If the Mind is a Lake

Un abrazo

Southbourne beach, 9am 2nd January 2025, photo Jonny Randall

I begin writing this from within a storm.

Hogmanay was cancelled in Edinburgh and most towns in the country were battered by high winds when New Years’ Eve parties and fireworks were due to be in full swing. A sou’ westerly blows hard and fast up the English Channel and greets my windows with a thousand salty kisses. I just gathered rosemary from the overgrown bushes in the clifftop gardens and snuck a peek at the sea: whitecaps as far as the eye can see, which to be fair, isn’t far. New Year swimmers are scant, the extant ones are smug after a ninja dip. What spirit!

The rain began as I wrote the word ‘watershed’, an ideal synchrony.

After Epiphany the new plans, essays and news will be ready to share with you, here at Uncivil Savant.

Today, an embrace and a loving glance at possible landscapes of mind.

Trees along Hillfoots Rd, Alva, Scotland

Bearing the marks

All week we chop and peel, stir and skim, wrap and baste. Our hands do the intimate work of delivering love and care, friendship and kinship. The bairns smear cheese on the table and their little hand prints look like mycelium somehow within the sycamore. I wipe the surface in the morning and return the table to its previous varnished gleam, ready for games.

A few complain about the state of things, some about each other. Others of us ignore the mithering, best we can, and instead frogmarch ourselves four miles along Hillfoots Road in light drizzle and a strange warm breeze, talking of marriage, children, writing, health and books. I say to one of my adult nieces, ‘I am so proud of you.’ Quick as a tern she relies, ‘I am so proud of you!’

I make a note to myself not to complain about the times we are in. The walk seeds in me the word ‘opportunity’. Not the kind which is a euphemism for ‘accumulation’ but the one that speaks of the pregnant void, aporia, the great no-thing which creates opportunities to make a difference. What a time to be alive. Suddenly, ‘May you live in interesting times’ is no longer a curse, but once again a blessing.

At night in a single bed at the front of my mother’s house, I lie awake for half an hour, knowing we are meant to wrestle. Not with God¹, not with each other, but with our own consciences. There is a long walk ahead and strengthened by our sometimes writhing relationship, conscience is at last my good companion, rather than a foe to be evaded. In our years of training, we spent many hours skin on skin, up against the ropes, down on the canvas, me sometimes arm-locked uncomfortably, prevented from grasping what I thought I wanted, just out of reach. To be able to grapple like this is the main blessing of having had to grow a conscience from what was once a vestigial, almost imaginary friend, to the reliable compadre who now accompanies me. Un abrazo, comrade, for not letting me get away with cheating in the ring. It really is the taking part…

Several roads in Alva end like this

The valley spirit never dies

Upstream of the mind is its sister organ of epithelial origin, the skin. If the Zen analogy holds water² and the mind is a lake, then skin is its watershed. Hands gather sensation as mountain sides gather the rain.³

But then, mountains create the weather, we are taught at school. They evaporate lakes-worth of moisture from their grassy sides, then, catching saturated westerlies from the Irish Sea, scoop them up in their screes to heap giant stacks of cumulus above themselves like an array of Marie-Antoinette’s powdered wigs, sat on their stands. Red Pike says, ‘Let them eat Kendal Mint Cake!’

The right hemisphere makes a river of the amorphous cloud of sensation. It receives all sensory information, we learn.⁴ In receiving, channelling and moving this endless falling rain of feeling, pressure, warmth and touch, are our right minds not like the great ridged flanks of a fell? And did those feet that walked upon England’s mountains green by their footfall cause the knowing of the land to be increased, to no longer be bare molecules abutting or in simple friction with one another? Are not the soles of feet⁵ the way that a mountain comes into connexion?

Without surfaces there is no touch, no friction, no adhesion, no connection. Surfaces are not all there is in the world but they do give an insight into what gives rise to surfaces, which is the substance of things. The substance of things gives an insight into the energy behind things. The energy behind things gives an insight into Tao.

Our right mind makes connexion from the substance of touch. None of this is possible without the quality of true receptivity. Receptivity is the nature of yin.

The Valley Spirit never dies.⁶

This week’s good thing: Southbourne Beach, as seen in the first picture of this post. I shall be leaving for two months, from Saturday to move further west to housesit, to write and to spend unbroken time with my partner, for the first time. All of this is a joy, but I will certainly miss my home turf, or rather sand. If you ever get a chance to come here, do. You can swim all year round, walk, eat very good ice cream and hunt for shells and flints. You can spend happy hours meandering along the promenade, peeking inside people’s beach huts and envying them their tea making facilities and cosy blankets.⁷ Consider yourself invited.

I finished writing this in bright sunlight on a still winter’s day, at last. ⁸

See you next week.

1. What hubris!

2. forgive me

3. In T’ai Chi we say, ‘the whole body is a hand’, so I am actually referring to the entirety of the skin organ.

4. In The Master and His Emissary.

5. or the sheep’s hoof, the mole’s paw, or the red kite’s claw -

6. Tao Te Ching chapter 6

7. English pleasures, for the win.

8. Excuse the recording quality this week, I am away without my usual microphone, which I shall pick up tomorrow.