Heroes Not Zombies

Back home to France.

Last night I crossed over from England to France. I left Stirling early in the morning and had a long drive down through England to Portsmouth.

That’s Portsmouth harbour at night as the ferry left port.

The next photo is what I saw when I woke at six am. A smooth, deep blue water stretching as far as I could see, meeting a sky, not quite lit up by the dawn sun yet. Then the flash of a lighthouse caught my eye and looking more closely I could see the outline of the French coast.

The third photo, the long one, is taken as the ferry enters Saint Malo harbour, another lighthouse, echoing the first one, the sky lightening up and the land ahead becoming clearer.

Then another few hours driving down to the Charente.

It feels good to have travelled, lucky to have found an opening in the Covid regulations to let us see family again for the first time in a year. Blessed to have shared time and place back in my Scottish roots, and fortunate to be able to travel back to France, residency card in hand.

It was an ambition of mine to live in a different culture and language at some point in my life so when I turned 60, seven years ago, we sold up and moved, lock, stock and barrel, to France.

The Channel, or La Manche, might not be the biggest stretch of water separating two countries but each time I’ve made the crossing I’m acutely and instantly aware of the fact I’m moving from one culture to another.

We humans have always had a tendency to move around this Earth, and the artificial barriers we erect to separate our communities from each other have been redrawn repeatedly throughout history.

We tend to regard the States we live in as permanent but you don’t have to look back over many years to see quite clearly that’s just not true.

So as I make this crossing again I wonder about how the world might change, not just because of climate change and pandemics, but because of political movements, changing cultural values, and the fact that we are more obviously interconnected and interdependent now than ever.

There’s our challenge – to savour and champion our uniqueness and diversity while bringing our connections, deepening our relationships and enlarging the horizons of our compassion.

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I’m crossing the English Channel, or La Manche, tonight. Not on a sailing boat like one of these beauties but in a car ferry.

However, one of the things which strikes me about these boats and the car ferry is how many people are working together to set sail.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a roll on, roll off ferry, but boarding, sailing and disembarking are highly co-ordinated team events. The staff direct you to particular lanes marked out on the dockside then load up the boat so that the “garages” are both full and balanced, from side to side and front to back.

What this makes me think about is a teaching I once heard from Thich Naht Hanh where he took a piece of paper and told the stories of its origin, highlighting the importance of everything from the Sun and clouds to farmers, loggers and paper makers. It’s a beautiful teaching which demonstrates clearly just how interconnected we are.

In fact this kind of insight is taken to an even deeper level when we consider the interdependencies of species and environments. The complex ecosystems and food chains on which our very existence depends.

It shows us how limited it is to think in terms of separateness and individualism. None of us could live the lives we live without a myriad of others.

That stirs my feelings of gratitude and humility. It’s awe inspiring.

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I have a lot of photos like this – well, when I say “like this” I mean a photo of water and sky. Of course, this particular photo is different from all the other ones. No other photo of mine shows a mostly green stretch of water with a completely different blue band beyond it, and such a pale blue sky above.

Something else catches my attention here. The green water seems a whole degree calmer than the blue. Look carefully and you’ll see all the breaking waves sparkling white on the surface of that further away stretch. More than that, the change isn’t gradual, it’s sudden. It’s as if there is a boundary running through the ocean itself.

But what draws me again and again to these images, and even more, to the experiences of actually standing on the coast somewhere gazing out over the seemingly endless ocean.

There is something transcendental about the sight, the sound and the smell of the ocean. It dissolves the close boundaries of the self. It makes me feel very alive.

It heightens all the senses, evokes wonderful memories and stirs the imagination.

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You could say that every one of us is so small in this vast universe that our lives are just drops in the ocean. I’ve felt that from time to time. Tiny, insignificant and powerless. In fact in the face of climate change, pandemics, political actions by those in power, it’s hard to feel otherwise.

But then I look at an image like this again and I feel different. I see beauty, uniqueness and the undeniable reality that vast landscapes, shorelines and mountain ranges are shaped by just this – one event at a time, one interaction at a time, one unique moment at a time.

Sometimes our actions bring about obvious and large changes, but mostly they are more subtle, stretching out their fingers of significance over vast timescales, cascading and rippling through the infinite web of connections we call this universe.

Every one of us is as unique as that sunlit glowing radiant splash of water jumping high into the sky, soaking and shaping the rocks and the shorelines where we meet the Other.

Every one of us speaks, acts, and creates; our every breath, every choice, every lived moment contributing to the changes which create this amazing world we live in.

We are beautiful, you and I. We are powerful. We are unique.

We are all a wonderful splash in the ocean. Here and now. In this instant, in this place, in this one precious life we are living.

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The photo on the left here is a full moon seen through a tree in winter. The one on the right is the reflection of the sky on water twenty metres down an old well in my garden.

I came across these photos side by side today and I think they work really well together. Both of these images are about reflected white light….the light of the Moon which is, of course, the light of the Sun reflected, and the light of day glistening on the surface of the water deep down in the well.

Both meld distances together, foreground, middle ground and background with both the near and the far. In so doing, along with the spherical shapes in each photo, it makes each photo very pleasingly holistic.

Maybe that’s why every time I look at these images I hear the words “as above, so below”.

Perhaps you’re familiar with that saying from old esoteric or alchemical writings, but it’s a phrase which speaks to me of the echoes, resonances and symmetries we find in the world, and which points to the essential truth of the inseparability of the invisible and the visible, of the mind and the body, of the subject and the object, of the immaterial and the material.

