At Blackwater Pond

Dissociation, the digital world, and paving paradise.

At Blackwater Pond

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled

after a night of rain.

I dip my cupped hands. I drink

a long time. It tastes

like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold

into my body, waking the bones. I hear them

deep inside me, whispering

oh what is that beautiful thing

that just happened?

(Mary Oliver)

The body knows beauty. Deep within our flesh we can understand something about the joy of life, at a level that has nothing to do with any other form of understanding. It is a profoundly spiritual aspect of our life - relational, opening, summoning. This embodied knowing is so precious, but is stolen away from us when we are dissociated from our body, through trauma, attachment wounds, over-interest in technology. Why does this happen? What can we do to mitigate it?

Considering dissociation, we turn first to traumatic wounding. Dwelling in the body becomes too terrifying for some people, at least for some of the time, and they find themselves moving in and out of their embodied being. Commonplace trauma leads to dissociation and dissociative patterns. The body, as they say, ‘keeps the score’, holds the memories which the mind does not want to engage with - perhaps the mind is not capable of engaging with some of these terrifying experiences. Therapists know this very well, and when working with trauma we have extensive protocols and techniques for building sufficient resource and resilience to begin to help a person back in to their physical world - the physical world which is stolen in trauma.

I am not just thinking about trauma when I think about the lack of integration of physicality however. I have just come back from a holiday in which I was able to step away from screens for days on end, and what a difference it makes to my softness, to my tenderness, to my field of vision. It strikes me as being urgent that we address the ordinary (non-traumatic) flight from the body that is typified in over engagement with the digital world.

I am going to show you something. I drafted this piece a few weeks ago, and I thought ‘I wonder what the digital realm would make of this lovely Mary Oliver poem?’. As you may be aware, there is a feature on the AI site ChatGPT which allows you to invite the - oh gosh I am stuck for the noun….invite the internet? invite the bot? invite the AI? invite the chatgpt? invite the monster? the Thing? Invite it (IT, ah yes, very satisfying, a pronoun/noun combo. I like that) to make an image to fit the instructions you give. I typed the poem ‘At Blackwater Pond’ in to the instruction box and this is what it came up with.

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is ya. that beautiful thing that just happened?

It is a bit odd. What are those round things in the foreground? Are they floating or (if you look at the one on the right hand side) somehow hanging over the air? What on earth is it?

It is not beautiful. Not to me anyway. Weird. And it makes me feel something. It makes me feel a bit sick. I have an embodied response to this but it is not the body of my bones saying anything about a beautiful moment in time that happened. It is something that disconnects, jolts, disturbs. It calls forward a body that I do not want to be in. I want to put a boundary between me and it. So out of my body I pop. See ya.

Drawing this together, when we can live an embodied, present life, we have the opportunity for encounter with rich beauty. I want that, and I want it for everyone I encounter. Sometimes we have to work at it to be able to get engaged and stay engaged with the world of the senses. We have to be really very aware that the digital world, marvellous as it is, does not share this aspect of humanity and to live full spiritually fulfilling lives we need to claim it. Don’t forget ‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot’.