I have a ton of notebooks which I’ve filled, or partially filled, over decades. I’ve also posted articles on this blog, www.heroesnotzombies.com since March 2007 (some 3600 posts altogether). I like to dip into both of these collections from time to time, and because I’ve been writing for so long I often come across something in there that I don’t remember writing, and I think…..”hey, that’s interesting” So, these are my inspiration banks. I must admit I do get inspiration all around the place….in nature, art, and daily life, as well as from newsletters I subscribe to, podcasts I listen to, magazines I buy, and so on….but my own notebooks, paper and digital, have become a rich source for me.
Recently, as I was preparing the next episode of the my podcast, (More Good Days) which will, at least in part, feature the importance of stories in our lives, I discovered notes I’d made about a book entitled “The World is made of Stories’, by David R Loy [ISBN 978-086171-615-9]
I read a lot about stories, as well as reading, and hearing, stories every day, but this book is a bit different because it’s written from a Buddhist perspective. I’m not a Buddhist, but it’s refreshing to read a different take on stories. Here are two passages which made a particular impression on me.
Like the proverbial fish that cannot see the water they swim in, we do not notice the medium we dwell within. Unaware that our stories are stories, we experience them as the world. But we can change the water. When our accounts of the world become different, the world becomes different.
and
The world is not composed of facts, because what counts as a fact is determined by the theory – the story – it is related to. Science is not primarily about discovering facts. It is about accounting for the relationships that make them meaningful.
What I like about both of these passages is that they highlight the foundational importance of stories in our lives, and explain how we can alter our world by altering our stories. Stories are how we come to understand the contexts for our experiences….both in our personal and collective lives. And stories are how we create the world we live in. Changing the stories is like “changing the water” we all swim in.
Some of the dominant narratives we all encounter have been particularly bothering me in recent weeks, and I guess it all came to ahead with the riots in Belfast and various cities in the UK the other day. Headline after headline in the papers, on the TV and on the radio, described the groups who attacked the police, singled out cerrtain houses and properties in their communities and burned families out of their homes, as “anti immigration” protestors.
These were not anti immigration protestors. They were attacking anyone who wasn’t white, targeting families who had lived in their communities for decades, but who weren’t white. These people were motivated by xenophobia and racism.
Yet telling these events as stories about immigration continues and inflames the anti-immigrant narrative which is, sadly, so prevalent these days. Singling people out for different treatment on the basis of their colour, race, country of birth or religion, is xenophobia and racism.
We need better stories.
We need the stories of integration, of adventure and travel, of diversity and sharing. Those stories exist, just waiting to be told and re-told. Whole sectors of the economy in countries like the UK would collapse without the contribution of workers who weren’t born in the UK….from health care, to hospitality, from agriculture to universities, from football to film-making.
Have you ever seen any of Stanley Tucci’s travel programmes? We recently watched one of his series from Italy. Everywhere he goes looks great, and all the food he gets to eat looks so tempting. He’s really good with people, very respectful and enthusiastic. Time and again he’ll highlight the diverse origins of a particular local cuisine, and make the point that the blending of cultures produces really great recipes and traditions.
I also remember a series the chef, Nigel Slater, made for TV where he visited different families from different ethnic origins, who lived in and around London. In each programme he visited them, told their stories, and learned one of their key dishes. Then at the end of the series he invited them all to his place to celebrate their cultures and foods together. The series made such a strong case for the benefits of multi-culturism, where people respect each other, and form good, enriching relationships.
I know my focus in these newsletters and podcast episodes is how we can, each of us, have more good days, but it’s important to remember that none of us live in isolation. We humans are deeply social creatures and even our very individual uniqueness arises, primarily, from our singular sets of relationships and connections.
Sadly, we have a concentration of power and wealth in the media, and, too often, the agenda is set by a small network of rich and powerful people telling the stories which suit their own perspective.
I’ve just started reading about something called “Market Humanism” which is a term coined by Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker. They convincingly demolish the dominant economic and social narrative, which is known as “neoliberalism”, a philosophy based on understanding individuals as unique, separate and selfish. They challenge the idea that the market is a way of achieving balance, growth and equitable reward distribution. They show that nothing has worked out the way the neoliberals claimed it would and we now have greater inequality (with no significant “trickle down” or “lifting all boats”), stagnant growth, growing division and disillusionment. On top of that, the idea that the Earth is a resource bank to be plundered for the greatest profit is driving both our climate and species diversity to collapse.
Their alternative story makes so much more sense to me….that we humans are actually social creatures, that we need each other, achieve our greatest achievements when we work together, and that the planet functions as a huge complex adaptive system of interconnected feedback loops. They propose we consider human flourishing as a better measure of economic health than the value-free “GDP”, and that governments and the private sector work together to create an economy focused on solving human problems, rather than one focused on maximising shareholder returns. I’ve a lot more to read in this work, but I think it’s another exciting, alternative narrative……stories which weave together to create a better paradigm.
We do need a new paradigm.
When we come to understand the world as precious, finite and delicately balanced, and our lives as unique, diverse and deeply embedded with the lives of others, then, as David R Loy, says “When our accounts of the world become different, the world becomes different.”
Another TV programme which I think brilliantly demonstrates our interconnectedness and our entangled origins, is “Who Do You Think You Are?” where a celebrity is helped by genealogists, social historians, and archivists, to discover the stories of their ancestors. If you were to tell your story in terms of your relationships and connections around the world, and, at the same time, trace some of the threads and flows from the past which have led you to where you are now, what will that story sound like, look like?
In “Saving Time”, Jenny Odell (who also wrote the excellent, “How to do Nothing”), writes –
“my definition of being alive is simply that: the embrace”
A long time ago I took this photo of a painted door of one of the craft shops on the Ile d’Oleron, which is only about an hour west of where I live. I loved it the moment I saw it. It’s pretty simple, really, but it captures several ideas in one little graphic. A human, in this case a young girl, encountering a sea creature, a “medusa”? They are almost kissing, looking directly into each others eyes. This is an encounter. A meeting. An interaction. The heart, the universal symbol of love, tells us that this a loving encounter. An embrace.
I think Jenny Odell is onto something….being alive is an embrace. Because everything which exists, exists in a vast web of connections and relationships, and if those relationships are loving, then they are nurtured, then they grow. The poet, Mary Oliver, says that we should pay a particular kind of attention to the world, a loving attention. She’s right.
Elsewhere in Jenny Odell’s book she quotes Harmut Rosa –
“Resonance is something that can only happen between us. Love as a resonant experience thus refers not to the fact of loving or being loved, but to the moment or moments of mutual, transformative, fluid affecting encounter” – Harmut Rosa.
I love this concept of resonance as an interaction. When we resonate with another, we create a harmony between us. We are on “the same wavelength”. And when we make that heart to heart, soul to soul, connection, then we experience moments which are both mutual, and transformative.
Resonance also occurs between us and other forms of life. That’s pretty easy to see when we consider animals. Our relationships with animals are a two way phenomenon. How we behave towards them, changes how they behave towards us, and vice versa. In fact, the resonance which can occur between humans and dogs, for example, results in the multiple ways in which a dog can become a “helper”, whether that’s to someone with partial vision, or someone who has epileptic seizures.
Doesn’t the same thing apply to plants, even? I know many people who talk to plants (though I’ve never met anyone who claims that the plants talk back to them!) but, I’m sure the benefits which accrue to plants from loving human attention, are clear to see. Any gardener will tell you so. It’s not just what The Little Prince had to say about “his rose”.
Plants, it appears, are able to respond to about fifteen different environmental factors all the time. They have elaborate, highly evolved systems of detection and response. Much more than we realised when we didn’t look close enough.
One of my favourite writers about physics, is the Italian physicist, Carlo Rovelli, (“Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” and “Reality is not What it Seems”) wrote this beautiful passage –
The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not stones.
“the world is made up a networks of kisses, not stones”……..isn’t that lovely? Of course, stones only appear as “things” because they change so slowly. Every one of them came about through a sequence of events too. The “limited duration” he refers to is the timescale of a human life, mostly. There was a time when every single “thing” we see didn’t exist, and there will come a time when it ceases to exist. But in the meantime, and here’s the even more important point, I think, every “thing” is constantly changing. Maybe kisses don’t last long, but their effects can ripple out through our lives for years…..generations even!
I read Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, “The Beginning comes After the End”, this week. I love her writing, and this collection which is focused on how everything is connected to everything else, is superb. In it she writes – “A new subfield called processual biology looks at the world as made up of processes rather than objects, as phenomena forever flowing and changing and thereby exchanging with each other and changing into each other. It proposes that it is more useful and accurate to think of ourselves and most of what we call things as events.”
This strikes me as another way of saying that reality is made up of embraces, of “kisses not stones”.
Actually, I think there’s an even more important point than the fact that everything is connected to everything else and that’s the fact that absolutely everything constantly changes. Reality is a network of relationships. Each of us is a mind-bogglingly complex network of cells and molecules, constantly interacting with each other. And each of us lives in a multitude of environments, physical, psychological, social, cultural, and so on….which means we are constantly exchanging molecules, energies and information with the rest of the universe.
