“We are not spectators in the world, for we are always enmeshed in a lived relation with it, grounded in the activity of the body. Furthermore, this active relation engages all the senses – not only vision – so we do not picture the world but live it through our bodies.”
Ian Burkitt – Bodies of Thought (via socio-logic through thepovertyoftheory)
This notion of the body, embodiment, bodies being connected, the flow and exchange of energy, atoms, molecules, among rocks and rivers and gardens and kitchens and outhouses, and of consciousness, words, writing, book knowledge arising from, and being intimately caught up in, all that is so foreign to my entire formal education that it still takes effort to interpret my experience through the notion.
When what we learn in school and share in the presuppositions of daily language is based on dividing practices and on valuing “mental” as something separate from all of creation, we are crippled in our abilities to perceive what Gregory Bateson called “the pattern that connects.”
Bateson and Foucault are my personal twin lenses, they provide the perspectives that help me sometimes, vaguely, get a glimpse of the depth and dimensions of a universe of flowing interconnection where energy and substance are not separate and never still.