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Archive for the ‘personal growth’ Category

Nodes and connectors

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on March 2, 2017| 1 Comment »

Look at the skeleton of this beautiful fish. The intricate and delicate structure of the bones is a stunning demonstration of the nature of networks. We can see the whole skeleton is made up from two simple elements, nodes and connectors. Whether we zoom in to study just one group, or out to look at the larger regions we see a variety of different patterns based on these two simple elements.

If you start at any point on this skeleton you’ll be able to trace a path to any other point without ending up down some disconnected cul de sac. In other words every single point is connected to every other one….either in simple one or two step connections, or through an almost infinite variety of pathways across the whole structure.

This is one of the most fundamental patterns at the heart of reality – networks of nodes and connectors.

You can see the same design in all forms of life, especially in multicellular organisms, all kinds of plants, animals and human beings.

Networks of nodes and connectors are the essential fabric of the universe.

Two of the best books I know about this phenomenon are Linked by Barabasi, and Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. I recommend them both. They show how this apparently simple structure builds up into the most complex of phenomena, from individual organisms, to social groups and whole ecosystems.

Once you see things this way you can’t help but see connections everywhere. It’s the science which demonstrates the limitations of reductionism and abolishes the notion of atomisation.

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Entangled

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on February 27, 2017| Leave a Comment »

starfish vines

Nature loves to be entangled.

Life seeks entanglement.

Nothing living can survive in complete isolation. We thrive when we are in active relationships with others, with other members of our own species, but especially with other forms of Life.

We need to connect, to make bonds, to entwine our energies and our destinies.

What kinds of connections can we make? What types of bonds will we form? How will we share our energies with each other?

Isn’t the most important question today – “how are we going to live together?”

 

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The blue yonder

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on February 23, 2017| 1 Comment »

The blue yonder – I wrote about Rebecca Solnit’s observation that distance is blue a while back.

The sea caught my attention for this shot….I was entranced by the rich palette of greens and blues….but when I looked later I noticed that the far mountains were just the kind of blue which she wrote about.

I love an image like this. I can lose myself in it for ages. I find it soothing and mesmerising. I hope you do too.

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Becoming not being

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on February 20, 2017| 1 Comment »

Becoming not being……you know that tag line I’ve used on this blog since Day 1…

Well this is a great example.

What is a wave?

How do you define it, measure it, set its beginning and its end points?

All of those questions are hard enough to answer but when I look at the spray which the wind is whipping up from the advancing wave, and flinging it backwards like soft hair then I see our attempts to define and delimit disappear like the fine white spray itself.

I’ve never seen this phenomenon before. It was a particularly windy day but I’d never seen the wind do both these things at once…..drive the water towards the beach in big white crashing waves AND whip the foamy top of the wave to create this transient curtain of white water…….astonishing!

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Reaching for the moon

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on February 19, 2017| 2 Comments »

I’d noticed it earlier on my walk. The moon was hanging in the blue sky of the morning. But a little further on and around the corner I looked up and saw this. Wow! I can’t remember ever seeing the moon looking as big as this. Usually when I see the moon it’s pretty small, and if I take a photograph of it, somehow it appears even smaller, so when I pointed my camera towards it this time I was surprised to see it didn’t shrink. It sat there, almost kissing the Earth, holding its own, not diminished in the slightest by the size of the mountain beside it.

Sure, the moon wasn’t shining nearly as brightly as it does when it’s full and high in the night sky, but it was still impressive enough to stop me in my tracks.

There’s something magical about the moon for we humans, or maybe it’s better to say, there’s something magical about the relationship we humans have with the moon. It’s more than just a delight in beauty. It’s more than fascination and wonder.

She inspires us, stimulates our imagination, encourages us to dream, nurtures our feelings of love and romance.

The pull of the moon draws us up and out of our limits, or our habits, as we “reach for the moon”, aspiring to grow, develop, achieve, to become the best we can become.

I delight in my relationship with the moon.

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Moments of bliss

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on February 18, 2017| 1 Comment »

There are places in the world where I feel more whole, places where I am suddenly deeply aware of the strong flow of life, of energy, of spirit around and through me. Pausing for a moment under the canopy of ancient camphor trees in Kirstenboch gardens to gaze up and far to the surrounding mountains which draw my imagination to their summits and beyond, I feel at peace and enlivened at exactly the same moment.

A day later, browsing through my photographs, I stop again at this view and am surprised to discover my memory presents me with an image I captured in the colossal cathedral of Toledo last summer.

The window to heaven in the highest point of the cathedral’s roof.

What’s the connection?

Why are these two images linked in my mind?

There’s the resonance of the imagery, each with its dark, ragged frame around a bright, distant light. But there’s something else too….something of a feeling, that feeling of smallness, enfolded in a greater something, whilst drawn up beyond my self to the universal.

In the cathedral, I didn’t feel at peace. I encountered image after image of suffering, torture and death represented in the lives of the saints. The immensity of the stone structure of the building with its enormous, ornate golden sculptures weighed heavily on me. So, when I stumbled on the window to heaven it seemed to provide some release, some lightening of the spirit and the heart. A few moments later I caught sight of sunlight and trees through an open door and delighted in the cloistered garden it led to.