There is nothing I can do, say or even think, which isn’t going to send out ripples through these networks and environments and there is nothing in those environments which can be walled off to prevent them from setting off actions and reactions too.
I think that’s why we should do our best to be loving, kind and understanding, rather than judgemental, angry and hating. The former creates, stimulates and grows, the latter poisons and destroys.
How about a Mary Oliver poem? I think this one is really pertinent to this idea of life full of embraces.
On the Beach
On the beach, at dawn:
four small stones clearly
hugging each other.
How many kinds of love
might there be in the world,
and how many formations might they make
and who am I ever
to imagine I could know
such a marvelous business?
When the sun broke
it poured willingly its light
over the stones
that did not move, not at all,
just as, to its always generous term,
it shed its light on me,
my own body that loves,
equally, to hug another body.
Finally, Do you know the Canadian singer songwriter, Tenille Townes? I love her melodies, but I most especially love her lyrics. This song, somehow, also seems appropriate to include in this post. I hope you enjoy it.
When I was in Clinical Practice and trying to help a patient who was overwhelmed with stress and distress, I’d often draw a simple straight, horizontal line.
I’d say the left hand end of the line represented the day they were born. We know that date. The right hand end of the line was the day they would die. None of us can know that date. And I’d put a cross in the line somewhere around the middle, and say, this cross represents today, this moment. Everything from the day you were born until the present moment, we call the past. Everything from this moment until the day you will die, we call the future. If you pay most of your attention to the past, ruminating, regretting, rehearsing the hurts and wounds of the past, and the rest of your time paying attention to the future, wondering and worrying about whether this or that might happen, filling your mind with “what ifs”, then the one place where you aren’t investing your attention, your energy and your time is here on this day, on this moment.
Imagine if you spent more time and energy focused on the present….this would inevitably be accompanied by less time and energy spent on the past and the future. Doing this bring a double bonus. It helps you become more aware of this moment, more able to savour it, enjoy it, fully live it. And it reduces the time and space in your mind occupied by hurts, wounds, worries and fears.
I still think this model is a bit simplistic. I mean, the past, present and future are not so linear as this little drawing implies. Life tends not to follow straight lines, but rather loops and cycles. However, there’s a value in simplicity, if we take it as a starting point.
I have a couple of large filing cabinet drawers filled with old notebooks which I’ve written and drawn in over several decades. From time to time I pick one out at random and browse it. The one I pulled out this week had a lot of notes about relationship between the past, the present and the future. I’ve always tended to use notebooks for thinking. They aren’t really diaries in the style of I did this, and then that, today. They are more phrases and sentences which have struck me in whatever I was reading at the time, and simple diagrams to help me think something through. They are full of ideas and thoughts and explanatory models.
Here’s what I was exploring about the past, present and future. It seems to me that we access the past through memory, the present through awareness, and the future through imagination. We need all three.
I turn to my memories when I want to reflect. Whether that be at the end of a day, the beginning of new month, or revisiting some shared memories with family or friends.
I turn to awareness to experience the here and now, to find beauty and wonder and joy in the everyday. To find peace and contentment through a savouring of what I see, what I hear, what I smell, touch and taste in this still moment.
I turn to imagination to solve problems, to innovate and create, and to plan.
But, of course, none of this fits well into three separate boxes, or along a single horizontal line. Memory involves imagination. We re-create our experiences and thoughts as we remember. They don’t lie dormant in some drawer, just waiting for us to pull them out and have another look. We know from neuroscience that it isn’t like that. The filing cabinet metaphor of memory is a very poor one. Remembering is a thoroughly active, creative process. We use our imaginations to make our memories.
Imagination draws on memory. If I want to solve a problem, I need to remember what I’ve done to tackle the issue on previous occasions. We don’t innovate and create out of a void. We do it by drawing on both memory and awareness.
And the present moment can only be experienced by a complex, active, ever changing interaction between memory, awareness and imagination. I can’t remember where I read it, but I read we can’t see what we’ve never seen. We need a starting point. We need some foundation ground to every new experience.
But the simple model still works I reckon, because, although all three “zones” are in a constant flux of interaction and change, whatever we focus on grows bigger in our minds. By deliberately paying attention to the present moment, we direct our attention and fill our minds with what we are experiencing right now. And if we really are stuck, devoting so much of our waking hours to memories of wounds and fears and anxiety about futures which might never come, then we denying ourselves the chance to be fully alive today.
One phrase I found in the notebook, was
“Let me understand what was, know what is and imagine what will be.”
I think I must have been reading some of John O’Donohue’s blessings at that point, because I don’t usually write in the form of a prayer or a blessing. But I rather like it….
We look back to understand, piecing together what might have led to what we are experiencing today.
We are aware and awake in this present moment in order to appreciate the world as it is, and,
We dream, daydream, imagine, to look ahead and envision where we want to be.
But there’s something else to add to all this. Nothing is fixed. I think we can accept that when we think of the future. The future isn’t a destination, waiting for us to arrive. It emerges, moment by moment, influenced by the events and experiences of the present. We make choices. Others make choices which affect us. And, we musn’t forget the power of chance. We can also accept that the present isn’t fixed. The present is influenced by past experiences, future possibilities, and the multiple contexts and environments within which we live our everyday. But the past? Isn’t it gone? Isn’t it behind us, written down in black and white? And therefore fixed? I don’t think that’s a helpful way to think about it. It’s said that history is written by those who win the battles, by the conquerors. But those stories are just the stories told from that perspective. Change the perspective, change the focus, and you find other stories. Pull together a diversity of those stories and you get a more holistic view. But, at the very least, even if we can’t change the past, we can change the effects the past is having on us now. That’s how we heal. That’s how we manage to break out of depression, move on from grief….not by changing our past experience, but by changing how we respond and react to it.
And, one more thing……as we try to understand our lives, we look back, we reflect and review. Our default is to see the chain of events as cause and effect. This happened, which led to that, and that led to where I am now.
There’s a danger in relying too heavily on the cause and effect analysis though. Sure, it’s how we learn, but cause and effect is often more a statistical probability than something we can prove. How many times have you read articles about, say a hundred year old man or woman, asked what’s their secret? How did they manage to live so long? Some will say by eating only vegetables, some will say by going to church every week, others will say because they have exercised regularly, but others will tell you it’s because they had a whisky every day and spent as much time as they could with their friends and family. There isn’t A secret. Not A secret which each of us can adopt, nor even a single secret which explains why someone has reached the grand old age of 100.
Thinking about that reminds me of an old joke about Jack Benny who on receiving an award, said “I really don’t deserve this, but, then I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either!”
Jung believed we didn’t pay enough attention to synchronicity, to the “coincidences” which were connected only through meaning, not through “cause and effect”, and he pointed out that by relying too much on “cause and effect” we tend to ignore the effects of chance. Often, we are just in the right place at the right time (or, conversely, at the wrong place at the wrong time!)
I think we don’t pay enough attention to factors and influences. We’ve learned from science and Public Health, that if we improve the quality of housing people live in, improve the quality of the water they drink and the food they eat, give them more opportunities to be creative and to make good social connections with each other, then many. many more people will experience better, healthier lives…even in the face of randomness, multi-factorial influences, and personal choices.
So, I reckon, as we attempt to have more good days, to lead a more meaningful life, and contribute to the creation of a better world, we need to have a bit of humility, accepting we can never know everything, and we need to accept the reality of change and chance.
Where does that leave me and you?
I think it leads right back to that point, or zone, on the straight line I mentioned at the beginning of this piece….the zone marked “the present”. The best we can do is to focus on this moment, this day, this period of our lives, and be aware, consciously choosing to be on the lookout for moments of wonder, beauty, and love. Maybe it’s not a point on a straight line, but an intersection of multiple memories, creative imaginings and awareness…..a bit like that image I put at the beginning.
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You’ll have noticed I’m pretty keen on stories. In issue 10, I wrote about the need to change the dominant stories about immigration. Racists and xenophobes, and those who crave dictatorships, flood our lives with their negative stories about immigration, yet human being have always moved around this planet. We need to counter this negativity and hatred with stories of diversity, of the richness of diversity, of the poverty of monocultures. We need to counter them with stories of compassion and love and the power of good, mutually beneficial relationships.
Then in issue 11 I shared with you the philosophy of stories, of what stories do for us, helping us to make sense of our lives, how they help us to create “concord” out of “discord”.
In the midst of writing those two issues I was reading Erin Morgenstern’s “The Starless Sea” which is one of those novels which puts stories front and centre. I’m not a big reader of fantasy novels, although I do have my all time favourites in that genre (Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin, Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast) but a novelist who can create a whole othewr world for you to get lost in for a bit, is a good novelist in my opinion. Anyway, “The Starless Sea” is simply bulging full of stories. She sprinkles tales and fairy stories throughout the narrative, and my favourite one is “The Inn at the Edge of the World”. In fact, for me, the book was worth reading just for that story alone. I decided to record myself reading that story, The Inn at the Edge of the World one, uploaded the mp3 to Dropbox, and shared it. If you’d like to hear it, send me an email, or message me, and I’ll send you the link.
