The Hum
[I] still have a heart of [my] own. And that feels important. [I] can feel it here in [my] chest. And [I] can dimly remember a time when there was only [my] heart in [my] chest. People were afraid that governments would try to take them over, that ISIS brainhackers would bury thoughts deep in their minds. Many were fearful at first. So it started, as so many things do, with just three people that trusted each other. [We] created a firewall around us. [We’d] known each other in old life for years.
[I] and my pod came together just to try it out for a day. when [we] synced up, the first thing [we] noticed was [our] hearts. the hearts of three people all beating at the same time sounds like a cacophony at first. But [our] biological rhythms started listening to each other, started humming together. Gradually, layers unfolded, as [we] loosened up. [we] could trace the deep paths inside each other. Memories and thoughts connected to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, which started to stitch together, synthesise. [our] senses of self started to become a sense of self. [We] felt our way through the day, feeling each other’s feelings, knowing what was inside each other’s hearts. And [we] started to move together.
The individuals in our pod all historically had different lives; [I] was service coach at Auckland Libraries,[J], my brother, worked at a newspaper doing death notices, and [M] was a computer programmer. But [we] started to live [our] lives together, and see connections. Little things, like when [we] saw someone in a library whose grandfather’s death notice [my] brother had placed the day before, [I] treated them a bit more kindly and carefully than [I] normally would have.
[We] started to experiment with the connections that we had to the wider world. Spending an hour inside the shoes of a researcher looking at shelves of ice falling away in the Antarctic, feeling their anxiety directly for a short period of time, gave [us] more of a visceral sense of climate change than all the guardian articles [we] had ever read. Looking across a continent using the many eyes in the sky, seeing the broad view of the land but also being in the body of a kiwi scratching around on the forest floor gave [us] a different sense of the sky and the land. And [we] could feel and see other lands, feel their rhythms.
And as [we] found our feet, [we] felt the need to connect with others. [We’re] now in a pod of a few thousand, from most of the countries in the world. And there is another layer. [We] can create connections more easily now. [We] have so much knowledge, as our experiences stitch and blend together, and [we] reference it with other views. And the layer helps us make sense of it all. [We] are getting a better understanding of the systems of this planet. Joining all the dots in the big data. Seeing opportunities and accupressure points, to start relieving the huge amount of stress she’s been under.
But if [I] focus in on just this mind and this heart, [I] can still feel how there is some sense of [me]. the interesting thing is though, how [I] feel so whole, and present, in every moment. The gaps and the doubts, insecurities faded a little every day, as the different parts of my self wove together inside themselves, at the same time as they wove together with others. And the layer got inside of [me], started to weave. [I] learnt a lot by comparison, feeling how others feel and how [they] weight value, when [they] punish themselves and when [they] feel proud, the stories [I] was telling myself about what [I] could and couldn’t do, they gained a calmer colour as [I] got some more perspective.
Time feels a lot slower nowadays. The border guards and governments have gone on holiday. [We’ve] started to reflect a lot more, spend time looking into the essence of things, even as [we] work in and on the world outside. [We] have more of a sense of scale, the minutae, [we] can feel the bacteria digesting food in [our] guts, the synapses connecting in [our] brains, but also the sweeping scale of the Rocky Mountains, the Fjords, the depths of the ocean. And [we] can feel the hum in it all. The heart beat. The rhythm. The hum.
