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Archive for the ‘from the dark room’ Category

One at a time…..

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »

vignoble

One of the most significant changes I’ve noticed since moving here to the Cognac region of France is the pace of life. One of the villages near where I live is part of the “CittaSlow” movement – the “slow city” movement which started with the “slow food” movement in Italy. The Charente river which winds its way through these parts as it heads west to the Atlantic is characterised as a “slow river” – mainly because as it passes through here its surface seems pretty unruffled most of the time. It’s the river equivalent of relaxed and steady.

“Slowness” isn’t really about pace at all. It’s about being present. It’s about paying attention to the here and now and savouring what the present moment has to offer.

But there’s something else all around here which contributes to that value – the vineyards. Most of the land in this area is covered with vineyards which produce grapes to be turned into Cognac and Pineau. I was out walking yesterday and noticed one of the vineyard workers doing what they all do at this time of year – prune the vines. Look at him, or her (I can’t tell from this distance), working along the lines of vines. Every single plant is pruned back to two stems, one heading to the left, and one to the right, stem by stem, plant by plant. All done by hand by an individual. Seeing one person working a whole vineyard like this is common around here. Sometimes you can spot two people, or, I think, at most, three in the same field. But mostly it’s just one. Can you imagine? Can you imagine what it takes to work from sunrise to sunset, day after day, until the job is completed? Paying attention at every moment to the particular plant in front of you?

So, let’s add two other values to “slowness” – patience and persistence.

Between them these three, interlinked values seem to me to be fundamental to the creation of the particular qualities of life here.

Taking the time without feeling frustrated, pressured, or resentful. And having the determination and the energy to keep on keeping on.

Wow! It’s quite a triad! I recommend them.

  • Slowness
  • Patience
  • Persistence

And you know what? I think we need to add something else to the mix – loving attention.

If the vine worker doesn’t care about each and every plant, they won’t thrive. The way to get the best harvest each year is to care enough to take your time, and work steadily and patiently, until the whole vineyard has been attended to.

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Is Nature bad for humans?

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science, video on January 11, 2017| Leave a Comment »

red-veg

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the outgoing chairman of Nestlé’s intention is for Nestlé to develop food scientifically – synthetic food which will be better than “natural food”. He rejects the notion that food grown in the ground is best for us. He says

Nature is not good to human beings. Nature would kill human beings. The reason why homo sapiens have become what we are is because we learned to overcome nature.

What do you think when you read this?

Is “Nature not good to human beings”? Does Nature seek to “kill human beings”?

I was pretty astonished at this claim because I think human beings are part of Nature, not something outside of “it”. If we want to learn what’s good for us my own feeling is that we should look to the rest of Nature. As Idriss Aberkane says of “biomimicry”, Nature is a library, a source of knowledge, not a source of repository of fuel to burn.

So where does this idea that Nature is trying to kill us come from?

Well, as chance would have it I read an interview with the French philosopher, Michel Onfray, at the weekend, and he mentioned the definition of life given by Bichat, the physiologist

Life is the sum of the forces which resist death

That’s an interesting definition of life – life is resistance. Is death constantly attacking life? I think that’s a pretty miserable and negative understanding of life. But I think it might come from the notion of entropy. You know about entropy? Entropy is “the gradual decline into disorder”. The second law of thermodynamics states “entropy always increases over time”. You can probably see how this observation can lead you to think that we are only alive as long as we resist death, disorder, and decline. But is that enough to lead you to conclude that Nature is trying to kill us?

It seems to me that this entropic force in the universe is only one of the major forces at play. What Thomas Berry referred to as “wildness” is another way of thinking about this force. It’s the chaotic force. If this was all there was, or if this was the dominant force, what would the universe look like? Would there be stars? Would there be galaxies of stars moving together? Would stars have planets? Would there be any complex living organisms? How could there be? There is a second force. One Thomas Berry calls “discipline”. It’s the ordering principle, the structuring principle, which contains, limits and holds together. But what if that was the only force in the universe? What would the universe look like then? Would it be any more than a dense ball of energy? Would it be expanding? Would it show diversity? Or would whatever existed by “more of the same”?

