Dear Ghin, it's been real

Yesterday, as I basked in the afterglow of Easter and everything it had brought - lots of activity and Forest School, not enough cleaning and writing or running - , I was just so grateful I had such a good relationship with da Baby. Despite everything we have been through, or perhaps because of it, we were able to have the relationship which we had. Lots of laughing and honesty, lots of making fun of each other - good naturedly - and lots of being real. Lots of it. Sometimes I don't know how Ghin takes to the being real bits of who the two of us are, but I do think he understands and knows that I mean the best for him. That I love him completely and would never do anything which would harm him. Never. That those two are placed in the middle and I would do everything to make it so that they are cared for until they are able to care for themselves.

16 is a strange age. The autonomy and the independence, that first brace of autonomy, but also the naivety. The strange weirdness of having the past but also racing into a new world of your own creation.

I look back and try and remember what I was doing at 16? I was studying for my GCSEs. I was working the hardest I had ever worked. I remember that. I was laser focused on my studies. I didn't understand what the future was. Just like reading my dairies in 2013, ten years ago, I cannot imagine that person. Maybe it hurts too much, or maybe I am just too far away from it all.

I think having crossed some kind of a mid-point at 50, there is a new future. The way my brain works, a sort of perpetual forgetting, I feel like I have left the past and am now in a sort of new - not quite childhood - but a new phase where much of the literal memory of what  I had to learn to get here has been discarded. but the lesson has been retained. I see this most clearly when I work with children, or younger people. I remember the deft actions my mother had which made her an expert, and me trying to copy her fluid, non-thinking, muscle memory work. Her actions, which flowed like the round, smooth, sinuous body of a pebble, like the pebble, moulded by time. 

There are also things which I have lost. The immediacy, the urgency. I wonder how much I relied on the hormonal breach of the month - and not just the cresting of that terrible wave just before the period, but the after as well, when the tsunami left the beach cleared and cleaned. The amount of work my body did to produce the spongy bloody nest is now retired and with it, perhaps the calories which I was used to eating. Do women put on weight in menopause because their body is no longer bleeding? 

I remember being disgusted by how fat I would be before the period and then always, always shocked at how I would drop almost two dress sizes after it. Now there is no swell and no shrink. There is only the gathering - and I know I must be careful.

There are now two camps about AI. Previously, the tech bros were united about universal progress. Now they are not so sure. There are those who say, there is no need to worry, and then there are those which say there needs to be a moratorium. The thing is that, despite what people may think, human beings are a uniquely intransigent species. Not so with AI. AI is the perfect soldier. Unlike us, AI does not have a past. It has had no learning curve, not really. Unlike me or my mother, it has not had the chance to perfect its thinking, its movements. It is born from the head, like Athena, coming out of the brain of the creator, fully clad in armour and screaming. It really astonishes me how the Ancients had these wonderful myths which even till today so perfectly describe the qualities of love, intelligence, courage, cruelty. In this age of the computer it is even more important that stories and myths are told because these weave the human soul and give it warmth and depth. 

No matter much it can try, AI will only ever be able to do. To simulate. It will never have the wondrous undulating factorising scintillating terrior of the soul, and its lofty companion, the spirit. Ahriman can try and try, but he will always be beating with great futility against the thing he most craves. And if we do not nurture this in our children, then we too will be lost. They will think they ARE less than machine learning. They will not see how they are perfect and treasured. And how much the cosmos loves them.

And AI will never have the soft, salty, blood-fueled beauty of this body. It seems that as the demons try to make a place for themselves in this world, they will always be defeated, stand in awe of, be mowed down by nature and everything this planet is capable of. I feel sorry for these tech bros, I really do. Imagine having thought you were top of the world in the last 20 years, believed that you were the pinnacle of success, to suddenly discover you are now manufacturing your own noose and the thing which made you most precious, you have neglected.

In a way, meditation and mindfulness was the worst thing for them. These people who barely lived in their bodies and spent all their time either online or working with their thinking. The last thing they needed really was meditation. What they really needed to do was to do a craft, work with their hands in a real way. Meditation was just a convenient get out clause. In a time when the body was all there was in Ancient India, working with the mind was revolutionary. Now when we barely have the body, and all you have is mind, meditating is adding fuel to the fire.

It has been a long time since I have written an entry like this. What else can I say? 

Yes my Ghin darling, it has been real and I have strived to keep it real for you. Now it is up to you. I feel like I have returned to something here... I cannot tell what yet. I must start running in the mornings again. Right. Time to head to the classroom to sort it out. I don't think I have ever NOT been back to the class before the start of term but I do know that I left it in a good state. So I am not too worried. 

The class is making excellent progress - most of them have managed to arrive at a Class 2 level of reading - and those which are still doing this - I know they will be able to do it soon. I have every faith. Machines cannot have faith. They only have logic. And sometimes I do wonder if these tech people are capable of knowing the full scope of what it means to be a human. I really don't think so. And therefore miss the most important point OF being a human. Which is not to be productive, or clever, or produce things, but to stand in the glory of our humanity and all it entails. Who knows, perhaps the development of AGI will demonstrate the gulf between us and them. And Ahriman can do his best - all he will succeed in doing is destroying humanity. And despite himself, he really does NOT want to do that. Because then where is the power? It is endgame now for this demon. It seems to have checkmated itself.