I think it’s time to start shifting our focus from parts to wholes, time to engage with people more than diseases, time to become aware of our interconnectedness and our interdependence.

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I was wandering around the streets of Edinburgh the other day and came across this.

I often talk to you about l’émerveillement du quotidien or the wonder of the everyday and of course this little pink bicycle parked in the cycle rack does make me wonder about who is the child who owns this, what this says about their character and, of course about the incredible capacity of human beings to learn through copying what others do.

But on top of that I reckon this is just delightful. It made me smile when I came across it and it makes me smile again now.

Even if this didn’t set me off wondering (slim chance of that!) it reminds me of the importance and power of everyday delights.

I hope this makes you smile too, and that you, too, encounter some little delights today.

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We all love a beautiful sunset don’t we? When the sky turns pink or golden I go to the window, or out into the garden for a better look. Tourists flock to the places where you get the best view of the setting sun.

Yet doesn’t the sunset mark the end of a day? I suppose it does, but it doesn’t feel like loss to me. It feels satisfying, uplifting and delightful.

So perhaps it’s understandable that my mind connected the experience of a sunset to the thoughts I’ve been having recently about the world entering the end of an era.

Is it? Are we really transitioning now from one world to another? From one way of living to another?

You could argue that evolution and development show us that change is a permanent feature but it feels that in this time of pandemic and climate change we are really seeing the sun setting on one era and the Earth rising into a new one.

So here’s my hope. A sea change. Or, more precisely, a “C” change.

I hope we are seeing a major shift from Control to Curiosity and from Consumption to Care.

I could go on – there are several other values and principles beginning with “C” which I hope will emerge but that’s for a larger piece of writing.

Let me just say today that I hope we are indeed entering a new era and that we will start to emphasise curiosity over control. This pandemic and the recent extreme weather events have shown us we can’t control the environment we live in. We need to promote curiosity so we can better understand how to live in a rapidly changing world, how to adapt, and how to thrive in the natural world. I hope we will start to emphasise care over consumption. Getting people to buy more stuff, consume ever more, ever more quickly, seems a rubbish idea to me. But there are millions of people who need more and better care.

I’ll leave you with that thought. Take it, play with it, consider it, debate it. I’d be interested to know what you think.

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A few years ago I visited Montaigne’s chateau in south west France and took this photo. I have a copy of his Essays and it’s one of the few books on my “special books shelf” in my library. (That’s the place I keep the books which have made the biggest impact on my thinking)

I thought I’d just take another moment today to promote Montaigne’s work. The complete “Essays” is a BIG book and I suspect a lot of people are put off by that, so the book I’m recommending today is Sarah Bakewell’s “How to live”.

The full title is “How to live: or a life of Montaigne in one question and Twenty attempts at an answer”. Isn’t that a brilliant title? Sarah Bakewell’s book is a biography of Montaigne which explores his essays in the context of his life. The Essays have stood the test of time and hundreds of years later are still cited by many people as a book which has influenced them. It’s not a self help book. It doesn’t teach you how to live but it’s the author’s attempt to record and make sense of his thinking, of his mind, his life and the world he was living in. He approached his attempts to understand in many ways and Sarah Bakewell explores a number of them in her book.

People identify with what Montaigne wrote. One of the commonest experiences readers have is to think “this could be about me”!

I love Montaigne’s humility and curiosity. Perhaps those are his two key characteristics which impress me most.

Why not see if his writing opens something up for you? If you’d like to, you could do worse than start with “How to live”.

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I’m visiting the town of my birth just now. Stirling. I lived here until I went to university when I was 18, then came back to do my first four years of junior doctor training.

I still have family here and can trace back on my dad’s side of the family in Stirling to the early 1700s.

This photo shows the castle, still one of Scotland’s most beautiful castles in my opinion! And it shows the edge of Stirling Bridge on the right. You can also see the River Forth in the foreground. The Forth has an astonishing number of loops and bends as it makes its way to the North Sea from here.

Stirling has a nickname of “The Gateway to the Highlands” and Stirling Bridge was the only way to get from the Highlands to the Lowlands for many years, giving the bridge a significance immensely greater than its rather humble size.

Stirling also sits midway between Glasgow on the West coast and Edinburgh on the East coast in the narrowest part of Scotland.

Culturally it was a market town and a meeting point drawing peoples of different traditions from all four points of the compass.

I find myself wondering again how much the physical, cultural and historical features and flows created the person I am today.

Family stories, Scotland’s stories, Stirling’s stories all flow together to create the roots and origins of my personal narrative.

Place is more than landscape, more than buildings, more than we can see with our eyes, and the fuller understanding of place reveals not only our origins and our history, but shines a light on who we have become.

Do you have similar thoughts about the place of your origin? Or about the place where you live now?

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I stumbled across this in an Edinburgh bus stop yesterday and I thought you’d like it as much as I did. I’ve never seen something exactly like this before. And, guess what, it made me smile!

Yes, that’s my fingers. I couldn’t resist taking one. The person who created it had taken such care and imagination to make it so I actually felt that by taking one I was fulfilling one of the creator’s desires. Maybe when they check it out they will smile too!

This idea of putting some positivity out there for people to stumble across is something close to my heart. It’s one of the reasons I make these daily posts.

Have you any ideas about how to spread some more good? Feel free to share them if you want.

Meanwhile, I hope this has brought you a smile today.

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