I think there is a third force at work in this universe, because it seems to me, without it, there is a tendency for the first two forces to cancel each other out, or for there to be a significant tendency towards either chaos or uniformity.

That third force is creativity. The creative force is a force of integration – it integrates the two forces of wildness and discipline to produce astonishing levels of complexity. Look at the history of the universe. Is it a history of endless decline and degeneration, or one of stasis and constriction? Or is it a story of ever increasing complexity and diversity?

It’s this latter, isn’t it? The universe is on a course of increasing complexity. We humans, with our bodies, our brains and our consciousness, are the most complex phenomena the universe has produced so far. But we haven’t been about for very long.

cosmic_calendar

(the cosmic calendar)

The universe is on a course of increasing diversity. Not just the rich diversity of species and life forms on planet Earth, but in the diversity of unique human beings. Not one of us ever repeated. No single experience of a whole life ever duplicated.

So is Nature a threat to us? Or is Nature a manifestation of the creative force of the universe?

I’m opting for the latter view. And I’m going to continue to enjoy the fruits of that rich creative diversity, just like you see in my photo at the start of this post. I won’t be swapping “real food” for synthesised, chemically “enhanced” stuff any time soon!

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Where’s everyone going?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on January 10, 2017| 4 Comments »

dawn-trails-above

When I looked up at the sky one morning recently it looked like this. The sun was just rising and the sky was virtually cloudless but it was pink because of all the trails from the planes which had recently flown over.

Look at them all! I can’t remember ever seeing so many at the one time. Here’s what happens with me all the time – first something catches my attention, then typically there are two qualities which come quickly to the fore – curiosity and a love of beauty. I look up and see this sky and at one and the same time, or so it seems to me, I’m filled with a sense of wonder and awe which provokes me to take a photo.

I’m looking at this and finding it gorgeous. A delight.

I’m looking at this and I’m wondering about how these cloud like trails are created by the planes. How ephemeral they are. How they track across the sky, then, dissipate. Yes, that’s the word. You can see it happen before your very eyes. They are dissipating…..thinning out, spreading out, becoming invisible.

I’m looking at this and I’m wondering where the planes have come from and where they are going to. Look at the spread of directions, of origins, of destinations. Where is everyone going? Well, first of all, there is no “everyone”. Each of the people in each of these planes is coming from somewhere different. Yes, sure, all the people in one plane left from the same airport, but none of them will have started their journeys there. All of the people in one plane will land at the same airport, but none of them will end their journeys there.

This is what we do, we humans. We move.

We’ve always done that. Individually and in groups. Thousands of years ago our ancestors moved out of Africa and started those journeys which took human beings to every part of the Earth. At various times in our history there have been mass migrations caused by violence and/or poverty. We’re in the midst of one of those at the moment and I don’t think we’re handling it very well.

We move individually too. We move because we are curious. We want to see other parts of the world, to taste other foods, to see other sights, to meet other people. We move out of a sense of adventure, or opportunity. We move to make a living, or to live a different kind of life.

It’s just a fact of human life. We move.

See! It’s written in the sky!

pink-trails

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The twelve project – day twelve

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on January 6, 2017| 4 Comments »

twelve-project-day-twelve

Day twelve of the “twelve project”, the final day.

Over the last twelve days, starting on Boxing Day, I’ve uploaded one photo I’ve taken from each of the twelve months of 2016, then created a post about that photo, one per day. Here’s the final image, this one from December.

I think its particularly appropriate to finish this project with a sunset. One of advantages of living here is that there are many, many spectacular sunsets. It’s really not unusual to be so caught by the colours in the sky at sunset that we stop whatever we were doing and either open the windows to get a better look, or dash out into the garden to climb on the wall and gaze at this most wonderful, most extraordinary, most ordinary of natural phenomena.

You might think that we’d get used to it, see a sunset like this and just think, “that’s the sun going down”. But we don’t. When I lived in Stirling I looked out from my second floor apartment to some of Scotland’s mountains, in particular to Ben Ledi. I swear that every single day it looked different to me. I never ever tired of it. It never became so familiar that I stopped noticing it. It’s the same with these sunsets here. I’m sure it would be the same if I lived on the coast and looked out onto the sea. The sea, equally, is different every time you look at it. I think that’s why artists like Cezanne painted the “same view” so many times (Mont Sainte-Victoire in his case) – because he was entranced by how different even a mountain could look every day, or, indeed, every hour of the day.

