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Archive for the ‘from the living room’ Category

Spiralling to clarity

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, photography on April 14, 2021| 3 Comments »

I love spirals. I find them quite captivating. My attention is caught by them and I’m drawn close to contemplate them. I’m not sure what it is that makes them just so beautiful, but, to me, they are amongst the most beautiful shapes in the universe. You can see them around you in many places of course….in plants, especially climbers which use this method of finding places to hook onto, then pulling tight to hoist themselves upwards. But also in ferns, and in plants which throw out creepers and tendrils which stress across the ground. We humans often create spirals in our art. Maybe it’s because I’m Scot, because like most Scots I’ve been steeped in the traditional Celtic and Pictish complex knots, three armed spiral shapes which we call the triskele, and intertwined ribbons which swirl around each other. However, I suspect it’s not just those of us with Celtic backgrounds who like spirals.

One of the things I like best about the spiral is that it seems to me that a person’s life story often has that sort of trajectory. There are issues, problems, difficulties which we meet, attempt to address, or run away from, which just keep spiralling back again and again. In fact, human development too seems to have a spiral path.

I don’t think time flows in a straight line. It loops, and it spins, slows down, pauses, runs forward. The past and the future both have their part to play in my ability to make sense of the present. They don’t exist in three separate, sequential boxes, but rather, they loop, cycle and spiral together to create the intricate patterns of the tapestry of a life.

There’s a special thing about this photo. You have to look a bit more closely to see it. Right in the middle of the main spiral in this photo you can see the world clearly – it’s as if you are looking through a lens.

Isn’t that magical?

It reminds me that if I really do want to see the world clearly, then the lens of the spiral can be a pretty good way to do that. What do you see more clearly about your life, when you consider it through the lens of a spiral?

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Human genius

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography on April 13, 2021| Leave a Comment »

“Emerveillement” is one of my most favourite French words. It means wonder, amazement, marvel…..words like that. You get the idea? I am a “wonderer” – Curiosity may be one of my core features. I’m sure that helped me to be a good doctor. I found every single patient fascinating. Monday mornings for me were an opportunity to begin a new week of meeting new patients, hearing their stories, working with them to make sense of their illness and to understand both who they were and what they were experiencing.

But my sense of curiosity, of wonder, of “emerveillement” was never focused solely on human beings. Every day my mind fills with questions, I find myself astonished by something I see, hear, or read. New discoveries delight me. New knowledge thrills me. And perhaps nothing pleases me more than achieving a better understanding of something.

This photo is one I took during several visits I’ve made to Segovia over the last few years. Surely it’s Segovia’s most impressive feature! It’s an enormous aqueduct built by the Romans (yes, the Romans!) to bring water from the countryside into the heart of the town.

I mean, just look at it! Isn’t it astonishing? What a conception! What a feat of engineering! What a vast labour, heaving those stones, cutting them to the right size, putting them into the correct positions! The aqueduct didn’t have a pump. As far as I know, Romans didn’t have pumps…..well not machine ones anyway. No, instead they built this impressive structure so that water would flow continuously downhill along the length of the high channel. Seriously impressive! Human genius!

But there’s more….because not only is it an incredible solution to the problem of how to get clean water to the population in the town, but just look at it…..it’s beautiful. It’s a work of art.
Nowadays we would be more likely to cut a trench, lay some pipes and then cover them up. Not the Romans. They created a thing of beauty which was also a solution.

I can’t help but think we’ve gone too far down the road of “utilitarianism”, “short term thinking” and “profit taking” these days. How many of the water supply mechanisms made in the last century will still be functioning and looking beautiful two thousand years later.

The human genius is not just in finding solutions. It’s in creating beauty, and in seeing far enough forwards to make things which can last. We need a bit more of that.

