Walking-with: EJ correspondence with Aldous Huxley, Christmas day 1939, on creating an ideology for a future college.
‘The Giantess” – print of painting by Leonora Carrington once owned by EJ
Dr Martin Shaw, mythic storyteller – “we make things holy by the kind of attention we give them”
Fritjof Capra on autopoesis – self-creating system of evolution/living. Santiago Theory of cognition: mind and brain are not the same. Gaia Theory.
Location: Winden Wood / Linchball Wood
‘Winden’ – to wind; to bind; to winch;
collinsdictionary.com:
“to wind itself, to meander, to write, squirm, to try to wriggle out”
Winden from the German word.
To wind – “to cause to have difficulty breathing – if you are winded by something”
winch “lift or lower an object or person using this”
The plant that comes to mind is ivy, but interestingly there was very little found in either wood, especially amongst the Linchball pines.
We are not conscious of our cells, but they are in our body keeping us alive. We are not conscious of the trees, but they are a body on which we survive. We know their function because of what we have been taught, we can see trees around us at a spatial level – over there – they breathe for the earth whether we see it or not in the same way cells in our bodies do. Science itself is phenomenal. A sensory experience is phenomenal giving an awareness of something ‘other’ than what is tangible, visible. That evokes another kind of relationship, another value, beyond industry, but how can both ways of knowing, understanding, sit together? What is lost in the measure of things compared to ‘other’ than ways of knowing through the senses?
What is the language that binds?
What is the language that re-minds?
“I pause for some tea – it’s luke warm. The pear has smashed and the sandwich and nuts are not enough. I’m angry at…a great swathe of forest was felled and not replaced, the land still settling, balancing, and there are so many tracks here it’s hard to step away from the. Two deer skulls in very little distance. A man shouting for a dog in the distance. Occasional gun shot sounds. Crows calling yups. Buzzards. Bright sun… Everything is so near, but I feel lost and I can’t get lost.” I was still grieving the loss of my mum. This painted my sensory vision today. I started collecting bits around me and assembling them. A mandala emerged. A system. I walked it. I lived with the grief walking it round like an organ of the heart, of life.
if we are part of the system we are not in isolation (even if we think we are)
we understand in terms of structure
what about pattern? patterns of emotion, spirit, ancestry, mind and the unconscious, the collective?:
the lie of separation.
Systems of painting and process.
Systems of materiality and material relationships.
Systems of experience.
Systems evolve through relationship.
