Left 4 bazinga full#

We could therefore see ourselves as emergent beings – the sum total in a given moment of all the influences (social, cultural, physiological, close and personal) that play themselves out on our bodies and our “being-ness” over time. Except perhaps that this Pendulum oscillates its arcs within a sphere, not just in two dimensions. This is about the translation of mutual emergence – back and forth like a pendulum. This is not about sensation being better than words. Like the gaps between branches, these worlds of language and thought on the one hand, witness and sensation on the other, and silent “ trunk-ness” at the heart of all, complement each other. It might seem paradoxical – if not oxymoronic – to state in a blog that has been meandering for over a year that I am beginning to comprehend, to feel, that the deepest mysteries, the greatest awe – are not simply beyond words perhaps they need to be perhaps that is precisely the way things should be.

Left 4 bazinga full#

Like when a son cradles his mother’s feet after a very full day – and simply holds them. Porous as our bodies are, we connect and translate far more than perhaps we realise.

Somehow the tree just is – just as we simply are.

Trees are also the ultimate translators – beyond all the words and thoughts we could possibly conceptualise. Soil and stone and fungi and water on the one hand, air and water vapor on the other. And while we see the tree as “above” the roots, taking a global view the tree’s super natural highway connects two very different worlds. And despite the apparent randomness of it all, it all seems to make sense – over time.ĭuring a creative writing workshop with Clare Mulvany some years ago, I found myself writing down during a reflective exercise – I love being trunk! A trunk is solid, anchoring, grounding – but it is also a through way – a super natural highway if you will. Over time these different explorations accumulate – all within a clearly identifiable yet utterly invisible framework. If a certain idea or possible solution runs out of road, it has taught us many valuable lessons, including what not to do! And we can return to heart of the matter – the “trunk” – and explore another pathway. This to me means that there cannot be a branch that is wrong or a waste. She talks about how thinking about problems or challenges in terms of a tree allows us to explore many different ways of approaching them without getting stuck in a dead end. For her, “tree thinking” is a much better way of making her way through the complexity of life (and it makes sense to me too!). One of her opening chapters describes the difference between thinking in terms of a box and thinking in terms of a tree. Camilla Pang in her book “Explaining Humans” that got me thinking of this. Sure, it may cause a nuisance to us or the neighbours or passing traffic, such that it may have to be cut back.īut there is no sense in which a branch is wrong, a dead end, a waste. What I mean is that no branch is “wrong” or “incorrect”. There is no such thing as a bad branch on a tree.