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Archive for the ‘perception’ Category

Looking for circles

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on May 26, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Continuing my little series of patterns to look for, today I’m going to share circles with you. I know, there’s probably a bit of overlap between spirals and circles, but I’m going to try and stick with the more obvious circles and not wander down the spiral path!

There’s an old tower near me, up in one of the neighbouring vineyards. I don’t know its history and I don’t know what it was used for, but it’s now just a circular stone tower with a doorway, a couple of spaces where windows used to be, and no roof. When I step inside it and look up, this is what I see! I’ve loved this photo from the day I took it. The circle itself is hugely appealing, and the blue sky sure adds something. I often look at this image (in fact I have it on the lock screen of my iPad) and it reminds me of my limits. I know I can only see within the parameters of my beliefs, values and personal experience. I know too, that I can never know EVERYTHING there is to know about ANYTHING – including about any of patient I ever saw, about any friend or relative I ever knew, and about myself. I like to remind myself of that. Isn’t it kind of odd that I use a circle to remind myself of that, because a circle, traditionally represents wholeness or completeness. Somehow I’ve done something quite different with it.

This is a round window in a little house in a village just outside of Kyoto. Well, is it a window? Or is it a lamp? It’s on the outside wall, but you can’t see through it. It’s also got a lamp, or a bulb, behind it, so that it is shining out onto the street. Why is it there? I’ve no idea. But, again, I’ve loved this image from the day I saw it. I satisfies me enormously.

This particular circle is, of course, one I see every month. I am unceasingly fascinated with it. I love to follow the phases of the Moon over each 28 day cycle, but I especially love the full moon. The Moon stirs the energy of the Divine Feminine for me. It reminds me how we all have both of those universal energies coursing through our lives. Maybe it’s because I am a man, but I feel the Moon completes me somehow. It makes me feel more whole.

Most stones are not circular. They are not spheres. So when I come across one like this I am struck but how entrancing it seems to be. With the patterns of the lichen on its surface, this looks like a small planet to me. A whole world mapped out right before me.

There’s something magical about a circular bowl filled with water, reflecting the sky, and the forest which surrounds it. This conjures up the image of Galadriel’s mirror (from Lord of the Rings) for me. I have an ancient well in my garden. It’s got a metal lid, locked with a padlock to keep it safe. But if you open the lid and peer down, more than twenty metres in the dark, you can glimpse lights and movement on the round surface of the deep water. I think of those things when I see this circle. It excites me, stirs my imagination, provokes thoughts about magic and divination.

I saw this circular window at a temple in Japan. Of course, some of you will look at this and say, “It’s not whole. It’s got a piece cut off the bottom!” but that’s the typical Japanese aesthetic, never seeking to present “prefection” as something complete, but preferring the dynamism implied by asymmetry and “incompleteness”. Well I love it. And I’ve wondered ever since why we don’t have more circular windows in our buildings. Wouldn’t it be great to have a circular window in your house? (Maybe you’ve got one!)

Finally, here’s the setting Sun. I have seen SO many spectacular sunsets in my life. I see LOTS of them here in the Charente. And I never, ever tire of them. I am entranced by the setting Sun. If the Moon is the Feminine Principle for me, the Sun is the Masculine one. I love to connect to both.

Once I read that the Sun doesn’t actually set. It’s we, on planet Earth who are moving, not the Sun moving in relation to us. So, a better term for this time of day would be “Earth Rising”, because that’s what is happening. The horizon of the Earth is lifting up into the sky as the Earth turns, giving us the sensation that the Sun is setting.

Well, whichever way you think of it. It is utterly entrancing, isn’t it?

Have you got any favourite circles to contemplate?

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Looking for straight lines

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, science on May 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »

“There are no straight lines in Nature”

I don’t know where this teaching comes from, but it’s not true.

There are plenty of straight lines in Nature. OK, maybe they don’t cover great distances in the way manufactured lines do (I’m thinking railway lines and Roman roads) but they are everywhere, all the same.

One typical expression of straight lines is “radial” – they start at a centre point and radiate out in many directions from there. This poppy bud in the image above is an example of that.

Not straight enough for you? Well, how about this?

Do you know what that is? Let’s look from the other side….

Plants show this “radial” spread of straight lines too.

As do shells…

and spider webs

Seeds designed to be carried by the wind use this pattern of radiant straight lines from pointed origins too.

We pick up on these patterns and use them in our art and architecture.

Have a look around today and see where you can spot this pattern. When you do find it, do you think it is beautiful?

One of the things I really like about these “radiant” straight lines is that each line has a beginning and an end, just like a good story. You can see where it has come from and you can see where it is going. It reminds me of a concept from Deleuze and Guattari, which they named “lines of flight”. When I read about this I saw its relevance to complex systems. You might have read elsewhere on this site about “complex adaptive systems” (if not, why not pop that phrase into the search box on the top right of the page and see what comes up?). The complex systems model does more than explain living organisms, it reveals a lot about the underlying structure and function of the universe.

Complex adaptive systems tend to move towards “far from equilibrium” zones. This is what gives them their dynamism, their points of growth and their ability to change. But how do they get there, to those “far from equilibrium” zones? By following particular “lines of flight”.

One of the reasons I liked that so much was it helped me unravel the stories my patients told me. One of my most favourite questions to ask was “When did you last feel completely well?” It often took patience and time to get a clear answer to that question, but time and time again it revealed that the chronic ailment from which the patient was suffering, began either after a particularly severe trauma, or from a phase of life where the traumas piled up on each other, one by one. I wasn’t trying to prove causation, but following the narrative line from that time forwards to the present often revealed both the nature of the traumatic impacts, and, crucially, the adaptive strategies the person had employed (probably mostly sub-consciously) to cope.

Lines of flight, and radiant lines, are typically multiple, and they are also highly unlikely to exist in isolation. However, unravelling what they are, where they intersect, and how they influence each other, is, I believe, at the heart of understanding a person and their life.

I’ll leave you today with another depiction of lines – well, two pictures actually, and neither taken by me –

On the left is the image of Mumbai at night, photographed from a satellite. On the right and image of neurones in a section of a brain. Interesting to think how this structure of intersections and nodes connected by straight lines scales up and down through the levels and dimensions. But I’m taking the original idea of straight lines a step further now, by seeing them in their context.

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Looking for spirals

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science on May 23, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Sometimes I like to collect images of similar shapes or patterns. Today, I’d like to share some spirals.

The spiral is one of the most beautiful forms in nature and art. I think it is at the heart of our universe and tells us something interesting about the course of a life.

It seems to me that rather than running along a straight line, our lives often follow more of a spiral pattern, revisiting old issues and events time and time again, but each time from a different perspective. If we are growing those spirals drive forward movement and a deepening of our understanding. If we aren’t then we spin round and round the same issues until we learn from them.

That first image is on a window fitting in the chateau where Montaigne lived. Here’s one from a mantelpiece inside that same chateau.

Some spirals you could draw with one line, but what appeals to me so much is how this enfolds two spirals into the one motif.

Here’s an example, found commonly in Japan, of three entwined spirals.

And, here’s a triple spiral where each one is spirally outwards, rather than in towards a central point. Although I completely agree you could see that in completely the other direction….as a gathering from three directions towards a single, common, point.

That’s a simple doorknob, but how beautiful is it? Especially with its triple spiral shadow cast onto the door.

Nature loves spirals too. Here’s a section through a seashell – I found this particular one in the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

At the opposite end of the scale, here’s a photo of a star being born….

I saw this while browsing the web this morning, and I think it’s what set me off in this spiral-gathering exercise!

Do you have any images of favourite spirals?

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There is always another way

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on May 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »

There is always another way.

I don’t believe people who say there is only way to do something. There are always other options, other choices to make, all dependent on our preferences, values, beliefs and particular circumstances.

Margaret Thatcher famously said “There is no alternative” – which was shortened to “TINA”. It wasn’t true then, and it’s never been true since.

I’m suspicious of algorithms and protocols because they tend to marshall everyone down the same pathway in order to produce the exact same outcome. But we are all different, and we are all living our every day lives, moment by unique moment, in each of our individual and particular circumstances. The more generally “TINA” is applied, the more inappropriate it is.

It’s been frustrating to hear politicians say they have been “following the science” all the time during this pandemic and that they have “taken the right steps at the right time”.

There is no “the science”.

Science is a methodology. It’s a way of considering the world, of exploring and attempting to understand it. The scientific method doesn’t produce end points. “IT’ is never finished. There is always more to discover, more to learn. Science is about doubt, not certainty. The findings and analyses of scientists can increase our understanding but they will never be set in stone, fixed for all time.

There are no “right” steps to take at “the right time”. There are just the steps we choose to take, in good faith, or carelessly. There are just the steps we choose to take now. They say hindsight has “twenty twenty vision” (or will we say in the future “2020 vision”?) but that’s not true either. Things just look different when we look back. Looking back is just a change of perspective. Not a perspective we had at the time.

Here’s the same passageway, viewed from the other side – looking back to the way we came, where the first one was looking forward to the way we were going.

Change the perspective, change the understanding, change the options.

There is always another way.

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What’s inside?

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, movies, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on May 19, 2020| Leave a Comment »

At first glance, this is a beautiful old building with its creamy, yellow stone all cleaned up and looking pretty glorious. But it doesn’t take long before you realise there’s something not right here. Something not whole. There’s no glass in any of the windows, which is the first clue, but when you look through the window frames you see…..the sky. When you walk around the building to the other side you see that there is nothing there. This isn’t a building any more. It’s a facade.

It’s not uncommon for towns to do this. The local authorities demand that the front of the old, beautiful building is preserved whilst the developers are free to demolish every other trace of it and replace it with a concrete, steel and glass box to put little offices or shops in.

It’s kind of sad. And yet, the front remains, and, when well preserved, it retains a lot of its initial beauty.

Have you ever visited a movie set? I don’t mean a movie theme park with rides and parades, but a set. I visited one once and it was the strangest experience to walk through a New York street, only to discover that every single building was a facade propped up from behind with great beams of wood and scaffolding. The building in this photo reminds me of that.

This sets my mind off down two quite different paths. The first is how we all present a certain face to the world. A certain look, style, a certain conformity really. Even when trying to be non-conformist, the “look” recreates conformity. I used to walk from Glasgow Central Station to Glasgow Queen Street Station on the way home from work. I’d pass the Gallery of Modern Art. On the steps of that gallery, goths would gather. Some evenings there would be a few dozen of them. Now, one goth in an office, or a shop, might stand out as really different, but several dozen of them together looked pretty much the same. (By the way, the pigeons used to hang about those same steps in large numbers too and I often wondered if there was some natural association between goths and pigeons!)

Our uniqueness is at its greatest on the inside. It’s not in our clothes, our “lifestyles”, our diets or our habits. We share all of those with many other people. (“Other customers who like X also like Y” – as the algorithms tell us)

So that’s the first thing I wonder about when I look at this photo. It’s uncomfortable because it isn’t “whole”, which, in my book, means it isn’t “healthy”. But, more than that it has no inside. So it’s lost its uniqueness.

The second line of thought is about imagination, because this image reminds me of the movie sets, and I know that whether it’s on TV, cinema or even in a theatre, “appearances” are manufactured to stimulate our imagination. So, I look again at this building and I wonder who built it and why. I wonder about the people who used to work there and how they related to the building they were working in. I wonder about the place this building had on this particular street, in this particular town. I wonder what stories these stones could tell, if only they could speak.

Here’s another photo which picks up that second thread.

Josette Navarro’s Dance School. Isn’t that beautiful? Doesn’t it capture your attention and set your imagination running? What a name! Once I got home I looked up Josette Navarro and her “Ecole de Danse” and she was still giving lessons, but I couldn’t really find much detail about either her or her dance school.

However, I still find this an incredibly evocative image. I love the wind-vane style of the sign with the dancer in full flight. I love the name. “Josette Navarro”. And the fact she has a dance school. I love the blue of the sign and how it echoes the blue paint on the shutters opposite. I love the light hanging directly opposite, and wonder if it casts a spotlight on the dancer at night.

Even when we can’t see what’s inside, what we do see can really stimulate the imagination, and/or bring back memories, such that it’s easy to imagine stories, scenes from movies, drama, romance, or whatever your favourite genre, and just spend a while enjoying that. Following where it leads you.

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Tiles, above and below

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on May 18, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I’m sharing two photos of tiles today. This first one is tiles on a roof. This is a pretty typical roof in South West France. Every one I look at seems beautiful to me. I love these terracotta colours, the shades from dark brown to pale, almost cream. I love the randomness of their placing – you never see a row of one shade, followed by a row of another. It makes me think of diversity and ordered chaos which makes me think of Life – because Life is like this – diversity, variety, uniqueness, difference plus shared features – and an astonishing synthesis, or integration of, order and chaos.

These are old floor tiles. You can see a floor covering like this in many old buildings in France. You see it in churches, castles, mansions, and even some pretty simple country homes. Like the picture of the roof tiles, I love the colours. It’s pretty much the same colour palette in both photos. I also love their ordered chaos, not just in terms of colour, but, physically, each tile isn’t quite “perfect” (as some would call it), and so they say to you “We are made by human hands”. These are not tiles which rattle off a factory production line. That, too, makes them more “alive” for me. But this second photo has another element – light. These little patches of light splashed over the tiles are the polar opposite of shadows but in some way behave in a similar manner. They take this image to another level.

Between them, these are two images evoke some of the most fundamental principles of Life for me.

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Nigella

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on May 17, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I have a Nigella plant in the garden. This is the time of year when it flowers.

OK, I know, flower pictures are often beautiful, although after a while I can have enough to them, but, stay a moment and allow yourself to fall into the wonder of this gorgeous Nigella flower.

I find it entrancing. Almost other-worldly – except I don’t know any other world where a flower like this would bloom, so it’s kinda typically this-worldly! Do you know what I mean?

I’ve read a few authors who claim we have lost touch with enchantment in our hyper-speed, consumerist, material culture, and I understand what they mean. This pause which has been enforced on so many of us by this Covid-19 virus, has allowed us to slow down, consume less, savour more and pay attention to the present moment world around us.

All that, I find, makes room for enchantment. That’s the word I think of most when I look at this flower. I love the milky, indefinite bluish purple blush of its five leaves. I like that it has five leaves, which sets me off wondering about the number five, and how many flowers have five petals, not three, or four, or more. I think of five pointed stars and pentacles, of magic and alchemy. I love the spiky branching leaves – are these leaves? – they don’t look like leaves – how they seem to reach further and further, like fingers or whiskers feeling their way through space, to see what they can encounter.

I just find it utterly beautiful. Made my day a better day. Hope it casts some enchantment in your life today.

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