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Perspectives, separate and shared

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on April 12, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This is one of the most unusual windows I’ve ever seen. I spotted it during a trip to Segovia, Spain a few years ago.
Have you ever looked through a window which has really old glass in it? The glass has structure and shape. It often has twists, curls or waves in it, so that whatever you are looking at through the window is completely changed by the window itself.


We are used to having factory produced smooth, “flawless” glass in our windows. It’s so unobtrusive that we don’t even really notice it at all. In fact, some places put red discs, or notices on the glass to stop people from trying to walk through it. But I like that older, hand-fashioned glass. Those patterns and shapes don’t seem like flaws to me, and I rather enjoy seeing the results of the creative fusion of whatever is on the other side of the glass, the glass itself, and my own act of observation. It reminds me just how actively creative perception is. Other wise I tend to think of it like a camera lens with the image of the “outside” cast precisely onto the screen after flipping upside down twice, once as it goes through the lens, then a second time, to “correct” it, as it passes through a prism. See, even that apparently more direct way of seeing, isn’t as direct as we first think, is it?

As well as reminding me of the active creative processes involved in perception, because it makes me more aware of myself as the viewing “subject”, I’m also reminded of how every one of us experiences the universe from our own unique perspective.

This particular window magnifies that idea for me. You could imagine that each of these circles is a unique lens through which a different person sees and experiences the world. Each one a bit different from the others. But, actually, all of the circles are connected……you see those connecting lines in the glass?

Because that’s a bit like how it is for us, isn’t it?

I view the world from this place of a “self”, whatever that is, this particular place which I cannot share with any other living being. No two of have identical experiences of what we perceive. We bring our unique memories, values, beliefs and imaginings to bear on it all. But that doesn’t mean we are completely separate looking at totally different worlds. We share a lot….we share a lot of atoms and molecules, we share time and space, we share stories, beliefs and traditions…..whatever we see and experience is not entirely disconnected from what others see, experience and feel, after all.

It’s a tricky one, that. It’s a constant dynamic balance, an integration of what’s different and what’s shared. Pretty amazing, huh?

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Opening up

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science on April 11, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I know that it is still too early for many of you to feel that we’ve reached a time of opening up. Here in France we are into yet another “confinement” and can only travel up to 10 km from home and there’s a curfew every night. But this is Spring here in the Charente and as I look around my garden I see “opening up” everywhere I look.
The trees and flowers have buds starting to unfurl. I see the green protective covers begin to peel back and show me hints of the glorious colours of the petals and blossoms which are about to emerge.


Life doesn’t progress along neat straight lines. It’s not “linear”, and it’s not exact. In fact, Life is so diverse that the changes around me occur at different rates all the time. The plants go through their various stages of seasonal cycles in their own time. The plum tree blossom has gone now, the cherry tree blossom is carpeting the grass every time there is a breeze, but the mulberry tree is only showing its first hints of the leaves to come. The Spring daffodils and tulips are all but past however the irises, the poppies and the tree paeonies are only about to reveal their beautiful flowers.


Wherever you live in the world there will be seasonal changes going on around you which are a bit different from the ones I see around me. Life is varied and diverse, and whilst all Life shares a tendency to “becoming” over “being”, the evidence is always contextual. It all depends on the circumstances and the local environment.
I think we humans are like this too. Yes, you can see broad, sweeping life stages in every individual, from birth to childhood, through adulthood and into mature, old age. But we don’t all develop at the same rate or in the same way. And we don’t progress mechanically as if we are working our way square by square around a board game.
We leap forward, retreat, hit setbacks, meet challenges, stumble across opportunities. We build support and networks of relationships. We connect, and we disconnect. There really are an infinity of paths and an infinite diversity of life stories. No two of us are identical.

But this “opening up” that I see in today’s image, is an essential part of being human. We don’t grow if we don’t open up.

