrose was a Eucharist.
A Eucharist without suggestion of bloodshed or blood.
Sometimes I’d inhale the fragrance down to the very soles of my feet. Then I could walk the earth without hurting it. Then I could walk in Paradise. Right here, in our Hill Meadow, I could walk in Paradise.”