Under the camphor trees I had none of that heaviness. I felt more cocooned, welcomed by Nature. But then suddenly, here again was an opening which lifted me up and out of my self.

Moments of bliss.

Precious.

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Millennia and the blink of an eye

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on February 13, 2017| 1 Comment »

I don’t edit my photos very much at all but this one of the cloudy mists pouring over the top of the mountains seemed to cry out for the monochrome treatment.

I took the photo because I find this phenomenon utterly entrancing.

The clouds appear over the top of the ridge and spill over, speeding down the cliff face for only a few metres before they disappear into thin air. The process is continuous. It has all the appearance of perpetual motion.

I love watching the cloud appear from over the mountain top, from somewhere I can’t see, and following its journey into wispy nothingness in such a short space of time.

From somewhere I can’t see to complete disappearance right before my eyes.

A metaphor for an individual life, delicate, beautiful, transient, and mainly made of water…..

I also like the contrasts in this image. Not only the blackness of the rock and the whiteness of the mist, but of their polar opposite textures. The rock, solid, suggesting a permanence because it changes so much more slowly than we humans can perceive in a single lifetime, and the mist, so insubstantial you can barely discern its edges.

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Enthusiasm and generosity

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on February 10, 2017| 1 Comment »

I’ve never seen a fig on the tree like this before. The fruit has burst open to reveal all the wonderful juicy flesh. I’ve picked figs straight from the tree many times, and opened them up with a knife, or just my fingers, but I’ve never seen one open itself up like this.

It’s like an exuberance, as if the tree couldn’t hold itself back. It poured its energies and its life force into producing these succulent, delicious fruits and couldn’t wait another second to show them to the world.

Look! See what I’ve made!

And there’s something else I see here beside this enthusiasm to be the best fig tree it can be….there’s a generosity of spirit.

The tree doesn’t hide its fruit. It declares it, and says, come, taste, share my delight.

It’s inspiring don’t you think….it inspires us to flourish and to give, to create and to share.

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The distance and the frame

Posted in from the dark room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on February 7, 2017| Leave a Comment »

dscn8059

Here’s an example of the type of photograph I enjoy so much. At first glance it’s pleasing. It delights me. I can sit and gaze at it for ages, enjoying its beauty. But it stimulates my thoughts too.

I see this and I think about ways of engaging with the world. Iain McGilchrist shows us in his Master and His Emissary that our two cerebral hemispheres allow us to simultaneously use two different types of focus….narrow and broad.

The left hemisphere separates out whatever we are looking at from the contexts in which it exists. It allows us to set a kind of frame around what we are looking at, to distinguish it from the whole. That lets us label it, put it into a category, and so grasp it. Literally. Get a handle on it so we can manipulate it. It’s a narrow focus, one which drills down to separate out and analyse aspects or components.

The right hemisphere focuses on the connections rather than the parts. It lets us see the broad view, the over view. It helps us to see whatever we are looking at in the fullness of its context. We don’t see the separate parts, we see the connectedness of everything. In the terms of classical philosophy, it helps us to take the “view from on high”.

The view from on high lets us do something else too….it allows us to stand apart from whatever we are looking at. It lets us put a little distance there…a distance in space, and/or a distance in time…a pause, or a moment to reflect and consider.

Some people argue this is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of human beings, this ability to create a distance which allows us to choose responses rather than simply react in programmed or patterned automatic ways. But I think it is equally characteristic of human beings that we have this huge cerebral cortex divided into two distinctly different hemispheres allowing us to focus on the world in two such distinctly different ways.

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How big is your box?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on February 1, 2017| 1 Comment »

person-in-box

It strikes me that one of the biggest questions facing us now is “how are we going to live together?”, and the answer to that depends on the extent of our consciousness and awareness.

How big is the box you are living in?

Is it only big enough for you? Do all other human beings exist outside of your conscious limits? I bet they don’t. For some people their box isn’t much bigger than their own family, or the village, street or town in which they live. For others its the size of their network of like-minded souls – the ones who agree with them, who share the same values, behave the same way, speak the same language. For yet others the box is a whole country. They want to put their own country first, and others can just get on and do the same. If there’s to be competition over space or resources, they’ll fight the others for it, hoping for one winner, and for the rest to be losers.

Maybe the box is the size of our species, though. Maybe it contains every living human being. After all, in this increasingly networked world of relationships, travel, agreements, and exchanges, artificially created boxes the size of a single country are increasingly hard to maintain.

Some people call this bigger box, globalisation, and kick against it. What they experience is personal loss, due, they believe, to others’ gain. But the current model of globalisation is just a way of us living together. We all live in the same world. It’s increasingly impossible to live as if others in other parts of this planet either don’t exist, or don’t matter. When people kick against globalisation, I think they are kicking against a way of us all living together. The answers will lie in finding a better way, not in pretending we all live in disconnected, entirely separate boxes.

Let me just stretch this out a wee bit further. Because I think the reality is not that we humans live together in a separate box on this earth. We are part of Nature. We live in constant interaction with the air, the soil, the water and the energy from the Sun. We are an integral part of the biosphere – living in an intricate web with the entirety of Life on Earth.

How often are we conscious of that? How often do we take that awareness and apply it to come up with good ways to live together….not just all we humans, but with the entire biosphere on the finite planet which we share.

 

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