Inside/outside

I went to Evolver, another event in the Adventures in Consciousness Season, this one a virtual reality journey through the breathing human body.

It started with a ten-minute so-called 'meditation' - actually listening to a exposition about human connectedness to all living things. Trees breathe out into the air in which we are immersed and we breathe in. We breathe out and trees breathe in. I've thought about this before only inasmuch as I know I have no choice but to breathe in traffic fumes, cooking smells, other people's cigarette smoke and hence, obviously, Covid germs. This made air feel more tangible, like water.

Therefore, it was suggested, since breath travels inside our bodies, into our lungs, our bloodstream and to every one of our cells which themselves take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide, are we, as individuals, not then the cells of the world? I was intrigued to picture myself as a tiny particle doing my cellular bit in the whole of breathing life.

Then the virtual reality bit: 24 minutes of air molecules and blood swirling around me. Some of the time I recognised parts of the body I was inside - the ribcage, the trachea and the bronchial tubes but a lot of the time it felt like spectacle - it was pretty but I wasn't convinced I was seeing 'air travelling from the mouth into the lungs, whirling like a tornado, before circulating the complex rivers and tributaries of our cardiovascular system and back into the natural world'.

The very small exhibition afterwards showed how the images had indeed been created from the medical reality of CT scans but honestly, I don't think I know any more this evening about the human body than I did this morning.

But I'm glad I went, and am amused to consider myself a gradually decaying and replaceable tiny cell in the organism that is (or might be) life on earth.