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Archive for the ‘from the living room’ Category

A handful of beans

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, personal growth, photography, science on November 14, 2020| 6 Comments »

Have you ever grown any beans? You know there’s something really wonderful about choosing different kinds of beans from a seed supplier, planting them, watching the little green plants poke up through the earth, then following their incredible climb all the way up to the top of a wall, or a fence, then seeing the long skinny pods form and hang down. Breaking open the dry pods to scoop out the beans is such a thrill.

Here are a few beans from just two pods. First of all, don’t you think they are beautiful? They are like tiny works of art. Second, isn’t it incredible that every single one of them is different? The particulars of the patterns on each bean are unique. Is this always the case? I don’t know. But it kind of looks like each bean is as unique as a fingerprint. Have you ever tried to find even two completely identical beans which are patterned like this? I mean, imagine, this level of uniqueness and diversity in beans! How much more amazing are the depths of uniqueness and diversity in human beings (or human beans if you like 😉 )

Thirdly, do you know that it is impossible to tell which of these beans is alive? There isn’t a single scientific test which can correctly tell if a particular seed is alive or dead. There is no way to know that this one will germinate and grow, but that one will just decompose. There are some statistical methods which can attach a figure suggesting the chances of a certain portion of seeds in a batch being “viable”, but no way to tell for each single, unique seed. Don’t you think that’s astonishing?

But I guess Life and Death have always astonished me. I’ve been present at the births of many children, and I’ve been present at the deaths of many people too. But that first breath a baby takes, and that last breath a dying man or woman takes, astonish me every time. Both these events seem mysterious to me. When does life begin? And when does it end? You’d think those would be simple questions, but they are not.

Then what about levels of consciousness? After all, aren’t many of these beans sort of sleeping, just waiting to wake up and start to grow when the time, the place and the conditions are right? How do we humans change consciousness every night and every morning? How do we slip from being awake to being asleep? And how do we wake up when we do?

I expect a lot of people are finding they don’t need their alarms to wake them up in the mornings any more, during these periods of lockdown. When our daily routines have been put on hold, for many of us, our patterns of sleeping and waking have changed too. Maybe for you, you are waking now without an alarm? What wakes you, and when? Sure, sometimes it’s a noise, isn’t it? Even though we are sound asleep, we are still aware of our environment somehow. I remember waking one summer morning in an apartment we rented in Carcassonne. As I woke I heard a nearby church bell ringing the hour. I counted, “seven, eight, nine”, then the bells stopped. I checked my phone and, yes, it was nine o’clock. How did I do that? How did I wake up thinking “seven, eight, nine”? When did I think “one, two, three, four, five, six”? I had absolutely no awareness of the first six bells. Well, not absolutely no awareness of course, but no conscious awareness and no accessible memory of them. I find that astonishing.

So these are still quite miraculous to me – these moments of coming to life, these moments of dying, these moments of falling asleep and those of waking.

Maybe that’s ok. Maybe that just keeps me curious. And maybe it actually adds some quality to everyday life to be aware of the mysterious, the unexplained, and the wonderful.

Hey, isn’t it amazing where a handful of beans can take your mind? How did that happen?

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Busy busy

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on November 13, 2020| Leave a Comment »

The sky above where I live often used to look like this.

It doesn’t any more.

It hasn’t looked like this since March, and, frankly, it feels like it might never look like this again.

I guess you’d call this a busy sky, and even though trains and cars and boats don’t leave visible trails like these, the same phenomenon must be repeating itself everywhere. We humans are just not moving around the planet this year in anything like the numbers of the previous few years. For obvious reasons of course – COVID!

Here in France we are in “Confinement” 2.0 – totally locked down with only essential shops and services open, the need to print out an “attestation” if you go out at all – that’s a sort of permission slip where you have to say what you are going out for (there are only a limited number of legitimate excuses), and if you’re going out for exercise you can only be out for a maximum of an hour and not further than one kilometre from home.

Well, I’m retired, so I don’t commute any more – which is one of THE biggest differences in my life. But many people are either now working from home, or have been laid off, temporarily hopefully, but many businesses are folding up and those jobs will be gone for good. I have travelled quite a lot since I retired – mainly by car, with trips to explore different parts of France and Spain – but some flights back to Scotland to see family and had plans to attend a conference in Toronto last week but that was cancelled months ago.

On the plus side I suppose it’s good for the planet that there are less planes flying here and there, and several people I’ve spoken to find the opportunities to work from home at least part of the time a real bonus. I’m not sure many people regret not having to spend so many hours commuting each week.

