Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on October 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »
This is a beautiful season here in the Charente. After a heavy shower of rain (it’s impressive when rain falls with a certain determination or significance) I saw the raindrops on these gorgeous autumnal leaves.
I love the Japanese cultural reverence of transience which they celebrate every Spring with the cherry blossom, but this combination of raindrops on autumn leaves seems to me to capture the essence of the dynamic changes we experience continuously in our lives……changes upon changes.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography on October 5, 2014| Leave a Comment »
In the A to Z of Becoming, second part, N stands for NEST.
Although we normally associate nesting with birds, like this little one building his unusual upside down nest with its entrance from below, we also use the concept of nesting in our own lives.
In one way, our nest is our home. We all need a sense of home, and each of us will personalise our living space to create our own familiar nest. Have you thought about your home that way? What’s your nest like? How’s it doing? Have you made it the kind of nest you want to live in? Is there anything you’d like to change or modify to make it a more comfortable nest, make it more YOUR nest?
It’s interesting to look at the three photos above. They remind us that it takes time to build a nest. We don’t often walk straight in to a house and it’s instantly our home. It takes time, effort and choices to make it home. They also remind us that all nests are unique. There’s no single “right way” to build a nest. What’s important, is not only that it does the job of providing us with shelter, but that it feels like our home.
We use the concept of nesting in another way too, I think. Nesting involves some snuggling down, or, in old Scots’, to “coorie doon”. I’ve a friend who talks about the need for the occasional “Club Duvet Day”…..you get the idea. Sometimes we need to create a pause which involves making a small, comfortable space and settling into it for a bit.
So, what do you think?
Is there anything you could be doing to make your nest more the way you’d like it to be?
Or do you have the need this week to “coorie doon” for a wee while, to create a wee nest and settle into it – for rest, for restoration, for recovery?
Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, photography on October 2, 2014| 1 Comment »
Little drops of water shining so brilliantly on a leaf are not just like gemstones, they are like little lenses.
It’s good couple of decades since I read “Lens of Perception“, but I remember being very taken with the author’s metaphor of the lens. We can only experience the world from our unique, subjective viewpoint, and our perception is continuously influenced by not only our personal make up and characteristics, but by our stories – created from our past experiences, memories, beliefs and values and by our imagination (so full of fears, anxieties, hopes, dreams and expectations).
It’s good to become aware of those lenses we wear all the time – we see the whole of Life through them.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on October 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »
October is the month of fruition in my twelve monthly themes.
I think that sometimes we think of fruition as an end point…..after months of planning and work, now the results can be seen…..now the project comes to fruition.
But there’s another way to think of fruition when we don’t take a rigid linear view. The seasons are cyclical and autumn isn’t an end any more than spring is a beginning. There is something about fruition which is, at one and the same time, an emergence of all that has gone before, and the jumping off point into a fantastic increase in connections…..as the beech nuts fall from the tree, the beginnings of new beech trees are picked up and carried off by creatures or by wind.
So what is coming together for you this month….and where might it take you next?
Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, photography on September 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »
A fairly recent development just off the Stirling/Edinburgh motorway is the installation of these “kelpies”. I visited them at the weekend for the first time. They’ve been installed in a newly created park area which has lots of common space for roller-blading, cycling, walking, feeding ducks at the duck pond, a children’s adventure playground and so on, but everyone comes to walk around, and be amazed by, the kelpies themselves. I visited on a Sunday which is probably a more busy day but there were hundreds and hundreds of people there.
Kelpies are part of the myths of Scotland – I suspect most people aren’t that particularly familiar with them, but I wonder how many go home and read a bit about them. Wikipedia is a good starting point (but it does strangely include paintings which depict kelpies as naked females, when, in folklore in Scotland, the kelpie was invariably male)
I loved that so many people were walking, sharing time with family or friends, and gaining such sheer pleasure from this open air art. What a fabulous combination of art, community and healthy activity. Made me wonder if we don’t pay enough attention to the way art in particular can be a central focus of influence on our quality of life.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on September 28, 2014| Leave a Comment »
In the A to Z of Becoming, second part, M is for ‘make’.
