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Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

Synchronicity and the comin’ storm

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the music room, from the viewing room, life, music, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on April 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I know, I know, you’re thinking, “didn’t I see that photograph yesterday?” Well, you did. And if you didn’t you can see it now if you scroll down to yesterday’s post “The edge of the Storm”.

I don’t know how this universe works, but one thing I do know is that synchronicities occur which are both attention-grabbing, and have the potential to take our understanding to a whole other level.

Let me start further back…….back in the 1960s when I was a child. One year we took a family holiday to the Isle of Man. We took the ferry from Scotland, a thrill in its own right, and as we sailed through the Bay of Ramsay, if my memory serves me well, we passed a boat with the name “Radio Caroline” emblazoned on the side. Radio Caroline was a “pirate radio station”. Which kids don’t want to be pirates? I loved Radio Caroline. I loved the fact that it was broadcasting outwith the control of the British state. Pirate radio stations were ones which didn’t have approved licences to broadcast, and even at that age I wasn’t fond of Establishment controls which tried to tell us we could only listen to the BBC. So it was a thrill to listen to Radio Caroline. You felt as if you were part of some underground movement. But as a radio station they just played fabulous music. I discovered several artists on Caroline who I don’t think I’d ever have found on mainstream radio.


Fast forward to last year…….I got a pair of pro AirPods for my birthday, and I just loved/love the quality of sound which they deliver. I found an app, called “sTREAMs” which made it easy to find radio stations which made full use of the surround sound capabilities of the pods. Guess what I found there? Radio Caroline! Hey, it’s still there! Of course, not a pirate station any more, and now with internet radio, is there any such thing as pirate radio any more? What a joy! But, a little browsing on the app took me to another station I’d never heard of before….Radio Paradise. Well, I’ve been listening to Radio Paradise A LOT in recent weeks. There are no ads, no “stuffing”, just one good, high quality, track after another. It delivers old favourites to me, so I know “I’m on their wavelength”, but it also serves up lots of artists I know nothing about. It’s like opening a door to a new treasure room of delights! I love it!
Well, yesterday I used the photo of the storm, and I wrote the post “The Edge of the Storm”, contemplating about our reactions to looming storms, our ways of both reacting to, and responding to, threats. Then in the afternoon, I’m sitting out in the sunshine and I’m listening to Radio Paradise and on comes this song……..”Storm comin’ “ by the Wailin’ Jennys. I’d never heard this song before and I’d never heard of the band either but I was hooked! What a great song……..here’s a link to the youtube video so you can hear it.

Ok, that was surprise enough, and counts as a synchronicity for me, because how likely is it that I’d write a post about a storm coming in the morning, and here this song, apparently, “just by chance”, on a radio station in the afternoon? But listen to the lyrics. This isn’t a song about the fight/flight/freeze reactions I wrote about in the morning. It’s a song which says “don’t run for cover” – “let whatever is coming rain down on you” – in other words, have courage, and don’t hide, but go with the flow, lean into it, and continue to be present. Well, that’s a whole other level of response from the ones I wrote about in the morning, so listening to this deepened and broadened my understanding of how we might respond to the challenges and stresses which come our way.

Maybe in acute situations, freeze/flee/fright might be just what we need, but I suspect in the longer term we need to face whatever comes our way, allow ourselves to be present with it, and live the experience. There’s a teaching about acceptance in here. There’s a teaching about adaptation. There’s a teaching about immersing yourself in the full flow of LIFE.

Isn’t synchronicity wonderful?

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Edge of the storm

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on April 5, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I took this photo five years ago, but I still find it one of the most dramatic images of a storm that I’ve ever taken. You can see the leading edge of the storm system making its way from the West, heading over the vineyards to where I live.

Of course, if you weren’t actually there you might think this is the back edge of the storm system which has passed over and is now receding. You’ll have to take it from me that that’s not what was happening.

What do we do when we see a storm coming? Brace ourselves? Batten down the hatches? Run away? Or just do nothing apart from feeling afraid?