However, I noted a couple of passages in The Starless Sea which really got me thinking. Here’s the first one – “Everyone is part of a story, what they want is to be part of something worth recording. It’s that fear of mortality, “I Was Here and I Mattered” mind-set.”
This set off a couple of trains of thought for me. The “everyone is part of a story” made me think of how everyone changes the world just by living. There really is no such thing as a disconnected, entirely separate individual. The way we live our lives changes the world around us. We might not intend that. We might not even be aware of it. But we change the air by breathing it. We change the planet by what we eat and drink. We change the planet by what we choose to do every single day. That’s why I’m so keen on “awareness”, because instead of making unconscious changes, driven by habit and algorithms, when we become aware, we become the heroes of our own stories, making conscious choices about how we might affect the world we live in.
“….what they want is to be part of something worth recording” – the “I was here and I mattered” mindset really stopped me in my tracks.
When someone close dies, we have an immediate sense of loss. Their physical presence disappears so quickly and feels so complete. But the person who they were was more than their body, and, even at the funeral, we celebrate that, by telling the stories of their life. We share memories, events and experiences. We share the phrases they used, perhaps the jokes they told. We share the feelings they evoked when we were with them. And we share the marks they made, the works they created. In some ways, I think, a person is never quite gone as long as we still tell the stories about them, and as long as we still enjoy their creations.
It’s easier to be aware of that in people who made a big impact on the world and became famous…Shakespeare, the great poets, writers and artists….the great composers and musicians, each with their utterly unique, distinct, and instantly recognisable styles.
But I also see that from the stone circles, the cairns, the ring and cup markings left by the first settlers in Scotland. Two of my most favourite place are Orkney with its stone circles and remains of ancient villages, and Kilmartin Glen with its standing stones, circles, cairns, and, especially the spirals, circles and cup markings engraved on the rocks so many thousand years ago. Nobody knows why our ancestors made these marks. One theory is it was to say “I was here”. Maybe that’s as good a theory as any, but I can’t help thinking these marks meant more than that.
Everyone leaves some marks, leaves some stories, some memories and creations. We keep others in our lives that way.
The second passage which struck me was “Stories – something was, then something changed. Change is what a story is, after all.” which comes after she reminds us that change happens all the time. This is maybe another aspect of story I didn’t touch on in my last two newsletters…change.
Change, transience, and flow, are all important to me. They seem so fundamental to our existence. Nothing is fixed. We are, all of us, in a continuous process of becoming. In fact, that’s the sub line on my blog, Heroes not Zombies, “becoming not being”. It’s a phrase I picked up from reading two French philosophers, Bergson and Deleuze. In many ways I think it captures the essence of being alive. The importance and the beauty of transience really came home to me when I visited Japan and encountered how fundamental that was in their aesthetic, demonstrated not least, in the annual festivals of the cherry blossom. Do you know that, during the season of the cherry blossom, TV news programmes, and national newspapers show maps of Japan, just like the weather maps, but instead of showing the weather, they show the progression of the appearance of the cherry blossom, from the South East up to the North West of Japan. And once the blossom appears, people come out in the thousands, to wander below the trees, taking photos of each other, taking selfies, settling down under a pink cloud with a blanket and a picnic. It’s really something.
“Stories – something was, then something changed” OK, you can capture everything about what a story is in one phrase, but, that’s a really thought provoking sentence. Many of the patients who came to see me had been suffering for a long time. One of my favourite questions to ask them was “when did you last feel completely well?” Pretty much everyone can answer that question, even if it takes a little time and patience. But getting someone to think back to when they last felt completely well often opened up not only the details of what changed in their life, but, the circumstances, the time and place, the events, which occurred and, maybe influenced those changes. It was a way of understanding this present illness in the context of a whole life.
Another of my favourite questions was “What has changed?” A question I would always ask during follow up visits. How else could I make any sense of what my treatments were doing without asking what changes the patient had noticed since I saw them last? How else could I follow the progression of the disease, or, hopefully, the expansion of healing?
So, yes, the idea that “change is what a story is, after all” is a good one, a useful one.
I started my podcast, More Good Days, as a way of drawing together and sharing some of what I’ve learned about what goes to making not just good days, but a meaningful life, because I think that’s our path, individually and collectively, towards making this world a better place.
But I said right at the start that life is nuanced, that there aren’t simply two kinds of days, good ones and bad ones. Pretty much every day will be filled with experiences which we will rate all the way along the spectrum from good to bad, and back again. There are delights, wonders, joys, moments of peace, of calm and of loving and being loved. And there are challenges, difficulties, sadnesses, moments of anxiety, anger and disconnection. It’s never all the one and none of the other. My focus has been on the former….what brings all those positives, and how our quality of life can be increased by paying attention to them. But, I want to keep this real, and June turned out to have many challenges and difficulties for me.
The whole of France experienced a “canicule”, a heat wave, like never before, with temperatures rising into the forties for several days in a row. The thermometer out in our garden reached 44 in the shade. It was exhausting. It was hard work to keep the plants alive in the “potager”, rising early before the Sun rose above the trees, to do some watering, and returning again late in the evening to give the plants some more. We live in a traditional, old, stone house with thick walls and wooden shutters, so were able to keep the place pretty comfortable by having all the shutters closed all day, but it was strange to spend day after day in semi-darkness. If you stepped outside, you felt like you were stepping into an oven. Millions of French people would have found it tougher than me. It was a huge challenge for those who lived in apartment blocks with no air conditioning, and buildings that got hotter and hotter every day.
At the beginning of the month I was hit by some weird but potent virus which floored me like I’ve never been floored before. As the fever raged (reaching 41 before the rest of France would reach 41 a few days later!) the symptoms progressed and followed a path which baffled me. I’m still not sure I understand it, but, thankfully, I’d say, I’ve recovered.
Then an old school friend of mine passed away the other day. We’d lost touch decades ago, but it still came as a shock, still made me sad. It also precipitated a flurry of communication between old friends, each of us sharing our memories of Ian, sharing old photos, and stories, some personal to each of us, and others we heard from the first time in the script prepared by the Humanist Celebrant for the funeral. Stories help us to remember, help us to know another, and helps us to connect.
But we did something else, too, my little group of friends who share a life long love of music. Ian was part of the original Stirling Record Club, and so each of the four of us in the current version which emerged during the pandemic, shared the music we most associated with our old friend.
Music helps us to remember, helps us to know another, and helps us to connect.
So, maybe take a moment, to reflect about a loved one…..either someone still in your life, or someone who has passed…..and think of the stories you associate with them, then think of the music you shared. Those connections, those stories and that music, together make something quite unique, something that connects you, something that will always connect you. Because just as every one of us is unique, so is every relationship. There are no two the same.
“How terribly strange to be 70. Memory brushes the same years….”
Yet, throughout this challenging month, I’ve continued to find flowers and plants in the garden which have amazed me, bird song which has delighted me, and moments of joy and beauty sprinkled through the days. More than that, however, has been the experience of the relationships in my life, the reality of being cared for and looked after by my wife, and supported and encouraged by family and friends around the world with messages, emails and video calls.
Not every day will feel like a good day, but even in the more difficult days, we can experience love and wonder and beauty. We can be aware of, and strengthen, our connections with others, and share with them, this one precious life.
And if you want to catch up with the newsletters as well (there are twelve of them so far including this one) then come and find me on Substack – https://bobleckridge.substack.com/ – and if you sign up, for free, you’ll get access to all the past newsletters and podcast episodes, and get all future ones delivered direct to your inbox.
I recently read an article by Richard Collett, author of “Along the Borders”. Here’s what struck me.
“Four millennia ago, a Sumerian king, his frontier beset by nomadic tribes fleeing prolonged drought in their own lands, ordered the construction of the world’s first border wall: a 177km-long boundary laid in stone between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Since humanity’s earliest city-states and kingdoms arose in ancient Mesopotamia, walls, ditches and fences have defended territory, marked the edges of empires and projected political power across the void. But the world’s first border wall failed. It now lies buried beneath Iraq’s desert sands. Rome’s legions abandoned Hadrian’s Wall long ago, and the iron curtain’s razor-wire fences fell with the eastern bloc’s collapse in the late 1980s.”
I was born in Central Scotland and lived my whole life there until I retired to France. From childhood I was aware of the remains of two walls – Hadrian’s and the Antonine Wall. Both had been built by the Romans at the edge of their empire to try and keep we Scots out. Both were little more than piles of stones and mounds of earth centuries before I was born. I could visualise those remains came as I read Richard’s opening paragraph.
When someone takes a historical perspective it can help us to see the present day in a different, often clearer, light. Thousands of years on from the Sumerians, we humans are still building walls, still calling for “taking back control of our borders”, still trying to prevent our fellow human beings from escaping the suffering and hardship of drought, famine, and war.
The answer has never been walls.