But there’s more to this image than the colours of the sunset. If you look carefully you can see the Moon and the planet Venus. I adore those early evening planets and stars and I am more aware of the current phase of the moon than I have been at any time in my life. The skies here are pretty dark. Those little lights you see at the bottom right of the photo are from the houses in the next village. So, you can see, there isn’t a lot of “light pollution”. That means that once it gets really dark I can see the Milky Way very, very clearly, and I can see stars I’ve never seen before.

And there’s one more thing in this photo. To the left you can see the branches of the Mulberry Tree which grows in the garden here. I just love that tree. I love following its seasons, from buds in the Spring, to the rich cover of huge leaves which I shelter under in the heat of the Summer, to the abundant mulberry berries which are the strangest looking berries I’ve ever seen, to the pleasure of raking up the leaves in the Autumn, and the striking shape of the bare branches in the Winter.

For all of these reasons and more, this is a great image to end the year with. It’s good to be alive.

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The Twelve project – day ten

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on January 4, 2017| Leave a Comment »

twelve-project-day-ten

Day ten of my “twelve project” brings me to this photo which I took in October last year. It’s a picture of the river Charente as flows through the town of Jarnac, which is about a half hour’s drive from the village where I live.

The river gives its name to this whole region, the “Charente” and it flows to the Atlantic passing through the neighbouring region of the “Charente Maritime” on the way. But the river does more than give its name to this region. It is symbolic of, or maybe more accurately, it creates, the pace of life here. People say it flows steadily and calmly, just as you can see in that photo. I’ve been here just over two years now and I’ve never seen it churned up or terribly disturbed. It might happen sometimes but I’ve never ever seen it. Normally when you walk along its banks or look down from one of the bridges, it looks like this.

I encounter the river most commonly in three different towns. My “home town” of Cognac, half an hour to the East in Jarnac, where this photo is taken, and half an hour West to Saintes. In all three of these towns the Charente looks like this. Yet in each of these towns it is also unique and different, because a river isn’t just the water, it’s the banks and the land around the water.

I think it’s not just that it is calming to watch the water flowing so steadily, it slows you down. It slows you down by capturing your attention so that you stand and gaze at it for a while, or you are drawn to wander along one of the miles and miles of footpaths which follow its course, and as you wander it seems the river is keeping pace with you. It’s wandering too. Or is it the other way around? Do we unconsciously fall into step with the river? It slows you down another way too, because when it flows this way the surface is typically highly reflective. Look at the reflections in this photo. It was the sparkle of the sunlight on the lily leaves which initially caught my attention this day, and it was only just after that that I noticed the reflections of the little clouds floating by. It inspires you to reflect.

I love rivers. I grew up in the town of Stirling in Scotland. The River Forth winds its way towards, through and beyond Stirling like a great ribbon, or maybe a snake. You can see it best from Stirling Castle. Standing at the castle gazing down to the Old Bridge, following the curves of the river with my eyes as I look towards the Ochil Hills is one of my strongest memories. It’s one of those scenes which embeds that place in my identity.

I love the symbolism of rivers, how they are never the same two days in a row. As Heraclitus said “you can never step in the same river twice”, reminding us that every moment changes and every moment is unique. I love how you can’t look at a river without imagining both where it has come from and where it going to. It’s like a story. It is present in front of you now, but it brings into this present moment, the past, from the springs in the hills, through its journey of days or weeks, and it holds within it all the potential to become the river it will become as it flows towards the sea.

I can’t think of rivers without thinking of the incredible water cycle of the Earth. How the rivers flow to the sea, how the wind and the sun lift the water into the air, how it condenses to make clouds which then dissolve into rain on the hills and the mountains to create the streams which flow together to create the rivers again. I like that I can see at least part of that in this photo with both the river and the clouds sharing the same space in my picture.

