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The A to Z of Becoming. Part 2. X for “Xtol”

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on December 14, 2014| 1 Comment »

In the second part of the A to Z of Becoming, we’ve reached the troublesome letter “X”! In the first part, I chose “eXcite“, and in this part I’m going for “eXtol” (yes, I know they both start with an “e”, but make me a suggestion – what verbs do you know actually start with an “x”?)

To extol means to praise….to enthuse about, to rave about, to passionately, lavishly praise. So, it struck me, how appropriate to be choosing a verb which means to praise this month.

What, or who, would you like to praise, and why?

I’ll start……

In April we visited one of the most beautiful villages in France – Saint Guilhem le Désert – it looks like this –
Saint Guilhem le Desert

In this village we stumbled across a tiny perfumier run by man called Nicholas Jennings. Here he is –

nicholas

Look behind him at his wonderful desk where he selects the various natural scents to make the products he sells in his shop.

At the door of the shop, he had a wonderful pendulum drawing intricate designs on sand. Nicholas and his friend, Ludovic make them.

So, now that I have my study set up in my house in France, I’ve got my own “pendule de sable” hanging in the window.

Look!
Pendule

Written on the sand

Isn’t it wonderful?

So, there’s one thing for me to “extol”! The amazing, totally absorbing, pendulum of the sand.

And while I’m at it, I can enthuse about Nicholas and his wonderful perfume shop, and the village where it is – Saint Guilhem le Desert.

The village is on one of the paths of the pilgrims to Compostella – you can know that from seeing the saint-jacques shells everywhere…..

DSCN1100

There’s something else unique in this village, and that’s the dried “cardabelles” on the doors. This is now a protected plant, but the villagers can gather them in season. It’s believed to bring luck and protection.

Cardabelle

 

So, as I set the pendulum in motion once more, I’m not only absorbed in the uniqueness of every single design it makes, but I remember Saint Guilhem le Desert, the cardabelles, the shells along the pilgrim’s way, and Nicholas and his shop.

See what joy can follow when you start to “eXtol” something?!

Your turn……….

 

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Joy

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography on December 13, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Joy

the magpie rhyme 

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Now the leaves have gone

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography on December 12, 2014| Leave a Comment »

behind the vine

Now the leaves have fallen from the vine, it’s a different kind of beautiful.

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Bienveillance

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, writing on December 11, 2014| Leave a Comment »

heart in the keystone

I read an interview with the author, Alexandre Jardin, in the new edition of Cles magazine . He was asked why he is optimistic about the future and the first reason he gave hinged around a word which was new to me –  bienveillance – so I looked it up.

It means benevolence, or kindliness.

In his interview he said he thought there was a reaction to the negativity and extremism of fundamentalism and far right politics, and that reaction had the quality of “bienveillance” – benevolence or kindliness.

He has initiated a movement/website called “bleublanczèbres” – I know, sounds strange, huh? Blue and white zebras? Even if you don’t speak French take a look and get a feel for it. The focus is on acting. On doing. Which is totally consistent with my focus this year on the verbs of becoming (search on my site here for “a to z of becoming”). If you scroll down on the bleublanczèbres.fr site you’ll see a whole host of projects. Every project offers you opportunities to get involved and the things you can do are divided into three categories – things you can do if you have a minute, things you can do if you have an hour, and things you can do if you have a day. I love it. He describes the over all project as not a “think tank” but a “do tank”.

Whether you go and look at that idea or not, I think a good takeaway for today would be to ask yourself how you can ACT with benevolence or kindliness to the others you meet or share some time with (at home, in your neighbourhood, or at work or school) today. How about we put benevolence and kindliness at the heart of whatever we are building – make it the keystone.

Try it, and see what it feels like.

Alexandre Jardin seems to believe we can grow the amount of “bienveillance” in the world by our actions. I think he’s right.

As Gandhi said

We must become the change we wish to see in the world

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The changing light

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on December 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I love how the light changes towards the end of a day…..

Towards the end of the day

And how the light we make begins to glow…..

time to close the shutters

It’s almost time to close the shutters….

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Difference

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on December 9, 2014| 6 Comments »

difference

Wouldn’t it be great if difference was seen to be something interesting, attractive, even beautiful?

If we could not just respect and tolerate difference, but encourage it and celebrate it?

Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t try to make everyone the same?

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Imagination and grounds for hope

Posted in books, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, writing on December 8, 2014| 1 Comment »

where I write

Here’s where I write.

The reflection of the sky in the window of my study really caught my eye. In fact, I’d say it caught my imagination.

Imagination.

Too often these days imagination is harnessed to fear. Our daily newsfeed from the media provokes us to think about and worry about the most awful horrors. During the Referendum campaign in Scotland this year the No camp bombarded people day in, day out, with scare story after scare story. How else can a minority continue to hold power over the majority? How else can a fraction of the 1% who grow richer by the day, no, by the minute, continue to exert power over the 99%? Is it any wonder that in democratic societies so many are disenchanted with politics? Where are the politicians and parties with vision….with spectacular, engaging ideas and passionately held values which motivate us to create the solutions to the problems which face us?

