online: 13 january 2012 modified: 12 january 2012 11 january 2012 a return to the whole
the hill garden
...warm air for midwinter and no one in sight as i digest a Jewish apple cake while gazing at the ornamental pond in a terrace surrounded by selected shrubs and trees beneath the unselected sky...
...but it's cold enough to wear the electric gloves to write through... and it's windy enough to blow away a paper bag which i immobilise by crumpling before it gets outside my reach... in one of those seemingly unimportant actions of which one's life quite largely consists... and yet again my attention goes to the complex dynamic pattern of the legs of a few people walking together in the unconscious miracle of neuro-muscular motion of which, according to Charles Sherrington, all human life consists*... though when i stop to consider his statement i wonder if thought itself is entirely physical... at which i see two people walking in step (without the apparent complexity of out-of-step walking) and realise that i know one of them... he is Jamie, originally from Madeira, who waves and then walks across the lawn to greet me... his companion also comes from Madeira (or did he say somewhere else in Portugal?)...
* 'all man can do is to move things', Sir Charles Sherrington, O.M., Man on His Nature, the Gifford Lectures, 1937-8, Edinburgh, Cambridge University Press. London 1951, page 102.
...Jamie is a person whom i meet now and then on the heath... and we talk today of this topic... the nervous system... and also various minor illnesses we share (though i prefer not to specify them having been brought up to exclude one's illnesses from conversation!)...
...we also talked of the electric gloves through which these thoughts are passing as i write...
...remembering that the title of this entry was 'return to wholeness', i feel sure that the mystery of the whole is that (though it probably exists) it (if it is an it) seems to defy objective description...
...my belov'd nervous system*...
* a phrase that arose while writing 'a meditation on the skeleton', page 233 of the internet and everyone...
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