Pendulum

 

The pulses of a seismic body,
A body that beats in extracted sugars and bitter sweetness.
It writhes in the rhythms of its own natural orders.
Where chemicals and synapses squeeze against each other like worms in a bucket.
Inside this cathedral of wet proteins and fatty acids lies my perceptions, my feelings, my very being.

The body is a vessel drawn towards equilibrium.
A beast ravenous to return to the centre balance of being.
You see it in our wants and our cravings.
It's the impulse to overeat after being underfed,
The desire to swim in iced water under summer’s sun,
The thirst to socialise following solitude.
Maybe monks of meditation may always find their presence in the equalised centre.
But this isn’t the trajectory for most of us.
For most of us we swing up and down through rhythms of pleasure and pain,
Like a needle on a seismograph.
Up and down,
We weave through the centre balance only for a brief moment,
only to immediately escape for fields of thorns or meadows of grass.
Life is about feeling it all, for that is what the body demands.
Comfort and distress, hot and cold, hungry and full,
Balance comes with how smoothly we sweep up and down between states of bliss and states of unease.
It’s not about the position of the moment but the grace in which the overarching curves of life flow.
For in these grooves where our paths weave we feel the shifting tectonics within.
We feel a body eternally in friction to the movements of the universe.
A body always attempting to return to centre.






Inspired by paper 

Leknes, S,Tracey I, 2010,  "Pain and pleasure: masters of mankind." Pleasures of the brain: 320-335, oxford university press, New York City, USA