It seems to me that we need to fire up peoples’ imaginations.

Where else are we to get our new ideas from? Where else are we to get our hope from?

Ursula Le Guin, the author, received a medal at the National Book Awards recently, and she said this –

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

I so agree.

Hard times seem to be coming. For many, they are here already. We DO need the writers who can see a way ahead and inspire us to create a better future. We do need to writers who “remember freedom” and count it as “our beautiful reward”. And we certainly need writers who can “imagine some real grounds for hope”.

I hope that, daily, little by little, I am becoming one of those writers……

After all, if we can’t imagine real grounds for hope, how do we carry on?

Imagination is such a precious and amazing facility. We can use it to solve problems. We can use it to create – art, music, literature, new thoughts and new acts…..not just, as Ursula Le Guin says “other ways of being”, but other ways of becoming!

If we are to realise our potential to become heroes not zombies, we’re going to need those writers who can fire up our imaginations…….. to think creatively, and, importantly, to DO things differently.

If we believe freedom is possible, aren’t we going to have to use our imaginations to create it?

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The A to Z of Becoming. Part 2. W is for Wish

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography, psychology on December 7, 2014| Leave a Comment »

a wish

In the second part of the A to Z of Becoming, W stands for Wish.

How nice, that we’ve come to this verb at this time of year!

You might want to make a single wish, like the Japanese one I saw above, or to create a whole flourishing bush of wishes, like in this next photo….

blossom of wishes

Or you might be a more organised type, and like your wishes in rows and columns! –

making a wish

Whether or not you choose to tie your wishes to a tree, or a fence, or a line of thread, I think it’s a great idea to actually write your wishes down and put them somewhere! This Japanese tradition is an attractive one. Why not try it?

Do you think wishes come true? Well, have you ever heard the phrase “Be careful what you wish for!”?

What does that mean? Does it mean you might not like what you get even when you’ve longed for it? Or because you might not have thought through the consequences of your wish? Does it mean you shouldn’t wish lightly? But only after careful consideration?

Whatever it means, the person saying it clearly thinks that wishes might indeed be fulfilled. Otherwise, why be careful?

I think wishes are often fulfilled. But I don’t think wishes are the same as magic spells. There’s some similarity between wishes and goals. Both provide some kind of focus, some kind of direction and I think a wish is more likely to come true if you apply something like the “SMART” principles which people apply to goals – “Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, Time related”.

I wouldn’t map the same criteria directly onto wishing, but I do think wishes are more likely to be fulfilled if they are at least specific, realistic and time focused.

I think there is also a relationship between wishes and hopes. Someone without hope is unlikely to make a wish.

What about you?

What place is there for wishing in your life?

Would now be a good time to draw up your own list of wishes for yourself for the coming year? Would that be a nice complement, or alternative, to resolutions, or goals?

And what do you wish for others?

When you wish something for someone else, maybe the wish is more likely to be granted if you actually do something to help make the wish come true. What could you do to help make your wishes for others come true?

I think that also applies to your own wishes, by the way – the ones more likely to come to pass, are the ones you actively work towards……

One final thought about wishes. Values-based wishing is likely to orientate you towards acting according to that value. For example, if you wish there was more kindness in the world, you are reminding yourself how much you value kindness, so you are giving yourself a chance, not just to act more kindly every day, but to open yourself up to acts of kindness in your life.

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Fields of gold

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the music room, from the viewing room, life, photography, video on December 6, 2014| 1 Comment »

How lucky am I? To live amongst the fields of gold?
fields of gold

(not barley, but vines, in my case!)

 

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Dinnae fash yersel

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on December 5, 2014| 2 Comments »

swans at the weir
So, I saw these two swans standing calmly on the edge of the weir and I thought maybe one was saying to the other “dinnae fash yersel” – or don’t worry/don’t get upset……..and how that attitude then turned out to be typical of this part of the world.

Not long after moving to the Charente region of France I was in the Orange shop trying to organise a phone line, broadband, a French mobile….and the assistant was on her computer trying to set me up with a new account. Something went wrong and she had to phone for help. After a few minutes of clicking here and there and conversing with her support line, she said “Soyons Zen” and finished her call. “C’est ça”. That was it sorted, our account was created and off we went.

I liked the phrase “Soyons Zen”, which means something like “Let’s be Zen”, or “Let’s stay Zen”. I think that little exchange says so much about the quality of life in this part of the world. Repeatedly I’ve found people helpful, friendly and not inclined to get agitated or upset easily. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but the Charente river has the reputation of being a calm, flowing river through these parts.

 

the Charente

One of the nearby villages is Segonzac, which is a signed up member of the “Cittaslow” movement.

I do think there’s something about this environment which seems to generate this attitude to life.

Which makes me wonder…..how much does our physical environment influence the way we experience life?

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