I don’t mean only literally in the face of a weather event……I mean what do we do when we think we see the signs of a big challenge or problem looming over the horizon?

Our body’s nervous system sets off three possible responsible responses to threat – you’ve probably heard of the “fight or flight” response – well, in addition, there’s a “freeze” response. I always remember watching the news footage of the bombing of the Boston marathon. After the blast the first thing you hear is silence and then quickly after that screaming and shouting as people run in all directions. That first silence really grabbed me. That’s the freeze response. Part of our defence system (the parasympathetic nervous system) kicks in at that moment and basically shuts down a lot of activity so we can really pay attention, really become aware, then after that the adrenaline/sympathetic nervous system response is activated and we are set to fight or flee.

Of course our range of reactions and behaviours is incredibly varied and individual, but we all share these basic reactions as the information and energy flows through us.

What I’ve just described there is the “acute” response. It’s short term, time limited, often very brief and kicks in when there is a clear and imminent danger. But on a day to day basis our whole system responds to our thoughts, to the words and behaviours of others, and to both memories and imaginings with aspects of these systems playing a part in creating “chronic stress”. That chronic stress is pretty damaging, impairing our immune systems, creating chronic inflammation in our bodies, and undermining our mental well-being.

What can we do about it?

I always start with awareness. When I worked as a doctor, usually my first priority was to understand – to figure out what was going on, to make a diagnosis, to assess the situation. That usually involved an element of analysis, but you can’t analyse anything until you are aware of it, so the first response is to be present. In becoming present, you become aware. In fact, being present is a powerful therapeutic behaviour. It’s good for the patient and it’s good for the doctor, too.

I think the next step involves responding with intention. It’s one thing to become aware, and even to figure out what’s happening, but it doesn’t amount to much without an intention which shapes your next thoughts, ideas and behaviours. In Medicine, that intention is to care. If you care, if you give a damn, if you activate love and kindness, then the healing responses will fall into place.

I reckon it’s the same with life. I think a good place to start is with awareness and intention. If we aren’t present, if we aren’t aware, we’re on autopilot, “zombie” mode, and we are open to the manipulation of others, and to becoming stuck in habits created by rumination and pain. But if we do wake up, we have a chance to recognise what’s happening, to stand back a little, by taking a pause, or a few deep breaths, and then make a choice…..make a choice formed by our intentions.

What if our intentions are kindness, love, and understanding? What if our intentions are to feel joy, wonder, and connection? What if our intentions are to build “mutually beneficial bonds”? What if our intentions are what the French call “bienveillance”…….well-meaning, well-wishing?

What do you think the experience of seeing a looming storm would be like then?

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Observers and observed

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »

As I walked along this beach I came across a piece of seaweed and shell. But that’s not where my observation ended. So, I stopped and took this photo.

What do you see?

Maybe you see a piece of seaweed and a shell on the sand.

But maybe you see the suggestion of a face? Maybe this piece of seaweed looks like the eyelashes on a closed eyelid, and the shell, a piece of jewellery on the side of someone’s nose?

Well, that’s what I saw. And once I’d seen that I felt more connected to the beach. It was as if the beach was at peace, and lying beautifully in the sunshine. I know that at the beach we often feel pretty relaxed anyway, but as I saw this, and as I look at it again just now, I feel a wave of calm. This image pleases me. It delights me. It brings me joy and makes me feel content. It stirs that deep feeling I have inside that the universe is essentially a friendly place, created with such precise balances between fundamental forces that everything Life needed to come into being fell into place, that the abundance of the universe facilitates both our survival and our thriving…..individually, as a species, and as one of Life’s myriad of forms.

Maybe you look at this image and the seaweed is a sort of smile? Maybe it seems to be a happy emoji? Well, I didn’t see it that way, but if you do, I bet you are aware of feelings of happiness growing inside you.