Wouldn’t it be better to build connections? To create bridges between ourselves and “the other”? To create, in particular, those fundamental, life enhancing, health giving, connections we call “integrative” – and, just to remind you, integrative bonds are the ones which promote integration – they are the ones where highly differentiated parts relate to each other in mutually beneficial ways.
Those are the kind of connections we see in every human being. Every single one of our organs, tissues and cells, exists within a vast web of mutually beneficial relationships with all the others. That’s what enables us to survive. That’s what enables us to grow and to thrive.
There’s an old saying “As above, so below”, but I’ve often thought we also need to remember “As within, as without” – what we learn about our healthy insides is applicable outside of us…..in other words, for each of us to be healthy, we need to form “mutually beneficial relationships” with each other, with other forms of Life, with the rest of this small, beautiful, planet, where we all share the same air, the same water, the same earth.
Richard Collett concludes his piece with –
“….if the aim of hard borders is to halt the flow of refugees, curb illegal economic migration or counter terrorism or instability, then surely a better solution is to tackle the conditions driving people from their homes, or towards extremism, in the first place.”
Interestingly, Pope Leo XIV, recently made a very similar point, when he asked what the rich nations were doing to improve the lives of those who live in poorer countries. The wall builders didn’t like it.
I mentioned recently that I’d just read Daisy Fancourt’s “Art Cure”, about the impact of the arts on health, and how she wrote about the “five pillars of health”….diet, exercise, sleep, nature and art.
I write a lot about nature, I take lots of nature photographs, and I am blessed to be living in rural France where I feel closer to nature than at any previous time in my life. I love to be amongst the trees, to be able to hear a chorus of bird song every day. I love to breathe the fresh air, to see the flowers and fruits appearing on the plants around me. All of that is about me being more connected with nature, more “engaged” with nature. I remember how important that was in my work as a doctor….to enable people to re-engage with the world, with the natural world, and with each other. Illness and suffering can be so terribly isolating, cutting us off from the world around us. It’s both a therapy and a sign of progress, when someone is, or becomes, engaged again….when someone makes better connections with both the natural world and with others.
But Daisy Fancourt’s thesis is about art and how engagement with the arts has a positive impact on our health. I had a very special and powerful experience of that last week.
Georgie Brown is a local, 23 year old, musician, who was born in England but brought up here in SW France. She gave a concert in Saint Jean d’Angely, in the beautiful, Art Deco, Eden Theatre, just over ten minutes from my house. The concert was billed as “Symphonic Jazz”. I confess I didn’t know what that might mean, but we’d seen Georgie perform a short set, in the middle of Saint Jean in the summer during the annual French festival of music, and really enjoyed her performance.
Symphonic jazz turned out to be Georgie Brown singing her own compositions, with her “jazz men” band of a pianist, double bassist, drummer and small brass section of trombone, trumpet, and two sax players. But, for this concert, she’d composed orchestral arrangements of her songs, and performed them with her band and a thirty piece local orchestra…..the “Orchestre Symphonique des Vals de Saintonge”.
From the first notes of the string section I felt moved to tears. You could see that every single musician on that stage was loving what they were doing. The joy, passion, and delight in music was infectious. The clearly evident mutual respect between them all was moving. Look, I know we all like different kinds of music. Some people love opera, others country music, yet others the Blues, but whatever their tastes, the audience at this concert were treated to something unique, and very special. It was heart warming, life enhancing and a great example of why Daisy Fancourt describes live music in particular, as something which can have positive and profound effects on health. For that concert to be so successful, it required the creation of multiple “mutually beneficial bonds” between all the musicians. When human beings get together to make music, they aren’t only capable of producing beautiful harmonies, but they build better connections between themselves and others…..between other musicians on stage, and between themselves and the audience.
I’m not saying we should go to concerts for the good of our health. We should go because we love music. But what I am saying is that when we choose to participate in activities which build and strengthen connections, our lives can feel better……that building connections is the way to building a better world.
One very obvious type of human construction is the bridge. I’m pretty sure we’ve built a heck of a lot more bridges than walls over the centuries. I pretty partial to bridges. They appeal to me. Part of the reason I love them so much is that they are a physical manifestation of our need to make connections. They also facilitate our basic desire to travel and explore the world we live in. My photos this week are some of my favourite bridges. I think they make it clear why I prefer bridges to walls.
Here’s a video of one of Georgie Brown’s songs where she sings about being partly English and partly French – just to give you a flavour of her style –
And I’m sure you’d like a song about bridges…..what songs do you know about bridges? For me, first up is surely Simon and Garfunkel…..Bridge Over Troubled Water. I think my friends all had their own copies of that album, and I still have mine, and it’s still a classic!
I recently read Daisy Fancourt’s Art Cure, and I highly recommend it. Daisy Fancourt is Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London, and in this book she tells us about the huge evidence base for the impact on health which can be made by participating in art.
What do we mean by art? Well, someone was bound to ask that question. Daisy tackles it by defining it broadly, not by trying to give characteristics of features to qualify for art, but, by giving examples, from a wide range of creative disciplines. I think that’s the essence of it, actually….creativity. Engaging with creativity, your own, and that of others.
For example her definition of art encompasses singing, listening to music, dance, drawing, reading, crafting, visiting museums, galleries and going to the theatre (not a definitive list) And she shows how many studies have found astonishingly high levels of benefits of arts engagement on everything from depression, anxiety and pain, to blood pressure, mobility and cognitive function. There is even good evidence that it can produce useful changes in dementia, (both at the level of the pathological lesions in the brain, and, at the level of cognitive function) and that it increases longevity.
I’m finding all this very exciting. I hope it convinces those who think the arts are a luxury. Some of the comments I’ve read from reviewers and other scientists are particularly encouraging, including those who admit they started the book as sceptics, and ended up convinced.
Mind you, I don’t listen to music, visit galleries, read, or write creatively for the good of my health. I do these things because I enjoy them and they give me more good days. I don’t think what Daisy is trying to do, though, is reduce art to a tool, or a new treatment modality to be applied to patients. She’s helping us to understand that engagement with the arts has very profound effects on everything from mental health, to reductions on the need for drugs and surgery in those with chronic conditions. This might seem a small point, but, I think it’s an important one.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to live a longer, better life quality life? No matter your current state of health. Not by applying a “treatment” but by making changes in everyday life which lead, naturally, to more good days….
Two chapters of the book especially struck me. In one she describes the impact of “Magic Camp” on children with cerebral palsy, where children were given the opportunities to learn how to do magic tricks, by professional magicians, working with a team of therapists. Learning these tricks enabled them to improve their motor skills, boost their confidence, and find access to whole new worlds of possibility. I love the holistic range of “outcomes” these camps achieved. What teaching these children how to do magic tricks can result in enormous breakthroughs which regular physio and psychology couldn’t achieve. She focuses on one particular case, and it’s a remarkable story in its own right, but goes on to describe how that one boy’s experience was not a one off.
In another she describes a music therapy where patients with fibromyalgia and other chronic painful conditions listened to music with their eyes closed for twenty minutes twice a day for two months. Their pain levels were halved. As was their level of depression and anxiety. The music was “U sequence”, using genres the patients preferred, starting with stimulating 90-120 beats per minutes, moving to slow 30-40 beats per minute pieces, and ending with moderate 60-80 beats per minute. I don’t know how to find music I like by beats per minute. Maybe you know ways to do that. Actually, for me, this particular intervention seemed over-focused on the measurables – the numbers of beats per minute and the numbers of minutes spent, but I am seriously impressed with the outcomes. Imagine if your doctor would recommend two twenty minute music listening sessions a day which could halve your pain levels? What impact might that have on your need for pain-relieving medication, for mood elevating medication? What impact might that have on your everyday experience of life?
Early in her book she mentions the “five pillars of health” – diet, exercise, sleep, nature and art – and, for me, this very simple point, turns out to be a crucial one. Most of us only hear about the first three, diet, exercise and sleep, so it’s incredibly refreshing and exciting to explore the fourth and fifth ones – nature and art, both of which are dear to my heart.
I’ve often written about the health benefits of nature, and you can find several such posts here on heroes not zombies, if you search in the search bar for words like “nature”, “NDD”, “forest bathing” and so on. Forest bathing is one of my favourites. Many studies have shown the positive effects on the immune and inflammatory systems of spending time amongst trees. But in fact engagement with the natural environment is available to all of us every day. There’s a wild area of my big, French, rural garden, which really has the feel of a mini-forest. Just stepping into that pattern is enough to feel different. The temperature is different in there, the light and smells are different. I love to slowly wander along the little winding paths I built, and just see, hear, smell, what I can notice.
I recently paid a visit with some of my family to Jupiter Artland which is just outside Edinburgh. It’s truly one of the world’s special places created around a forest walk sprinkled with sculptures and art installations. Do you know it? Here’s a link to their website – https://www.jupiterartland.org/ I highly recommend visiting, although it is just outside of the city, and it’s not that easy to get there by public transport. Still, it’s really worth it. I have a particular liking for art installations in natural environments, and the diversity and range of works in the forest there are really something special. In fact the visit inspired us to create our own installation. My wife, Hilary, is a very talented and prolific knitter. So she created a kind of giant web, or dream catcher and we attached it across a gap between a couple of the trees. Here are a couple of photos.
