Our two halves

Saturday morning just past and I am sitting in my favorite corner breakfast chair holding a 2nd coffee while looking upwards through the gable windows to the hill top beyond. Three dark shapes barely visible stay perched on the skeletal, silvered limbs of a wind shaped tree. Minutes pass. These three wedge-tail eagles, cuddled together as they are, stir a wondering in me as to what conversing could be happening.

Sitting where I do, I join them.

Waxwings

Four tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berrybush
in sun, and I am one.

Such merriment and such sobriety —
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk —
was this not always my true style?

Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four
birds. Can you mistake us?

To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together — for this I have abandoned all my other
lives

Robert Francis

The house was now empty, but at 5:30AM I was pouring the day’s first coffee into three cups to wake myself and two others before they drove off; one to Hobart and one to the airport to an eventual flight back to his home on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

In the living room three empty chairs bear witness to the previous night’s occupancy of three “tao philosophers” who conversed animately about the book the middle chair wrote. The author, sitting between Chris and myself is Iain McGilchrist. The book in question is ‘The Master and his Emissary’ and is nothing less than an urgently needed addition to the question of “Why is the world in the mess it finds itself?”

Basically, McGilchrist is arguing that the two separate halves of our brain — the left and right hemispheres — have evolved to have different perspectives on the world and offer different skills. Both hemisphere are needed, but need to be in balance, which they aren’t.

Quoting from the book:

The left hemisphere is designed to exploit the world effectively, but is narrow in focus and prizes theory over experience. It prefers mechanisms to living things, ignores whatever is not explicit, lacks empathy, and is unreasonably certain of itself. By contrast, the right hemisphere has a much broader, more generous understanding of the world, but lacks the certainty to counter this onslaught, because what it knows is more subtle and many-faceted.

It is vital that the two hemispheres work together, but in Western culture there is evidence of a power struggle, with the left hemisphere becoming increasingly dominant. The result is a dehumanised society, where a rigid and bureaucratic mentality, obsessed with structure and mechanism, holds sway, at huge cost to human happiness and the world around us.

Science has demonstrated that the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body; the right hemisphere the left side.

As a sculptor, my right hand “grasps” and holds tightly the chisel. My right eye with 3 degrees of focus searches for “explicit” detail of grain and pattern. My left hand and eye, however, “stroke and caress” and find “implicit” poetic metaphoric meaning in the grain and form of wood whose shape spills out over the work bench, touches dirt, air, fills with bird song.

In the edited poem below, although Sufi poet Hafiz might be referring to the Body/Mind split, it is useful to imagine him also talking about the left and right hemispheres of our brain.

All the Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

Hafiz, translation Daniel Ladinsky