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Archive for May, 2017

Catching the geo-bug? Or an insect with OCD?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on May 31, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I come across something new every day.

You do too.

Some of those new things are so startling they make us stop and look more carefully.

Often when I stop and look more carefully I’m filled with wonder, awe and amazement……and loads of questions!

I mean, look at this photo here! What, oh, what, is that??!!

It’s a small collection of eggs on a leaf. But look at the arrangement. Have you ever seen anything like this before? What kind of creature laid its eggs in this tightly fitting symmetrical pattern? A geometry bug? An insect with OCD?

And look again, a little more closely time, because on of the eggs is out of place. It’s either failed, or it’s hatched already leaving just the casing to become a bit unstuck. So the pattern doesn’t look as “perfect” as we might like. There are quite different cultural responses to something like that. Some people find complete symmetry the most pleasing. Others would look at something like this and see the one egg which has “broken” the pattern and see that as “natural”, as “alive”, even as a symbol of transience, of change, and of “becoming not being”. And it will look all the more beautiful for that.

How do you feel when you look at this?

What thoughts, memories, emotions or imaginings does it spark?

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What is it about a new life that stirs our hearts?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on May 30, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I’ve been watching a pair of blackbirds dash in and out of the ivy for some time now and this morning I thought I heard that tiny squeak of new life so had a peek (from a distance). There they are! Two little blackbird chicks!

This wasn’t an easy photo to take. I used full zoom so I could remain as far away from them as possible and the bright sun behind my back was making the LCD viewfinder pretty hard to see. Also, have you ever tried finding something using the zoom function on a camera? You’d be surprised how hard it can be to train the lens exactly on what you can see with your naked eye. Once I uploaded the images to my Mac I saw this. Wow!

Look at the one on the right, eyes closed, mouth wide open, tuft of little white feathers on its head. And how green this little BLACKbird is!

How do you feel when you look at this image?

There’s something here delights us, thrills us, makes us feel good, isn’t there?

Can we carry that feeling forward as a core value?

To delight in, and to welcome, LIFE, here on this little planet Earth.

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Don’t just stand there!

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on May 28, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Whether you use your phone or a camera to take photos, standing straight holding your device at face level and pressing the capture button isn’t the best way to get great shots.

We have a mulberry tree in the garden and this year, our third year here, it is producing an abundant crop of mulberries. I don’t think I’d ever seen a mulberry in real life till I moved here, but over the last couple of years I’d become aware the tree could produce these strange, almost insect-like red fruits. Until they turn black they have virtually no taste. But this year they are literally dropping off the tree every day. And they’re sweet and juicy!

I decided to take a photo of how we are finding them in the grass but as I looked through my viewfinder the scene was decidedly underwhelming. So I got down on my knees in the grass and took these photos (the one above and the one below)

 

I know they don’t show dozens of fruits lying in the grass but don’t you think these shots are more engaging?

The first one is of two mulberries and you get an idea of the scale from the size of the daisies in the background. The second image is just of one mulberry in all its strange and beautiful ripeness.

What do you think? Try for yourself next time you’re out taking photos. Don’t you think changing YOUR position before you frame your shot opens up a whole other, more interesting, world?

Thought for the day – I think this applies in life too.

When we change OUR position to look at anything from another angle, we see MORE, and can understand more deeply – whether that’s changing our physical position, travelling to see the world (other towns, other countries, other cultures) from other perspectives, or trying to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes to gain a better understanding of what life is like for them.

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Stepping off the well travelled road

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on May 19, 2017| 1 Comment »

I drove out of the village, as I have done countless times, and I noticed a bloom of poppies in a field of wheat.

I’ve noticed these poppies each day for several days, and I remember noticing them at this time last year too.

But this time, I pulled over onto the grassy verge and stepped out to have a better look. I looked at one or two of them up close. I crouched down and looked at them against the wheat, then against the sky. I stood up and gazed over the whole extended scene. Then I took some photos.

When we travel along familiar roads and paths, both physical paths from one place to another, and mental paths, or habits of thought, we slip easily into automatic mode. Automatic mode makes it easy to get from one place to another, or to complete a task with a minimum of effort, but it by-passes reality.

When we stop, hit the pause button, take a moment to turn our attention to what’s here and what’s now, then we immerse ourselves in reality.

That attentive focus slows the heart, calms the body and stills the mind as we allow the five senses to present us with the world around us. For a little moment the flood of memories and imaginings, the stuck loops of thought, the anxious repetitions of what-ifs, ebb away, to be replaced with colour, light, sound, and sensations of smell, touch or taste.

