She turned it over in the palm of her hand.  It was smooth, cold, and oval shaped with a crack in the middle where time had yet to wear away its surface.  She closed her eyes.  She could hear the sea singing and feel the breeze caressing her.  The beach was before her with its purple, yellow and pink pebbles reaching from the cliffs to the water.

Yet when she opened her eyes there were four walls surrounding her like a box, and a computer on a melamine desk.  The pebble was her only contact with the Earth at that point.  When she held the pebble firmly, clasping with fingers that pressed it into her palm, she could breathe more easily.  The Earth coursed through her veins.  The box-like surrounds melted away, and the constructs of human endeavour were defeated by the constructs of a human mind.  A mind that was longing, reaching, feeling for a place in nature.  The spirit was awakened.  The spirit tried to defeat the walls of reason.

She placed the pebble down.  Reason bade that she must complete the day’s tasks before the working day ended.  The mind readjusted to the position it had been trained to fill for the twenty-five years since its creation.  The mind must apply itself to filling the screen with letters and numerical figures.  The screen was connected to the computer.  The demands of the computer were now master of the mind.  The sea and beach had to relinquish control.  Fingers that were no longer connected to the pebble instead now connected to a keyboard.

Spirit watched on helpless.  The mind was temporarily blinded to spirit.  Spirit was again shut away from the Earth, and trapped in darkness away from the sun.

Tip.  Tap.  Tip.  Tap.  Her fingers reflected off the keys and the sound she generated echoed back into the mind.  The flat hard plastic pushed against her fingertips, which no longer caressed the curves of the pebble.  The tendons snapped up and down with short, sharp, linear movements.  The pupils enlarged to let the light of the screen form its likeness at the back of the eye.  The image on her retina was the entire visual world open to the mind.  Monochrome black and white with straight lines and curved lines forming letters that grew from left to right, filling up, row by row, the empty space.  The quickly multiplying words on the screen updated the image on the retina at a furious pace and yet still in monochrome, never changing.

A movement at the right edge of her visual field disturbed her.  For a moment she looked away.  There was a bird on the windowsill of the office.  It looked in at her, cocking its head to one side as if to say why are you in there?  The sun shone outside reflecting off the golden bark and emerald leaves of the tree on the other side of the window.  This image replaced the monochrome on the retina and travelled to the mind.  The spirit sensed a change again.  It tried to reach the mind.  It could feel the warmth of the Earth stirring in the brain, and the sounds and colours stimulating the mind.  The bird was where spirit longed to be.  The two creatures looked at each other for a moment in polite recognition of presence.  The bird turned its back on the box with the human inside and flew away to where spirit could not go.  

She put her hands on her lap.  The mind was distracted and no longer locked into the monochrome.  The eyes flicked to the window.  The spirit was crying.  She felt a longing, a longing to feel the sun, to hear the birds chatter, to breathe the air, and to feel the Earth under her feet.  She could almost feel the soft moist grass as her mind began to walk over the oval.  The small of her back ached.  She rolled her shoulders and her eyes dropped to her hands.  The air was stale and suffocating, recycled and old.  The same air she had breathed in a moment before, an hour before, the day before.  She reached for the drawer.  Inside was the chocolate.  Beautiful, smooth and sweet.  It added texture to the moment.  It gave the mind another dimension, another sense, it could engage with.  The toes wiggled; the legs were almost forgotten.  While the mind wandered, the feet were still.  Spirit stretched.  She stretched.  She stretched out inside the box with arms, legs, and neck each straining for the mind’s attention.  The mind remembered that the day would end and it would not have to sit there forever.  Spirit sighed.  Its time would come, brief and intense when it did.  Reason was at odds with spirit, but spirit was strong.  It could wait.

She felt torn.  She looked at the computer, then to her hands in her lap, and then around the room.  The material of her skirt was soft.  There were folds without order.  The skirt was pliable under her fingertips, not cold, hard and impenetrable like the keys of the keyboard.  She sighed.  Spirit sighed.  She looked at the computer screen.  The monochrome injected itself into the eye and onto the retina.  The mind locked onto the image it was presented with.  Once again the mind submitted to the mastery of the computer.

