Thinking as Way Out, Thinking as Trap

Perhaps one could lead a totally instinctual life
and everything
would just fall into place.

People talk as if that's true,
and every time I've heard someone say that
I've heard a person spouting a set of words
that they believed in and had spouted
many times,
and they were never present to me nor to themselves as they
were spouting the words.

So, this is the trap folks:
to speak is to enter the world of the abstract,
the world of words,
and in that world,
a "tree" is just a set of letters, or a set of sounds
that can point us in "reality" to one real tree,
that is different from every other tree in the world,
or can at least point us toward the
tree beings out in the world.

And yet, if we were on some land
and wanted to improve that land,
perhaps best thing we could do for that land would be to plant it
in fifty to eighty percent trees.

That's thinking:
using mental pictures
to pre-view reality,
to set up a plan to change reality.

And we would need to use thinking
to explore why trees would be good for our soil,
and the water in the air,
and our eating,
and a windbreak
and a food source for our own chickens and goats
and a food source for the wild things
and a future source of timber for anyone who wanted to build with wood
and a wish of our own to have an income source in the future
and a wish and desire and commitment to keeping some of our land "wild"

And we could "think" about
which is plan mental pictures
and conduct thought experiments
in what percent of our land we wanted in orchard
and what percent in timber
and what percent in wild/ hedgerow trees
and where we might create windbreaks with trees

This is permaculture,
which is applying thinking to land use
and what better way to use thinking?

To improve relationships.
That might be a better way,
or we could think of relationships as a big swatch of land
and what percentage of our relationship
is mindless chatter
is business / getting things done talk
is admiring and supporting the other
is listening to the other
is having physical contract
is complaining
is demanding and correcting and ordering
is fuming inside and having inner complaining
is ignoring
is talking to friends about what's "good" or what's "bad" with the partner

Which is to say:
we can use the brain's joy in seeing how much
and which is more than something else
to get a good look at our relationship.

And then, the core of the Anat Baniel work
and the Feldenkrais work:
what variations could we create

in our relationship
in our land use
in our day use
in our thinking patterns
in our feeling patterns
in our moving patterns


..................

I'm laying in a lot of thought possibilities

Ideas as a kind of food.

Most of my essays I strive to have a kind of high density
nutritional value.

They might require reading several times.

Think about how often you slow down
and really allow your mind to chew
over  (rather than stew over)
new information
and especially,
new ways of organizing that information
and
PUTTING THAT NEW ORGANIZATION
INTO ACTION
IN YOUR LIFE


This is the purpose of thinking:
to create possibilities for an
even more wonderful life
for ourselves,
those in our community
and
the world.


Good.