For the second half of my career I worked in a specialist centre for people with chronic illnesses. When someone has suffered for a long time they are often in a state of closing down, of separating themselves out from the world, and of building more walls in the hope of some security and safety. They are often exhausted and lack the ability to take even small steps forward. For all those reasons, our hospital was built around a garden which was like a small, abundant, natural, cloister, where we could wander, sit, wonder and talk together……the patients and the staff. Time and time again we’d see how this enabled people to re-connect, to break out from the closed, separated, fearful places they had retreated into, and begin to notice the plants, the seasons, the birds, the fox and the squirrels, to begin to be heard, to begin to feel cared for.

This process of healing required a coming together of “opening up”. The opening of the hearts and minds of the carers, who paid attention, and listened without judgement. And the opening of the hearts and minds of the patients who could begin to feel safe, to feel hope, and begin to get in touch with Life’s flow of energy again.
Wherever we are in life, whatever stage we have reached, we all need to open up in order to grow. We need to find the right circumstances, the fertile ground, the caring, loving connections between ourselves and the rest of this world……other people, other creatures, “Gaia”, herself…..in order to flourish, in order to become fully what we can become.

Even in the midst of these difficult times if you look around you will see signs of opening up…..in hearts, minds, bodies…..in communities, relationships, in plants and other creatures.
I think it helps to look out for those signs of opening up. It gives us hope and courage, and without those, then what?

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Resilience and identity

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography, science on April 10, 2021| Leave a Comment »


I think this is one of the most remarkable trees I ever saw. I don’t know what the story is here. I don’t know if the original trunk was damaged, became diseased, or was deliberately cut down by some people. But what you can see here is the remaining stump of the tree, surrounded by new growth on all sides. So it’s like a ring of trees around the original one. I can’t prove it but I bet these are not separate trees at all. As best I understand what happens in situations like this, all of this growth stems from the one plant. It is, in fact, one tree, with several trunks.
This image sparks off two trains of thought for me.

The first is about resilience. Living organisms have astonishing powers of resilience. Of course, they aren’t immortal, but when you do see recovery the shape and direction it takes can be pretty surprising. I saw that many times with patients. There were always those who didn’t just “become well again”, but who were so changed by the experience of their illness, that as they healed, they grew in completely different directions to the ones they had taken up to becoming sick. A few months, or years, further one, they were truly transformed. The impact of the illness might still show in some ways, but the changes in their personalities, choices, behaviours, ways of thinking and living, were so profound that it was hard to see they were, in fact, “the same person”.


The second is about identity. That phrase, “the same person”, is always one which gets me wondering about identity. I read an article online this morning about the Celts. It described the controversy which exists between academics about just how the Celts were, who they were, where they lived and where they came from. What amazed me about that piece was just how widespread the “Celtic” peoples appear to have been in the past, and whilst there is debate about whether the Western Celts moved East, or vice versa, and whether or not, the people we call “Celts” were all “really Celts” is something I find much less interesting. Rather than falling down the rabbit hole of identity and its origins, I found myself wishing again that people would accept how inter-related we all are….all we humans. These attempts to divide us up into neat categories and then challenge each other on whether or not we qualify to be a member are both harmful and sad.

Yes, it might be interesting to trace some of the threads which have intertwined to weave our individual tapestries of self, but can we give up on all this unhelpful categorisation and attempts to separate and divide? Can we see instead that every one of us has connections, past, present and future, which wind their way across all such artificial, imaginary boundaries, which we call “categories”?

Our connections, what we share now, what our ancestors shared before, what we will share in our common future, all matter so much more than all this putting everything and everyone into separate, labelled boxes.
After all every one of us is changing every moment of every day, and with enough time passing, those changes can take on the significance of transformations.

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The living universe of bonds

Posted in books, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on April 9, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Every connection we make is a bond. Every relationship we have involves an interaction between ourselves and the other which changes both parties in the process.
In Saint Exupery’s “The Little Prince” he describes two key relationships, one which the Prince has with a rose, and one with a fox. In both cases he makes the point that creating the relationship changes how they see each other. In that process they become unique to each other, they start to care about each other, and, in fact, they become responsible for each other.


