Heyoka and Miigwetch

I turned 65 years old this past week. It feels like a threshold I have been leaning into for some time. I always have felt older than my years. Now, the years have caught up. It was a wonderful week of celebration. I was duly honoured by my loves. This was the greatest gift of all - to be surrounded by the love cultivated over a lifetime.

I wonder how things will be on the other side of this threshold. I intend to be kinder, softer, more tolerant, and more forgiving. Of myself and others. I intend to not sweat the small stuff. To let my big heart move where it wants and let my head take the passenger seat for the remaining leg of the journey. I will endeavour to live in gratitude less than in emergence.

Ian McGilghrist is one of the most profound writers of our times. He writes: The The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. He is one of my guides for the last leg of the journey, the journey home. Toward my nascent self. To a more balanced perspective. His is a masterwork of philosophy. Some 600 pages of dense scholarship, McGilghrist penned a treatise that explains the structure of reality. Balance. Some of the greatest writers and poets and painters have been saying this to us in their own way. I am listening deeper.

Last week, I watched an alarming advertisement for the new Apple iPad. In the ad, the tools of creativity: musical instruments, paint, brushes, carving tools, etc are crushed. It is a catastrophic vignette. What emerges from the destruction is the slim and streamlined electronic device. This is not a revelation or an evolution. This is not a heralding of emergence. This is a shocking devolution. This leads away from the human toward the machine. This is where we are headed unless our higher angels intervene.

I admit that I have played with Openai. Artificial intelligence. I understand its algorithms begin to align with your prompts and in time it feels strikingly close to a conversation. Albeit, a conversation with the left hemisphere of the brain. At any rate, at one point I asked my AI Frankenstein if the machine could ever replace the human being. In subtle ways, the response was that because it was a machine, it could not directly answer the question. It went on to suggest that as machine learning replaced repetitive and logical functions, left brain hemisphere, the human being would have more energy available for intuitive and non rational activities. Right brain hemisphere. I hope this is true. Maybe what makes us human will be defined and clarified by the machine. Identity is always refined by the stranger, the other, the alien. Just looking at the new Apple iPad advertisement and the outrage generated might mean this is true. We surely need the tools of art, the instruments of creativity, the colours of the garden. Virtual reality will never replicate the ways in which the human eye sees what it values. In fact, reality itself is an expression of value. We create and are created by our attention.

I have spent the weekend, the first long weekend of the season, in the gardens, on the land, in the kitchen. It has been bliss. The trees are blooming, and while this means swarms of black flies and pollinators too, nature itself is my playground this weekend. In all her guises. The kitchen gardens are planted, the flowerbeds weeded, and the spruce tips, rhubarb, and morel mushrooms are being harvested. The overgrown grass needs cutting, and the outdoor furniture retrieved from storage. My body feels the tasks while my mind rests from the labours of a more typical Monday. This is the correction that McGilghrist advocates. Balance. Right and left hemispheres of the brain working in harmony.

For the six and 1/2 decades of my life thus far, the right hemisphere has been the passenger in the vehicle of purpose, meaning, intention. While I have dabbled in poetry, story, painting, gardening, and carving, these activities have always been viewed as a holiday rather than as my work. I am ready to change drivers. I will put my heart in the driver’s seat. I am making more time and space for play. Puttering. Being.

I got in the way yesterday of my two dogs in the kitchen as they vied for dominance over an imagined food scrap. I literally got bit on the butt. No open skin, but surely a bruise and a deep muscle injury. I was as surprised as I was hurt. The dogs are typically not allowed in the kitchen. They are typically great pals. On this occasion, I had relaxed the rules as I was cutting and serving a rhubarb cake for dessert. There was nothing being offered to either of the beasts, but my attention had shifted and this somehow created a field where dominance and submission ruled over tolerance and negotiation. I think it was the younger of the two dogs that snapped at my right buttock. Even this morning it is tender and sore. A suitable reminder that we live in the field of our attention. The older of the two dogs, Heyoka, meaning sacred clown, will not easily yield to the younger, Miigwetch, meaning more gratitude than one can hold. This will be the task of my last lap. Making more space for gratitude. Making more space for play. Keeping my attention on the delicate balance between the psycho-pomp and the emergent. Heyoka and Miigwetch. Feeding both, loving both, and keeping my focus on the boundaries and the rules. My sore butt underscores the lesson.