This photo of Boschendal garden in South Africa always makes me think of two forces of the universe – order and chaos, or, as Thomas Berry says, discipline and wildness. Everyone who writes about these polar opposite forces argues the same point – we need both, and we need them in a particular kind of balance. Too much of either destroys what we have.
We live in an ever more divided world, presented, day after day, with a black and white version of reality, with one pole presented as “right” or “true” and the other presented as “wrong” or “false”. Genuine dialogue and understanding disappear under the noise of anger, indignation and distrust.
Reality is full of paradoxes and polarities. And it’s not that some “happy medium”, or some bland “neither this nor that”, is better. It’s about understanding and acceptance, about seeing the necessity of apparent opposites.
Reality emerges from the synthesis of these two forces, not from their dilution, or from the exclusion of one in favour of the other.
I wonder if we have dreamed of being able to fly. I know that many people experience some kind of flight in dreams. If you listen carefully, their descriptions are quite different. Some people have the experience that they are flying like “Superman”, zooming here and there, able to go wherever they have the fancy to go. Others don’t have that experience of being in control but, rather have the feeling that they are being blown long distances by the wind. For yet others they find themselves following a winding road or river, tracing its twists and turns. And, for many, it’s not so much a flight, as a fall. In this latter case, it’s quite common for the dreamer to have the actual sensation of falling, so vivid that it wakes them with a start.
I take great pleasure from listening to, and watching, the birds in my garden. For much of my life I was either too busy in my medical career, or I lived in a top floor apartment without any outside space, but since I retired to rural France I’ve been blessed with a garden, surrounded, in my first house, by vineyards, and, now, by trees and fields, and I have the weather for most of the year to be able to just be outside….either gardening, strolling, noticing, photographing, swimming, or sitting reading….and I am surrounded by birds.
I’ve had a number of very special exchanges with particular birds over these last ten years or so, and I feel their presence more than I ever did. I don’t know if that’s a common experience, or peculiar to me.
What’s your experience with flying dreams? What place do birds have in your life?
This sculpture in the Dylan Lewis garden in Stellenbosch evokes the sense of an ancient primate, maybe an early human, maybe a creature evolving between the higher primates and first human as we now know them.
I love how he’s captured the sense of the creature walking, not quite yet upright, but still using a hand to get around. I did think, at first, maybe it was someone bending over to pick something up, but I think the positions of the legs convey a feeling of movement, not simply stooping. I also love how the shape of the creature’s back echoes the shapes of the mountains in the distance.
I enjoy sculpture in nature. It often arrests me, capturing my attention, my gaze, and stimulating my thoughts and reflections. The whole Dylan Lewis garden is large and has many, many sculptures, placed throughout it, and its position at the edge of a wilder area, without any fences or walls around it, make it feel much more natural, although, I believe, it was created in a massive work of landscaping just a few years ago. It looks ancient, and it’s embedded in the even more ancient.
His sculptures often capture a kind of betweenness – in this case, a stage of evolution, between primates and modern man.
I’m a fan of the idea of “going with the flow”, and I’ve written about it often, but when I was in South Africa last January I saw this person in the sea….not so much going with the flow, as “riding the wave”. This latter phrase isn’t one I use so much, but these feel like turbulent times, and it feels as if the flow is also turbulent….there are great waves, one after another. Waves of significant change, eye catching, attention grabbing waves. It would be easy to feel submerged by waves like these. It would be easy to feel that they are going to wash us all away. So maybe this is a time to learn how to “ride the waves”, to “rise above” them. To tap into their energy and use that to go my own way.
I think it comes down to the attitude we strike – if we approach these waves with fear, then, surely, we’ll drown, or, at best, be driven this way and that, against our will. But if we approach them with confidence, with a sense of wonder and curiosity….then we can play with them, create what we want to create, drawing on the energy and power within the wave, without blindly following its direction.
This does feel a time of great change, but, that can be exciting when we begin to see a potential evolution, a possible phase change, allowing us, as individuals, as communities, and even as a species, to move on to very different world, a very different way of living.
Here’s a gift for you today – a blue, blue scene which I find SO calming, and I hope you will, too.
I took this photo a year ago when visiting good friends who live in South Africa. The sea was especially calm that day, and the sky so clear, even though there were thin white clouds in the distance.
Rebecca Solnit writes incredibly beautifully about blue in her wonderful “Field Guide to Getting Lost”…you can read an extract here.
Meantime, just take a moment and immerse yourself in this gorgeous palette of blues.
One of the things I like about this photo is how it captures three completely different rates of change in the world.
Most of the image is filled with the sea, which changes constantly and obviously. It’s never still (even when it looks calm). It’s always flowing, breaking into waves, surfacing water molecules and throwing them into the air, deepening others to hide them on the ocean floor. Every wave reminds us of how every individual appears distinct only for a little time, then dissolves back into the source, erasing duality, every one never really separating from the One.