I like the verb ‘make’ because its essence is creativity. To make something is to create something. But it’s broader than that somehow because it includes the wider sense of taking an action, of ‘making something happen’.
Maybe you could make some music this week? Play an instrument, sing a song…..I’ve recently purchased a new guitar (I got my last guitar when I was 13, and haven’t played it for almost 40 years) – and I can’t tell you just how much FUN it is to rediscover the chords, the notes, the ways of creating a rhythm.
Maybe you are good with your hands and you could make something in the sense of building or constructing something.
Maybe you could make a change – decide what you’d like to do differently and actually start doing it.
Maybe you could make a meal, or at least a cup of tea…..
Maybe you could make a difference in someone’s life with a simple gesture, or an act of kindness……..go on, make someone’s day!
The joy of making lies in doing it consciously, doing it with both intention and awareness. That’s what makes all the difference.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on September 26, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Sometimes I think change is like crossing a bridge. You know where you are, you have an idea where you’d like to be, and you see the bridge you have to cross to get there…..
But then when I saw this bridge I realised that change is often more complex than that. There are several stepping stones you have to negotiate before you even get to the bridge!
Doesn’t your life feel like that sometimes?
How many steps do you have to take before you even get to the bridge?
And once you get to that bridge…….what lies over the other side? You can’t see it yet, can you, but you’ve at least decided you’re going to go and explore it.
Well, this is exactly where I am. I’m in the process of moving to live in another country. I can see the bridge, but I’m still negotiating the stepping stones! Exciting, huh?
Just as an aside, the other interesting thing which struck me about this particular scene is that the river which the stepping stones and bridge are designed to help you cross doesn’t actually seem to be there at the moment – its grass instead of water. A lot of rivers are like that, sometimes flowing full and fast, and sometime trickling along a path (usually a stony path, but in this case a green one!) So maybe in certain circumstances you don’t need all these stepping stones and bridges, you just walk straight across…..
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on September 25, 2014| 1 Comment »
2000 years ago, Seneca wrote about the shortness of life, but how modern his advice sounds. This particular passage actually made me laugh out loud…..
you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
So my white hair and wrinkles don’t speak of my life, just the time I’ve been around here on Planet Earth! How often do we have that experience that life is not so much a journey, more a “long tossing about”!
Sticking with the journey idea, I also really love this thought –
Just as travelers are beguiled by conversation or reading or some profound meditation, and find they have arrived at their destination before they knew they were approaching it; so it is with this unceasing and extremely fast-moving journey of life, which waking or sleeping we make at the same pace — the preoccupied become aware of it only when it is over.
A core value underpinning this whole blog is choosing to live, choosing to be aware of our constant becoming, choosing to be aware of the “émerveillement du quotidien” – the wonder and amazement of the every day.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on September 24, 2014| Leave a Comment »
If you use a fast shutter speed on your camera you can make the water flowing over a weir look like it has momentarily become solid. The water in this photo almost looks like icicles. It’s beautiful and it catches our attention but it misrepresents reality.
Movies are made of millions of single images like this. We run them past our vision so fast that we think we are seeing a moving image. But we aren’t. We’re seeing a series of still images, one frame after another.
Philosophers including Bergson and Deleuze have pointed out that reality is not like this. It’s not made up of discrete moments all stitched together. Instead reality flows…….continuously and unceasingly. Isolating a single moment is wonderful but it can trap us into thinking that life is made of single moments.
To begin to experience life differently, begin to notice the flow, and be aware of when you are isolating a moment in that flow.
Becoming not being.
Life flows.
It’s not like the movies.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, personal growth, photography on September 23, 2014| 1 Comment »
This hollyhock is just gorgeous.
As I gaze at it I think one flower is looking back and one is looking forwards……it’s a Janus-like flower!
Then I see all the emerging buds entwining the main stalk…..and I think, isn’t that like Life? Don’t we create our personal narratives here in the present, building them out of the past, and with our hopes and expectations of the future? Don’t we need good memory, good imagination and a focus on the present in order to flourish?
Heroes Not Zombies 