Fushimi Inari shrine, on a hillside just outside Kyoto, is one of the most impressive places I’ve ever visited.
I have a lot of photos taken along the winding path which snakes up to the top of the hill. This is such a unique path. It works it way along under hundreds of these bright red Tori gates.
They are beautiful.
You can stand anywhere on this path and see these glorious structures stretching out before and behind you. I can’t really capture in words what that feels like. It’s an experience of being inside beauty, inside art, inside creative power.
And all of this exists because of spiritual feeling amongst the people who made it.
This really is the phenomenal beauty which can emerge when spirit and art combine.
In the 14 billion years or so since the beginning of this universe (well we can trace some kind of beginning, Big Bang, or whatever, to then), an uncountable number of stars have been born, exploded, sent newly formed atoms scattering across space, smashed and fused them to make new elements, and gathered a few billion together to create this little planet we call Earth.
Every single one of us has been created out of that stardust and each and every one us has emerged, unseen before, to manifest an utterly unique human being.
Then as each of us lead our lives, forming relationships, making connections and choices, we write a brand new, and different personal life story.
Like this flamingo, you are beautiful. Like this flamingo, please spread out your wings and manifest what only you can.
The universe never made a “you” before, and won’t make another one ever again. For me, uniqueness is beautiful.
If you’re a regular reader here you’ll know about one of my most favourite French phrases – l’émerveillent du quotidien – the wonder of the everyday. I really believe that the practice of having an eye open for the amazing around me is the basis of a life of quality.
Often, very often, what catches my eye, what amazes me, is beauty.
Where do I see beauty? In the natural world, in smiles and twinkling eyes, in acts of care and kindness, in creative expression whether that be painting, sculpture, music or dance.
I think I’m going to share a photo a day for the next few days each one chosen because I find the beauty both breathtaking and amazing.
These cabinets, or others like them, are very common in this part of France. They are places to share books. You can deposit books in them and you can take, for free, any which are there.
I filled one in Cognac several times over as I culled my library before the big move and they’d disappear within days.
There’s even one in the little village I’ve now moved to.
Also, just down the road from here is an “Emmaus” shop where you can donate anything you don’t want any more and they sell them very very cheaply, allowing people to get things they need for little money and raising funds for charitable works.
I love how pervasive sharing is here and I think it’s a strong characteristic of human beings.
Whenever disaster strikes there are always folk helping each other. Such acts can be ignored or trivialised but I think they demonstrate a really important aspect of human nature – one I like to promote and share – with you.
This is the season when large flocks of starlings gather, swoop through the vineyards, and, if you’re lucky, create murmurations. They amaze me.
I am enthralled by how many will gather noisily in a single tree, then all at once they go completely silent. A second or two later they take off “as one”.
They make it so clear to me that social behaviour, how we connect, coordinate and collaborate is a fundamental characteristic of Life.
What’s so astonishing to me about these starlings is how they communicate. When they fly in great clouds of hundreds of birds, how do they do that without all crashing into each other? Whatever the mechanism every one of those birds is perceiving the others around them and adjusting their flight speed and direction constantly, moment by moment. I know there’s a whole field of study about swarming because there are many creatures which can do this, but I don’t know if scientists really understand how it’s done.
The other evidence of their ability to communicate clearly and instantaneously in a flock is the noise they make. Noise is probably not the right word. When you hear them gathering in a tree it sounds as if they are all shouting at the same time. You could say they are singing together as in a choir, but it sounds more like mass chatter than song. I’ve no idea how the flock falls silent over a second or two, or why that heralds the onset of mass flight. Whoosh, and they’re off!
We hear a lot about the importance of competition, and I don’t deny that competition is an important part of evolution, but I think we have downplayed the importance of collaboration. It’s time to address that distortion of reality and see just how important collective behaviour, communication and cooperation are to survival and growth.
If you’ve been following my blog for a while you’ll know I like to photograph nature – especially birds. So, it’s really nice that the first bird I’ve encountered in my new garden is a robin.
I’m pretty sure he’s not the same robin who lived in the garden in Genté but you only ever seem to see one at a time.
Once again I’m reminded of the constant presence of both the general and the particular. This is not just “a robin”, this is the robin who lives in the garden of my new house.
I only wanted to take a photo of a fountain, backlit by a low sun.
Well, I managed, but something else happened as I pressed the shutter release. A bird arrived to enjoy the water. That serendipitous happening completely changed the nature of the photo, and took it to a higher level.
I love this photo because it tells me that you can never be completely sure of what is going to fill this present moment. But when you are awake, when you’re aware and really present, then you can truly catch the moment.
Removal day. For the last seven years I’ve rented an old house near the town of Cognac. We decided that when I retired from four decades of medical work that we’d emigrate from Scotland and go and live in France. We always hoped to buy somewhere if it turned out that we enjoyed living in France but with one thing and another it took much longer to get round to looking for a house to buy. However, this became the year to do it and today is the day the removal men are here.
Here’s a couple of photos which, I think, nicely capture where we’ve been living.
So it’s goodbye to the Charente, and hello to the Charente Maritime, as we head about an hour north west of here.
Time’s a strange phenomenon and it sure isn’t captured by clocks and watches. This has been a good seven years.
It’s pretty clear that the present changes constantly. You can’t nail it down. This present moment constantly appears out of the future and disappears into the past right before our eyes.
It’s also pretty clear that the future changes constantly. Have you ever looked at a 10 day weather forecast and noticed how when day 10 becomes day 9 the forecast often changes too? In fact the further out you gaze you less likely you can see clearly what lies ahead. It’s not, it seems to me, that the future lies ahead set solidly in place just waiting for us to get there and find it. No, the model of the future as an infinite matrix of singularities constantly flickering and waving in and out of potential existence, yes, that works for me.
But the past…..well it’s easy to think of the past as done and dusted isn’t it? I mean you can’t go back and run it again, can you? However, looking at this jet trail makes me think the past isn’t so fixed after all. As I watch where the plane has been and see both the direction and shape of the trail it laid, I see that trail change before my eyes.
Well, you know, it seems to me the past doesn’t lie in some filing cabinet in our brain. Nobody has ever found such a “thing”. Memory, it turns out, is a creative process which involves imagination, attention and the ability to make a past event anew.
History isn’t a simple matter of just finding the facts, is it? We explore, put attention and effort in particular places, ignore or discard others, and we tell a new story of times gone by.
At a kind of simple level I often said to patients who had suffered a great hurt or loss, that we can’t change or erase what happened but we can alter our relationship to it. We can change our experience of it.
For the last seven years I’ve lived surrounded by vineyards. Watching the changes in the vines through the year has connected me to the progression of the seasons. They are a completely different environment from the one I grew up in, and lived all my life in, back in Scotland.
I’ve taken multiple photos of these vineyards and every one of them is unique. What makes this particular one stand out for me is the interplay between the land and the sky. The rows of parallel vines cover the entire landscape from this viewpoint making their distinct pattern the main one visible from this viewpoint. But then look at the sky. The clouds are small and white and most unusually they are lined up in parallel rows running at right angles to the rows of vines.
That correspondence is what makes this photo stand out for me.
The core of my four decades of work as a doctor was one to one consultations. For each and every patient I tried to recognise patterns of symptoms and signs which might indicate a particular diagnosis. But on top of that I tried to understand the patterns of their lives, their thoughts and emotions, their behaviour. Seeing the correspondences between the different patterns is the basis of holistic practice. Only by searching for them could I see and treat every patient, not as an example of a disease, but as a unique, individual human being.
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