I’m SO delighted with it. Yesterday, in the afternoon, on a breezy day, as clouds flew across the face of the Sun, I watched how patches of light shone bright red on the dark red background, constantly changing shape and position. It was almost like watching a 3D kaleidoscope. Mesmerising!
Anyway, the opportunity to experience two of the five pillars of health at the same time – nature and art. I love that combination.
OK, so maybe you’re wondering, why haven’t I said anything about the first three pillars – diet, exercise and sleep. Well, mainly because we are flooded with information about all three of these. There are so many variations, and, the truth is, no one size fits all, so you have to find the diet, the exercise regime and the sleep routine that works best for you, but essentially, it seems to me that a healthy diet includes diversity of foods, and is mainly, if not exclusively, one of non-ultrahigh processed foods. On top of that, most healthy diets recommend eating more plants than meat, and, if possible, eating food which hasn’t travelled all that far. I guess I’m lucky, living here in rural South West France, because there is an abundance of weekly markets within an hour from where I live. At any of these markets you can easily find seasonal foods, and locally grown ones.
As far as exercise goes, the main rule isn’t about a certain number of steps every day, it’s about not spending too much time just sitting. Many of us have pretty sedentary jobs, or lifestyles, and there’s no doubt that the less we move each day, the more likely it is that we will develop severely limited mobility. Again, it’s a matter of finding what works best for you, but most specialists advice both strength training exercises, and some exercise which puts your heart rate up.
Sleep? It comes down to finding the routine that works best for you, and sticking with it. That includes both determining when you want to go to sleep, and when you want to wake up ( 6 – 8 hours sleep is usually recommended ) and developing a wind down routine pre-bed time. It’s pretty much common sense, but, the underlying principle is to gradually reduce your exposure to stimulants, whether they be food and drink, or activities.
Anyway, you really won’t find it difficult to find advice about those first three pillars of diet, exercise and sleep. What I will keep coming back to in my newsletters, posts and podcast episodes, is the value which nature and the arts can bring to our lives, to our health, and, to making more of our days, good days.
So, here’s my quick summary advice for this week –
listen to music,
treat yourself to some art experiences and, if possible,
allow yourself some time in nature.
Oh, and one more piece of advice, or, rather, an invitation. Come to bobleckridge.substack.com and sign up to follow me. 100% free. If you do that, you’ll get an email every time I publish a newsletter (I’m writing one every week just now) and every time I publish an episode of my new podcast, More Good Days.
By signing up, you’ll make sure you never miss an issue or an episode, and you’ll be able to catch up with any of the ones I’ve published so far.
I’ve visited Copenhagen a number of times. In the winter months there are no direct flights from my part of France to Scotland so when visiting family before Christmas, a few times we’ve taken the train up to Paris, flown from there to Copenhagen, then from there to Edinburgh, returning by the same route. We stop over for a couple of nights in Copenhagen and in Paris as part of the trip which makes the journey into a bit more of an adventure and takes away time pressures related to train and flight connections.
One of my most favourite places to go in Copenhagen is the Glyptotek. It’s a beautiful museum in the heart of the city. It has a lovely internal garden courtyard with a cafe restaurant which serves delicious Danish food. But the main reason to go there is to see the exhibits of sculpture. Their permanent displays include a vast number of marble sculptures and, honestly, they are magnificent.
I took this photo during my first visit there. It is the “Young Mozart” by Louis Ernst Barrias. I couldn’t quite believe this was carved out of a block of marble. Look at the detail! Here’s a section of his coat…..
….it looks like real cloth. This is the kind of art which stops me in my tracks and takes my breath away. The skill involved in carving this is astonishing. The whole piece is a real beauty, and, beauty, I contend is one of the most life enhancing phenomena we can encounter. I’d have been happy to have seen just this single work that day, but, in fact, there are many, many more just as impressive.
The subject matter here interests me too. I’m not a classical music buff, but I know enough about Mozart to be astonished at his youthful creativity. There is a whole catalogue of his works written between the ages of eight and twelve years old.
What can we make of such extraordinary talent? Where does it come from? I have no idea, but surely one of the most significant characteristics of our species, is our creativity, and how, we express it through the Arts, Sciences, Philosophy, and even in everyday problem solving.
But there are always those whose talent, whose genius, appears first at a very young age, and develops throughout their adult lives. It’s a gift. It’s a gift they have received, and it’s a gift they give to us every time we encounter their works.
I wrote about Saint-Exupery in the last newsletter, but I didn’t tell you about one of his inspirations for The Little Prince, which occurred during a train journey through Poland. Here’s what he wrote
“I sat down [facing a sleeping] couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants….. This is a musician’s face, I told myself. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become? When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine…. This little Mozart is condemned.”
This was written in 1935 as dark clouds were gathering over Europe, so, maybe his rather gloomy conclusion should be read in that context. Isn’t it interesting that he thinks of the “child Mozart” when he sees this little boy? And, he was so right to point out that “a life full of beautiful promise” could either be nurtured to fruition, or crushed by the machine-like forces of industrial society.
Just before Christmas last year I went to a concert in the Art Deco, “Eden Theatre”, in Saint Jean d’Angely, my local town. The concert was a performance by a young French violinist, Esther Abrami, who I’d read about in the French press. She is one of the most talented violinists I’ve ever heard. One of her albums is called “Women” and features compositions by female musicians. Esther told a little story about each composer before she played one of their works. I’d never heard any of these stories before. The concert was a real eye opener, and ear opener too? So, I was delighted to learn that she had written a book about women in music. It was published just last week and I got my pre-ordered copy delivered on Friday. I’ve been delighting in it every day since.
Esther’s own story is fascinating. She is from Aix en Provence, and as a little girl, was gifted a violin from her grandmother, a particular instrument her grandmother had, herself, played as a girl. But her first lessons didn’t go well which she puts down to the fact that she found her teacher unkind and difficult. However, only a few years later, she was inspired by another violinist and persuaded her parents to let her try again. This time, things clicked, and she’s turned out to be the excellent professional musician she had dreamed of becoming. That story reminded me of how important it is to nurture and nourish little children. Not that they will all grow into musical prodigies but surely at least one purpose for us all is to become the fullest expression of our uniqueness, and we can’t do that alone.
One of the female composers she described in her concert, and writes about in her book (“La Musique est (aussi) une affaire de femmes”) is Chiquinha Gonzaga, Brazil’s first female conductor, who was born in 1847. She was a remarkable woman who led a quite astonishing life, divorcing her husband to whom she had been forced into an arranged marriage, after he asked her to choose between him and her music. She chose her music, which meant she had to give up a life of riches and servants, to become a poor, single mum making her living teaching piano and selling music sheets of her own compositions.
She eventually found success, love and happiness, and composed over 2000 works, living to the ripe old age of 87.
One of the most astounding parts of her story is that she composed her first musical work, the song “Canção dos Pastores”, at the age of 11.
Go and have a listen. If you don’t use Spotify, search for it online. I’m sure you’ll find it elsewhere. But, seriously, she composed this at 11 years old?
Esther Abrami’s book is just out in French, but I think she plans an English language translation. I’ll tell you about it when it gets published. Meanwhile, if you can read French, do get yourself a copy. It’s a real treat.
Back to Esther and her own skills…..if you’d like to explore her work, I suggest you start with one of her own compositions, “Transmission” which she wrote for the grandmother who gifted her her first violin. It’s on her album, “Women”, and here’s the link to it on Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/track/0w8AtUiGnz0Khf5AZOPLu4?si=3cc4b13d9c714fff
At her concert, as well as featuring music from her album, “Women”, she played a number of pieces from another of her albums, “Cinema”, and my favourite from that album is probably “Yumeji’s Theme” from the movie, “In the Mood for Love”.
Have you ever seen that movie? Oh, it’s on my list of all time favourites. One of the most beautifully filmed movies I’ve ever seen, and “Yumeji’s Theme” fills my mind with gorgeous scenes from it which I’ll never forget.
I’ll leave you to go exploring Esther’s work wherever you listen to music. I know we all have different musical tastes, but I think you’ll be delighted by both the beauty of the music and the skill of this young violinist.
Can I leave you with a question?
Who are some of your own favourite sculptors and who are some of your own favourite composers/musicians?
I’d really like to know.
And if you’d like to receive my weekly newsletters and fortnightly podcast episodes please come and sign up here – https://bobleckridge.substack.com/
I’ll publish an episode of the podcast every Full Moon and every New Moon, and I’ll publish a newsletter every week, keeping in sync with the phases of the Moon. Why have I chosen to link my publishing schedule to the phases of the Moon? Maybe the recent Artemis II adventure was one of my inspirations, but my main one was Peter Gabriel, who published his i/o album, releasing one track every Full Moon over the course of a year, and is now doing the same with his latest o/i album.
