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Flesh of my flesh

Writer's picture: CroneCrone

After rain and in the sunshine, the bark of this tree looked like skin. Like the limb of some great creature, spreading its feet into the earth. Skin that was cut and healed into scars. So very alive. So powerful, patient, resilient.


Listening to IMcG on my walk today I learned that John Stuart Mill described Jeremy Bentham as like a boy who never grew up. He experienced no despair or euphoria, no wracking guilt or hungry longing. He had no interest in other countries beyond their ability to accumulate facts and compute utility. IMcG says he sounds severely right-hemi deficient. As well as autistic. David Runciman on his History of Ideas podcast was more generous and greatly values Bentham's contribution to social wellbeing through utilitarianism. Both, to me, seem right. But it does encourage me to draw a line between policies for abstract statistical people and the decisions one makes with those one knows.


Life is both. And for most of us is primarily the face-to-face (screen-to-screen, email-to-email).


For me, I cannot treat any person whose voice I have heard or whose eyes I have seen as anything but a precious individual node in their own chain of being which now, however lightly, is connected with mine. All these merit more than being a statistic.


That chain of being - as unseen as the root structures and communications through fungus and soil and microbes between tree and tree. The whole wood, like us, intimately, invisibly connected.


Flesh of my flesh.


Today is my mother's birthday and last week I realised how much I seek to live up to her view of me. She loved me for who I really am, but saw me as some creature of wonder, which I can never me. Now may be the time to rest in the first part of that acknowledgement - of being loved for who I am - and worrying less about that unattainable vision.

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