But the main thing I thought about when I looked at this photo today was how this pandemic is doing more than give many of us an opportunity to reassess how we are living our lives….it’s forcing us to. By applying the brakes to what we came to know as normal we have the time and space now to ask “how do I really want to live?” – and/or “how can I live now in the light of this 2020 year of pandemic?

What about you?

How is commuting less and travelling less affecting your life? And, once this pandemic is over, do you think you’ll choose to re-establish those old patterns if you can? Or have your values and priorities changed now?

Have you already started to live differently?

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Let’s not be shy about love

Posted in creativity, education, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on November 12, 2020| Leave a Comment »

How much do you think love motivates you to do what you do, to say what you say, to think what you think?

Are there serious arguments against making love our priority, our touchstone, our foundation, our core?

What couldn’t be improved by bringing a loving attitude to bear?

I think good health care requires love….love in the form of caring about, caring for, and wanting the best for, every patient. Love in the form of non-judgemental listening and attending. Love in the form of respect for the unique individual. Love which values personal relationships above techniques, tools and processes.

I think good education requires love…..love for children, love for knowledge, love for wisdom, love for growth, development and maturity. Actually, education isn’t something we should restrict to children, we could all do with learning all our lives. We could all benefit from life long education based on loving each person and wanting to try to help them realise their potentials.

I think good work requires love….love for craft, for skill, for quality, for service to our fellow workers, our families and our communities.

So how about a politics of love and an economics of love ….. love of Nature, of Planet Earth, of our fellow creatures, and of other people? What would that look like?

Maybe it’s time for us to be less shy about love. Maybe it’s time for us to speak up and say it’s important. More than important….essential.

Can we learn from this pandemic and move towards a society based more on creativity and care, than the present model which is based on consumption and competition? Can we move towards a society based more on qualities than on quantities, challenging the current dominance of figures, statistics and “data”, and insisting instead on loving, caring relationships, on experiences, on individual uniqueness, and on diversity?

I’d like to see that. How about you?

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Dissolving the boundaries

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, science on November 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I love to be able to look over the vines and see the rain falling in the distance. Where I’m standing it’s dry. No raindrops keep falling on my head. But across there towards the horizon I can see where the rain is falling….and where it isn’t falling.

It looks like I can see the edges of the rain. The rain is appearing as sheets, veils, or fingers reaching all the way down from the clouds to the ground. You can see it too, can’t you? You can tell that some parts of the land are getting wet, and that some aren’t.

In other words it appears that we can see the boundaries of the rain – it’s reach, not just vertically from cloud to soil, but horizontally, over a certain distance, left to right, or west to east, or whatever. If we see these boundaries so clearly, then surely, we could measure them. I could find out exactly the height, the breadth and the depth of that rain over there.

The thing is, as best I know, I can only do that approximately, and only if I stay at a sufficient distance from the rain. Because the closer I get, the harder it is to see exactly where the rain is falling, and where it isn’t falling. If I did do a measurement then something interesting happens. I have the impression of exactness. I have the impression that I have a more accurate, more complete knowledge.

But that’s a delusion.

We can prove it’s a delusion just by actually standing in the rain. When we are being rained on, it’s pretty impossible to know if we are in the middle of it, at the beginning of it, or nearing its far edge. It’s a lot easier to see a shadow approaching or receding, than it is to see the rain. That’s at least in part due to the fact that the rain has no hard edges. Those clear boundaries we can see in the distant rain, disappear the closer we get. By the time we step into the rain, the boundaries dissolve. We can no longer see where the rain begins and where it ends.

Yes, I know, there are two exceptions to that……if we look far enough away through the rain we can sometimes see outside of it to land where the rain isn’t falling. That can give us an idea of the rain passing through, knowing that in a short time, it will be gone again. And the other exception is sometimes rain falls in intense highly localised bursts. I’ve been able to see the rain pouring down just outside my garden while I stand, perfectly dry, inside the garden. But that’s rare. And even then, the exact boundaries are far from clear as I approach them.

What this image and these thoughts inspire in me is wonder……wondering about how everything is connected, and how it only looks separate if we don’t look closely enough. The closer we look the more the boundaries dissolve, the more connections and gradations we see.

It also inspires me to think about the difference between observing an object and experiencing an event. I can see the rain in the distance as “something”, maybe even something I could measure. Certainly something with particular dimensions. I see it as an object. But when I stand in the rain I experience it as an event. I don’t see it as an object. I can’t measure it. I can just live it.

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You are not a machine

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on November 10, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is a machine. It is manufactured by human beings. It has a number of solid, pretty unchanging parts (ok, they all gradually wear out with use), which are assembled into fixed relationships with each other by other parts…. nuts, bolts, springs, cogs and hinges.

These parts don’t grow. They don’t develop or mature. They don’t develop new ways of connecting to each other and they don’t change their function. Their relationships are linear. A always leads to B.