Why publish a weekly newsletter in addition to the fortnightly podcast?
Well two of my most favourite activities are taking photos, and writing, so I decided I could combine them to make a weekly newsletter to share with you. Each issue will have one of my own photographs attached, which you are free to download, print out, make into a screensaver, or just collect in your own photo album. There will also be a short piece of reflective writing inspired by whatever I see in the photo, and I hope, together, the photo and the text will inspire you with your own creativity, and contribute to making more good days. In addition, in each issue I’ll share with you some of what has brought me joy, some of what has stopped me and made me wonder, some of what I’ve found inspiring or moving this week, and I hope those joys, wonders and inspirations will also contribute to making more good days for you.
You can expect to find my encounters with music, art, sculpture, and nature, and with stories, poems and articles I’ve read, because those are the places I find my greatest joys and inspirations. I look forward to sharing both of these with you – the fortnightly podcast episodes and the weekly newsletter.
The photo I’m sharing with you today is of a front door. Many modern doors are glass and it’s easy to see who is outside, but, in the past most doors were solid and the only way to see who was calling was to use a hole cut into the door, and, often covered with a flap which could be raised. This was eventually superseded by the insertion of a small lens in the door, through which the home owner could look to get an often fisheye view of the street, the corridor or hallway.
I hadn’t really stopped to think about this until I saw this particular door, but what does the world look like to whoever is looking out from within?
In the traditional square hole covered by a flap, it would be like looking through a picture frame. The closer you put your face to the door, the more you would see of the outside world, but, usually, your view would still be restricted, limited by the four sides of the hole. The little lenses gave a more wide angle view, but, pretty much everything appeared distorted as a result.
I wonder what the world looked like to whoever looked through this heart shaped hole? I like to think it enabled a more loving gaze, a kinder, more positive view of the world.
Then I got to thinking, maybe a hole like this isn’t for peeking through, but for letting light in. And with that thought I had an image in my head of a heart shaped stream of light illuminating the whole house. Now, wouldn’t that be delightful?
But, whether this heart shape, cut into this wooden door, enabled a view of the outside, or allowed light to stream into the interior, I couldn’t help but wonder if it inspired the owner to “see with the heart”, as the fox revealed to the Little Prince.
Maybe seeing the heart every time they approached their doorway, inspired them to pay loving attention to whatever they were about to encounter.
I don’t know, but I’ve returned to this photo many times because it does exactly that for me. It reminds me to pay loving attention to the world.
Antoine de Saint Exupery, born in 1900, was a French writer and one of the first commercial airline pilots, flying routes between France, Africa and South America, for the postal service. He was shot down in 1944 somewhere over the Med while flying a reconnaissance flight over Corsica for the Free French Air Force.
He wrote and illustrated “The Little Prince” in 1942, and it has since been translated into over 600 languages and sold over 140 million copies worldwide making it the best selling work of fiction in the world.
The Little Prince is the story of an aviator whose plane crashes in the desert and who encounters a young boy, who he calls, The Little Prince. Whilst he is trying to repair his plane, the boy tells the narrator various stories.
The book can be seen as a children’s book, but it is also a philosophical work which has inspired countless adults. Not least of the lessons in the book is that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It’s a phrase I have returned to again and again, throughout my life, and I became a firm believer in the fact that “what is essential is invisible to the eye”, something which inspired me to stay focused on each patient’s story of their unique experience. In other words, to keep their invisible experience of their illness to the fore, rather than only the physical measurements of their disease.
This is the eightieth anniversary of the publication of The Little Prince, and I discovered, in my local newsagent, in Saint Jean d’Angely, a special issue of the rather unique “1” newspaper dedicated to Saint Expupery and his Little Prince. The “1” newspaper is like nothing else I’ve ever encountered. It is a single sheet of A1 sized paper, which is folded, first in half, to make an A2 size, then once more to create an A3 size, and finally again to make an A4 size publication which sits on the shelf with the other newspapers. Each issue takes a focus on a single issue, and it is richly illustrated with graphic art. One of the articles in this special edition, is by Riad Sattouf, whose illustrated edition of another Saint Exupery book, “Terre des Hommes“, coincidentally (if there is such a thing as coincidence) I stumbled across and bought in a “librairie” (in France, a “librairie” is a book shop, and a library is a “bibliotheque”) in Orleans, where my wife and I recently spent a few days to celebrate her birthday.
In Riad Sattouf’s article he considers the fact that the Little Prince is a sort of Peter Pan character, a little boy who never ages, and reveals that he discovered that Saint Exupery had a younger brother who died at about the same age as his Little Prince appears to be. Saint Exupery never wrote or talked about that death, but it does seem highly likely that that experience of a brother who never aged (because he died) inspired him to imagine the Little Prince.
I’m currently about half way through Riad Sattouf’s Terre des Hommes, or should I say Saint Exupery’s Terre des Hommes, in this special edition illustrated by Riad Sattouf and I’m savouring it.
I can read French pretty well now, but I definitely read it more slowly than I read English, however I don’t find that is a handicap. I love to take my time with a French text, enjoying each phrase and image, one after the other.
Riad Sattouf says he discovered Terre des Hommes in a bibliotheque in Rennes when he was an adolescent and has read it every year since. He’s 47 this year. His illustrations are a true work of art. I am so enjoying his book.
When I read, in his introduction, that he had read this book every year since he was an adolescent, I thought again about a conversation I had at the beginning of the year, with the teenage grand-daughter of a friend, who told me Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” was her all time favourite book which she, at just 15, had read eight times. I’ve never read any book eight times. Have you? From time to time I come across an article where someone says they read the same book every single year. “Don Quixote” was one example. I’ve never read the same book every single year. Have you?
It made me wonder if there are two different approaches to reading….those who always want to read something different (I’m in that camp), and those who find a work so special that they want to re-read it time and time again. I honestly don’t think one strategy is better than the other and I can see pros and cons of each. I’m not saying I never re-read a book. In fact, I have a shelf of “special books” on one of my bookshelves where I keep certain books which I turn to again and again….it’s just rare for me to actually read any of them all the way through more than a couple of times, and all of them are works of non-fiction.
Are there any fiction books you have enjoyed so much that you’ve read them more than once? Do let me know.
The Moon
Neil Armstrong said the famous words, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” as he walked on the surface of the Moon on 20th July 1969 when I was 15 years old. I remember watching him on TV, mesmerised by the whole adventure, as were millions of others.
Three years later, Harrison Schmitt, aboard Apollo 17, took the now famous “blue marble” photo of the Earth.
It’s an image whose power has never diminished. You only have to look at it for a second to recognise the beauty, and the fragility of our little planet.
I don’t know if it inspired Nanci Griffith’s “From a Distance”, but I always hear her song in my head when I look at this. I only saw Nanci perform live once, in Edinburgh, at the Usher Hall, but I still have six of her albums in my vinyl collection. And, although the “blue marble” is a picture of Earth, when I look at it, I also hear Nanci Griffith sing in my head, “Just once in a very blue moon”.
Well, all this came back to me again this week as I looked at a couple of the astonishing photographs taken by the astronauts on Artemis II. Did you see them? This one, is very like the blue marble, but, in addition you can see the glow of the aurorae top right, and bottom left, which highlight just how thin a layer of life giving atmosphere we have.
and this one, where a crescent of Earth can be seen just over the lunar horizon, a complete reversal of the image we are more used to, of a crescent moon appearing over a horizon after sunset.
These are awesome images.
Awesome in the most significant way. They make me feel tiny, and they make me feel infinite. All at the same time. But more than anything they imprint on me the finite nature of our planet, and how we should all be working together to care for it, to nurture it and look after it for all of Life which exists here.
Surely, an image like this can help us to reject the imaginary borders which artificially divide up the planet, and to see our inter-dependence on, not just others, but on all the elements of the biosphere, all the animals, like the fox, all the plants, like the rose, and all the other creatures which are, like us, way too small to see from this far out.
Is it foolish to hope for a world which turns away from selfishness, greed, violence and destruction, towards selflessness, sustainability, peace and creativity? I hope not. I think we can make it happen by turning a loving attention to the world in which we live, and by creating true bonds of care with the plants, creatures and people with whom we share this planet, this life.
I read a Mary Oliver poem this week which seems extraordinarily relevant. It’s called “I Worried”
I Worried
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not, how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
That line about worrying about getting rheumatism reminds me of a story about Jack Benny, who, on receiving an award, said “I really don’t deserve this, but I have arthritis, and I don’t deserve that either”
Finally, a song which really touched me this week….well, it has to be Nanci Griffith, from her “Lone Star State of Mind” album…. “From a Distance”.
I have a long, long love for the French language and culture. I’ve found books, articles, magazines over the years which do a couple of things which I didn’t come across in Scotland, reading English. It’s not just the way these texts are written, nor the way they use beautiful graphic art and images, it’s the subject matter they consider worth while spending time on.
