Let the healing begin

Another futile day. Futile, why? Because we are not moving; we are stuck here in the house. And any time we are stuck here in the house, we could go crazy. So we distract the mind with sugar, tobacco leaves and coffee. We spend the day trying to survive ourselves and each other. We ought to be in motion. Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. The best thing for everything. A stroll. The bigger the problem, the longer the walk.

A remedy for mental illness? A life on the road. Open the doors of St Pats and the Redbrick above in Ardee. No more treatments, down with stupor, out the road with you now and good luck. Here’s a stick and a water pistol. Mind yourself.

Danger to themselves

Couldn’t have that, though; couldn’t have such unpredictability afoot. A danger to traffic and themselves. But the dream of it is good. A culture that’d be big enough to handle stray and awkward energies. A culture not insistent on productivity and usefulness. They’d stroll past the house like holy men and women. Like the Indian lads in the nip walking toward the Ganges, or the witches who live in trees.

You’d pop out of the house to throw an eye on them and offer the cup of tae and full packet of custard creams. Mad for sugar, is the stray. You’d hear news from the otherworld, the othermind. Traipsing the land, free as a crow. With our blessings as well, because we need them. How? Why them that way and you yours? Well, that’s the skewed view, you see. There is no them. It’s all us. And something about wildness. It is built into being. As part of and as integral to life on the planet as oxygen. It will find a place to play. If it’s not in the jungle, then it’ll be in the housing estate. One world, one mind, one being. That which is repressed will erupt.

I can be ying, if you can be yang. I can be sober, as long as someone else is drunk. I can be married, as long as you’re not. We live on behalf of each other in a sense. You do one thing, I’ll do the other. I can be sane, as long as others aren’t. We are one organism. Every impulse will be expressed.

A sense I have is of interdependency, and I got watching a documentary on cows. One of them just looked at me and something happened. I got this message. ‘Together’. For reasons of psychological as well as physical survival. A togetherness of living.

Say a lion, fending for her cubs, lunges, claws first, teeth next, in your general direction, where then is this sense of oneness? Same place as when I eat steak from the butchers. Argument to be made that’s it’s in the same place when you’re eating carrots or cauliflower, too. These living things.

And there’s nothing to be done with it. This perception, that I got from the cows, that we are all in this together. I can’t do anything with it, I can’t change the way we behave as a species, but I can’t deny it either. You just have it, and that’s it.

What’s a perception, anyway? A realisation that is subject to change. A cloud in the sky being blown by the wind. A series of unending perceptions, one following the other. All of them will die with you. You are a being in whom perceptions take place, like digestion or growth. What happens to all your realisations after you’ve gone?

Bang bang

Reality is up for grabs. The story we live from now is the fabulous book of fact. Science, Chapter 1, Verse 1. It starts, “In the beginning there was a bang, and all things followed the bang, and there was nothing created that was not in the bang, and there was nothing that created the bang. It just was. The bang just banged. Bang.”

And it is a natural law, according to these storytellers, that one day (even though there are no days in space) all things that expand will one day contract, and all matter and light will return to a dark, bodiless state. And the space where space was won’t be there.

Space for me. Space for you. Space for tigers and wasps. Space for trees, and space for order. One mind.

So let us turn our attention to those parts of the country where the people seem most dysfunctional and upset. Where the only thing that’s thriving is pain. And let us ask ourselves how can we let this wildness breathe, so that the healing can begin.

Walk... we’ll start with a walk.