Heroes Not Zombies

When I was working as a GP in Edinburgh we had two clinic premises, one near the university and the other down at the shore in Portobello. One of my favourite routes between the two was the road around the base of Arthur’s Seat. As I’d drive along that road hurrying from one set of appointments to another I’d often spot someone sitting on one of the park benches and I’d think “Wouldn’t that be bliss?” But it seemed I had no time to take such a pause.

Ever since I was a student at Edinburgh University I’ve loved spending time in the Royal Botanic Gardens. One of my most favourite places in the world. I love the diversity of plants in the different areas of the gardens but I especially enjoy spending time amongst the tallest trees.

Last week I visited the Palace gardens in La Granja, in Spain which has lots of forested areas. Really a complete delight. Look at this bench, one of several scattered around the fountains along the many paths winding their way through the trees. Isn’t this just SO appealing?

This image makes two points for me. It reminds me of the importance of spending time amongst trees….something well known now as a healthy activity. And it reminds me of the importance of “taking a moment”.

We need to just slow down a little from time to time. We need to pause and reflect if we aren’t to be driven on semi-automatic by the wishes and Will of others.

It’s only when we stand back a moment and appreciate the “necessary distance”, as Iain McGilchrist calls it, that we can break the automatic feedback loops and become truly aware of the here and now.

Why not take a moment? Even right now, after reading this.

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I know it seems that the seasons are not so distinctly different these days as they seem to be in my childhood memory banks but I still love how the natural environment clearly demonstrates the cycles and rhythms of life.

I visited the Royal Palace in La Granja near Segovia in Spain this week. It has amazing 1500 acre gardens with thousands of beautiful, very old trees.

However, on a much smaller scale, this chestnut and an autumn crocus in full bloom caught my eye and between them they just say – we’re in autumn now.

Yes, I know that if you’re reading this in the Southern Hemisphere you’ll be noticing signs of Spring, and I rather like that – I like that wherever we are on this planet we can see the signs of seasons moving from one to another but what we actually see and experience depends on exactly where are.

I love that melding of what we share and what we experience differently which creates the uniqueness of this present moment.

But especially I love the sense of “telling the time” by observing the plant kingdom around me. It has the effect of instilling a deep sense of harmony in me, a feeling of resonance, of “tuning in” and of connecting.

In short, a simple natural “tableau” such as this single crocus and single chestnut dissolves my personal boundaries and fills me with the sense of being connected to what’s greater than me.

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I’m pretty sure this wee plant seeded itself on top of this metal plate but it looks as if the iron frame has been an attempt to fence the plant in.

But look! This plant isn’t going to be constrained so easily. It’s made it’s way out through a little gap and is already discovering a second exit.

Many years ago on my morning commute I sat next to a student on the train. The student was revising for a science exam and the definition of science which she was rehearsing really struck me at the time.

It had the following steps –

• Observation
• Description
• Explanation
• Prediction
• Control

So I was with this for the first three steps – observation, description and explanation. This is completely consistent with what I love about science. It’s about noticing, looking carefully, describing what you see and trying to explain it by way of trying to understand what you’re looking at. All of that fits with a science of wonder. A science which is humble and curious.

So the next two steps were the ones I found, and still find, controversial, and frankly a bit misguided – prediction and control.

Wow! Prediction! Good luck with that! Hasn’t this pandemic shown us how often our predictions are wrong? Hasn’t the emergence of more and more extreme weather events shown us how difficult it is to predict rainfall, floods, forest fires, hurricanes? Not to mention volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

The truth is prediction quickly becomes inaccurate the less focused and limited it is. The further ahead we look the less accurate our predictions. But more than this, all of Life, all of Nature, all individual human existence is a complex, open system. What happens in this real world cannot be reduced and abstracted without being falsified. All is interconnected and the webs of connections allow the open flow of particles, energy and information unceasingly. Prediction in detail over time isn’t possible.

