No Yin, no life - Too much Yang, no life
There’s change happening out there. We’re creating a Yang world and its consequences suggest life as we once knew it will change. With yang one associates heat, dry, sharp, straight and hard.
Suggesting if we didn’t have yin, we wouldn’t have life. Yet we continue to "Yangify” our world and concentrate life support systems into adopting compressed cycles and increased competition for limited resources. Something has to give. Fewer creatures, less diversity of plants, reduced biodiversity and interaction. Both are essentials to healthy life.
Yet our planet quietly absorbs technology and its many forms. We inadvertently leave yin surroundings such as wooded meadows and bubbling streams. The countryside as we ideally picture it. Life prefers Yin surroundings. We clear land cover and replace it with roads, buildings and concrete. Very Yang influences. And our lives become more Yang as we compete and produce to survive.
Harmonious chi gardens seek to become Yin places. Not creating Yin as we close front doors but Yin as we step inside the front gate. Yin seeks to nurture its surroundings including what’s outside the window and hopefully reducing the influences of detrimental external influence (sha) at our gardens boundaries and entries. In the garden we can help achieve these attributes through a number of ways:
- Create a boundary or edge. Screening, shade and fencing are examples.
- Entries used to separate one function from another.
- Locate some water in there somewhere or symbolise it, e.g., meandering pathways.
- Use vegetation to shape boundaries, leaving open spaces for beneficial chi to enter and accumulate.
- Place some symbols in the garden to add dimension and character and finally, try to balance the area’s climate through shade, shadow and light i.e. placement of our plants.
It’s improper to suggest no yin and no life while too much yang, also no life. We need both, interwoven and one’s dominance countered by the other. If we are "yangifying” the world (a new word coined here), we risk the reality of climate change moving us into a warmer world and yin places retreating to places away from concentrations of mankind. Maybe yin places of the future lie in the hands of the fortunate who have the resources to create surroundings which harmonise in diversity of life and remain vital and interesting places, rewarding those privileged enough to enter and enjoy them.
