Open Notebook

From the sunlit meadow, diamond crispness, space and stillness, grass wet with the morning, she slips into the woodland. A different world, ancient community of beings, darker, richer, more immersive than the open landscape of a moment before. Without intention her body slows, quietens and her footsteps soften. With intention, she softens her eyes, opening out into a wide, soft vision that shifts her perception of everything that surrounds her. Easing her body more deeply to the wood, she softens her footfall, shifting to land silently on her toes first. She murmurs out of habit, “Inner, outer, heel, commit”, as she had been taught long ago. She shifts her hearing too, letting go of the reflex of listening to discrete sounds, a bird call, a distant chain saw, a plane unseen above the canopy, to hear everything as equal, as a piece of unstructured music. Soles of feet, eyes, ears attend outwards, with width, with softness, receiving not penetrating. Her breath slows, deepens, undulates, a slow ripple through her slow body.

After some minutes, the world begins to change. Everything begins to stand out towards her with a palpable presence and she can feel the tangible substance of the space between her and each tree that she draws near to and then passes by. Vivid, tangible, vibrant presence of each thing but more than that. The space between everything now has a presence itself. As she moves, she senses that her gently flowing body is pushing slow undulations in the fluid fabric of the space between everything.

As she moves on, the edges of her awareness spread out. Her awareness, her consciousness slips away from its former focal point somewhere behind her eyes. It has displaced downwards, spreading out into her body, her chest, the palms of her hands, her belly, her pelvis, the soles of her feet all resonate with the fibre of the wood. And more than this. Her gentle awareness is no longer bounded by her skin and somehow seems to linger all around her, in trees, bushes, glimpses of sky, the rutted ground with its leafy litter. Somehow the sense of her is there too. Her presence has floated free of her own boundaries. A nearby beech presences itself towards her and she feels it, herself and the space between them as single. The seer, the seeing and the seen are the whole.

She walks for a while in this silent, spacious moment, breath slow, every sense alive but without effort or intention. She gently attends to her new distributed self; moves around in the field of awareness that has opened out. She is within her body, she is over there by the dense holly tree and she is in neither of those places, and everywhere. But in any moment when she tries to think about or find words for the experience, it collapses back into her head and she is left with only an impression of it. The spacious presence slips away into memory.

After continuing for some while, dancing between this unbounded state and the contracted feeling of thinking, she relaxes into being comfortable with the flip flop and the qualities of the two experiences. Moving so slowly, with such stillness, such openness, she feels that she has stepped into a moment which is outside time. This palpable now its somewhere else than the procession of future moment, present moment, past moment. And it is wide and still. Likewise, the wood has changed too. Somehow the sense of where she is, is the same as the sense of the now, in a way that is outside of place. She murmurs “Here now in this”. And feels that here and now and this are felt the same in this moment of awareness for her. And this unbounded moment of presence can be moved in, with exquisite sensitivity of feeling.

And this dance between the unbounded moment and the collapse of thinking opens a portal into yet another cascade of awareness as she begins to find a sensation of awareness that is neither of them, though somehow part of the landscape of the unbounded presence. The thinking ripples and flutters in a larger place, like the dance of the young, spring leaves in the unseen breeze.

And more than this, unthought but intuited, this all-encompassing awareness slips back into the bounds of her still slowly moving body, into each step, each breath, into the soft gaze of eyes, the open field of the ears. All is both within and outside of her and is more than all of this.

Photo by Yasin Hoşgör on Unsplash

Life does not exist.
It is just that certain configurations of matter
Disclose something inherently present in it
That other configurations conceal.

Consciousness likewise does not exist.
It just manifests in certain arrangements
Of the building blocks of existence.

Consider a seed planted in the ground
It makes “life” out of the minerals of soil
Nothing is added
Just “information” and “form”
To shape a configuration
That we experience as living.
But nothing has changed
Or been added.

Is life a relatively unstable arrangement of matter?
So if a certain “homeostatic” environment  
Is not maintained
From within or without
It collapses
Back into what is considered non-life.

So what is the difference
Between a dead seed and a live seed?
One has the possibility of organising matter
Into life.
And one just “destructures” 
To become non-life matter.

Is a virus life?
Can you make a woolly mammoth from the icebound remains of a long-dead creature?

In a similar way
A mountain
Or a river
The sea
Or the wind
Disclose sides of matter
That other configurations do not.

Maybe Mars is fabulously beautiful
And alive with “life”
Rich beyond our imagination?
We just don’t have the biological structure
To experience it.
And if a Martain came to earth
Maybe they would discover a barren lifeless planet?

Are we like the deaf man who goes looking for a beautiful melody?

What am I writing when I write? 

I am trying to curve words round the impressions that have arisen in me. Whether the stream of talking going on in my head, or rising memories, scenes, moments, awakened by something in my present, or the positions I am taking towards something in the world driven by the engulfing emotion I might be feeling just now. Of course, all of these circle and swirl in me like the Gulf of Corryvreckan.

