Knowledge and Knowing
This morning I saw a rainbow, not a full one, just the beginnings of a rainbow.
It was a ball of colour coming out of a hillside and then it melted into the sky, no arch over the countryside or houses. Just a sphere of multi-coloured light. It then occurred to me that I know how a rainbow is formed. And I wondered how must our ancestors have looked at this phenomenon? With no science to understand how a rainbow is created, they must have gazed on it with awe.
Alchemy. Magic. True beauty.
To see a rainbow is a heart filling experience, but to see it just as it is, with no knowledge or expectation, must have been as if viewing a miracle.
How divine.
It got me thinking about everything that we ‘know’. How our bodies work. How plants grow. How life is created. Energy. Gravity. Forces. Sound. Light. I mean, we put a man on the moon! We are exceptional at finding answers to the unknown. And then they invented the internet and Google! Is there anything we can’t find an answer to?
Imagine not knowing. Imagine everything being because ‘it just is.’ Imagine trying to do things without worrying about the outcome. About how it should look, taste, sound or be.
Imagine going with the flow of life.
Just for a minute, think about ‘Time’. Think about how we follow our clocks. Time when we get up, go to work, eat, sleep, meet friends, an hour to do this and an hour for that. And don’t get me started on clock watching with children! Clubs, school run, get up, go to bed, eat, don’t eat – the list goes on! We are governed by time. Which is maybe why we rush, maybe why we try and fill our days, maybe why we become too controlling?
Just imagine you don’t have a clock or watch or phone. That you have to run your day entirely by the sun and moon. By listening to your body. By darkness and light. By seasons. By tides. By weather. By intuition.
Just like the living creatures that roam the land and the birds that fly away for winter. We would have to use our inner knowing to feel our way through the days and years. I wonder how Mother Earth would react to us all connecting in with her. To us all having to use Her for Time.
Imagine how much more in tune our lives would be, with ourselves, each other and nature. How much more we would trust our bodies, knowing that they would let us know if we were tired or hungry. We wouldn’t look at the clock and say ‘oh, I can’t be tired its only 8pm’. We would just go to bed!
Our bodies are phenomenal. They know, they feel, and they react. It seems we have lost the art of communicating with our senses and trusting our intuition.
This is just a musing from my head, a wonder about how our ancestors lived. How they viewed the world. How in comparison, we see life playing out. But what I have taken from these words that have come from my heart, is this:
Knowledge is external, it is linear, it is fact based, it is learning. It is what we know from the outside in.
