Holding on

This tree has entwined itself. I wonder how or why that happened.

Sometimes that is how I feel... that I am holding myself together through sheer will. And yet maybe I shouldn't see it as a sign of desperation. Maybe it's more about self-compassion? Or narcissism perhaps.

When I was running, I had an idea of how I wanted to write about this picture. It was something about what is held within... or caught... and I had this rather poetic title written in my head. But it has fled.

Perhaps I can recall if I run through my run.

I saw the woman with the spaniels, the thick glasses, the big teeth and the elegant legs. She had one dog on a lead so I enleashed mine as I passed and her other dog ran at him snapping and snarling. The woman was angry and upset. I know how she feels. I wanted it all to be OK, for her not to feel that roiling within.

I saw the woman who walks that route every day. She said her dog died last August. He was 13 and a half and had cancer. My dog liked her. I said I'm thinking of puppies and have now decided (not cocker, not poodle) to get another Jabi. A sable bitch. I could call her Fauna. I didn't mention the name.

I went up the hill, surprised it felt quite easy as I really had been struggling up until then.

I was listening to Sam Harris talk with Lisa Feldman-Barrett. The predictive brain. Constructed emotions. Ah yes, and how our brain is shaped to interpret the world according to the concepts wired into it by our upbringing. We are made by our world and make the world according to how we expect it to be. We are self-fulfilling prophesies. Rupert Sheldrake, father of Mushroom Merlin, thinks that will is the imagining of the future and that is a causal pull on the present in the same way that events and a causal push in the past. It's the same sort of thing: we are made of what we are and make our future in our past.

But none of this is the tree holding itself with entwined branches. Or maybe it is.