Now that my wife and I have settled into our new digs, I will be returning to blogging. Not sure how reliably, but a few comments have been very encouraging, so will move along. We are now living in a CCRC, Brookhaven, still in Lexington, MA. We lucked out and got a great apartment. The move and down-sizing were quite traumatic, but things have quieted down and we are very happy in our vey new, different life style. Once I have gotten used to the long line of walkers outside of the dining room, life has come back to a new normality. I had to leave most of my books behind, but, other than that, our place is very homey and comfortable.
I have been a member (it costs a bit) of McGilchrist’s web site, but do not find it much more than an advertisement for his interviews. For me the importance is not in how the bilateral brain model can guide us toward a better understanding of the ultimate nature of the cosmos and, perhaps, life itself, but how it explains the mess we moderns find ourselves stuck with these days. So much of the many messes—climate issues, authoritarianism, mental health issues . . .—can be related to the hegemony of the left hemisphere and its inability to grasp the real world we actually inhabit. No matter how strongly people claim they know the truth about what has happened, the reality we affect, but cannot control, creates the facts that matter. More to come as I get restarted. But please do comment as we move along so that I may interact more powerfully with all who visit this site and, hopefully, share my ideas.
In the meantime, I include one of my poems that, in part, owes a debt to McGilchrist as well as Rabbi Heschel.
Walking with God
Walking with God sounds presumptuous.
That God should spend even a minute with me
ignores how much already is on God’s plate.
God has to keep the rivers flowing,
and the flowers growing,
and the stars glowing,
and that’s just the beginning.
God does walk with me,
but only when I stop thinking
about God, and simply let myself
connect to the cosmos as it is.
Not trying to figure it out.
Thinking takes me away from
my very being a part of it.
God is the river, the flower, the star.
But never something I can reach out>
and see or hear or touch or smell.
God is the seeing, hearing,
the touching, smelling that can
stop my search for Why or What,
and simply stand there, amazed.
Amazed at being a part of a process
that never started and never ends.
How can that be?
Always, the wrong question pops up.
God cannot be found in the answer.
Isn’t it strange that God joins me
only when the silence roars?