We don’t take the world seriously enough. We doze through dawn and dusk and wonder little about the gift of sleep or a breakfast of cereal, milk, toast and marmalade. No, we make things too thingy! We dilute them and conspire to say – ‘they’re not really that magical and amazing and way beyond us’. So we agree, without a word, to take the music out of it all in exchange for a corporate or supermarket reality where everything has its price!
Meanwhile the beginners, our children, instinctively go for the real thing – a twig on the grass, a pigeon feather, walking along low walls – until, in a fit of distraction, they shed their original version of the world for something less touchy-feely, something useful for getting on in life, something on the syllabus.
Human knowing happens in two complementary ways. One side of our brain targets the prey, so to speak, while the other scans the area. Or, better, one highlights clarity and precision while the other stands back and appreciates everything else – making art, music, dance, falling in love, the wisdom of not knowing. We need both sides of course but as a society we privilege a purely rational take on life above knowing the sublime singing of things.
Whatever happened to the embodied world we knew as children? Let us go back to the smell of autumn leaves becoming mulch; that earth smell that no perfume can match, no chemistry explain away. Let us have again the smell of ourselves.