The straight lines and curved lines of the letters running left to right talked of a corporate organism, some creature that the mind was bound to.  The mind must give the corporate organism direction, provide it with knowledge, answer its questions, and obey its will.  The mind created the will of the corporate organism as it filled the white screen with black words.  The corporate organism demanded that its newly created will would direct the mind.  The corporate organism had no form of its own to act as shelter for a spirit.  There could be no exchange of sentiment or feeling with the organism.  There would be no mutual recognition of presence.  

There was chatter in the corridor beyond the box.  Other people were discussing the will of the corporate organism.  The voices raised and lowered as each ego vied to stake a bigger claim in the organism’s creation.  Each person acted as part of a neural circuit in an entity that they themselves created.  Yet that entity had become self-fulfilling and began to create them, to shape their identity.  For some of these creatures the mind never unlocked from the machine.  The corporate organism lived inside their form and their spirit was lost, harvested at the end of youth.  From further along the corridor came the echo of other fingers snapping against plastic keyboards as they filled computer screens with symbols of belief.  Her mind recognised the sounds of newly birthed sentences and facts.  The mind was compelled to follow and not to fall behind.  The world outside the window had faded from the mind.

Her fingers rose to the keyboard. Tip. Tap.  The mind fed the corporate organism with more words, more direction, and more will.  Its will would sleep at five o’clock.  Not long now.  The mind set its targets for the day.  A certain level of achievement would allow the mind to rest that night.  The mind was driven to not fall behind, not to fail the task, and perhaps even to be rewarded.  Tip.  Tap.  The task was nearly done now, nearly complete, for today.

The spirit grew restless.  The mind wandered from the monochrome to the clock in the bottom right-hand corner of the computer screen.  With every passing minute the spirit grew in anticipation.  She wriggled in her seat.  Tip.  Tap.  Tip.  Tap.  The mind was not locked in.  The monochrome image on the retina was replaced intermittently with images of trees.  Blue sky switched places with the computer screen, and then gave up its spot once more.  She flicked from the world in the box this second to the world outside the window the next second.  Tip.  Tap.  Then silence.  Then the senses became aware of the sound of the breeze rustling in the leaves outside.  Multi-toned, multi-hued, multifarious sensory inputs began to give the spirit hope.  Then she turned back to monochrome.  Tip.  Tap.  The space between the sounds of fingers hitting plastic keys increased as the mind drove the fingers down more slowly and with less determination.  Tip.  Time passed. Tap.

Her concentration was broken.  The spirit was beginning to win.  Spirit was beginning to drive the mind.  Spirit must be recognised.  The computer mouse moved on the smooth grey surface of the desk.  Driven by one hand, it moved with long rehearsed precision like an extension of the arm.  Click.  Click.  The computer began to act under the will of the mind.  The computer was now subject to the spirit.  The fingers no longer made tapping sounds as they obeyed the computer.  It was the computer that began to play sounds in obedience to the mind.  They were the sounds of strings and keys being struck, but each with their own note to play, and not the monotonous tip, then tap, of the computer keys.  Sounds of voices releasing passion, releasing laments, or releasing hopes came from the computer to the mind.  Music.  The spirit absorbed the music and waited.  The mind no longer heard the sound of tipping and tapping as it pulled the tendons up and let them fall down on the keyboard.  The will of the corporate organism was still addressed, but the mind now felt the music and the spirit was awake.  The sensory environment rivalled the screen for the mind’s attention.  The words of the corporate will were lost inside the mind which wandered toward a tangible world of sound, colour and texture.

She stopped.  It was five minutes before five o’clock.  The corporate organism was at last forgotten.  She placed one hand on her lap.  The other hand reached out and picked up the pebble from the top of the computer where it had waited.  She clasped the pebble tightly, pressing it back into her palm.  Its shape fitted the hand like a key in a lock.  The eyes looked out the window and through the glass.  Beyond the horizon the sea still bellowed somewhere, washing up on the pebbly shore.  With each wave the pebbles were left a little smoother and a little rounder.  They waited.  They waited for a hand to fit.  She held hers tightly and felt spirit rising, longing, looking to the horizon.  Mind, body and spirit felt the Earth.  Spirit soared.

Copyright © Louise Osborne 2016.  All rights reserved.  No part of this document may be reproduced without written consent from the author.