breathing the wind..

the wild wind spoke to me the other night

the same breath that we breath that gives us life

and makes the trees dance and sing their wild, reckless song

the same wind that causes my wind-chime to resonate with my soul

the same breath that breaths the music that flows from my flute

And so the wind was wondering why we hide inside

And it was wild and strong and powerful, yet sad

sad that we feel we don't fit

sad that we feel everything is moving so fast

and that everything is so out of control

And it told me we need to breath more

and remember that the air we breath is part of us

just like the sounds we hear, the light we see, the food we taste and smell

the cold and the heat that we feel

a combination of Earth, Water, Fire

and Wind

And then I realized I was talking to myself

but so was the wind..

Friday afternoon mindstream..

Sometimes I just let my thoughts flow, without trying too hard to contain them - just go with it and see what happens. Like this:

My youngest daughter can't entirely read yet. So she has this oral she needs to do at school, but obviously can't just use crib notes. The solution: I drew some little pictures - icons - for her to remember the various sections of her talk. Bushbabies live in trees - so I drew a tree with a house on it. Bushbabies are bluish grey but the South African version is slightly yellow - I drew my version of a bushbaby eating custard. Isabelle loves custard - so despite the picture looking more like a stick man, with a tail, holding a square over a circle (instant custard being poured into a bowl) she remembered it. And for the bluish grey - I drew a cloud. Within a few minutes we had memorized the whole thing and she got it right first time.

This got me thinking about language - and hieroglyphics and other symbol based systems of writing. We tend to see writing as a contained unit. I give you a book and that's pretty much it - you read it and you're expected to get it all from the words used. Or like reading what I'm writing here. I sort-of expect you to understand what I'm getting at without having too much context.

But perhaps it all started differently. What if writing wasn't so much to contain a message, but the symbols were used to remind the 'reader' of a story they already had heard. That the symbols and the culture went together - like maps to a 'file' that contained that knowledge.

But I guess that's what words do as well, or names of people, animals, things. Each word, each phrase triggering a memory.

So I did some research to find out the origin of language - and got everything from theories about the tower of Babel and language supposedly being proof of a higher power, to whole lot of other stuff that you only find on the www. But the one thing that triggered a thought, as words tend to do, was the recursive nature of language, which led me to think about the word 'word'. We have a word for 'word', a word used to describe itself, which reminded me of an old friend who used to say 'Words don't have meaning, meaning has words'.

But there's another lesson in here - that the mind is full of words that take up so much space and time, full of meanings and memories and perhaps all this stuff is there because if it wasn't, then maybe there wouldn't be any meaning at all. And perhaps this is the truth of truths - that, as a very wise man once said, what we need isn't meaning, but an experience of being truly alive. And if, every now and again, we don't allow all these words to get in the way, that might just happen. So now is a good time to stop this flow of words and go and enjoy the weekend....

What if?

All throughout life we are taught that there is something we need to attain. Something out there that will make us happy. Something that, when we achieve it or reach a certain goal, we will be complete, whole, enlightened, whatever.

And so we spend our lives trying to find this thing or this place, or we come to the conclusion that we're not good enough for this and so we give up, spending the rest of our lives making excuses as to why it wasn't meant for us, but believing we're some kind of failure.

But - what if that's all wrong, that this 'system' is all messed up. And that the whole time everything we needed, everything that matters, was all already there, all the time, we just forgot..

That this 'reality' existed right here, right under our noses, we just became so involved in everything else, that we somehow forgot - forgot how to truly see, forgot who we really are.