Drew Mearns, Acorns and Oak Trees
Part 2 of a conversation with Drew Mearns. Read part 1 here.
Maddie: I've been reading a lot of Richard Rhor and also the gospel of Luke, and I feel that a strong message in both is the story of embodiment. Just as you've talked about with coaching, making everything physically and spiritually connected, that's essentially the story of Jesus, that spirit is embodied and connected to everything physical.
Drew: That's essentially the theology of the incarnation. Again, I risk my own ignorance of theology, but it's the idea that God so loved the world that he came down and literally embodied himself in the person of Jesus, and in some way in all of us. I talk about that in the sense of entelechy, which is the idea that inside of an acorn is the oak tree if all the things and relationships surrounding are able to bring that greatness out of him or her. If that's in a runner, that person knows deep inside that he or she has a place and a future and can be a better runner or person. I see it and help to bring it out. I think that's what the best teachers or pastors or lovers do in and through their relationships.
Even Gurdjieff talks about that. He asks one of his students how many acorns he believes are in the oak tree out the window. The student says he doesn't know, so Gurdjieff asks again. The student answers, "Probably thousands." Gurdjieff asks, "Well, how many do you think will become a tree?" The student replies that maybe 5 will, and Gurdjieff asks, "What if it is only one?" All those thousands of acorns, all of us human beings…some of us will mature in one way and some in another way. Even the acorns that die will fertilize the lives of the others. It's a beautiful thought, not only the Aristotelian idea that inside of us and inside that acorn is an oak tree, but also Gurdjieff contributing that we might not all be oak trees or Olympic champions or financially successful. We're here to become that, or maybe in our love become part of the fertilizer for someone else to achieve a kind of greatness. We're in this all together. It's beautiful to think about.
Maddie: It's amazing. The more I look at the sciences and natural world and discover how they work, I realize so much more about the spiritual world, the soul world. Maybe they aren't so different. They both display the same patterns, like that story you just told.
Drew: Yes. And it comes back to the one thing that the great ones, the mystics and writers and saints, talk about. They see that connection, that we all are intertwined with everything else. Nature helps us understand that, the examination of trees and how the roots of one tree interact with another. We're all part of the same thing. Joe Holland has talked about that too regarding the future of our world, of humanity - that we're going to build this from the ground up again. It's a natural idea, that we're always growing. That's why I called my project Growing Runners, to influence the young runners early and connect them with the older ones before they're gone. So often, we forget even the names of the champions before in our focus on the present. We forget that our roots are in something that might not be with us but may still be feeding us.
Maddie: It helps you see patterns, that maybe this has happened before in a different sense. Everything that happens has happened before. Maybe that makes the world a little less overwhelming. For everything to reconstruct, it must be deconstructed. That's been a comforting thing for me to think about in the midst of this. For things to get reorganized, they have to be disorganized first.
Drew: I was at a conference with Michael Murphy, and one of the important points he made was that evolution meanders. It doesn't go in a straight line. So many kids want to get a personal best every time they run the race, but they don't understand that there's a build-up period, a season, a cycle. There's a process. Every day is not going to be your best. There's also the idea of entropy, that the world is heading for a kind of destruction and everything falls into evenness or death. But syntrophy is love. Love is the organizing principle that fights the idea of entropy, that looks backward. It's a very theologically Christian idea, that there's an end that is a wonderful reunion, almost like the reversing of our universe's time. There's a big bang at the start, a massive expansion that peters out. But love seems to be the organizing, energetic force that not only slows entropy but begins to reverse it. It's a beautiful thought. Evolution doesn't go straight, and there will always be a bit of degradation. The fertilization of a massive tree happens by the death of many other seeds, branches, and roots. I think of the gifts we have as former seeds planted that make us into who we are. I can imagine that Jesus or Saint Francis had something in their head that didn't exist yet where they were. They saw it as a reality, that the path they took was towards something they knew would happen at some time.
Maddie: This has been such a beautiful, enlivening, uplifting conversation. Is there anything else you'd like to say?
Drew: I feel so fortunate to be part of the SSGN, whose purpose and mission are directed towards building on the tradition and history of the Rome-Assisi conference, St. Francis, Thomas Berry, and all the people before us. We're then recruiting young people into an integrative movement, connecting nature with spirituality, connecting the kinds of things that we do with spirituality in a way that is not authoritarian or didactic, but experiential. I'm happy to be involved, learn more, and contribute where I can.