 

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The Twelve project – day nine

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on January 3, 2017| Leave a Comment »

twelve-project-day-nine

In September, the ninth month, our walks through the surrounding countryside brought a bonus. Fruition.

We have a number of paths to choose from when we go out for a walk, but all of them involve partly wandering through the outskirts of a village or two, partly walking down quiet roads between the villages, and mostly walking through, or around, vineyards.

This year we discovered that one of the paths between the vines leading back down the hill towards our house passes a handful of fig trees and a couple of walnut trees. In September the figs ripen and the walnuts fall to the ground. These are all wild trees growing beside the grassy paths which traverse the vines. And these paths are quiet paths. I can’t remember the last time I passed anyone else walking along them. This happy discovery meant that preparation before setting off on the walk changed a little bit. As well as putting on walking boots I’d put a couple of plastic bags in my pocket.

Every day, if we wanted, we could bring home a harvest of figs like the ones in this photo. Have you ever tasted fresh, wild figs? Delicious! When I was a boy growing up in Scotland the only figs I tasted were in a biscuit called a “fig roll” – that was the kind of biscuit you only ate when you were desperate and there were only kind left in the biscuit tin. I could force one down, but I didn’t really enjoy them. Well, fresh figs are NOTHING like “fig rolls”! Yet another experience which shows me the difference between what is natural and fresh, and what’s been processed and manufactured.

And fresh walnuts? Walnuts used to be my least favourite nut. They often seemed dry and tasteless, but fresh walnuts, picked up from the ground and eaten straight away are moist and delicious. Can you see a couple of them lying on the table in front of the figs?

There was one more treat I could pick up on my September walks – blackberries. The field next to my garden has a hedge running along two of its four borders, and both of those hedges are full of blackberry bushes. I didn’t include them in this photo but they made a great addition to the morning cereal bowl.

So, here’s my gratitude for the ninth month – the fruits and nuts which made my morning walks extra specially delicious!

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The Twelve project – Day Eight

Posted in art, from the dark room, from the living room, from the viewing room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on January 2, 2017| Leave a Comment »

twelve-project-day-eight

Day eight of the Twelve project takes me to August 2016 (I’ve selected one image for each month of 2016 and I’m posting one a day for twelve days). The big thing for me in August was my first ever visit to Spain. The Spanish border is just four hours drive from where I live in France so you can leave first thing in the morning and have lunch in Spain. I’m not going to write about that whole trip and all the places I visited here but I’ve selected this one image because it captures one of the main threads of that story.

This photo is taken in the Alhambra in Grenada. If you’ve ever thought of making a “bucket list” of places you want to visit before you die, then I highly recommend putting the Alhambra on that list. It’s best to buy your tickets in advance (here’s the official site for buying them online) and you have to select both the date and the time you want to visit. There are a limited number of tickets for each half hour period of the day to manage the flow of visitors. Here’s the number one tip – buy tickets for the 0830 entrance – its the first entrance of the day before it starts to get too busy and way too hot.

This one photo reminds me of several of the things I loved best about my visit.

The shapes of the windows and doors. There are so many in the Alhambra and Generalife site. You can wander from room to room as you wish, unless you are on an organised tour in which case you have to go with your chosen crowd. I prefer to explore freely. Every room you enter has beautiful, enticing windows and doors. You’re drawn to them, both to look through to see what’s on the other side, and to pause and admire their shape, design and decoration.

The decoration – there are just the most astonishing patterns in the stonework and the plaster everywhere. They reminded me of the Celtic knots and Pictish patterns on the ancient stones in Scotland but they are different from both of those. One glance at them captures you. They are beautiful at that very first look, but then you’re drawn into them, exploring more of the detail and noticing how the patterns both repeat and evolve. If you look at the walls, archways and frames in this photo you won’t see a single area left unadorned. The whole place is like that. Room after room. But look down too under the double window and to the left of it….see the mosaic pattern of the tiles? That’s the other major design feature here, the tiles. There are so many different tiles creating so many different patterns in so many different combinations…..the diversity, the creativity, the workmanship….breathtaking.

Through the double window here you can glimpse a garden and that’s one of the things I loved best about the Alhambra….the courtyards and gardens, with trees, flowers, bushes, fountains, pools, paths and benches. The fact that the windows and doors are all wide open to the outside spaces breaks down the boundaries between the inner and outer parts of the palace.

