I am writing a longer piece entitled ‘Out with Lanterns’. It’s a journey into old stories, long told, but drawing new conclusions. Here is an extract.
The problem with the mind: it leads us astray. It gets us to believe all sorts of things. It’s the clinging part, the refusal part, the can’t be arsed, the gullible, the distracted, the home of delusion, the lazy generalisations, the gossipy us, the angry us, the spiteful us. It seeks revenge, it acts out. It’s the stuck record us, the obsessive, compulsive us. It’s the part that is fused on the spectrum. I hear you say, let up on being so mean about the mind. Okay, okay! It’s also the beautiful part of us, the laugh out louds, the wit, the grin on the face, the funny side, the senses of the taste, the smell, the sounds. In between our ears, we love, we cry, we dream, we hope, we dare, we imagine, we create. We take on the world.
Now the body / heart. That’s something else: miraculous, mysterious, wonderful. There are other shades here: a tightness, something painful. It’s where grief sits, is embodied. Yet it is also where the present lives and there is no rushing to catch a train into the future / take a scenic drive into the past.
I am meditating on a chair. It’s a dull English day. The cloud is canopied to the earth. I drop out of my head and into my body. I feel the grief and pain, the loss of something. I smell the conjured up rain as the thirsty earth soaks Bulawayo. It’s a downpour of feelings for a place of my youth. I literally take my body to a country that only memory recognises. It’s dark and the house is quiet. My leg aches again. Growing pains! I hear you say in your distinct English accent. I say, even though you are long gone: funny how the pain lives on, still returns half a century later. It’s like the body remembers.
I scan the back of my body. The back of my crown, my shoulders, the small of the back, the legs and I stay with this. It keeps me drifting back to my head where stories are told.
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