That’s why the shift towards industrialised Medicine is so wrong. Nobody can predict the life path or future health of any individual with accuracy and nobody can be sure about the outcomes of treatments at an individual level either.

Which brings me to the last point – control.

We live in a society obsessed with power and control. We do not control NATURE. We do not control LIFE. It’s an illusion.

So it’s refreshing to see that complexity science is leading to a resurgence of a science of wonder and hopefully that shift will begin to let us put the control myth back in its box and replace it with a determination to care instead.

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It’s been a long day, folks. I left Segovia in Spain about half seven this morning and drove to Saint Jean de Luz in the south western corner of France to see some relatives and have lunch.

Then late in the afternoon I headed north. I got snarled up in very, very slow stop and start traffic around Bordeaux. It’s really unusual to be able to drive round Bordeaux without hitting traffic jams. It’s been like this as long as I can remember but today the amount of traffic heading north was unprecedented. I began to wonder if the rest of the world knew something I didn’t. Was there a mass exodus underway? And if so, where to??

So by the time I pulled into the driveway the sun had set. There was a gorgeous tobacco glow just over the horizon and a crescent moon was sitting there in the pink.

It’s good to travel. It’s good to spend some time in another culture and try a different language. But it’s good to come home again.

Well I almost missed posting today and I know that some of you are already wondering where I’ve got to. So this is me, back home, marvelling at the astonishingly different, deeply familiar last few minutes of the last light.

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I’m visiting Segovia in Spain again for a few days. Ever since I first came here I’ve had a sense that it’s a special place.

I’m sure you’ve had that kind of experience where within minutes, maybe even seconds, of arriving somewhere new to you, you might have a strong feeling about it. That strong feeling might be a sort of belonging. I had that in Marrakesh which completely surprised me. I’d never had a strong desire to go there but I deeply felt that I belonged, or more that I had lived there before. Weird.

It might be a bad feeling. I once visited a small town in France which had been a centre for tanneries. I don’t think I knew that before I got out of the car and within minutes we all decided we didn’t want to be there and left. It was only after that, that we read about the history of the town and learned about the stinking tanneries.

But then other places instantly feel just right. For me, Segovia is one such place.

There’s no doubting the power of the Roman aqueduct here. I mean you really couldn’t miss it, could you? It’s astonishing in its size, construction, beauty. Gradually, metre by metre, it allows water to flow naturally downwards from the countryside to the town, and it worked for centuries. A testament to human creativity, to Will, determination and strength.

I think it’s the main influence for me in making this town such a special, attractive place.

What towns have had the biggest instant effects on you? Which villages, towns or cities feel special to you?

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As you’re probably aware, I’m a fan of the gorgeous greens we see around us in so many healthy natural environments. I also love the bright reds, yellows and purples of many flowers and adore the goldens, yellows and browns of autumn.

So this photo, taken in Scotland a few years ago, is startlingly different. Just look at the greys, whites, and so, so pale shades of any other colours. It almost looks monochrome.

But it draws me in and I find the subtlety of the palette soothes me and makes me want to linger.

Spend a while contemplating it today by yourself. I hope it brings you the same delight.

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There are times and places where it’s good to aim for perfection. Mainly in the manufacture of machines and technologies, especially where precision makes a big difference to performance.

But in the natural world, in Life, in living as a human, perfection isn’t such an easy concept to define or achieve.

What’s a perfect tree? A perfect person? A perfect day?

In Japanese aesthetic, captured in the concept of wabi sabi, what might be termed imperfection is seen as beautiful.

Think of pottery made by human hand. It tends to look different from that mass produced by machines in a factory.

This photo is of a “dry stane dyke”, a common sight in Scotland, and almost always beautiful. The stones are carefully placed on top each other but they are all different shapes and the wind can blow through the spaces between them. There is no cement or mortar. They often get covered in moss which makes them somewhat more beautiful but you can’t manufacture that.

They are even beautiful many years later when they fall down.

