Happy Farm Manager Mick McEvoy shares about his living practice of nonduality with the Earth and “others.”
By Mick McEvoy on
I still remember the moment I discovered Thầy’s book Love Letter to the Earth. It has become a north star for me and our Happy Farm project. I have absorbed every page into the marrow of my bones.
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Happy Farm Manager Mick McEvoy shares about his living practice of nonduality with the Earth and “others.”
By Mick McEvoy on
I still remember the moment I discovered Thầy’s book Love Letter to the Earth. It has become a north star for me and our Happy Farm project. I have absorbed every page into the marrow of my bones. I have no shame in sharing that I “consumed” the book and it has helped me fill a spiritual vacuum. I fell in love with Love Letter to the Earth as Thầy shared that of course you have permission to take your spiritual practice outdoors into the natural world. I heard him profess that the forest was as reverential as any meditation hall or house of worship. As someone who has an allergy to some of the ritualistic and devotional aspects of spiritual practice, I found Thầy’s words a deep teaching of nonduality, beautifully expressed in his encouraging words to practice walking as if we are “kissing the Earth with our feet.”
I adore Thầy’s words “man is not our enemy.” I have been gifted great resilience by Thầy’s teaching that we are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
My allergy to the devotional and ritualistic in spiritual practice has everything to do with childhood and teenage years. I still remember my first retreat in Plum Village, France when the community in Upper Hamlet practiced “touching the Earth.” I physically could not bring myself to bow down and kneel. As I observed one hundred or so humans moving, kneeling, bowing all in unison, I thought to myself “not again.” Irish Catholic! It took some time for me to be offered a deep introduction to the practice of touching the Earth and what exactly I was being invited to participate in. I remember a deeply moving Dharma talk from Sister True Dedication that focussed solely on this practice. Wow.
“I aspire to practice to love Mother Earth, Father Sun…”1 Now when I have the good fortune to practice touching the Earth I become deeply energised. Goosebumps! I think of Thầy inviting me to touch the Earth to “Bodhisattva Gaia, Great Mother Earth” and to Father Sun, “Buddha of infinite light and life.” Such skilfulness to include Earth and Sun in this practice. With the utmost respect, I think of Thầy as a “Badassatva.” I am not being invited to bow to deities I see as fictional but to that blazing orb of fire that makes all life possible. Real life. I can see it and I can feel it. Earth and Sun. This is my devotion and ritual, in direct contrast to the spirituality of my upbringing, where religious dogma penetrated every aspect of life: home, education, society, and politics.
I grew up in Northern Ireland in a segregated community divided by sectarianism. We were divided by an imagined reality. My society was deeply dualistic. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that the intricacies of our modern societies are all built on imagined realities: “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”2 With that way of thinking we humans can create societies of paradise or societies of immense suffering.
“…for human beings to love one another with the radiant insight of nonduality and interbeing in order to help us transcend all kinds of discrimination, fear, jealousy, resentment, hatred, and despair…”1
Growing up in Northern Ireland we experienced war. Daily reports of murder. Bombs and guns. Flags flew to mark territory. Our schools were segregated based on religion. The Catholic and Protestant communities lived separately, divided into specific areas of our villages, towns, and cities. Streets for them and streets for us. This deep duality meant that as a society we had a very limited chance to meet “the other.”
Our lived reality was rooted in real suffering. There was entrenched discrimination born from colonialism of Britain in Ireland. A combination of political, religious, and social differences plus the threat of inter-communal tensions and violence led to widespread self-segregation of the two communities. Catholics and Protestants led largely separate lives in a situation some have dubbed “self-imposed apartheid.” Every aspect of life was full of human-created dualism.
The result? Fear, jealousy, resentment, hatred, despair. Some 3,720 people were killed as a result of the conflict. Approximately 47,541 people were injured. There were 36,923 shootings and 16,209 bombings.3
When asked what the insight of nonduality and transforming the delusion of separateness means in my personal practice, I can respond peace is possible, and social justice is possible. Today we have peace. We work for it every day. Removing the delusion of separateness is possible whilst retaining the beauty of individual cultures and traditions. Yet divisions remain. I have a daily practice of contemplating and internally accepting that the horrors that unfolded in my country for over thirty years actually took place. I look deeply and see that this violence and injustice stretched back hundreds of years to the beginning of the colonisation of Ireland. I adore Thầy’s words “man is not our enemy.”4 I have been gifted great resilience by Thầy’s teaching that we are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
I aspire to bear witness to the violence, the hatred, and the discrimination we humans enact on each other and on the natural world: between Belfast and Gaza, Derry and Darfur; every conflict, every victim, every genocide, every ecocide; all those killed by other humans acting out of their fundamentalist beliefs; the Earth extracted, polluted, degraded for our consumption.
I have had the good fortune to have touched the radiant insight of nonduality and interbeing. I have awoken from the delusion of our separation. Then I forget. I other. I discriminate. I aim to remember and wash my eyes to begin to see clearly. I have begun the perpetual work of removing the dust from my eyes and the practice of transforming the delusion of our separateness. It is not a destination I reach so as to never have a discriminatory mind again. I feel this practice is just like following my breath and steps. I forget, and then I hope to remember and come back to my breath, my steps. Each time I hope I strengthen this habit of deeply living the reality of our interconnectedness whilst bearing witness to the horrors and tragedy that we as a human family can enact on each other in our imagined realities of nationality, religions, genders.
Peace is possible. Social justice is possible. May we awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
1 Thích Nhất Hạnh, Love Letter to the Earth (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2013), p. 126.
2 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens–A Brief History of Humankind (Visalia: Vintage, 2015).
3 Conflict Archive on the Internet, 2007, “Fact Sheet on the conflict in and about Northern Ireland,” CAIN. https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/victims/docs/group/htr/day_of_reflection/htr_0607c.pdf
4 Thích Nhất Hạnh, 1965, “Recommendation,” Plum Village. https://plumvillage.org/articles/recommendation
For more information on the Happy Farm, visit thehappyfarm.org.
