Amongst Death, an Abundance of Life

Where one finds death in nature, an abundance of life is sure to follow

Photo by Adam Mills on Unsplash

The pure and simple delight of overturning a deadwood log to uncover what lies hidden underneath is one of the earliest memories I can recall from my childhood. I can vividly remember the sense of anticipation of what I might discover under each individual log. Those who have undertaken this activity with their children will know all too well that what I discovered gave me as a curious little boy endless wonders of dark hidden worlds now brought into the light: of scurrying centipedes and funny woodlice, to strange coloured slimes and wriggling earthworms, to the rarer gems of devil’s horse coaches and stag beetle larvae.

I loved uncovering these creatures. l loved overturning log after log, each one revealing its own unique community of “creepy crawlies (as I called them back then). I loved overturning logs — and I still do. I thank God that I have never lost this sacred wonder of the things He has made, both large and microscopic. Rarely does a woodland walk go by where I don’t overturn at least one or two logs to peer anew at what lies hidden underneath.

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It was on one such a woodland walk recently that my mind drifted back to the childhood woodland ritual. A great deal of time has passed since I overturned my first log — time which has included gaining a degree in ecology where the importance of deadwood was scientifically explained and emphasised over and over again. Now as I walked through the trees, talking out loud to myself (as I do when out in nature where only the birds can listen in) I wondered why so much life is intimately and abundantly associated with dead and decaying things. As a trained ecologist, I knew the scientific answer for it is obvious — an abundance of readily available nutrients and a dark damp atmosphere conducive to processes of decay. But since those days of hard science in the lecture room, my mind has strayed down the less-beaten trail of ecological philosophy and indigenous wisdom. And that is the angle this ‘why’ question took: What does abundant life being found amidst death mean? What are the reasons beyond ecology and biology? What great truths and realities does this phenomenon communicate? What are the lessons I can learn?

These questions once would have unnerved me and sent me running back to the safety of the concrete, linear answers of the textbooks. “What a stupid question” the old me would have shouted from the back of the class¹ — “there is no deeper why there is just the scientific how. Look in the textbooks, there you will find all the answers you need.”

But who made me think like this — that there is no underlying reason why things are the way there are and that the only answers are the reasons found in scientific textbooks with their peer-reviewed pronouncements? If we live in a spiritual world (which I believed back then and much as I do now) then there are spiritual and deeper reasons that underpin the way things are. Everything we observe is not all just down to chance operating within the bounds of the Laws of Physics. There are deeper reasons. Everything has meaning. There is thought and design.

Of course there is! If there is a Creator, then there must be a message. No one creates anything in a vacuum devoid of meaning. Architects don’t just create buildings, they create buildings with messages emanating out from their structures. Their designs are the outworking of their ideologies — they are trying to communicate something through their creations, whether that be the brutalism of high modernism or the respect of ancient traditions which come from the Classical school. We readily accept deeper meanings in architecture so why not in Creation? The way things are in the natural world — the sacred order — is meant to communicate a message, meant to show us truths, meant to make us stop and ponder.

But most of us are senseless to this.