Knowing All About It

Wisdom consists in perceiving that opposites, far from being sequestered in their exclusive individuality, ceaselessly modify and communicate with each other. The one never transpires but in response to the other, and all reality is nothing more than this process of reciprocal engendering.

Francois Julien, In Praise of Blandness

Up only exists because of down, not in spite of it. 

On a bicycle, or on foot, this process of reciprocal engendering is something that etches itself into the bones, brain and blood. You breathe those ups, you breathe those downs, because it is you, your blood and your bones, that works them, not sitting passively by, sealed behind screen and speed, as you let some machine do it for you. Moving under your own steam, the shape of the bodymind is thus governed by the shape of the land.

Because of these live-contoured-encounters, and this dynamic inter-influencing of bodymind and world, you soon understand that unity (or, com-unities), and not duality, governs the universe. Organism and environment, together, constitute a single evolutionary process.

A unity of opposites naturally emerges.

'Knowing All About It on the Loch Humphrey Path'     July 2013