One particular book from 2009 opened up a whole way of seeing for me. The book is called “La Maladie cherche à me guérir”, and it’s by a doctor called Philippe Dransart. The book has never been translated into English as far as I’m aware, but the title in English would be something like “The Illness is searching for a way to heal me”. Dr Dransart starts from the idea of the embodied metaphor. Now, I have read about this idea elsewhere, not least in the books like “Metaphors we Live By”, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. But Dr Dransart draws from his own clinical experience to show us how often the actual words patients use, especially the body-focused metaphors they use, can be the key to understanding their suffering. Understanding not only their diseases, and why those diseases might have appeared in specific organs or tissues, but also understanding their psyche and life story, and how that connects so deeply to their unique patterns of illness. Put simply, he discovered, time and again, that when someone presented with a problem in a particular part of the body, then they’d often use metaphors about that very part when talking about themselves.
In his book, he systematically considers metaphors and figures of speech used by patients presenting with problems in pretty much every system and organ of the body, but for my purposes here, I want to focus on only one – the heart. And, as an English speaker, I’m going to focus on the heart metaphor phrases which we use in the English language.
I’ve already mentioned one at the very beginning….having a heart to heart. When we say that we imply that our conversation will be true, important, and intimate. You don’t have heart to heart conversations with just any stranger you might encounter in a coffee shop, do you? We have heart to hearts with loved ones, with family and friends, and with trusted professionals. In a heart to heart conversation we will talk about what’s important to us, and also, to what is shared between us. A heart to heart, does, after all, involve two people. It’s not something you do yourself, and it’s not something you’d normally try to do in a group. It’s personal. It’s specific. It’s an opening up to another.
Let’s look at some other heart metaphors. Do you know someone who is “big hearted”? It means they are generous doesn’t it? Not at all the same as someone who is “big headed”! And notice we don’t say people are “big kidneyed” or “big livered” by the way. On the other hand, do you know anyone you think of as “heartless”? We might even apply temperature differences to these opposites. So maybe someone is “warm hearted” and another is “cold hearted”. A warm hearted person will often do, or say, something we’d describe as “heart warming” when we feel that comfortable, cosy feeling inside.
What would you say if I were to ask you what was “dear to your heart”? You might say, not what, who, and tell me of loved ones. Or you might tell me about whatever it is that is most important to you, whatever you feel most passionate about. In fact, we tend to think of the heart when we think of passion, don’t we? Maybe we associate “will” with the head, but we associate “passion” with the heart. On the other hand, when we are de-motivated, we might say our “heart isn’t in it”. We are not really committed. It doesn’t move us, inspire us.
We apply a weight to the heart too, don’t we? When did you last feel “light hearted”? Can you think of a time when you felt free of anxieties, content, even happy, where “light hearted” would be a good description? When I think of someone “light hearted” I think of them smiling, moving easily, maybe even skipping (if they are still young and fit enough to skip!) It’s a joyful image. But what gives you a “heavy heart”? When do you get sense of dread, a sinking feeling? We often move our metaphors down into our abdomens when we have these heavy feelings, don’t we, describing a “gut feeling” of something not quite right. Isn’t it interesting that we “feel” intuition in our hearts and in our guts? As if our bodies are telling us something, our brains haven’t quite figured out yet.
The heart, of course, is the seat of love, isn’t it? We use a stylised image of a heart, usually a red one, as an emoji to say we love someone or something. We put red hearts on the Valentine cards. We make a heart symbol with our two hands when we want to communicate love at a distance. How often do you see athletes or performers do that when their fans are loudly applauding an achievement?
When we fall in love, the very sight of our loved one can make our hearts “skip a beat”, and if they abandon us, we feel “heart broken”. In unresolved grief, we might even say someone died of a broken heart.
The heart is also the seat of excitement. There’s a Dutch knitting podcaster who my wife listens to, who often talks about something being “heart jumping” – which, although not an expression I’ve heard much in English speakers, is a great one for conveying what is exciting, what stirs her or inspires her.
Can you think of any others?
There are two more I’d like to consider. The first is how we oppose the head and the heart, saying someone lets their heart rule their head, or vice versa. Usually there, we are talking about the balance between rational thought, cognition, and feelings and emotions.
And here’s my most favourite one, which comes from “The Little Prince” by Saint-Exupery. The fox asks the Prince if he want to know his secret.
“It is very simple. The important things in life you cannot see with your eyes, only with your heart”
Isn’t that wonderful?
But how do we do that? How do we find the important things in life by seeing with our heart?
When I was at university I was taught about the heart, its structure of four chambers, with valves between the atria and the ventricles, its muscle cells with their astonishing ability to beat out a rhythm, its incredible system of production and distribution of electrical currents to co-ordinate the beating of those muscle cells, its blood supply and its nerve supply, and a lot about the diseases of the heart, how to diagnose and treat them.
But it was only years after graduation, when I was working as a young doctor, that I came across the discovery that the system of nerves around the heart was much more complex and powerful than had previously been thought.
There’s a special kind of nerve in the human body called the neurone. We have somewhere between 80 and 100 billion of these cells in our brains, and another billion spread throughout the body. These neurones either transmit information up to the brain from our sensory organs and from specialised sensors which are spread through the other tissues of the body. Or they are responsible for sending electro-chemical signals from the brain to all our muscles, co-ordinating which contract, and which relax.
The 100 billion neurones in the body are each directly attached to as many as 5,000 other neurones forming an astonishingly complex web known as a neural network. I mean, these numbers are beyond our comprehension, aren’t they? They are just mind boggling!
For a long time we’ve paid a lot more attention to the neural networks in the brain than we have to the ones in other parts of the body. But we now know that there are in fact important neural networks which surround especially the heart and the gut. That discovery is fascinating enough, but, what I find even more fascinating is that the nerves connecting the network around the heart to the one in the brain are mainly carrying information from the heart to the brain. Only a minority of them are carrying instructions from the brain to the heart.
So, it turns out, the heart is more than a complex muscular pump responsible for distributing blood around our arteries and veins. It’s actually doing some of the processing we used to think was exclusive to the brain.
What’s it doing? Well it’s now known as heart intelligence. It’s gathering information and processing it before passing it on to the brain.
I mean, that’s fascinating enough, isn’t it? But there’s more. We’ve discovered something else. Everything in the world which beats a rhythm sends out electromagnetic waves. As the rhythm of the heart changes so does the pattern of these waves.
You know how in medical dramas on tv there is often a heart monitor attached to some sick person lying in a bed? The monitor shows the beating rhythm of the heart, with a little line running across the screen. A flat line means the heart has stopped beating. A healthy pattern is of little spikes appearing in that line at regular intervals.
Well, it turns out, those intervals shouldn’t be too regular. The actual gap between each beat of the heart should be varying, ever so slightly. We can measure that variation and we call it “heart rate variability”.
Different degrees of variability send out different patterns and strengths of electromagnetic waves. We’ve discovered a particularly important pattern, which we call “coherence”. When the rhythm of the heart achieves coherence a number of powerful, important healthy changes occur throughout the body. This rhythm affects the release of certain hormones and other chemicals, it affects the tone of the other muscles, and it affects the activity of the brain. Not only that, but heart rate coherence is associated with very distinct emotional states. It’s a two way process if you like. We can focus on the heart and induce both coherence and particular emotions, and we can relive certain emotional experiences and induce heart rate coherence.
I first learned about all this when I came across the publications of a group of researchers in America who described this phenomenon, and were teaching people how to achieve it. They called it “Heartmath”. I took the training programme and taught the techniques to many of my patients over the years.
I’d like to teach one of these techniques right now. It’s called “Quick Coherence”.
There are three steps to achieve “Quick Coherence” – a basic Heartmath technique, and by the way, you can find out a lot more about these techniques at the website of the Hearthmath Institute.
Step 1. Heart focus. Bring your attention or your focus to the heart area of your body. Remember how important attention is? It activates and it magnifies. So we want to bring our attention now to the heart area of the body.
Step 2. Heart breathing. Take three, slow, deep, even breaths, filling the heart area of your body with oxygen, then emptying your lungs of all the carbon dioxide. Slowly in, slowly out, for three breaths. Just these three deep, diaphragmatic breaths resets a part of the nervous system we call the “autonomic nervous system”, calming us down, settling us.
Step 3. Heart feeling. Now recall an event where you experienced one of the positive, heart felt emotions. Here’s a couple of ones I use to give you an idea of the kind of event I mean. One is one of my grandchildren running up to me, shouting “grandpa!” and jumping up into my arms. That’s a great one! Another is looking out over Ben Ledi from my living room window when we have one of those gorgeous deep red sunsets – just amazing! Pick one of your own, and recollect it. Stay with that memory until you become aware that you are feeling that feeling again. This is about recreating a feeling. Once you have it, that’s it. You’re there.
Congratulations, you just managed “Quick coherence”.
Many of my patients would use that technique to escape from a panic attack, or to settle a state of agitated anxiety. It’s quick. It’s effective. And it gets more effective the more you practice it.