This machine looks a bit complicated but everything can be taken to pieces and understood. We can learn how it works and predict how it is going to work. It does what it was designed to do and if it stops doing that we can find the parts which are “defective” and replace them with new parts.

Living creatures are not like this. Human beings are not like this. We are not manufactured by human beings. Every cell, every tissue, every organ within the body changes all the time. The massive network of inter-connected feedback loops create relationships in the human body between cells, tissues and organs. These relationships are non-linear. A influences B in the presence C, D, and a host of others, whilst B, in turn influences A. These relationships are not fixed. They are not predictable.

Living creatures, like human beings, are “Complex” not “Complicated”. You can’t take them to pieces and understand the whole.

We are all “complex adaptive systems”, constantly bathed in flows of molecules, energies and information, which we transform within ourselves before contributing to their onward flow into others.

Machines can exist in isolation. Human beings cannot. We live only because we are embedded in the complex biosphere of Nature, dependent on the lives of a myriad of other forms of life, dependent on our relationships with others.

Machines are not unique. You can produce millions of identical machines. Human beings are unique. There has never been “YOU” before in the whole history of the universe, and there will never by “YOU” again, once you die.

The truth is every one of us is special, and every one of us deserves to be treated as unique. Every one of us deserves to be understood within our individual web of connections, relationships and life story.

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Natural connections

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science on November 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Pumpkins are one of the most prolific and successful plants in my garden. They appear even where I haven’t seeded them (they must be in the soil now after five years of planting) and once they start to grow they spread across the entire vegetable patch reaching out towards every border.

On their way around and over the other plants they send out these tendrils which catch on to whatever they can touch. The tendrils then spiral intensely creating these powerful bonds which the plant uses to anchor itself and pull itself up on the surrounding plants, fences, walls and so on.

I think these bright green coils are astonishing. I’m amazed by them. How does the plant know when it’s touched something else….another plant, a part of the fence, or whatever, and then how does it move its tendrils to wrap around whatever it has connected to, and then how does it “wind itself up” like this?

Plants don’t have brains. We know that. But they sure have the ability to sense – they can sense touch, they can respond to light, to gravity, and as far as I know can seek out the nutrients they need. They can unfold their leaves to gather up the Sun’s energy to transform it into sugars and structures. They can fold their leaves up to protect the plant from too much sun. We tend to think of plants are creatures which stay put, but I can tell you pumpkin plants to anything but stay put!

I think we under-rate the plant world. It is astonishingly diverse, incredibly resilient and is far more sentient than we realise. Plants have the ability to move much more than we realise because we don’t see them walk or run anywhere, and we know they don’t have muscles or limbs. But, goodness, they are not still. They reach out, spread, grow and seek what they need to survive and thrive.

I wonder how they communicate with each other? I wonder if the pumpkin here in this photo communicates with the tomato plant it has found and fastened itself onto? I don’t reckon they “think” or “speak” like we do, but they surely make connections, exchange energy, chemicals and information, and doesn’t that amount to a vast amount of communication?

Seeking, connecting, communicating, pulling together……..I guess we’re at our best when we do that too, aren’t we?

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In the pink

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography, psychology on November 8, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Sometimes the colours in the sky and those in the garden just match so beautifully it’s breath-taking.

Here’s my scene to share with you today – glorious pink in the sky and glorious pink blossom on the bush, with the petals falling in a perfect circle on the grass.

I didn’t take this photo today of course but it’s one which delights me every time I look at it. And, hey, why not share was spreads delight?

Here’s my question for you today – what will you choose to share with the world today? Because, the truth is, we share what we think, feel and do all the time. We might do that unconsciously most of the time, but we always have the opportunity to choose – to share consciously. It’s this conscious sharing that I’m interested in today…….which I why I hope this image brings you some joy, delight, and tranquillity. It’s a beautiful world.

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What’s in a name?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, photography on November 7, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I took a photo of this little street in Segovia for one reason – it’s name. I mean, look at the street. I’m standing at one end taking the photo so you can tell it’s a pretty small street. I don’t think the buildings on either side of it would entice you to go and explore it, but the cobblestones are attractive, and, probably more than anything that arch at the end looks very inviting. Which is interesting because seeing the arch, which invites you to pass through it, and seeing the countryside rising up the hillside beyond it is definitely tempting. But the truth is there are wonderful views of the countryside all around Segovia.

Here’s what caught me and convinced me to take this photo.

Now I don’t speak much Spanish but I know that this is the street name – and that the name is “Street of the Moon Gate”.