Then we see a large rock. Stable and strong as a rock, we say. But rocks are constantly changing too. They are submitted to daily forces of wind, rain and sunshine. They are sculpted by the weather over thousands, even millions of years. Just as it is hard to see the minute hand move on a clock, it’s really difficult to see the changes taking place in a rock. But change is happening, all the same. Every rock reminds us of how every unique being emerges from the underlying flux of the universe to present a consistency, a transient integrity which allows them to appear as a whole, and separate individual. Just as I look back on my life after a number of years, I can see photos of myself as a baby, as a little child, as a teenager, as young adult, a parent, a maturing adult into retirement, and on, beyond the “three score years and ten”….but all those appearances, all those “selfs”, are a single self. Each photo from a different decade looks so different, but inside, they all feel like me.
We need both – the constant flow and flux of change AND the transient consistency of a structure, an ego, a self.
Thirdly, the foreground in this image is filled with plant life, an abundance of plant life. Plants change both quickly, from moment to moment, hour to hour, with the sunlight, the warmth and the wind. But also seasonly. They change in cycles. The life of a flower isn’t linear, it’s more like a spiral, looping round and round through the four seasons of the year, each season revealing its particular characteristics, of growth, blossoming, reproduction, fruition, then a winter of quiet and apparent inactivity.
We need this third energy too….the cyclical, seasonal, rhythmic change.
Constant flowing change, a certain resistance manifesting as consistency, and spiralling rhythms of reality.
I don’t know if it’s universal, but, a lot of us are enthralled by breaking waves. I know I love to see them, and can stand, or sit, mesmerised for ages watching waves crash onto a rocky shore. I love the colour of them, the size of them, the sound of them, the shapes of them.
These are moments of power and transition. You can tell how much power is in them from the noise they make when they crash against the rocks. I know that it’s the steady, constant, repetition of fairly small, less dramatic waves, which do most of the work shaping the rocks and the land, but these big ones must push things on a bit, don’t you think? The power of the sea is more obvious when it breaks through the surface like this, and smashes onto the rocky outcrops. And it’s a moment of transition. How long do any of these waves last? Seconds, at most. If you’ve ever tried to photograph them, you’ll know you have to take several photos to capture a single moment like this. As the liquid sea bursts into spray and foam, billions of water molecules are released into the air, some to return quickly back into the sea, but many others to dissipate, invisibly into the air….on their way to form clouds and mists, and to dampen the soil and the sand.
I’m also struck by how wave watching like this gives you a vivid experience of the fundamental unpredictability of reality. It’s really hard to predict which wave will hit the rocks the hardest, which will soar highest into the sky.
So, this is what strikes me, as the waves strike the rocks…….power of nature, the beauty of transience, and the fundamental unpredictability of reality.
Three life lessons in a moment, huh? How about you? Do you love watching waves crashing into rocks too?
Awe is the sensation of connecting to what is greater than you. It’s a moment of dissolution of the self, to less apart from the whole, and more an inseparable part of the whole. It’s where boundaries and limits disappear. It’s expansive, stimulating and life enhancing.
In Keltner’s book about awe, he reports that many people experience it in nature. Here, I looked towards the far blue mountains, saw the vast stretches of bush in the middle distance and the Hadida taking off in flight from the foreground garden. And right in front of me, this astonishing sculpture, which captures a sense of liberation, of freedom, of transition, of aspiration to escape any worldly limitations and soar, just as the Hadida is about to do.
Maybe this is something we don’t talk about enough, but what’s missing, so often, in this world, is love. Whether we see that aspect of love we call kindness, or the aspect we call compassion, or care, or whether it’s the aspect of desire, and passion, our world is enriched when we pay loving attention.
It’s a bit of a cliché to say that what the world needs is more love, but, it’s true, all the same. But even without such grand dreams as world peace, and a society based on kindness, rather than on ego and greed, we can still make our everyday lives better by loving more.
We pay attention to all kinds of things. Our attention is “caught”, is “attracted”, in order to sell us stuff….goods and ideas. The dominant way of catching attention, magnified by all the algorithms, is to stoke anger, shock, horror and outrage. But I can’t see that any of that is making the world a better place, and I certainly don’t have the experience that a day filled with anger and fear, is a good day.
When we pay loving attention, whatever we are “attending to”, is enhanced, and, here’s the great thing, by paying loving attention, we, too, are enhanced.
It’s a good day when we have filled it with love. It’s a good day when we have paid loving attention to the here and now. It’s a good day when we have felt love for others, humans, animals, and plants. It’s a good day when our hearts have filled, again and again, with love.
Try it for yourself, and see what you experience. Pay more loving attention.
In Dacher Keltner’s excellent book on awe, he reports how he and his team of researchers gathered personal descriptions of moments of awe from thousands of people around the world. When they analysed the stories they found that they could fit into about eight categories, which he calls “the eight wonders of life”.
The commonest one was “moral beauty” – witnessing courage, kindness or strength. Next were “collective effervescence”, “nature”, and “music”. I certainly recognise many experiences of all of those. The next one is “visual design”. I wasn’t completely sure what to make of that. I do love art. I love sculpture, especially in natural, or urban environments, but I wasn’t sure that architecture or interior design would be likely to give me an experience of awe.
Well, when I walked into this church in Palermo, Sicily, and the Sun cast an intensely bright light through the domed windows in the roof, I got it. Everything from the detailing of the various colours of marble on the floor, to the vast frescos, combined with the sheer volume of the place with its massive pillars, but the shafts of sunlight really did it for me. What a genius design. What an incredible effect. What a moment of awe.
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Heroes Not Zombies 