Lynne McTaggart writes in her book, “The Bond”

An entirely new scientific story is emerging that challenges many of our Newtonian and Darwinian assumptions, including our most basic premise: the sense of things as separate entities in competition for survival. The latest evidence from quantum physics offers the extraordinary possibility that all of life exists in a dynamic relationship of co-operation.
All matter exists in a vast quantum web of connection, and a living thing at its most elemental is an energy system involved in a constant transfer of information with its environment.
The world essentially operates, not through the activity of individual things, but in the connection between them – in a sense, in the space between things.

We often have the tendency to think of a bond as a limitation, even something which imprisons us, as if each bond is a chain. But, I prefer to think of bonds as relationships, as connections which, at their best, are “integrative” – that is – mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts. That, after all, is how the body works. Every single cell, every organ, every tissue and every system within the body exists in constant interaction with all the others. It functions because the basis of all these relationships is the creation of mutually beneficial bonds. And as I often think, what happens inside the body, happens outside the body. In other words, what we come to understand about the nature of reality by coming to understand ourselves helps us to understand the entirety of reality.

Carlo Rovelli, the nuclear physicist, advocates a relational understanding of the universe. He says

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not stones.

Once we shift our awareness away from parts and separate entities towards relationships, connections, experiences and events, we find a whole other set of values develop.

Try it for yourself and see how it seems to you.

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We are not machines

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I took this photo in a steampunk themed cafe in Capetown a few years ago. There’s no doubting this is a work of art. There is a beauty in technology which we can admire in both some of the latest devices and machines we have available to us, and there’s also a certain beauty in old technologies, which are the source material for these steampunk creations.

But we humans have become almost hypnotised by the machine model of reality. Everywhere we go we see machines. We use the concepts of components, parts, processes with inputs and predictable outputs everywhere. The human body is often thought of as an elaborate, perhaps complicated, machine. But it isn’t.
If there is one big modern myth I’d like to counter it’s the myth of the machine. Life is NOT machine-like. Human beings are not like machines….no not even computers! Animals and plants are not like machines. Reality, in fact, is not machine-like.

Why not?
Because reality, Nature and Life are not assemblages of components. We are not made up of discrete parts which can just be replaced.

Reality, Nature and Life are non-linear and massively interconnected. Nothing exists in isolation and every movement, every behaviour, every birth, life and death makes changes which ripple through the entire world. Life is dynamic, never fixed. Life is emergent….it changes in ways which cannot be predicted at the individual level. Life is adaptive, constantly detecting and responding to changes in the environment and in the vast networks of relationships.

Reality, Nature and Life are inter-dependent. All that exists is implicated in the co-creation of all that exists.
Some scientists have defined life as possessing a quality of “auto-poiesis” – self-making capacity – all living creatures grow, mature, reproduce, replace cells, repair damage throughout their entire lives.
Others define life as having “self-moving capacity” – a stone can’t move itself, but a bacterium can, a bird can, a human can.

In fact, it’s still pretty amazing to look at Biology textbooks, check the index and see if you can find a definition of Life. Let me know if you find any! Similarly, textbooks of Medicine don’t seem to have even index entries, let alone whole chapters, about “health” – it isn’t even defined!

There are many other arguments to consider which make the case for just how UNLIKE machines reality, Nature and Life are. So, why do we persist? Thinking we can deal with reality as if it is a giant machine. Why do we persist in giving such attention to short term thinking and reductionist science? Because the longer the time scale, the less and less machine-like, reality appears.

In the last fifty years or so there have been great advances in our understanding of networks, of systems, and of “complex adaptive systems” in particular. We are waking up to the inter-dependent nature of this little planet we all share. My hope is that these insights will shift the balance and the machine-like model will be put back in the box where it deserves to be – the box marked “machine”. Let’s not put anything else in there!