I find that when I do this, the world becomes a more and more wonderful place, filled to overflowing with beauty, novelty and presence.

I recommend it.

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The mind and heart connection

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth on May 16, 2017| 2 Comments »

Spotting this little creature on the petals of this flower hooked me. I stopped, looked closely, drawn by the beauty of the sunlit metallic green colour, particularly against the red petals.

I was more than drawn to it. I was engrossed by it. It caught my attention and for a few moments I revelled in it.

I savoured the moments.

Then, of course, because this is what I do, I took a photograph.

This is one kind of attention.

It’s the kind of attention of the senses. It might be visual, as it was in this case. It might be a sound, like a bird song, or the chirping of a cricket. It might be a scent, like the honeysuckle bush I passed on my walk, or might be the taste of the fresh, juicy gariguette strawberries in the market, or the feeling of the cool morning grass on the soles of my bare feet.

There’s something that happens to the heart with this kind of attention….it slows down. And as it slows down, the “parasympathetic nervous system” becomes active (actually it’s not as linear as that. The world isn’t as cause and effect as we think), and the whole body relaxes, the pupils in the eyes dilate and softly focus. There’s a feeling of peace, joy, delight, ease.

It’s wonderful.

There’s another kind of attention which is the type associated with mental effort. The kind we need when we work with mathematics and logic. In that second kind of attention quite the opposite occurs in the body. The heart speeds up, adrenaline quickens the body, sharpens the mind, produces a very narrow, focused concentration.

We need both these kinds of attention, but sometimes, I think, we rely too much on the mental effort type, and not enough on the kind that melts us into the rest of the universe.

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Two views of the world – the tree view and the grass view

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on May 12, 2017| 2 Comments »

Many years ago I discovered the writings of a French philosopher called Gilles Deleuze. I found some of his writing really hard to understand but several of his basic ideas and concepts completely changed the way I saw the world. That “becoming not being” phrase at the head of my blog is one of them. That shift from seeing the world as a collection of separate objects to seeing that everything is connected and always changing was a radical shift for me.

One of the other concepts was exploring the difference between trees and grass….what he termed “arboreal” vs “rhizomal” thinking.

You know the basic shape of the tree….a single stem or trunk which bifurcates again and again producing more and more branches and twigs as it grows upwards, and more and more roots and rootlets (is there such a word?) as it grows down into the soil, the one a kind of mirror image of the other.

This tree like form is everywhere. It’s the shape of our circulatory system as arteries branch out into smaller arteries which branch out into capillaries. It’s the shape of our lungs as the trachea bifurcates into bronchi which bifurcate into smaller bronchi, bronchioles (there is such a word!) and ultimately into alveoli.

We use it as a way of ordering and organising what we see in the world. It’s the most fundamental way of categorising and classifying the world. Everything is ultimately connected back to the single trunk or stem….the same original root, but everything exists in a separate category way out along the furthest branches, each ultimately distinct from, and separate from, everything else.

Grass is a rhizome. It doesn’t grow in this branching way from a single root. You can’t find the original stem or root of the grass. It’s like it has multiple points of origin, and each blade is connected to roots which then connect to other roots in a vast web or network. This rhizome structure is everywhere too. Because there is nothing which isn’t connected. The connections are multiple, diverse and ever increasing.

Two things became clear to me when I compared these two phenomena.

One was that the tree like view was produced by a sequence of “or” choices – at each division we say this is either this or that. The rhizome view is produced from a sequence of “and” choices. We don’t say “I’ll use either Facebook or Twitter”, we’ll use them both and connect them to each other. That’s what I do when I started to blog. I created my blog on WordPress but automatically connected every post to a tweet and a Facebook post. That way I could write once and share on several different platforms, for different audiences.

The other thing, which came after I read “The Master and His Emissary” was discovering how well adapted our left hemisphere is to the “arboreal” view of the world, and our right is adapted to the “rhizomal” one. We use the left to discriminate, categorise and classify. We use the right to see the whole by focusing on the relationships and connections.

How amazing that we have evolved this incredible brain with its ability to engage with the world in both tree-like, and grass-like, ways simultaneously.

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Everyday brain training – what’s new?

