The Second Body
The idea of a body which can reach over to the other side of the world is not one we tend to speak of in everyday language right now. In normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin - it is supposed to be inviolable. The language of the human animal is that of a whole and single individual. You are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself - to be whole, to be one. Move away from this personality, self-expression, and you risk going out of your mind, being yourself, failing to be true to yourself, hearing other voices or splitting your personality: it doesn't sound good. This careful language is anxious, I think - threatening in a desperate way. You need to take care of yourself, it says. You need boundaries, you have to be either here or there. Don't be all over the place.
Climate change creates a new language, in which you have to be all over the place; you are always all over the place. It makes every animal body implicated in the whole world. Pg. 13*.
Every living thing has two bodies these days – you are flying into the atmosphere and back down to the ground right now, but you can’t feel it. You breathe something in, and what you breath out is something else. Your first body is the one belonging to “you”, the place you live in made out of your own personal skin. Your second body is the body belonging to Gina, a body which is not so solid as the other one, but much larger. This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence – it is a version of you. It is not a concept; it is your own body. The language we have at the moment is weak: we might speak vaguely of global connections; of emission and circulation of gases; of impacts. And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another. The concept of a global impact is not working for us, and in the meantime, your body has already eaten the distance…. It understandably difficult to remember that you have anything to do with this second body – your first body is the body you inhabit in your daily life. However, you are alive in both. You have two bodies.
I need to find some place where real life and this global truth – the two bodies – come into one another. I want to make the second body come into the first body. I’m not going to tell you what to do with your second body or how to use it. The purpose of this book is just to find its real life. I want to incorporate the second body with the first. Because the body exists at different scales, I need to close in on it, starting from its most expansive expression. I want to start by talking about the whole world. Pg. 25 – 26*.
(*The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard)
"Close your eyes, as that’s the best place to find a vision, within yourself, without distractions. Be in a relaxed conformable position and take a deep breath.
Try to see in your mind a sustainable world… Don’t push it, to feel bad if nothing comes. Don’t grasp too hard to try to see something, just notice what happens. This needs to be a very relaxing exercise. You may see brilliant pictures, you may see nothing, may hear something or feel something, you may see colours. Whatever comes up your mind will do what your mind does and that’s fine. If anything, else distracts or bothers you ignore it and follow your vision and just see what will happen.
Put yourself in a sustainable world that you really want to live in. Put yourself right in that world. Start near at home, in your home, whatever your home looks like? A home you would love to live in, that’s comfortable and beautiful and sustainable and look around, what does that home look like? Inside and outside? Whose there? What does it feel like to live there, to work there, to eat there, to get up in the morning?
What does it feel like to walk out the door into your community? Your neighbourhood, rural or urban or or in-between? What’s the neighbourhood like, one that you would love to live in that is sustainable? And that knows itself to be sustainable, a world that could be handed on intact and be even better to the children of that neighbourhood? Physically what is the neighbourhood like? What’s the built environment look like? Where is nature and what is it like? What kind of energy is powering this neighbourhood? What kinds of materials? Where does the water come from, where does it go? Who’s living there? How do they make their living? Where do they go to make their living, if out of the neighbourhood? And how do they get there?
How do you communicate in the neighbourhood and with other neighbourhoods? How often? By what means? About what?
And now if you can, move up to a bigger view of several neighbourhoods together. A whole city or a whole rural area. A whole state or a whole province where you live working sustainability in a way you would love it to work.
Look at your whole nation. What does it look like? What does it feel like? How are decisions made? How are conflicts resolved? What kinds of technologies are being used and being born?
Now go to the whole world. Sustainable, full of nations and neighbourhoods and cities and rural areas. Where people love to live. Where they know their children and their grandchildren will have an even more enacted more sustainable more exciting world than they live in. What kind of world is that? How do people of different kinds and colours and cultures communicate? How do they learn from each other, how do they get along with each other how do they resolve conflicts?
Spend a little more time in your sustainable world looking at anything you want to look at. Or envision anything you want to envision about this world in which you would love to live in. When you’re ready open your eyes and come on back to the unstainable real world.
Now share your vision with others and ask them what their vision is too…”
Donella Meadows