honey and sting

Bradford Keeney, in "Shaking out the Spirits":

"In studying what Bateson calls the 'ecology of mind,' I became more aware of how people, performing artists in particular, were searching for ways of moving beyond the limitations of their every-day, predictable minds. They sought experience that was "spontaneous," "creative," and "improvisational." Such experience came when their every-day mind was connected to another, whether the other be another person, musical instrument, or paint brush, so as to create a mind larger than what they knew as their "own." In the surrender of their own mind to this larger mind, they would behold the gifts and surprises of creative, improvisational contact."

What I find interesting in this is all the different ways we can join another object, person, or experience in order to create/extend into an emergent, moment-to-moment "mind" that is greater, more complex, and more generative than the sum of the two parts. It makes me think how each significant relationship I've been in has its own language that it develops, its own humor, its own wisdom, etc. And that prayer is another example of this kind of extension, except that we don't know the limits of the Other. And so we tap into the Infinite, limited only by our ability to tolerate the interface.