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Time’s spirals

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science, writing on April 7, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Here they come again….the leaves on the mulberry tree.
I have a mulberry tree in my garden. I provides the most amazing shade on hot summer days and its abundance of mulberries feeds many birds, as well as leaving more than enough for us to make crumbles etc. In the autumn it sheds all its leaves and I spend many days raking up the dead the leaves to take to the recycling centre. I actually really enjoy that task. It’s kind of a meditation and the variety of colours, shapes and sizes of the fallen leaves continues to astonish me. Then in the winter time the tree stands bare. It’s grown a lot over the six and bit years we’ve been here and I like to think it thrives because I pay it so much attention!

In the Spring, buds appear, then a few days later, the first leaves…..small, curled and bright at first, then rapidly unfurling and stretching out to greet the Sun. Here are some of the first ones which have appeared over the last couple of days.

The cyclical nature of the seasons is right here in front of my face. I see it every time I look out the window or step out of the front door.

When you live with this it is absolutely clear that time is not a straight line….it’s not “linear”……but, rather, time spirals. It turns around, loops, and eternally returns. There really are no straight lines in Nature.

Thinking about this reminded me of T S Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

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Synchronicity and the comin’ storm

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the music room, from the viewing room, life, music, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on April 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I know, I know, you’re thinking, “didn’t I see that photograph yesterday?” Well, you did. And if you didn’t you can see it now if you scroll down to yesterday’s post “The edge of the Storm”.

I don’t know how this universe works, but one thing I do know is that synchronicities occur which are both attention-grabbing, and have the potential to take our understanding to a whole other level.

Let me start further back…….back in the 1960s when I was a child. One year we took a family holiday to the Isle of Man. We took the ferry from Scotland, a thrill in its own right, and as we sailed through the Bay of Ramsay, if my memory serves me well, we passed a boat with the name “Radio Caroline” emblazoned on the side. Radio Caroline was a “pirate radio station”. Which kids don’t want to be pirates? I loved Radio Caroline. I loved the fact that it was broadcasting outwith the control of the British state. Pirate radio stations were ones which didn’t have approved licences to broadcast, and even at that age I wasn’t fond of Establishment controls which tried to tell us we could only listen to the BBC. So it was a thrill to listen to Radio Caroline. You felt as if you were part of some underground movement. But as a radio station they just played fabulous music. I discovered several artists on Caroline who I don’t think I’d ever have found on mainstream radio.


Fast forward to last year…….I got a pair of pro AirPods for my birthday, and I just loved/love the quality of sound which they deliver. I found an app, called “sTREAMs” which made it easy to find radio stations which made full use of the surround sound capabilities of the pods. Guess what I found there? Radio Caroline! Hey, it’s still there! Of course, not a pirate station any more, and now with internet radio, is there any such thing as pirate radio any more? What a joy! But, a little browsing on the app took me to another station I’d never heard of before….Radio Paradise. Well, I’ve been listening to Radio Paradise A LOT in recent weeks. There are no ads, no “stuffing”, just one good, high quality, track after another. It delivers old favourites to me, so I know “I’m on their wavelength”, but it also serves up lots of artists I know nothing about. It’s like opening a door to a new treasure room of delights! I love it!
Well, yesterday I used the photo of the storm, and I wrote the post “The Edge of the Storm”, contemplating about our reactions to looming storms, our ways of both reacting to, and responding to, threats. Then in the afternoon, I’m sitting out in the sunshine and I’m listening to Radio Paradise and on comes this song……..”Storm comin’ “ by the Wailin’ Jennys. I’d never heard this song before and I’d never heard of the band either but I was hooked! What a great song……..here’s a link to the youtube video so you can hear it.

