The air carries her immense and varied feeling. Vast, slow-moving dark clouds move eastwards across the thin blue dusk sky, heavy with rain, but more than that, heavy with the weight of strong emotion bearing down from the sky and through my senses. So different from the rapid moving, almost skittish, game of tag that sometimes air will play in the high tree tops of the beech wood or the cold, clammy, darkness when she roots amongst the rushes, and the alders, black with dampness, at the head of the fishing lake. All are air. What clothes she wears, what variety of moods she carries, in her ever-present, shifting invisibility.
My school of education from the land is forming itself, over the past couple of days. The crows, the ancient trackways, Markstakes Common and its ancient trees, and of course, the air, always the air, have presented themselves most noticeable as my teachers. My responsibility is to apprentice myself to them as completely as I am able.
If I watched the sky for a day, it would always be continually changing, but always slower than my ability to notice. It is always in endless change and is never the same twice. Likewise, the river, likewise the sea, likewise the wind. Life is always in movement, but in a way that is unnameable, that submits ultimately to no laws but its own. Keep in step with the spirit (the ruach, the pneuma, the breath) it goes where it wills. And yet there is order.
There are patterns that form. Waves in the sea, the river, the sand. Gulleys and ravines in mountains, in tree bark, in farm pathways. There is a fingerprint to the Tao.
The left hemisphere is vital to notice the patterns, to learn them. But it really does have two modes to its working. One helpful, when you notice the number of lobes on a leaf, and the markings on a bud. One unhelpful, when it gets lost in story-telling about things – making models and maps and believing them.
To notice you need to move between the right and left attention constantly, but always using the right hemisphere mode as the foundation and point of return.
And slowness. Slowness in attention is everything. And it is my Achilles’ heel.
Image mine