Posted in creativity, education, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on May 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Look at this! I mean, just look at this! I know, it’s not one of my best, my sharpest photographs, but I was in the garden the other day and I heard this deep low buzzing sound. It wasn’t as deep as the humming-bird moths which will arrive when the buddleia bushes bloom later in the year, but it was a lot deeper than the various species of bees and wasps I usually hear in the garden. Luckily, when I turned to the sound I saw the source. This inch long jet black bee with iridescent blue wings. I quickly got my iPhone out of my pocket and did my best to snap a shot before the bee flew away. I have never seen anything quite like this. There were two or three of them buzzing around the flowers but they just never settled long enough to be able to focus a camera and take a nice close up (not yet anyway – I haven’t given up!).

I looked it up online and it seems this is a “violet carpenter bee”. Never heard of such a creature. What a thrill! What a delight! Made my day!

There’s an important lesson to learn here. I’m sure you’ll have come across “mindfulness”. It’s quite the thing these days. Mostly the term is used in relation to certain meditation practices and they are good ones. It seems that mindfulness meditation can have a lot of benefits, from easing depression and anxiety, to stimulating “neuroplasticity” (that’s the phenomenon of how the brain changes and develops itself). But even before the meditation practices were popularised Ellen Langer researched mindfulness in everyday life. She claims we can either go through life mindfully or mindlessly. Seems a clear choice, huh? How do we lead a more mindful life? Search for the new.

By new, she means what’s new to you. The trick, you see, is that every day is new. You have never lived this day before. Nobody has ever had, or ever will have, the same experience as you are going to have today. Once you are aware of that you can set out to be aware of what’s new.

Iain McGilchrist points out in “The Master and His Emissary” that our left cerebral hemisphere has a preference for what is familiar, whilst the right hemisphere thrives on curiosity – it leads us to seek out what’s new. His larger thesis is that we have become very left brain dominant in our present society and that some deliberate change of focus to the right brain might bring about a much more healthy, more integrated level of brain function.

I recently read a book by French author, Belinda Cannone, “S’émervieller”, which explores many of the ways we can bring a heightened sense of wonder and awe into our everyday lives. Bottom line is the same as Langer and McGilchrist say – seek out what’s new. And that’s exactly the experience I had the other day when this violet carpenter bee turned up amongst the garden flowers. Cannone gives various different examples of the places, times and activities which seem most likely to stimulate “l’émerveillement” (“amazement”) and the strongest one is “Nature”.

The thing is the natural world, especially the world of living forms, is constantly changing. Pretty much any time we spend in natural environments will be likely to gift us the delights of something new.

Let me just clarify what I mean by “new” in this piece. I mean it’s anything you haven’t seen before, heard before, smelled before, touched or tasted before. It’s also the newness of the present moment. You have never ever lived this present moment before, so what do you notice? Right here, right now. It’s also the encounter with anything you don’t know or don’t understand. These are the experiences which stimulate our curiosity and our drive to learn. They are the every day experiences of adventure and discovery.

From the Japanese art of forest bathing, to Richard Louv’s claim that we are suffering from “Nature-deficit disorder” which can be treated with a good dose of “Vitamin N” (Nature), to l’émerveillement, to mindfulness and neuroscience, it’s clear that one of the best ways to develop a healthier brain is to spend some time in Nature – whether that’s a forest, a beach, a park, or a garden. I recommend it.

You’ll be amazed.

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Iris – bringing hope by opening channels of communication

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, personal growth, philosophy, photography on May 5, 2017| 4 Comments »

Irises are the most astonishingly beautiful and attractive flowers. Whenever I see them I think of the story ‘Iris’ by Herman Hesse where he wrote this –

He had a great love for this flower and peering into it was his favourite pastime; sometimes he saw the delicate upright yellow members as a golden fence in a king’s garden, sometimes as a double row of beautiful dream trees untouched by any breeze, and between them, bright and interlaced with living veins as delicate as glass, ran the mysterious path to the interior. There at the back the cavern yawned hugely and the path between the golden trees lost itself infinitely deep in the unimaginable abysses, the violet vault arched royally above it and cast thin, magic shadows on the silent, expectant marvel. Anselm knew that this was the flower’s mouth, that behind the luxuriant yellow finery in the blue abyss lived her heart and thoughts, and that along this lovely shining path with its glassy veins her breath and dreams flowed to and fro.

oh, I loved that the first time I read it and it’s stayed with me for over forty years now.

Iris, in Greek mythology, was the messenger of the gods. Her symbol was the rainbow, which in many cultures is the symbol of hope. But her main role was in carrying messages from one to another. She connected the sea to the sky. She was a bridge builder (not literally but in terms of making connections).

