My body has two legs and two feet that carry its weight, they walk, they run, they climb. My body has two arms and two hands that manipulate and make all manner of things, they can heal or kill. My body has two ears – they hear silence, voices, music, birds, wind, rain, thunder and explosions. My body has two eyes – they see beauty, wonder and horrible happenings. My body has two brain hemispheres, left and right, each controlling the opposite side of this amazing human abode.
Ian MCGilchrist suggests that our culture, as many before, tends to be dominated by the functions of the left hemisphere … focussing on linear time, growth, progress, taking things apart, analysing, and grabbing opportunities for power, as it were, with the right hand.
The right side of the brain hemisphere has a different agenda. From there the perspective is vast, sensing the whole beyond parts, seeing beauty also in decay, avoids being fixed by a piercing stare, though catching the gentle glance of those who experience life as cyclic and eternal.
At best, the two different parts of the brain work together, though mostly one side dominates. In this asymmetry each hemisphere takes on a different function. One energises the linear and rational scientific tendency of the mind, which favours action, pragmatic goals and consciousness …
The other invites the dreamers, the artist open to intuition, receptive to the moods of weather and atmospheres, myth, metaphors, the imagination. We are deeply nourished by this larger gestalt of reality, the enormously vaster sphere of the unconscious psyche, beyond time and space.
So when I tune into my body, the different parts – legs, feet, arms, hands, ears, eyes, brain spheres, the asymmetric dynamic keeps me alert and curious. More often than not, and not always to my benefit, I like to ignore the constantly urgent rational mode our daily necessities require, and escape into the wild. Though ideally I wish for a balance of Yin and Yang energies.
At times I use my left hand to do tasks, shrug off reason, put my left foot forward, risk mistakes and imperfection, welcome the unknown, discern creatures in clouds, listen to birds, the hum of my blood, enjoy twilight, gaze at the waxing and waning moon, the twinkling stars, or simply get lost in a dream rich dark night.
The themes of my two novels (see books page) include asymmetry.
Then again, apart from wishing my novels to be read … I don’t have any stakes in the stock market to keep track of.
Further material to explore …
http://systemspedia.bcsss.org/?title=ASYMMETRY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson Gregory Bateson
How to reconcile moments of pure beauty and light our restless world offers, with the heavy darkness of human ignorance? How is it the guiding spirit that is shining through everything so often escapes the unseeing eye? Is it our wounded hearts, or our anxious busy thoughts that prevent spontaneous being? Many of us like twilight, the dawn, the dusk, mist, where darkness and light do not negate but enhance each other. They mingle. As friends do, or lovers. Twilight is poetry in motion.
like tiny cherubs
When there is no other near to share such paradoxical quickening with, I may call on those who enriched my life but are no longer present. I adore the moon, the ancient chunk of earth, reflecting and making tolerable the blinding beams of the sun, granting us poetry and symbolic language.
We must see things fresh, not through tired ideas our establishments bank on, that destroy nature’s homeostasis and spill imbalances into cultures too poor to afford resistance. I say – let our children and young people decide what’s worth living for?
Course of Mirrors 