Your Meaning is Enshrined in You

Why do we have to cut down the tree to find meaning? How is it that only upon destroying the life of something that we have the sense that something has been gained?

Or why is it that we only see the world for its utility? That waters are used for ‘clean energy’, to keep equipment cool or to be a vessel of our sewage and waste product?

It runs deep.

So deep that we treat the body the same way.

Tired, torn and bruised from the demands of the incessant nature of 21st century living we think to ‘maintain’ health - or indeed sanity - under such demands is to go on pounding runs or to overburden already rigid joints with weights in the gym.

To really understand the nature of this we need to understand the nature of us.

Two weeks ago we ran a beautiful Somatics retreat in Wicklow, Ireland where such themes were explored.

Let me paraphrase a scene I painted for guests at it:

Imagine our palaeolithic ancestors who roamed these lands 30, 40,000 years ago. Not a road, building or electrical pole in sight. They roamed the land honouring the segways and turns of terrain that gave them clues as to which animals had just been closeby and what the imprinted surface of such fabrics including grass, moss and soil told them about the behaviour of the birds, wind, temperature and sun that day. They saw the world as it is, a vibrant labyrinth of information, brimming with wisdom that was ours to eat from.

There were no such things as ‘things’. “I” was ‘it’ and ‘it’ was ‘me’ because there can be no ‘me’ without factoring in my extended body, my extended body being everything beyond the boundaries outside of this physical form.

It informs my behaviour and mood, it tells me where I should be and where I belong. It’s as vital to my sustenance as the very Heart that pumps nourishment to all my vital organs.

We developed for hundreds of thousands of years in direct correspondence with the movements of nature. We are as much bacteria as we are cells, and our consciousness is as much shaped by our cells as it is by the brain.

If we look at anything over ‘there’ or ‘here’ we know that there’s no boundaries, only a change in composition that features a continuous unbroken thread in which all moving parts direct and inform each other.

Now imagine we took these ancestors to the year 2024. We say ‘look at our world’. We have concrete roads, high-rise buildings and artificial light inside and outside no matter what time of the day it is. We don’t read nature nor do we read each other's faces because we get all of our sensory sustenance from our screens.

They say to us: everything outside this limited body is dead, inanimate and of no relevance to our minds, moods or emotions. Now we attempt to care for the planet but still, to us, it's really just a series of bits and pieces that we can quantify and that we can manipulate so that we don’t burn up just yet and the money machine can keep running.

Oh and as for our own internal compass? As in, the sense of meaning and what is sacred beyond our own limited five senses? Well, no need to worry as we outsource our power to a bunch of people we’ve never met, who engage in constant aggression and war. Did I mention we have a plethora of mental and health epidemics and crises? Yea, but with them we’re not sure why? We’ll continue to ‘progress’ and ‘move forward’ anyway.

The truth is that to both have meaning and a sense of direction, of orientation we must look to the outside world and acknowledge it for what it is: an extension of what’s going on inside of us.

See, it’s easy to point the finger at ‘it’ (society, culture, capitalism etc.) but it’s harder to look at the one who has the finger. If one can’t imagine the celestial bodies in the sky as significant vibrant entities who hold sway over the moods and currents of the cosmos then one sees them simply as a collection of dust and particles. And if one can’t see the vast underground complexity of communication and organisation of resources that happens between the roots of trees and those all throughout the forest then one fails to wonder what it is they could be trying to say to us and so chops them down to make meaning.

To know where we’re going we need to know from where we came.

This point in the history of civilization where the biggest act of rebellion is to slow down and relax our five senses.

Hug a tree, bang a drum and look at the moon regularly. Because it’s what our ancestors did for millennia and in doing so we mimic them, we enshrine their nature within us. Moreover do it because it feels way better to be in harmony with all of creation than it is to be alienated from it.

The body, indeed your very own body, has evolved as a direct result of the same unseen forces that guide flowers to bud, that induce osmosis, that fires neurons and expands the lungs.

So couldn’t we say that the ability to therefore feel peace and harmony is your birthright? If nature is coherent, self regulating and birthing itself out of love, why are we different?

The world of mind is abstract and constantly places itself outside of what is happening.

The world of the body, both the individual body and the world as my body, is, without doubt. It’s just happening. And it’ll carry us with it if we stop swimming against its current.

It’s in this body, in this moment, I get agency over reality. I don’t have to worry about the state of the world - that mental world we too often inhabit. I can feel into the movement of life.

And I can see that meaning is not something I ‘find’ or ‘achieve’, that meaning exists in the recognition of all as sacred.