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Archive for the ‘perception’ Category

Two forces of the universe

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, Uncategorized on March 21, 2016| 1 Comment »

hanburymarqueyssac

Two gardens.

Could they be more different?

The first is the Hanbury Botanic Garden in Ventimiglia, Italy, and the second is Marqueyssac in the Dordogne, France.

Thomas Berry, in The Great Work, describes the two forces of the universe as wildness and discipline. David Wade, in The Crystal and the Dragon, describes them as the moving, flowing principle, and the ordering, or structuring principle. You get the idea? One tends toward expansion and one towards constriction. Empedocles wrote about Neikos and Philia, the forces of repulsion/separation and of attraction/combination.

Our left cerebral hemisphere is great for sorting, labelling, and ordering. The right seeks out the new and makes connections.

There is no right or wrong here. Both forces need each other, like the yin and the yang. As they interact with each other, as we produce integration (the creation of mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts), we create.

These two gardens are examples of this. In the first case, the Hanbury Garden, there is a glorious “far from equilibrium” quality brought about by encouraging diversity and a light touch on control. In the Marqueyssac, constant pruning, trimming and shaping brings this astonishing spread of geometric and repeating forms.

Is one more beautiful than the other?

I suspect each of us have certain preferences…..drawn towards the wildness, or drawn towards the discipline.

Isn’t it great when we can have “and” not “or”? It just requires the will to explore and to stand back and see the view from Sirius.

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The four elements, and Life

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, Uncategorized on March 9, 2016| Leave a Comment »

4 elements

As I stood looking out over the Mediterranean I saw this.

Water. Stretching in every direction. From this distance it looks calm, almost smooth. But from where I stood I could hear the waves breaking on the rocks, the water spraying into the air then slipping back down from the land into the sea again. Without water, no Life.

Fire. That silver shining strip of light caused by the Sun’s rays sparkling the sea. But it’s a false horizon. Beyond that apparent edge, if you look carefully, you can see more water. The fire of the Sun warms the water and warms the Earth. It’s the source of all our energy. Without the fire of the Sun, no Life.

Earth. Look more closely now, beyond the water on the other side of the sunlight. Can you see shadows? Hazy impressions of something more solid?  The Earth. Islands, other lands, rocks and stones and sand. Earth, the element which changes so slowly. Without earth, no Life.

Air. No, you can’t see the air. But as I stood there I filled my lungs with it. The clear, fresh, sea-scented air. The most invisible of all the elements, constantly changing, as I breathe in and breathe out again. As you breathe in and breathe out again. As all living creatures breathe in and breathe out again. Without air, no Life.

Then look again. Look down at the bottom right hand corner of this photograph. See the tree? Doesn’t she look like she has a fancy hat on? Doesn’t it seem as if she is looking out over the water, the fire, the earth and the air?  It seems to me that she is stretching both her arms up towards the sky and celebrating.

Makes you want to join in, don’t you think?

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The importance of story

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, Uncategorized on February 29, 2016| 2 Comments »

What do you think about this path?

path

Not very impressive is it? Not sure it would catch your attention at all if you stumbled across it. But then what about this sign on the wall telling you a little bit about this path, the “Via Aurelia” (nice name, huh?)

notice

Now, I’m sure that’s not a complete listing of all the famous people who have walked along this very path, but even knowing that Napoleon, Emperor Charles V, Macchiavelli and Catherine of Siena, (not to mention the various Popes!), walked along here completely changes it doesn’t it?

And I’m sure that if you were to read some of the stories about where these people were coming from and where they were going to, then this little, apparently unimpressive little path, would take on another quality altogether.

 

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On reflection

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, Uncategorized on February 28, 2016| Leave a Comment »

on reflection.jpg

I love it when I see a beautiful reflection in a pond or a lake. Here’s one I saw recently in a botanical garden in Menton.

When you look at an image like this it’s quite disorientating at first as you try to figure out exactly what you are looking at. The funny thing is that when you are actually there, there is no confusion.

I suppose it just goes to show how context helps us to make sense of what we see. Focus in on a part of what you see, then pull it out into a separate, disconnected image, and it isn’t so clear any more.

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Edges

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, Uncategorized on February 23, 2016| Leave a Comment »

I love the places where different elements meet. There’s a magic there. Here are three I saw recently.

Where sun, air, clouds and rain meet the sea…..

rainatsea.jpg

Where the sea meets the land…..

seasand

and where the snow meets the forest and the clouds meet the mountains…

snowline

Iain McGilchrist, in his Master and His Emissary, describes how our right cerebral hemisphere has an approach to the world which focuses on “betweenness”. I think looking out for, and noticing, the meeting points, these boundaries, margins and connections in the world is a great way of activating your right hemisphere.