It’s strange that for many years now we humans have lived with the idea that there is “me” and there is “everything else” “out there”. That somehow we live separate from, and disconnected from a meaningless universe of objects. But that seems to be changing now. The Physics of the 20th and 21st centuries have revealed to us a whole other perspective on reality and our place in it. Gone are the notions of separate, disconnected objects. Everything, it now appears, is connected to everything else. Everything which exists is manifested within a universal energy field. Everything which appears, briefly, or for a number of years, is a manifestation of relationships and connections. The universe, as Carlo Rovelli, the Physicist, says, is made of events and experiences, not things.

And maybe one of the biggest insights we’ve gained is how there is no disconnection between the observer and the observed. We now know that whatever we observe is changed in the act of being observed. And we also know that the observer is changed by what they observer. It’s a two way process.

We humans bring our imagination to bear on what we observe. We bring our memories and our consciousness. We uncover meaning, create narratives, and enrich our worlds with art, with poetry, with stories, music and dance. We interact with the rest of the universe every moment we are alive. Now, we are beginning to realise that.

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Connectomes

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on April 3, 2021| 1 Comment »

The pine forest at the “Côte Sauvage” in the Charente Maritime, the “Foret des Cedres” in Provence, the deciduous forest around the Bracklinn Falls in Central Scotland, the maple forests around Kyoto……these are some of my most memorable forests. They delight me.

It’s many years since I learned about the Japanese practice of “forest bathing” – which simply means spending some time in a forest – well, actually, not so much just passing some time there, but immersing yourself in it, really engaging with it, listening to the sounds of birds calling, of the branches swaying in the wind, breathing deep the scents of pine, cedar, and other trees, watching the play of sunlight through the leaves as together they create whole performances of light and shade, of shape and shadow – you get the idea.

We have learned a lot about forest bathing in recent years. We’ve learned of the benefits it brings to everything from a sense of well-being to a boost in some of the chemicals and cells involved in our immune system, to a calming of the harmful chronic inflammatory activities inside our bodies which occur as a result of stress. It’s just GOOD for you! And that’s a sweet spot for me – finding what is BOTH good for me and just utterly enjoyable – health boosting and happiness boosting – result!

We’ve also learned a lot about the lives of trees and forests in recent years. We’ve learned that trees don’t live in isolation, that they are in constant communication with each other, sending out warnings when they are attacked or vulnerable, sharing nutrients, and supporting each other. They do this both by sending out chemicals through the air, and by an astonishingly complex network of root systems intertwined with microfibres of fungi creating what has been termed “the wood wide web”.

Here are some of the main books I’ve read which have taught me what I know about how trees and forest demonstrate inter-dependency, how they communicate with each other, and how they behave as one complex adaptive organism. “The Hidden Life of Trees“, by Peter Wohlleben, subtitled, “What they feel, how they communicate: discoveries from a secret world”; “Gossip from the Forest” by Sara Maitland, subtitled, “The tangled roots of our forests and fairytales”; “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which blends “indigenous wisdom” with “science and teachings of plants”; and, the novel, “Overstory“, by Richard Powers. You can probably add your own favourites to that list, but if this is something you want to explore, you could do worse than start with any of those books.

This fairly new knowledge of forests is part of a much wider trend in science – the attempt to understand connections. I think this is a radical, and much needed, shift. The reductionist science of understanding parts has led to an explosion of knowledge, but too often, we fail to really understand the real world because we fail to see that every single part only exists as an embedded, inextricable element of the whole. The fabulous improvement in that approach mirrors a shift in the use of the left hemisphere of the brain which engages with the world by separating it into parts to analyse and categorise, towards the use of the right hemisphere with engages with the world as a whole, and focuses our attention on connections and relationships.

We are now looking much more at whole environments, whole webs of inter-relationships. We see such networks everywhere, from the activity of micro-organisms in our guts (the “microbiome”), to the “neural networks” within the brain, the inter-relationships of species within ecological “niches”, or “biomes”, and in world wide cycles of movement of water, gases, and other molecules.