Light and shade – the shadows, the reflections, the contrasts of light and shade are as varied as the patterns on the tiles and walls. I don’t know if they designed the place to give you that experience of light and shade but I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else.

I know there are many, many, beautiful places to visit in the world. Too many for any of us to experience in one lifetime. But despite the crowds the Alhambra made a huge impact on me. A lot of my photography is of Nature  but this was one of the places where it was the unique creativity of human beings which was almost overwhelming.

We humans really can create the most beautiful, varied, delightful world when we work together with focus and determination.

Patience and persistence – I’d say these are two of the skills I learn to practice every day living in the Charente – and those are the very two skills needed to create beauty. Slowing down, paying attention to the details and enjoying every single moment to the full.

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The Twelve project – Day seven

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on January 1, 2017| Leave a Comment »

twelve-project-day-seven

Day seven of the twelve images over twelve days, one photo from each of the months in 2016 – Happy New Year to you, by the way (I’m writing this on the 1st of January 2017)

We have a number of buddleia bushes in our garden. Most of them produce these amazing purple flowers (one produces white flowers) which butterflies and hummingbird moths just love. I like to sit close to these bushes where I am surrounded by dozens of these beautiful creatures. The wings of the hummingbird moths are so fast that they emit a deep buzzing sound so you know when they are around, but the butterflies are completely silent.

I can watch them for ages. I love to see them up close like in this photo. You can see them delicately slipping a long proboscis into the centre of each little flower. They are so quick and so accurate. And of course their wings are painted so gloriously.

The butterflies stimulate two trains of thought for me – unpredictability and change.

I’ve tried to see if they work around a bush in any kind of methodical way but I can’t see that they do. Every move seems totally random. They’ll be selecting one little flower after another to explore, then suddenly they fly off into the air, zigzagging around, up, down, left and right, then might settle again on the exact same flower they had just left, check out a different part of the bush or fly off to a neighbouring bush. There’s just no telling where they are going to go next. Their whole movement seems to embody randomness. It’s quite something.

Then if you stop to think about how the butterfly you can see is only one stage in a cycle of astonishingly different forms you realise very quickly why they are the symbols of metamorphosis and change. From egg, to larvae (caterpillar), to pupae (chrysalis) and the beautifully winged creature. A life of the most incredible phases and changes. As far as I know nobody has managed to explain how this cycle of change came about. We change throughout our whole lives, and our bodies change a lot, but not as much as these butterflies. Maybe our most astonishing changes are on the inside – our psyche and and our spirit?

Then when I get thinking about these butterflies and wonder where they go when the buddleia are not in bloom I find that many of them are migratory, traveling between Africa and Europe, cycling back and forth between very specific locations. How do they do that? How do they find their way over hundreds, no thousands, of miles? But wait, it’s even more amazing, because for some of them the journey is long it takes several generations of them to complete it. Now how do they do that? How does the great great grandchild of the butterfly which left my garden find its way back to my garden when its parents and grandparents had never ever lived here?

So, here’s what the butterfly in this photo is the symbol of for me – curiosity and the unfathomable depths of our human lack of knowledge and understanding?

So much to learn, so much to discover, so much to understand.

 

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The Twelve project – Day Six

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, personal growth, philosophy, photography on December 31, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Twelve project Day Six.jpg

Day six of my twelve images, one for each month of 2016, (the twelve project) brings me to June. Look at this – gathered over a few minutes from the potager, our vegetable patch in our garden. I’ve lived in a second floor apartment for many years, but since moving to France I’m living in a house with a garden. The potager isn’t large but in this part of the world a wide range of plants thrive outside without.