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There are places in the world which we experience as special. Places where we feel connected to, and at one with, what is greater than ourselves.

Some people describe these as “thin” places, where the boundary between the visible and invisible dissolve.

Some people describe them as sacred places, others as the places where we experience a “re-enchantment” with the world, with Life even.

For many people these places are buildings – constructed by others as “places of worship”. For others they are “holy places” in the midst of wildernesses, forests or deserts.

Where do you find yours?

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This is one of my all time favourite photos.

I’ve taken lots of photos of seed heads over the years. I’m repeatedly drawn to them. The earliest ones I remember would be dandelions in the garden. I expect as a child you too played the game of blowing a dandelion seed head and counting how many puffs it took to send every single seed flying.

We called them “dandelion clocks” and the idea was that the number of puffs told you what time it was. I always thought that completely odd. I mean it was so easy to manipulate by varying the strengths of your puffs. You could prove the “dandelion clock” right or wrong depending on what you believed.

I know there are other traditions associated with the dandelions but, actually, I just preferred to look at them, and as I got older, photograph some of them.

This particular photo stands out from the rest because I was lucky enough to catch the moment that a single seed set off on its journey.

This still makes me of think of both the time in my life where I left home to go to university, and the times where my children left home to set up their own homes.

So it’s a poignant photo. It stirs in me that mix of emotions common to most parents – when their child reaches the time to leave home and step into adulthood. It’s a moment that, at best, feels right, feels natural, feels like the witnessing of maturation. I’m reminded of the passages in Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet”

You are the bows from which your children
As living arrows are sent forth
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite
And he bends you with his mightThat his arrows may go swift and far
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness
For even as he loves the arrow that flies
So he loves also the bow that is stable

It’s also a moment of anxiety and trepidation. Are they going to be ok? How am I going to protect them?

And a moment of sadness and loss, a realisation that their childhood is over, the little birds have flown.

Fundamentally however, this image stirs a sense of awe and wonder in me. I am yet again astonished and delighted by the beauty of Life.

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I know this tree doesn’t have a mouth and I know it’s not shouting, either to me or to the other trees, but it definitely makes me think of that.

For a long time we’ve seen trees as separate beings and forests as collections of trees which are in competition with each other for sunlight, nutrients and space. But that’s all changing thanks to the scientists who study the connections between things and the relationships which living creatures have with each other.

The work of Suzanne Simard, published for a wider readership in “Finding the Mother Tree”, is perhaps the most convincing of this kind of research. She’s shown that trees in a forest are in constant communication with each other, sharing nutrients and sugars, warning each other of predators and threats and basically working together for mutual benefit.

This kind of work shows us that the dominant belief in Nature as constant competition between individuals is simplistic and wrong. I think it’s harmful actually – it feeds into politics and economics. It creates cultures of “us and them” and stokes self interest and division.

So it comes as a breath of fresh air to find scientists now demonstrating the importance of a model based on cooperation instead. Well, not simply cooperation but more complex interplay between competition and cooperation than we’ve been led to believe.

Richard Powers, whose brilliant “Overstory” novel changed the way many people understood trees, forests and the world, has a new novel out, “Bewildered”. I listened to him being interviewed by Ezra Klein this week. He quotes Suzanne Simard and talks about his own development of thought, from traditional scientist focused on control and power to his current way of thinking which he terms “humbling science”.

Great phrase. He’s referring to the science which increases wonder, awe and understanding. He’s referring to the shift towards seeing complexity and studying both inter-relatedness and inter-being.

He also said in the interview that he thought the largely negative 20th attitude to our human tendency to anthropomorphising other living creatures has had a downside of increasing the distance between ourselves and other beings, which has allowed as to treat the rest of Nature as a mere resource to be plundered. He said it had diminished our ability to see other living beings as sacred, and even other human beings as sacred.

Isn’t this what we need? The ability to see our interdependencies and our interbeing? The need for more empathy? The need to reconnect to a sense of the sacred.

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