It’s a good way of just enjoying the sheer beauty of the world too!

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Likin’ lichen

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, Uncategorized on February 9, 2016| Leave a Comment »

lichen

Next time you are passing some lichen can I recommend you stop for a moment and take a look.

Isn’t it amazing? Sometimes the colours are subtle, sometimes striking – this particular yellow lichen makes all the more impact because of the blue sky behind it.

But look at the shapes too…..Nature’s art work.

Here are another couple I spotted recently

lichen spiral

lichen ear

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Nature’s colour palette

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, Uncategorized on February 7, 2016| 1 Comment »

sky above

Sometimes the beauty of the sky straight above your head reminds you of something you saw earlier when you looked down at your feet….

crocus.jpg

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Two kinds of attention

Posted in education, from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, Uncategorized on February 1, 2016| 1 Comment »

Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, says we use our two cerebral hemispheres differently. The hemispheres, remember, control the opposite sides of the body, so the right control the left hand, and the left hemisphere control the right. It’s the same with vision where the right field of vision is the responsibility of the left hemisphere and the left field of the right hemisphere. I’m simplifying here, but you get the idea. In birds which have their eyes on the sides of their heads instead of in the front of their faces, each hemisphere controls the opposite eye but the idea is the same.

The right hemisphere supports a broad, vigilant attention. In a bird the left eye, therefore, is taking everything in to be aware of predators.

left eye

See how this duck is looking at me?

They use the left hemisphere to focus the right eye on details….for example, when picking out food.

right eye

There’s something else interesting about the field of view of interest to each hemisphere.

In we humans, the right hemisphere is more interested in what is far from us….

distance

while the left is more interested in what is close up….

catkins

 

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Deep past

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

Near where I live now there’s a dolmen. A dolmen is a Stone Age rock structure which looks like a table. It’s got three standing stones, each about ten feet high, and a massive 5 ton slab of stone laid on top as a cover. Originally it’s thought that the walls were filled with slabs of stone, then the whole dolmen was covered with a cairn of stones. The cairn and most of the walls have gone since it was built about 3500 to 5000 years ago.

dolmen size

There’s a small plaque with some information on it, but otherwise it’s just sitting in the middle of a vineyard.

Look at the size of the roof! It weighs about five tons. How on earth did they get it here then hoist it up to sit on these standing stones? Seriously, how did they do that? And where did the stones come from? If they came from far away, how did they transport them? When you step inside things begin to get even more interesting.

dolmen inside

It feels cool and damp inside, and the sun makes it way in casting long shadows as it does so. The sound quality in there is startling. It is such an open structure that it comes as a complete surprise to hear a kind of echo. It feels impossible to resist singing, or calling out, just to hear the quality of the sound.

dolmen view

Nobody knows the purpose of this dolmen. Was it a burial chamber? A structure for the celebration of rituals or ceremonies? We don’t know. Of course, when it was built there were no vines here, so I’m guessing the makers would look out over the fields and have a great view of the surrounding countryside.

dolmen roof

The underside of the roof has these damp patches on it, and between the sun, surrounding puddles, and passing clouds, the wetness on the stone shimmered strongly suggesting the waves of the sea. Which was made even stranger when I looked more closely at some of the stones –

dolmen shell.jpg

The stone is a mixture of limestone and iron, but there are many little fossil shells in it, which, when you are standing on top of a hill in the middle of the Charente, miles from the coast, is pretty bizarre!

I love the way the lichen grows on some of the surfaces….tracing spirals and circles –

dolmen lichen.jpg

Something of the quality of this whole structure forces you to slow down, take your time and just be there. It really feels as if you are in touch with the deep past. I was going to say the distant past, but the strange thing is, when you stand under here, touching the stone, the past doesn’t feel distant at all, just deep….like roots.

dolmen sky

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Seeing faces

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, Uncategorized on January 28, 2016| 1 Comment »

Have you ever noticed that we seem to be so well equipped with the ability to see faces that we can see faces where they don’t actually exist?

tree eye

I know this is a knot in a tree but I can’t escape the feeling that the tree is looking at me…..the Spirit of the forest?

And we don’t only see faces in living organisms, we see them in rocks too…..

rockface

There’s a Stone Age dolmen near where I live. It’s like a huge three-legged table with vertical stones each about 3 metres tall and a 5 ton enormous rock laid on top of them like a table top. I took a lot of photos when I went to explore it but this one particular shot looks for all the world like the profile of a face….perhaps in the same way that owners come to look like their dogs this rock reflects the face of one of the people who created the dolmen?

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