Another Life: The crystal hanging in our eastern window announces the sun by splashing little rainbows round the room. They drift as the morning goes on, hovering like humming-birds at walls and pictures and furniture; even on the dozing dog, writes Michael Viney.
The crystal was a homecoming present from a friend, meant to enliven a spell of convalescence. It may also have shared some intuition of a healing crucible of light. That kind of New Age fancy can appeal when The Force is low.
As the year begins, we are invited to look at ourselves in some improving way. It usually involves pulling ourselves together, copping ourselves on. An alternative course is to lose a few inhibitions: opening up the senses; letting the spirit roam - all this, especially, about reconnecting with nature. It may mean suspending some old (read masculine, hierarchical) taboos.
I love, for example, the beauty and fragrance of flowers. In Connacht, a man with a good excuse may carry a bunch hanging down at his side, like a fly-swat, but never in an upright, bridal manner. I also keep my flower-arranging quiet.
In private, in winter, I practise aromatherapy without the therapy. The flowery, herby oils delight my pheromonal being: today it's geranium over the candle, pervading the study with a summery benevolence.
I love the soil: the cool, moist, yielding feel of it, the way it embraces a seedling or sifts free from a root. I cannot see one millionth of the life in a handful of soil, or sort the grains of rock that make it up, but never feel more at home on Earth than when on my knees, sharing its bacterial breath. Connacht men are never seen on their knees except at Mass: they are masai from way back, standing tall beside their spears.
I love to be amazed at trees, to feel the solid shock of their being that comes with throwing one's arms around them; to be dizzy at their height. No wonder Thomas Pakenham's Meetings With Remarkable Trees was such a huge success: each picture showed us an old god, instantly remembered.
I love the wind and rain: that is, to be open to them, not to feel them an enemy or an insult as they sting or buffet. To walk the shore in a gale is to know exhilaration; to accept the daily touch of wind and rain and not to shrink with one's head down is to step back into the real world.
How does this orgy of touchy-feely animism fit with my high regard for science? They belong, indeed, to different sides of the mind. But ecology, as an integrating science, comes closest to reuniting human instincts with the rest of the living world. It seems to vindicate such clichés of alternative culture as "holistic thinking" and "oneness with nature". But these are probably best left as guiding intuitions, not elevated into dogma.
Curious to see how New Age preoccupations had changed since their genesis in the 1960s, I called up their marketplace on the Internet: buy your crystal at Mystic Trader or Merlin's Dream Shop, along with Tarot cards, ritual tools, dragon's claw necklaces and the varied accessories of Feng-Shui. A spiritual warehouse offers Courses in Miracles and Conversations with God, along with paganism, astrology and UFOs.
This feast of unreason is almost entirely an American construct, where magical hopes and paranoia feed a consumerist addiction. For an intellectual antidote, one must turn to something like Resurgence, the invariably beautiful and intelligent UK magazine edited by Satish Kumar. Here, the spiritual, ecological, economic and artistic are held in a discriminating balance.
Meanwhile, the path to enlightenment of the average Irish "green" is still flanked by essentially earthy organic gardening and its allied arts and crafts. One may take the psychic temperature, so to speak, of the country's alternative culture by way of the substantial booklet of courses and activities on offer this year at the Organic Centre at Rossinver, Co Leitrim.
Now in its tenth year, and well-sponsored by Bord Glas and other bodies, thecentre demonstrates organic growing in polytunnels and gardens (I buy my seeds from its catalogue) and promotes such eco-friendly systems as waste-recycling wetlands, dry stonewall construction and building with hemp and other natural things. Felt-making, living-willow structures, herbal medicine, cooking with seaweeds, make-your-own soaps, how-to-live-on-an-acre - all offer the stuff of New Year resolutions.
It all looks quite safe to go out and hug your first tree of 2004. Just for me.
Michael Viney's new book Ireland: A Smithsonian Natural History is published by The Blackstaff Press at £20 stg.