But we can do something else with this state of “coherence”. We can use it to access our heart intelligence. Let me just suggest one way to do that. Start by following the steps to achieve coherence, then ask your heart what it wants you to know. Just sit quietly for a few minutes, maintaining this coherent state with slow, deep breaths, and notice what comes up for you. Alternatively, ask a specific question. Is there something you are trying to decide? Is there a problem you are trying to solve? In the state of coherence, ask your heart for its suggestions. Ask it to help you decide.
All this is a very deliberate, very conscious way of accessing our heart intelligence. But, in reality, this is just the way we are. We are using heart intelligence all the time. It never goes away. It’s just that it is occurring in the background, below the level of consciousness.
But heart coherence isn’t just an exercise. As the research has shown it is associated with certain emotional states, namely, love, awe, joy, excitement, and contentment, ease, calm and peace. So when we experience an everyday event which generates one of those emotions in us, it sets up the heart to enter into coherence. The same thing happens if we re-create in our minds a particularly vivid memory of an event where we experienced one of those emotions. That’s the step 2 in the quick coherence exercise.
There’s a way to make all this happen more often. Practice. Both the practice of an exercise like the one I’ve just described, or setting an intention at the start of the day. When we set an intention, it doesn’t mean that the universe magically aligns itself to that intention, but it can feel like that. It means we heighten our ability to notice whatever might align with that intention.
You can prove this for yourself with a simple exercise. Pick a colour. Any colour. Now during the course of the day take a photo of whatever you see that is that colour. It’s likely you’ll pretty quickly start to see that colour everywhere.
Well you can do the same with the heart. How about you set an intention to notice the moments in the day when you feel warm hearted, or light hearted? Or how about moments when you experience what the Dutch vlogger calls “heart jumping”?
It’s that old thing of attention magnifying whatever it is focused on. An intention like this is a kind of focus, and it increases the chances of you experiencing what aligns with it.
You can also increase your experience of heart centred living and seeing by reflecting at the end of the day – what did I experience today that was “dear to my heart”? What did I do which made me feel “my heart is in this”? Did I have any “heart to heart” conversations?
Because there is another aspect to this heart coherence thing that I haven’t talked about yet. Remember how I said anything which beats with a rhythm sends out waves into the world? Well, anything which CAN beat with a rhythm can pick up those waves, and align itself.
You know there is a story about the clockmaker who had several old clocks in his workshop. The kinds of clocks which work with a pendulum. At the end of the day, he would set each clock pendulum swinging. Before he left the room he could see that each pendulum was swinging its own rhythm, left to right and back again. When he came back to the workshop the following day he noticed that every single pendulum was swinging in synchrony. They had aligned themselves. That’s a physical phenomenon called “entrainment”…..the rhythms coming into alignment with each other. Well, the Heartmath researchers discovered they could measure the electromagnetic waves coming from the human heart. In fact they could measure them outside of the body as they spread into the environment. And you know what? They found that if someone achieved heart coherence, then the person standing next to them was more likely to develop it too. The wave pattern travelled from one person to the next….entrainment. Or, maybe you could say, “attunement”. Now this happens, not only with coherence, but with other patterns too. Maybe that at least partly explains why we feel uncomfortable around certain people, or why we can “pick up an atmosphere” in a room.
But here’s the exciting part. If we deliberately practice coherence, both through exercises and emotional experiences, the we can spread those healing waves to others.
Do you find that surprising? Well, let me tell you one other finding….that the power of the transmission increases when two people touch. So, one person whose heart is in coherence, holding hands with another is likely to induce coherence in their heart too.
Now, you’re probably thinking…isn’t this a two way process? Isn’t the disturbed or anxious pattern likely to be transferred too? Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s true. But signals have a power, and the more we practice coherence, the more powerfully we will transmit that to others.
Intentions and reflections. They can both train our attention. So let’s put our heart into both of them.
How about a Mary Oliver poem?
An Old Story
Sleep comes its little while. then I wake
in the valley of midnight or three a.m.
to the first fragrances of spring.
which is coming, all by itself, no matter what.
My heart says, what you thought you have you do not have.
My body says, will this pounding ever stop?
My heart says: there, there, be a good student.
My body says: let me up and out, I want to fondle
those soft white flowers, open in the night.
Her heart says, “there, there, be a good student”. Why not take that advice? Give it a go. Sit yourself down somewhere, take the three, deep breaths slowly, and ask “what does my heart have to say?” Maybe nothing will come to mind. Maybe something clear will appear. Maybe something will suddenly pop into your consciousness later, even at night, asleep, in a dream.
In episode two of my podcast, “More Good Days”, I shared some music with you which I collected together into a “More Good Days” playlist. So, I thought, today, I’ll make a playlist for this episode, “Heart to heart”, gathering songs which mention the heart.
I’m going to start with Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”. This goes all the way back to my first year at university, 1972, and even though, now, I’m really “growing old”, I think the “heart of gold” is still worth seeking out in life. I feel so blessed to have discovered so many of them!
I am a life long Genesis fan, not just the Peter Gabriel years, and I’ve got many, many favourite Genesis tracks in my favourites list. “Hold on My Heart” still moves me every time I hear it.
“Heartbeats” by Jose Gonzales, is a beautiful song, with the memorable line – “sharing different heartbeats in one night”. We are all different, but is there anything more beautiful than sharing our different heartbeats?
“Heart” by Sleeping at Last, only mentions the heart in the title, not in the lyrics, yet it is a gorgeous, heart felt song.
“My Heart Will Go On”, Celine Dion. Oh my, this ballad has been played a bit too much at times, but, returning to it today, flipping heck, it still reduces me to tears!
“Heart and Soul”, by Roseaux and Olle Nyman, might be completely new to me, but the line “You’ll remain like a song in my heart and soul” reeled me in. Isn’t that what Celine Dion sings about in “My Heart Will Go On”? And isn’t that a beautiful metaphor that illuminates the deepest truth – that we keep each other “like a song” in our “heart and soul”?
“The Shape of My Heart”, by Sting. Sting is another of my favourite singers who has written so many beautiful songs. This song asks me, and asks you, what is the shape of your heart?
Finally, I’m suggesting an instrumental track, Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” which holds my heart and makes it soar.
Until next time, bonne journée. Have a good day.
Here’s a link to a Spotify playlist of these songs –
When NASA shared this photo taken from Artemis II I was entranced. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent looking at this. This is a view of planet Earth which few of us will see with our own eyes, but thanks to the astronauts, all of us can see it. Look how much water there is! I know, 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, but it still takes me aback to see these great expanses of oceans. And guess what? There are no divisions between one area of water on the planet and another. The great water cycle, from the oceans and seas, to the swirls of rain-soaked clouds which constantly change shape and size, to the streams, rivers and lakes….what goes into the water, flows from one part of the world to all the others.
The second thing I notice are the auroras, one top right of the image, and the other bottom left. In both cases a thin green glow, illuminating just how short is the distance from the surface of the Earth to the airless atmosphere above. There is this incredibly thin layer around our planet, which makes life possible. Compared to the planet herself, this life sustaining layer is astoundingly thin. It looks so delicate. So fragile. Staring at this slip of atmosphere I’m impressed by how, like the water cycle, all of the air we breathe is undivided. What goes into the air at one point on the Earth, quickly spreads around the entire globe.
Nanci Griffiths sings, in “From a Distance” –
From a distance there is harmony And it echoes through the land It’s the voice of hope It’s the voice of peace It’s the voice of every man
From a distance we all have enough And no one is in need There are no guns, no bombs, no diseases No hungry mouths to feed
and, later, in the same song……
From a distance you look like my friend Even though we are at war From a distance I can’t comprehend What all this war is for
“From a Distance” was written in 1985 by Julie Gold, and recorded by Nanci Griffith for her album, “Lone Star State of Mind”. I heard Nanci perform it in Edinburgh in the early 1990s, and it delights me still. Yet, there is, of course, a sadness there, because all these years on and there are still pathological narcissists flinging bombs, missiles and bullets at people, killing, destroying, and sowing fear and chaos.
It doesn’t need to be this way.
Human history tells us that we humans excel at killing each other, destroying habitats, and wiping out whole species. But we are also capable of great art, from the cave drawings of Lascaux, to Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Picasso, Van Gogh, and so on. We are capable of creating the most exquisite music, of writing the most astonishing poems and stories. We are able to invent mind boggling technologies. And, most of all, we are one of the most social animals on the planet, deeply desirous of love, affection and caring relationships.
I look at this photo and I think of all of that. I think, with sadness, of the hate, the selfishness, greed and destruction. I think, with hope, of the kindness of strangers, of the infinite creativity of humans. And, most of all, I think, what a tiny, finite world we all share, spinning on this little planet as it flies, soundlessly, across the universe.
We are well capable of creating a better world, recognising what we share, caring for this planet, and all the marvelous diversity of life living here.
Maybe the view from on high will remind us of that, and inspire us to work to achieve it.
I welcome constructive criticism and suggestions. I will not, however, tolerate abuse, rudeness or negativity, whether it is directed at me or other people. It has no place here. ANYONE making nasty comments will be banned.