Ok, that was surprise enough, and counts as a synchronicity for me, because how likely is it that I’d write a post about a storm coming in the morning, and here this song, apparently, “just by chance”, on a radio station in the afternoon? But listen to the lyrics. This isn’t a song about the fight/flight/freeze reactions I wrote about in the morning. It’s a song which says “don’t run for cover” – “let whatever is coming rain down on you” – in other words, have courage, and don’t hide, but go with the flow, lean into it, and continue to be present. Well, that’s a whole other level of response from the ones I wrote about in the morning, so listening to this deepened and broadened my understanding of how we might respond to the challenges and stresses which come our way.

Maybe in acute situations, freeze/flee/fright might be just what we need, but I suspect in the longer term we need to face whatever comes our way, allow ourselves to be present with it, and live the experience. There’s a teaching about acceptance in here. There’s a teaching about adaptation. There’s a teaching about immersing yourself in the full flow of LIFE.

Isn’t synchronicity wonderful?

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Edge of the storm

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on April 5, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I took this photo five years ago, but I still find it one of the most dramatic images of a storm that I’ve ever taken. You can see the leading edge of the storm system making its way from the West, heading over the vineyards to where I live.

Of course, if you weren’t actually there you might think this is the back edge of the storm system which has passed over and is now receding. You’ll have to take it from me that that’s not what was happening.

What do we do when we see a storm coming? Brace ourselves? Batten down the hatches? Run away? Or just do nothing apart from feeling afraid?

I don’t mean only literally in the face of a weather event……I mean what do we do when we think we see the signs of a big challenge or problem looming over the horizon?

Our body’s nervous system sets off three possible responsible responses to threat – you’ve probably heard of the “fight or flight” response – well, in addition, there’s a “freeze” response. I always remember watching the news footage of the bombing of the Boston marathon. After the blast the first thing you hear is silence and then quickly after that screaming and shouting as people run in all directions. That first silence really grabbed me. That’s the freeze response. Part of our defence system (the parasympathetic nervous system) kicks in at that moment and basically shuts down a lot of activity so we can really pay attention, really become aware, then after that the adrenaline/sympathetic nervous system response is activated and we are set to fight or flee.

Of course our range of reactions and behaviours is incredibly varied and individual, but we all share these basic reactions as the information and energy flows through us.

What I’ve just described there is the “acute” response. It’s short term, time limited, often very brief and kicks in when there is a clear and imminent danger. But on a day to day basis our whole system responds to our thoughts, to the words and behaviours of others, and to both memories and imaginings with aspects of these systems playing a part in creating “chronic stress”. That chronic stress is pretty damaging, impairing our immune systems, creating chronic inflammation in our bodies, and undermining our mental well-being.

What can we do about it?

I always start with awareness. When I worked as a doctor, usually my first priority was to understand – to figure out what was going on, to make a diagnosis, to assess the situation. That usually involved an element of analysis, but you can’t analyse anything until you are aware of it, so the first response is to be present. In becoming present, you become aware. In fact, being present is a powerful therapeutic behaviour. It’s good for the patient and it’s good for the doctor, too.

I think the next step involves responding with intention. It’s one thing to become aware, and even to figure out what’s happening, but it doesn’t amount to much without an intention which shapes your next thoughts, ideas and behaviours. In Medicine, that intention is to care. If you care, if you give a damn, if you activate love and kindness, then the healing responses will fall into place.

I reckon it’s the same with life. I think a good place to start is with awareness and intention. If we aren’t present, if we aren’t aware, we’re on autopilot, “zombie” mode, and we are open to the manipulation of others, and to becoming stuck in habits created by rumination and pain. But if we do wake up, we have a chance to recognise what’s happening, to stand back a little, by taking a pause, or a few deep breaths, and then make a choice…..make a choice formed by our intentions.

What if our intentions are kindness, love, and understanding? What if our intentions are to feel joy, wonder, and connection? What if our intentions are to build “mutually beneficial bonds”? What if our intentions are what the French call “bienveillance”…….well-meaning, well-wishing?

What do you think the experience of seeing a looming storm would be like then?

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