And I thought the thought just now. As inner talking ran through the conversation with C yesterday. About empires and corporations. That an empire or a corporation only grows and dominates, succeeds, if it can force an idea on a sufficiently large part of the world for long enough to subject the world to its shape. And once that idea starts to lose traction then the entity is doomed, as each will be, to decline and decay.

And this too is the model for all our personal endeavours for good and otherwise. We imagine, project and with a gentle or aggressive force shape the world to our imaginations.

The distinction of order and chaos is a characteristic of thought, not of what is there. Things appear to us as ordered when we project an ordering perception onto them. This is left hemisphere meaning-making, everything is actually, just as it is. Looking up at the skies we see constellations only because we see constellations – the order is held in how we see them, not in the distant entities themselves. 

Life comes in fragments.

Last night low cumulus clouds moved hurriedly across the sky at dusk. Entralled by this drama of the evening skies, for a moment I pitied those seduced by the intense but empty drama of their TV screens. I recalled something I wrote many years ago in the small courtyard of a long-gone family house in the Languedoc. A similar procession of huge clouds was moving across a windswept sky. It seemed their movement was purposeful, important and urgent – that they were all hurrying to some great Council of Clouds. A rare gathering of wise and powerful clouds from across the land summonsed to make weighty decisions on some crucial matter that would affect us all.

This moment opened two bubbling-up fragments.

Maybe a helpful way to name our experience of the world is to pay attention to presence. Rather than beings or things. It would be silly to consider a cloud a being. However I experience them  with a palpable sense of presence – a felt sense of them “showing up” in my own awareness in a way that is not captured by considering a cloud an inanimate object. On my walks on Lewes Railway Land I would often pause near four very distinct Sycamore trees. Yes they are four trees, but my strongest impression of them is always as a single presence. For me this becomes a super helpful way of experiencing the world – escaping the cognitive restriction of the whole and the parts. 

And my second fragment. My second bubbling up. Is that to radically slow down the arrival of a memory is to notice that there is at least a two-step experience going on. First, the image/moment arises into awareness (or maybe not even into awareness!) as pure recollection. Then we attach a story to the image which triggers the emotion we experience. My memory of the Languedoc Cloud Council arises – it is just pure re-presentation of image and thought. However, as it arises for me again,  context floods in. The house in the Languedoc was a holiday home in a life that has now gone. I connect it to stories of another time that brings sadness, regret and other emotions.

There are no happy memories or sad memories in the way that they are stored in us. The meaning, and hence the emotion of them, is attached to them in the moment of consciousness.

It’s a whole other subject, but this is just how we experience events that are occuring in the present moment. We experience things right now through the narrative that we give them as they show up in our day.

Photo by Sawyer Bengtson on Unsplash

Yesterday was reading articles about the lockdown and nature. About how people are noticing that the human quietness makes the sounds of nature, even the movement of wings come into the foreground. The birds can almost be too loud! Sitting here, in my garden this early morning, the diversity and depth and panorama of sound was delightful. Bees and other buzzing insects up on the bramble slope, the whirr of the wings of a passing sparrow, even the cars, because of their infrequency step forward into the mix. It was magical to sense the difference in the diversity of sound without the background of human noise, that we do not even hear, but causes other sounds to disappear.

Now, as I write, the Chinese restaurant’s air conditioning breaks the moment and restores the human dulling of nature’s sparkling soundscape.

This is not nature’s pandemic. It is actually a tiny tiny blip in the big field of nature. Only one species is affected and that only marginally so. It is deeply affecting that species’ hubris – it’s abstract architecture of commerce and mechanised movement and its ill-founded confidence in its mental supremacy. But the other 99.99% of nature just is, just continues to be itself, in and of itself and for itself. In fact, it can expand, retake sensuous domains that it has cowered from, due to the clumsy presence of the one species.

This pandemic is actually an outbreath, a sigh in the natural world. And for us too, if we can slip from our tense anxiety and breath with it, listen with it, see with it, feel with it.

Written 4th April 2020

Photo by Anastasiya Romanova on Unsplash

Somewhere I read recently “Write what others won’t, in ways that others don’t.

And elsewhere, “How would you write if you didn’t care what people thought of you?” 

I guess the overarching intention of this site is to experiment with writing with these two statements as guides but to do it in public.

This site is an experiment for me, and I guess ultimately for me alone. Though I hope that what emerges in it will be of benefit to anyone who passes by to read it.

I am under no illusions as to my competence as a writer, a communicator, a maker of videos or of everything else I chose to turn my hand to here. But, the one commitment I make to myself, is push my own boundaries, speak in my own voice, follow my own thought paths and imaginations.

The site will not be static. I will revisit and change/improve what I have already done. It’s design may change, its format may change. The whole thing is nothing more than a very serious and very playful experiment, and hopefully a pathway.

The most likely outcome is that it will fizzle out, or I will self edit or fail to put down here my most faltering experiments. 

But I am giving it a go.

I aspire to put something up three or four times a week. Anything less than that will be cause for review.

I will hope for feedback but will keep going even if few read it as is the way of most blogs. The experiment can still be valid.

Thank you for reading!

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash