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Archive for the ‘perception’ Category

The golden frame

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on December 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »

In my two previous posts I’ve considered how our experience is altered by the frames through which we live – through which we perceive and engage with daily reality. These frames, psychologically, are fashioned out of our beliefs, our values, our habits and our memories.

This photo is of a picture frame at a stall in an antiques market in the middle of Aix en Provence. What always strikes me first when I see this photo is how the frame is the dominant source of colour in the image. I’ve actually looked at this and wondered if it was a black and white photo with only the picture frame coloured later on, but it isn’t. I haven’t edited or changed anything from the original shot. When you look more carefully you can see plenty of colour to the right hand side of the image. Still, that contrast between the golden frame and the pretty monochrome pavement, tree and the left hand side of the background really, really makes the frame stand out.

So, I got to thinking a bit more about this idea of the frame, fashioned from our beliefs, values, habits and memories, and how that plays such a role in our lived reality. The first thing that came to mind was the way in which our two cerebral hemispheres engage with the world differently. The left focuses in on parts and details, emphasises objects, measurements, and data. The right is more focused on the whole, on the connections, relationships, the “between-ness” of everything, and on the particular, the unique and the specific. Along with that goes a predilection for mechanisms and machines with the left hemisphere and a predilection for nature and human beings with the right. At least, that’s one way of summarising some of what Iain McGilchrist describes in “The Master and His Emissary”.

The question then is which hemisphere are we in the habit of using most? And I think, again agreeing with McGilchrist, that there is no doubt the left hemisphere approach to the world has become the dominant one. We live in a world where we give priority to data, measurements, objects, control and grasping, to machines and computers, to industrialisation and automation. But this pandemic has shown us the importance of understanding how everything connects, of the importance of the human, and the unique, of our need for care and for each other. So, maybe one way we need to move forward into 2021 is by building the strengths and powers of the right hemisphere “frame” of values, beliefs, and habits. Maybe our way forward is going to require more imagination, more flexibility, more adaptability than the dominant “frame” the left hemisphere has provided for us?

The next thing that comes up for me is about our shared values, beliefs and habits – our structural ones which have produced modern day capitalism, our exploitative relationship to “Nature” which we see as something outside of us, something to be dominated. What if we tackled those two issues together?

What if we explored a different kind of economics and politics which would reduce inequality, reduce exploitation and injustice? What if shifted from having money as our god to Nature as our god? To see Nature as something we are a part of, not apart from. To see Nature as a source of infinite wonder, of an enormous resource, not to be consumed but to learn from? What would the world look like through that frame? How would that change our values, beliefs and habits?

Well, that’s what I want to explore in the months ahead. I want to learn more, understand more, and share more about the real world, the real world seen through the frame of connectedness, uniqueness, diversity, equality, kindness and wonder.

How about you? What values, beliefs and habits do you think dominate the frames through which you engage with the world? And which of those do you think are shared with others? Is there anything there you’d like to change?

In fact, more than that, what if you were to imagine your “golden frame”? Your ideal, your dream, frame? The way you’d most like to engage with the world and the shared beliefs, values and habits which you’d like to spread most widely? What would that look like?

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Framing my view

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on December 28, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday I wrote about the difference between viewing a garden from the perspective of inside a building, to that of viewing it as you walk around the garden itself.

The photo I used for the first perspective showed a traditional rectangular shaped doorway, all straight lines and 90 degree angles between them. So I thought I’d contrast that today with this photo, taken at a different temple, but again showing a garden viewed from the perspective of inside the building.

This time it’s a round window. Now, before I say anything more what do you feel as you look at this image? Isn’t there something particularly attractive about the round frame, instead of the rectangular one? Isn’t it somehow less aggressive, less harsh? Even if you didn’t think the other window frame really had those qualities before you looked at this one.

But there’s something else about this frame…..the circle is not complete. There is a section missing at the floor level. This is, as I understand it, another characteristic of Japanese design aesthetics. The idea is that if you leave something “less than perfect” or “incomplete” then it does two things – it stimulates the observer to use their imagination to “complete” the shape, and it contains a kind of latent dynamic quality – it is in the process of “becoming”. It isn’t “fixed” or “dead”.

All that makes me wonder about the kinds of frames we use to engage with everyday life. Because there is no doubt that our values, beliefs, memories and habits all exert powerful effects on what we notice, what impact those observations and experiences have upon us, and what sense we make of them.

Do you agree?

If so, I think that’s why it’s good to stop now and again, to reflect and to try to become more aware of just what values, beliefs, memories and habits we access most frequently. One simple way to do that is Julia Cameron’s “Morning Pages” exercise. It’s just writing non-stop, stream of consciousness writing to fill three pages of a notebook every morning. My experience of this is that it works best when you don’t re-read what you’ve written until some time later – say at least a month or so – so, here’s my proposal – are you up for doing “Morning Pages” every day of January? Then reading over what you’ve written once we reach February?

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Inside or outside?

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on December 27, 2020| 2 Comments »

I’ve read before that one of the major differences between Japanese and English garden design is that in Japan the emphasis is on what the garden looks like from inside the house, whereas in England the garden is designed from the perspective of the observer actually in the garden.

I think that’s probably an over-simplification and as with pretty much all generalisations it should be taken with a pinch of salt.

However, here’s an example of a Japanese garden. I took this photo form the interior of a temple, and you can see that the garden pulls your attention towards it. Not only does the window seem to create a frame for a beautiful picture, but the wooden flooring leads you out of the room towards the fence inviting you to enter the garden…..but only to the edge.

Maybe that’s partly where this idea comes from that the aesthetic in Japan is to create the experience for the observer standing just a little bit outside of the garden.

But, now, look at this next photo, which I took during the same visit to the same garden.

This isn’t a garden just to be looked at from the outside. Look at these winding paths, the stone lantern, the opening between the trees, the well trimmed low shrub, the grey rocks. This is all absolutely begging you to get out onto that path and experience this garden as it unfolds around you! This is a garden to be experienced from the inside of the garden itself.

How do I reconcile these two views and these, at face value, conflicting sets of design value?

“And not or“.

Here’s some of the true genius of Japanese aesthetics, in my humble opinion…….a resolution of polarities to create something greater than either of the poles can achieve by themselves.

This is a garden created to be beautiful and inviting from inside the temple, AND to be beautiful and inviting once you are in the garden itself. Both of these experiences are so memorable, and dovetailing the two perspectives into one takes the entire visit to a whole other level.

I find this incredibly inspiring. It inspires me to connect to, to seek out, and to create, beauty. It inspires me to break down the artificial boundaries between perspectives – to bring the view from outside the garden into the view from within the garden. It inspires me to create curiosity and intrigue as well…..because don’t you just want to walk along that path and have a closer look at those rocks, that shrub, that stone lantern? Don’t you just want to walk along that path and “bathe” in that gorgeous forest of colour? Don’t you just know in your bones that this is the kind of thing which is “good for you”, which will nourish your soul, stimulate your body and your mind, enrich your life?

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Looking up

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on December 26, 2020| 3 Comments »

When we look up the world looks very different.

This is not the view of a tree which you’d usually see in a photo, and I think it stands out all the more because of that.

In “Metaphors we live by”, Lakoff and Johnson make a convincing case for the embodied nature of the metaphors which underpin the meaning of so much of our speech. We take these metaphors so much for granted that we don’t even notice them. They give many, many such examples in their book, but the one which comes to mind as I write this is the one I used for the title today – “Looking up”.

Looking up is something we do physically, as you see in this view of a tree. “Looking up” also refers to our position in the physical world. We’d have to be very tall to look down on most trees! We look up to see what is above us…..or to raise our eyes from the ground if we happen to be walking around with our gaze fixed somewhere just between our noses and our feet.

The important insight about the embodied nature of our metaphors is that we can find clues in the language we use which can point in two different directions – they can indicate something about our emotions and our behaviours, but they can also indicate something about our bodies.

Once I learned that insight I became even more alert to the exact language a patient would use when describing their symptoms and experiences. Sometimes the words and metaphors they chose were the clues to finding their pathologies, and the way in which they were unconsciously trying to adapt to those pathologies. But that’s for another day.

Today I just wanted to highlight how physically “looking up” can actually link us in to the emotions, values and behaviours of “optimism”, of “looking forward” and of looking ahead with some flavour of brightness or expectation. Because it seems to me that we are pretty desperately needing a bit more positivity just now.

So, here’s my thought……maybe if we go out and deliberately, consciously, look up more, it will influence our mental state at a deep, unconscious, and emotional level and work as a kind of “reset” to enable us to engage with our lives more positively in the year ahead. And maybe if we do that, then as the active co-creators or reality, we will actually begin to build a better world.

As you raise your glasses at the end of the year, here’s to a time when things begin to “look up”!

Another world is possible.

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When the night sky reminds us…

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science on December 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is just an iPhone photo at night, so not a great quality shot, but what it captures is a special moment. You can see the crescent moon quite clearly, and now that I live in the countryside I’m constantly aware of the current phase of the moon. I notice when its a “new moon”, when it’s a waxing crescent, a waning crescent and when it is full. That wasn’t the case when I lived in a city. I guess when we live in a city, what with all the light pollution at night, as well as air pollution which seems to make the sky more obscure, that the phases of the moon are just not obvious. But there’s an element of attention too. City life = working life for me, and a lot of the time while working my attention and thoughts were absorbed in all the important things of the day. Consequently, noticing such things as the phase of the moon, slipped away from me.

I like that I am more aware of it now, because it gives me an ongoing sense of connectedness to one of the rhythms of the universe, that cycle of phases of our moon.

But there’s an even greater rhythm revealed in this particular photo – if you look at the sky at the twelve o’clock position relative to the plum tree, you might make out a star – or if you look really carefully you’ll see that it’s two stars, very close to each other. Well, they aren’t stars really, they are planets. Jupiter and Saturn. From our perspective here on Earth they seem to be occupying almost the same small square of space in the sky. They haven’t appeared this close to each other for hundreds of years and won’t again for another several hundred years. That makes this particular pattern special. It’s the only time I’ll ever see this in my lifetime. Generations of my ancestors never saw this, and generations of my offspring will never see it either.

Yet, it impresses me so much, not just because of its uniqueness, or, that it is so rare. What impresses me ever more is how this is part of a cycle of the universe which is way, way greater than I am. It is a rhythm, a pattern, a cycle which loops through generations….in both directions. That fact really strikes me. It humbles me. It puts me, viscerally, not just intellectually, in touch with the fact that I am part of something much, much greater than I am.

I find that intensely reassuring. I find it transcendent. I find it incredibly satisfying.

I also find it beautiful.

This is a great example of when the night sky reminds us that we are a part of flows, of patterns, of rhythms and cycles which are far, far bigger than we are. Isn’t that “awesome”, “inspiring”, “enlightening”?

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Inspired by a spiral

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on December 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is one of my most favourite photos of a seed head. When I was a child I guess the “dandelion clock” was the seed head we all knew best, but as I’ve got older I’ve realised there are an immense diversity of “wind dispersal” structures and systems used by a variety of plants. I do find them truly beautiful. But they do more than entrance me, they inspire me too, and perhaps this one more than most.

I love the whole phenomenon of wind dispersal. This is the way a plant handles that most crucial aspect of life for any species – expanding its reach physically (to other fields, other landscapes, even other continents), and expanding its reach temporally (by reproduction – by reaching into the future and create the generations to come).

No species of life would survive unless it did this – yet look at the way these plants handle it – not by setting goals, measuring and calculating and trying to control all the variables – but by trusting to the planet – by holding their seed high and waiting for the wind to come, pick them up and carry them to their future destinations.

This is SO different from our drive to be in control of everything. I’m not saying our controlling drives aren’t useful, I’m sure they are, but I am saying we should learn from the rest of the natural world sometimes and pick up this principle of letting go, of trusting that when you live in harmony with the rest of Nature, then you will survive and thrive.

Of course this is not a way for we humans to procreate and raise children – leaving them outside for the wind to carry them away! But that’s not what I’m saying…..we are not adapted to survive through the specific method of wind dispersal! No, what I think we can learn from this is the deeper, more widely applicable lesson – that we should live in harmony with, in tune with, in association with, in collaboration with, the rest of the natural world, rather than seeing the rest of the planet as something outside of ourselves just waiting to be plundered, consumed and controlled.

But there’s something else in this particular seed head – that glorious spiral shape. It seems to me that the spiral, looping model of time makes a lot of sense….the way the cycles of Nature appear – from seasons, to moon phases, to birth, growth, maturity, decline, death and birth again……

A spiral is also a very dynamic shape – it looks like it is moving. It captures that truth that change is constant, that nothing every stays the same.

I hope you find something inspiring in this photo today – it really is one of my favourites.

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Blue

Posted in art, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, psychology on December 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I love a blue sky. There’s something incredibly uplifting about seeing blue filling your whole view from horizon to horizon. But of course, not many places in the world see blue skies like that every day, and those which do, tend to suffer from a lack of clouds and, so a desperate lack of rain. So, it’s not that we should want blue skies every day. There’s a lot of wisdom in the observation that we need contrasts, that we need the dark to appreciate the light, and the light to appreciate the dark. There’s a Scandinavian wisdom in plunging into the snow and ice when you step out of a sauna!

I understand the need for these opposites and contrasts. But that takes nothing away from the joy and delight in what is….right here, right now.

Today the weather forecast is wrong again. I went to bed expecting to have a day of rain when I woke up, but instead I’ve woken up to a blue sky. I can see white clouds making their way across the low horizons, and maybe they will spread and bring rain later, but, for now, I’m enjoying the blue.

Perhaps that’s why this particular photo caught my eye this morning. You see these gloriously faded, distinctively blue signs all over France, but especially in the South. I’m no expert in colours but there is something about this particular shade of blue which evokes a whole culture for me. It’s the colour of France, the colour of the Med, it evokes memories of cafes and bars, of village squares and tables under spreading plane trees. It evokes vineyards, fields of sunflowers and hillsides of lavender. It entices me to buy a bottle of Rosé and a small bag of olives.

Amazing what a colour can do……

So, here’s my challenge for you today – find a colour somewhere – in the sky, in the garden, on your bookshelf, on your wall, in your closet……just find a colour that attracts you, that brings you joy, that stirs your heart and lifts your spirits, and allow your mind to recall the times and places that colour evokes, allow your mind to re-create those moments of beauty and happiness. Allow yourself to bask and bathe in those experiences for a little while. I have a hunch, it’ll do you good.

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Reaching out

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, photography, science on December 19, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Here’s what Nature does. She reaches out.

Here’s what Life does. Life expands.

There are many stories of the Universe, many Creation stories. We discover the Universe in those stories. We tap into Creation. We uncover the themes, the characteristics, the features, the behaviours and the phenomena of reality in those stories.

One of those stories is the story of Evolution. It’s the story of Life on Earth. In this story there is one particularly striking feature – there is always more life. Life creates life. Life replicates, reproduces, expands, connects, complexifies, diversifies, multiplies.

Look at these two photos – on the left, a plant with two sunbursts of seeds held up as high into the air as it can. Reaching for the sky, reaching for the Sun, reaching for the wind, reaching out for other creatures, birds and other animals, to come along, to help her spread her seeds, to send her offspring far and wide, seeking new places to settle, take root, and to thrive. On the right a tree in the middle of a forest, a tree with branches reaching out in every direction. Every year adding rings to its trunk, every year sending out new branches to hold leaves closer to the sunlight, closer to the other trees, inviting birds, insects and other creatures to come and find home, to make their nests, to find shelter, in order to nurture their own.

We used to think of forests as collections of individual trees, but we know now that forests are not quite like that. Instead every single tree has multiple connections through a hidden root system interwoven with a myriad of fungi creating a “wood wide web” of connections. Each tree learns to find its share of sunlight and holds back from interfering with its neighbours. Each mother tree protects her young, nurtures them, in ways we never knew before.

Every year there is more Life on Earth than there was the year before. Yes, we have species loss, and we lose habitats. But from the beginnings of the Earth until now, Life has spread to every nook and cranny, adapted to every possible environment, diversified, evolved and spread.

It’s something which evokes wonder and amazement in me. After all, we know that when it comes to elements, the elements we have ordered in the Periodic Table, that pretty much all the atoms of all the molecules which exist on this planet, have been here since the beginning. The Earth doesn’t make more gold, more silver, more lithium. All the elements we know were created in the great furnaces of distant stars, and all came together here to form this little planet. But Life isn’t like that. Life expands, doubles, multiplies.

From the time Life emerged this direction of travel hasn’t stopped.

Life, it seems, makes life out life.

I think that’s pretty amazing.

It strikes me that if I want to be in tune with the planet, if I want to live in harmony with Life, then I need to pay attention to this characteristic of reaching out, connecting, expanding…..I need to focus my energies on nourishing and nurturing, on protecting and providing, this living planet. What does that tell me about the choices I should be making, the directions I should be following, as 2021 rises above the horizon?

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Mind the gap

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, photography, science on December 18, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is a very common pattern of spider web, and in the early morning the dew hangs in sparkling droplets creating these beautiful strings of glittering crystal balls.

But this particular web attracts me especially because of the parts I can’t see. There is a whole central section between the outer rings and the middle of the web which have not held onto any water droplets (or hardly any) so there are many strange of the web that, at least at first, you can’t see.

That reminds me of constellations – how we create the designs and symbols in the night sky by “seeing” the invisible connections between particular stars. It was the artist John Berger who first pointed that out for me when I read his “Ways of Seeing”.

Artists are also the people most likely to be aware of “negative space”. Only yesterday I came across an article which pointed out that if you look at an “8” of diamonds in a pack of cards, you can see the figure eight in the negative space between the red diamonds.

It’s clear once it’s been pointed out to you, isn’t it?

Iain McGilchrist describes how the right hemisphere is brilliant at enabling this kind of observation. Whilst the left hemisphere zooms in on the parts, the right has a preference for connections, for “the between-ness”, and for patterns.

Finally, this web makes me reflect once more on perception, and how what we “see” in our minds, is not a simple optical image cast onto the brain by a lens, the way a camera works. It’s a far more complex phenomenon, an act of creation, where we use sensations, memories and imagination to deliver the exact image which we “see”.

Turns out there is always more to be seen that we realise at first, it’s always worth exploring the “gaps”.

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Two owls

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on December 17, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Can you see the two owls?

The “Little Owl” sitting in the plum tree at the corner of my garden is watching me, watching him…..as usual! On the right is a photo I took in a forest in Southern France last year. Can you see the carving of the owl at the top of the tree? Instead of just cutting the branches (I don’t know if there was something wrong with them, or they broke in a storm), someone has carved an owl at the top of one of the stumps.

These two photos make me think of our relationship to the world…..just how interactive that relationship is. I have many experiences now of noticing another creature noticing me. Maybe it just makes sense that we would both have the natural ability to be aware of each other, but when it happens directly like this, it shifts the experience into another gear. It’s a bit like when I do a whistling “conversation” with the Redstart who lives in the garden every summer. Those “call and response” sessions are delightful and they really do give me a deep sense of connection to the non-human, living world.

The carving speaks to another aspect of our relationship with the world brought about by our powers of imagination and creativity. The truth is we change the world every second just by living….just by breathing, just by walking, gathering, eating and drinking, just by our behaviour which is determined by our values, beliefs, our thoughts and our bodies. But this conscious interaction, again takes our relationship to another level. This fashioning of an owl changes the experience of this tree, and so, too, of the whole forest. It’s a point of wonder, of delight. It made me pause, raise my camera and take a photo. It made me wonder about the artist….who he or she is, when they did this, and why……what did it mean, and what does it mean, to them? The sculpture raises the awareness of the observer to the fact that the forest is full of life, not just of plant life, but of birds and other creatures, but given the symbolism of owls, for me, at least, it also raises my awareness of the wisdom of the forest, and the wisdom of Nature.

Seeing this example of human imagination and creative expression in Nature reminded me, also, of an article I read in “Le Monde” a few days ago, about another cave complex full of wall art in the Dordogne. This one near Cussac. It isn’t open to the public and has still not been completely excavated but has many, many drawings of animals, just like in nearby Lascaux, but in addition they have found the skeletons of six Paleolithic human beings. There’s something else different about Cussac – (click that link if you want to read a good English language article about this cave complex) there are, so far, four clear drawings of the female form. Yep, that’s right, the female, not the male, form…..gets you wondering, huh?

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