“That other anatomy”: how can spirituality sit alongside science?

Kirstie McKinnon

Mindfulness teaches us to notice our thoughts. Recently I read Switch on Your Brain by Dr Caroline Leaf. She proposes a step by step scenario in which we notice, yes, our thoughts, but go further, to notice the attitude of our thoughts, and then go further, to change the thoughts. Radical stuff, she calls it DIY neurosurgery.

It’s a difficult book for me to endorse because it’s not secular. Caroline Leaf quotes the Bible throughout and is very sure. I’m wary of anyone who’s sure of anything. Yet I learnt from engagement with the deep focused thinking programme she outlines. I’ve puzzled over this, a lot.

Then I read Glen Colquhoun’s book,  Late Love. He expresses this thing I tried to puzzle out: how can spirituality sit alongside science?

That other anatomy each human being carries is the shape of their spiritual life, and it is present in all consultations. It can be accessed. It has a shape. It is often felt by allowing our own extra-corporeal lives to lay hands on it. This means we have to understand our own extra-corporeal lives … if we are lucky there can also be for a moment a glimpse of the interconnectedness of all things beyond this, a sense that we are part of a larger whole. This is a healing intuition and a powerful succour for individual loss.” Glen Colquhoun, Late Love, BWB Texts 2016.

After much chin-scratching, I cut down a tree in my garden.

And then I wrote this poem. It’s interesting, the way neural pathways in the brain resemble trees.

EVERGREEN MAGNOLIA MIND

Tremors run deep in me
from a black water well
tunnelled at the base, dead
words tumble, leaves shake
sawdust floats on the breeze

cut the tree down

in champagne pale cross cuts
rolled to grass, see
ink-black internal scars
hollow stained deep centre
dark-edged veins which carried
bitter water to fibres, to cells

cut the tree down

let it grow new shoots
feed them sweet lime, seaweed
salts from the ocean
blown with wild kindness
tend the rampant explosion
of new thought branches
let them grow garrulous
from the stump

forget beauty, forget
symmetry, what are these
compared to an exuberant
growing tree?
free of bitter water
free of apology
and grown glossy with love
heavy-limbed and tall as it forgives
the mistakes of the old gardener
gives air and the peace of its leaves
to all as it reaches for light.

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Kirstie McKinnon lives, surfs and writes from her home in East Otago, New Zealand.

Read ‘Books beyond loss’ by Kirstie McKinnon.