Every vegetable is a revelation. Look at the colours! Sadly, what I can’t share with you are the tastes, but believe me the tastes are every bit as intense, varied and impressive as the colours. Have you ever tasted vegetables which were literally minutes ago still growing in the soil a few yards away? They are different. I didn’t realise radishes had a nippy, peppery taste until I ate the ones which were straight out of the ground. Fresh peas are a totally different flavour from frozen or tinned ones. And that rainbow chard you can see on the right hand side there? I’d never come across that before but isn’t it a fantastic colour? Cut into ribbons and added to a stir fry they are a revelation. The rocket leaves are as peppery as the radishes. I hate bland, tasteless rocket leaves. They seem such a pointless thing to eat, but fresh leaves are zingy. I could go on….you don’t see in this photo some of the other great tasting veggies which matured a bit later than June….the tomatoes which grow in abundance in several different varieties, red, yellow, striped…..the courgettes, oh, the yellow courgettes, totally delicious….and later yet, the squashes, pumpkins, butternut squash and so on…..

There’s something else which has happened from experiencing this food. I’ve become more aware of the seasons, looking forward to certain foods at particular times of the year, I mean in the local markets and supermarkets too, not just from the garden.

I’ve begun to strongly favour food which is as fresh, as little travelled and as little processed as possible. In the markets and shops I look at the origin of the food now and opt for the what’s been grown close over what’s come thousands of miles.

I’m enjoying salads and salad vegetables more than I’ve ever done before. When I was growing up in Scotland salads were dull, boring and tasteless. A couple of lettuce leaves, plus a tomato and some cucumber chopped up and maybe some cheddar cheese. Here in France people have a few salad leaves (mainly varieties of lettuce….yes there is more than one kind of lettuce! Who knew?) with a sprinkling of vinegar and oil dressing, almost with every main meal. Just on the side. It’s delicious. In fact, there’s a restaurant in Bordeaux, “L’Entrecôte”, which has no menu but serves everyone salad leaves with their own special dressing and walnuts sprinkled through them as a starter, and steak and chips as the main to everyone. You can’t reserve a table and there is a queue stretching along the pavement outside every lunchtime and dinnertime seven days a week.

I’m enjoying a simpler level of food preparation and a larger range of foods than I’ve ever done. When the food is fresh and locally produced it tastes so good it doesn’t need much preparation.

And, here’s the final thing. I’m eating most of my meals outside for about four or five months of the year. Both in the garden, and when out and about.

I moved to France from Scotland to savour a different lifestyle. Climate and food are two of the biggest influences on that lifestyle. I think this photo from June captures some of that.

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The Twelve project – Day Five

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on December 30, 2016| Leave a Comment »

twelve-project-day-five

The photograph I selected for Day Four of the Twelve project reminded me of one of the days when colour and light grabbed my attention. Day Five’s photograph was taken the day that a noise I’d never heard before made me stop what I was doing and open the front door to find out what was on earth was happening.

The noise started suddenly and seemed to completely fill the world. It was a clattering, hammering, thundering noise, like the heaviest of heavy rain but with a harder quality to it. When I opened the door I saw chunks of ice falling everywhere. When it hit the garden table and chairs it played them like a set of drums. When it hit the grass it bounced back up a couple of feet before landing back down again – the grass was covered with white pieces, not like snow, not like frost, but as if a giant bucket of white marbles had been poured out from the sky. I could here a very strange noise which was the sound of the hail tearing through the leaves of the mulberry tree and all the other plants in the garden. Leaves, and bits of leaves, were flying everywhere. I held out my hand and was immediately stung by hailstones.

There was nothing to do but wait till it passed. Of course I grabbed my camera and took some video clips to record both what I could see and what I could hear. It lasted about fifteen minutes, then it stopped, as suddenly as it began. I wandered out and started to look more closely at the ice particles.

Every single one of them was different.

There were ragged, irregular ones, round ones, opaque ones, transparent ones, some which looked like small sculptures and they were a huge range of different sizes. I photographed many of them.

This one particularly caught my attention because it looked for all the world like an eyeball, which was spooky to say the least.

I look again at these photographs and I’m astonished at the diversity. I read many times that no two snowflakes are identical but to see that played out around my feet in these ice particles made that fact all the more powerfully real.

Water. It’s just water. How incredible that it can form into what appears to be an infinitely large range of shapes and sizes.

And what power! I wrecked havoc in the vineyards around here. In a neighbouring village the storm lasted twice as long as here – half an hour – and in that time it destroyed the entire year’s vines.

 

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