When I thought of her role in facilitating connections I thought of flow, of the to and fro of communication and I thought how much do we need that now? In a time where politics has become more about hate than love, where there are calls for more walls when we need more bridges, when there are demands to close down, isolate and see the ‘other’ as an enemy or a competitor to be defeated.

Oh, how we need Iris, to open peoples’ hearts and minds and to facilitate communication between them.

How we need her, the idea of her, the energy of her, the meaning of her, to create mutually beneficial relationships between different peoples with different ideas, different world views. To make the case for constructive co-operation rather than destructive competition and division….

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The music in our heads

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the music room, life, music, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, video on May 2, 2017| 3 Comments »

I suspect a lot of us have a lot of music in our heads. Sometimes we start to hum a tune or sing a song and only after we’ve started do we become aware that we’re doing it. Then we might pause to wonder “why did that particular song, or tune, come into my head just now?”

I find that when I look at some images something similar happens. Take this for example. I took this photo of an old couple sitting in a public park in Limoges a few weeks ago. They are both engrossed in their books. Their body positions and their physical closeness tell us they are close, that they are connected, as well as the fact that they are both enjoying reading in the park.

As I saw them, and as I looked at this image again just now, certain songs popped into my head and I could hear them as clearly as if I was playing them on a stereo.

This because of the line “You read your Emily Dickinson and I my Robert Frost. We mark our page with bookmarkers which measure what we’ve lost”

And, by the same musicians….

 

“sat on a park bench like bookends”

OK, so that example was a pretty obvious one, but sometimes the music which starts to play in our heads is not so easy to nail down. Sometimes we just enjoy that it’s there without even wondering “why this music?” “why now?”

I know I can use music to match or create mood, but this phenomenon of the music just seeming to appear has all the quality of somebody else hitting the “play” button. Even if that somebody else is also me!

What music started to play in your head today, and do you know why?

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Caring and creating….and learning. The alternatives to “uselessness”

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on May 1, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I listened to an interview with Yuval Noah Harari recently. I read his “Sapiens” some time ago and mostly enjoyed it, but I haven’t been tempted to read his more recent “Homo Deus”. This latter book looks ahead to consider how things might go as artificial intelligence and robotics develops apace. He argues that our technology could give us incredible powers, so that we may end up more like gods, but he also says things could go the other way and create an increasingly large class of people he labels as “useless”.

That “useless class” terminology is certainly a way of getting attention, but when he specifies what he means by it, there’s a lot in it –

“I choose this very upsetting term, useless, to highlight the fact that we are talking about useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system, not from a moral viewpoint,” he says. Modern political and economic structures were built on humans being useful to the state: most notably as workers and soldiers, Harari argues. With those roles taken on by machines, our political and economic systems will simply stop attaching much value to humans, he argues.

He goes from there to imagine a future where this class spends its time on drugs and Virtual Reality games machines. Depressing, huh?

So, two things struck me immediately. Firstly, this connects to some of the debate about “Universal Basic Income” – the idea that every citizen should receive a monthly allocation because we are heading towards a system which will be “post-work” – robots and algorithms will take over most of the jobs and the increased automation will increase unemployment. Our current economic system will either be adapted to take account of that, or human beings will have to adapt to the current economic system. Or not. It’s this “or not” that Harari explores by describing the “useless class”. One question then is what do we value in society and how do we allocate resources to what we value? As a society.

The second thought was, what, if people don’t have jobs in factories, shops or offices, the only thing they’ll be able to do is take drugs and play VR games? What popped into my mind straight away were caring and creating.

Human beings are great at caring. Sure, we don’t do nearly enough of it, and we could sure do with developing our capacities to care, but take, as one example, the response to an earthquake, a storm, a flood, a terrorist attack. In all of those situations we hear story after story of human kindness, human sacrifice and human caring. With declining infant mortality and increasing life expectancy more and more people in the world are living longer and in need of more care. We won’t run out of opportunities to care for others.

Human beings are great creators. We are problem solvers, scientists, home makers, gardeners, cooks, and artists of all kinds – writers, sculptors, painters, musicians, dancers. We won’t run out of opportunities to create.

Thirdly, I’d argue, human beings are great learners. We have whole neural circuits primed to seek out what’s new or different. We have whole systems dedicated to learning skills, acquiring knowledge, understanding and making sense of things. We won’t run out of opportunities to learn.

So, when I visited the town of Blaye recently, I saw this artwork in a car park. Isn’t it beautiful? Simple, and beautiful. Doesn’t it capture something about the human ability to care and to create.

Isn’t there an opportunity at this point in civilisation to change our focus away from grabbing and consuming, to caring and creating? And learning!

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