Three Boats on a Horizon

Fragments from the end of summer

I am away somewhere there is no electricity. I come to town to look at this screen, drink coffee and send pictures to my mum.

Here are three fruits from my larder of letters, thoughts, poems. I send greetings from a day with SSE winds and an abundance of bats at dusk. The mackerel’s bellies are full of baby sprats, a first. The local swimmers report huge silver shoals of them around their legs. The grey seal rested all day yesterday and gazed at us with huge black eyes. I watched the rise and fall of its sighing bulk and found myself exhaling in time. Mammals relax in similar ways. This morning I returned to the flat rock near where it had lain and spent a good ten minutes on my side enjoying a vertical horizon.

Back with essays and the link for the next Heartwork session, next week.

No dig method

I read about conservation farming, which is a hugely restorative no-dig method. The mycelium is not chopped up twice a year by ploughing, there is minimal or no spraying and ground is always kept covered. Immediately this spoke to me about working with one’s conditioning, ie, the inner work. For a while I had counselling, two periods of 18 months, to deal with specific things, a bit like digging out brambles or old tree stumps. But despite that, therapy for therapy’s sake has always seemed weird to me, like digging up a plant to see how its roots are.

The no dig method is this constant work of the worms and fungi, aeration by roots, insects. In the psyche this is the healthy dreaming of good sleep, an artistic practice to express inner content, a mycelial community of friends, family and neighbours, the ability to accept new people and ideas... It is a slower way to transform the soil than digging, but it preserves the natural biome, the community of tiny creatures too small to see, that do untold work of the natural process. 

So what is our ground cover, and what is our crop? Sometimes flowers, sometimes roots, greens, beans.

If we are really lucky, a forest.

 

The Great Firewall of Self

The eye pierces but the ear gathers. The ear outreaches to the horizon, near sound, middle sound, distant sound, like a gleaner, gathering berries. 

The eye is a funnel, and all light comes to it, what is not seen is not consumed and therefore does not exist. The eye fixes, pierces, receives as tribute. 

This is why when I occasionally teach meditation I use attention to sound as the way in, and it helps people let go of self and merge with their surroundings. Or rather, that is how real life actually is. The meditation on sound just helps them experience it, beyond the great firewall of self. 

Vision is extremely difficult to use in this way. My Grandmaster John Kells was 95% blind by time he died, and only had the far circumference of his vison, no centre at all. So we have this incredible raft of practices which help us turn the organ of the habitually acquisitive gaze into a visual ear, if you like. Turning a harpoon into a basket, never mind swords into ploughshares. The land-grab of the visual and the commons of the aural are facets of the struggle of the so-called-self, both towards and against the direct understanding of the interpenetration of all things. 

No wonder selfies.

Also, no wonder everyone loves the sound of the sea.

Bicameral humans. We are such torn scraps, sometimes. 

(both from letters to DH, 2020)

Tidal

You will not give it a name
this pulsing tidal pull at your torso
and you tell me how for two years
you thought it was lost.

I won’t define it but I felt it 
rip around me many times
afloat upon the liquid county
I thought I was lost.

We attempt to explain it 
to each other now
faces pressed together
limbs wound round like kelp.

Perhaps our inner algebra
will calculate the tide tables
so we will know when to swim 
out under the new moon

from the slick rock 
of our selves
into the vast 
un-numbered


2022

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