Street of the gate of the moon!! I mean, how can you read this and not feel your curiosity and your imagination start to stir! That archway at the other end of the street was probably where the original gate into the old town was. But why was it called after the moon? Was it the gate to enter by moonlight when you hoped not to be noticed? (actually you are less likely to be noticed on a moonless night)

I don’t know. Maybe one of you does. If you do, please let me know what you’ve found out. There is a Sun Gate in Segovia, but the other gates are all named after Christian saints.

However, here’s my point. It’s the name which caught my attention. It’s the name which has stimulated my curiosity and fires my imagination. I’m sure there must be stories set in Segovia which mention this gate, but if there aren’t, maybe I’ll try and write one!

Have you come across any places where the name made the location special?

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Wonder and joy

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography, psychology on November 6, 2020| Leave a Comment »

What makes a good day a good day? Our daily experience is shaped and influenced by a countless myriad of forces, signals, energies and events. Most of those influences impact on us unconsciously….we neither register them, nor do we consciously respond to them. But they shape our days all the same.

That’s not to say that we can’t play a more active role. We can. We can be the co-creators of our daily reality. There are at least three ways to do that.

First, we can create the spaces and pauses which enable us to reflect instead of react. We do this by slowing down, taking time to more fully savour the experiences which nurture us.

Second, we can make choices, choosing to follow certain chains of thought, and choosing to let go of others. We can choose to keep doing, thinking or feeling the same thing, and so reinforce the path we have created, or we can choose to do something different, to think something different, and, yes, even to feel something different.

Third, we can seek out and/or create the contexts, events and environments which we know set us up unconsciously to experience what we want to experience.

Looking at this third option recently, I’ve decided there are a number of qualities which positively influence my day. There’s curiosity and wonder. There’s joy. There’s love, kindness and positive intention. The more I can seek, create, pay attention to, nurture any of those, the more I am setting my brain up to respond accordingly. Even when I’m not consciously choosing.

So, here is a photo I took the other day which I find fills me with both joy and wonder. It’s a photo of a wild fig tree which has been growing outside of my garden, and the Boston Ivy plant which has survived the collapse of the enormous old stone wall which runs along that border. That wall fell eleven months ago now, but the vine which seemed to tumble down with it survived, grew and, look – its leaves are a more glorious red this year than they have ever been.

Life amazes me.

I am amazed how a seed can fall somewhere apparently random, germinate, take root and grow….with no involvement from human hands. And I’m amazed at the resilience of plant which can be partially uprooted, which can have the vast bulk of its being destroyed, but can survive. No, not just survive, but thrive.

I didn’t add beauty to my list, but there is no doubt that contemplating beauty is good for the heart and the spirit.

So, here it is to share with you today……an image of beauty which I hope will set you up for wonder and joy today.

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The human paradox

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, philosophy, photography, science on November 5, 2020| 1 Comment »

It strikes me there is a paradox at the heart of what it is to be human. We each have a sense of being different from other people. We experience what Freud termed “the ego”. It’s a sense of “self”, of a kind of centre of the universe from which we observe and interact with everyone and everything else. Our immune system is finely tuned to quickly recognise anything that is “not me”, to identify it as a potential threat and to mount inflammatory and/or allergic responses to contain and/or expel it. We need to know that we matter, that we have value and worth, and whilst some of that comes self-referentially as “self-belief” and “self-worth”, a lot of it comes from that other, somewhat paradoxical theme – the fact that we are social creatures.

We need to belong. Complete isolation is a punishment – we call it “solitary confinement”. We need to find common ground with others, to be accepted by a family, a group, or a community. We need to find and express what connects us to others so that we can share our experiences with them.

This paradox of separateness and belonging is never “resolved” if we see them both as opposite, unconnected poles. Although they are undoubtedly difficult to reconcile, they need to be “integrated” – in other words we need to find how we can connect them to each other in ways which will enhance and develop both.

It’s important to grow and mature as an individual. It’s important to feel free, to have personal autonomy. It’s also important to grow as communities, as a species, (if we want to evolve), and even as an integral part of all Life on Planet Earth. We share the same air, the same water, the same limited “resources”. We create waste which cannot be contained. What I do affects others. There’s no getting away from that.

If an individual takes a strong exclusive position on one of these two needs, they lose their necessary connection to the other one. That results on the one hand in selfishness and narcissism, and on the other, as auto-pilot, group-thinking, which sets them up for domination and manipulation by others.

These things make us sick. They set in train the forces of dis-ease.

To be healthy and fully human we need self-belief and self-knowledge. We need freedom and autonomy. We need to belong, to form loving, caring and mutually beneficial relationships. We need to find common ground with others. And we need to see ourselves as inseparable individuals emerging from, and embedded within, the whole – the whole species, the whole living planet, the whole universe.

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