One concept which is useful in all these areas is the one of the “connectome” – this is the activity of mapping out the interactions and relationships within whatever we are studying. In terms of the brain it can be helpful to imagine that every single thought has the “neural correlate” of a “connectome” of nerve cells. Apparently we have so many neurones in our brain, and each of them is so massively interconnected, that if you were to consider all the potential permutations of activity of little networks within the greater network, then that number would be greater than the number of atoms in the universe! Well, I don’t know how anyone works out something like that, but suffice it to say, the potential for our imagination, for our cognition, for our memory, for our ability to visualise, conceptualise, analyse, synthesise and create, is pretty damn close to infinite!

There’s something else interesting about all these “connectomes” – they are related to each other. Each one is nested into several others, and each one of them sets up resonances and harmonies with other ones. Perhaps that partly explains how we feel what other people feel, how we come to think what other people think, and, maybe even how our inner environments are affected by our external ones.

Amazing what a walk a forest can do for us, huh?

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Waves not building blocks

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 2, 2021| Leave a Comment »

One thing which always fascinates me at the coast, is the appearance and behaviour of waves. I love to stand, or sit, and gaze at them, watching the areas of swell in the water turn into obvious waves as their tops break into white surf. It’s amazing to see the ocean unfurling as the waves appear, rush to the shore, turn white, crash, and dissipate into foam and bubbles, before the water rushes back out to the sea again.

This one photo captures something of the complexity of waves at the beach. You can see at least half a dozen different “fronts” here, each one interacting with the others. It reminds me of the experiments we did in Science class at school which taught us about “interference” patterns as one wave interacts with another. I always found that both beautiful and mesmerising.

Another thing we were taught in Science class was about the molecular basis of all substances. I remember the brightly coloured balls stuck to each other with rods which were used to show us the molecular structure of different crystals and other materials. It was only much later that I came to understand that reality isn’t really made up of discrete units like that.

The world isn’t like a lego kit, a jigsaw, or any kind of machine assembled from discrete parts. I know it can kind of look like that, but it’s not how things are. A better way to think is demonstrated for us at the beach. Reality consists of flows – flows of energies, of atoms, molecules, and of information – flows which are in constant interaction with other flows. What we see as separate objects are just some flows which hold together for a time. The world, as the Physicist, Carlo Rovelli, says, is better understood as “relational”.

I sometimes think of that as I watch the waves, imagining how we too are each like a single wave, emerging on the surface of the ocean, but never separating from it, forming complex relationships with others and with the rest of the world, for a time……for moments, for days, months, years, even for what we call a “lifetime”. Then we return to the rest of the universe from which we emerged.

We are not as separate as we sometimes think we are. Even you and I, dear reader, are interacting just now, as you read this. My thoughts are stimulated by the images I’ve captured, then I express some of them as words in this post, and you read it, and look at the photo, and you, too might begin to have some thoughts very similar to mine. Perhaps even some feelings similar to mine.

We do this all the time throughout our lifetime, don’t we? Everything we do, think, create, express, ripples out far beyond the here and now, and flows into the flows of other lives. We affect each other all the time. We influence each other all the time.

That’s why I want to share these images, these words, these feeling of wonder, awe and joy, in the hope that they influence your life a little, and bring some of those positive energies to you.

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Living as ONE

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 1, 2021| 2 Comments »

I’m standing at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, taking a photo of the wet sand, the dunes and just part of a very long beach. It looks peaceful, doesn’t it? Well, play the video below and turn your volume level up!

This is the sound of the Ocean. Just one minute of video as I stood holding my phone towards the waves.

As I walked through the pine forest from the car park, I could hear that roar of the sea. I could hear it long before I could see it.

Isn’t it wonderful?

I love the sight and the sound of the ocean…..so much more than the estuaries and rivers where you can see the other embankment from where you stand and the whole expanse is bounded in by the edges of the earth. With the ocean you look out and you don’t see an edge.

And that captures an important truth for me – there is only ONE ocean, ONE expanse of water on this Earth. We divide it up artificially and give the parts different names – Atlantic, Pacific, and so on – but you can’t find the dividing lines in Nature. You can’t find any borders or frontiers between “one ocean and another one”. We share not just ONE ocean on this planet, we share a single water cycle, a single atmosphere, ONE Earth.

We are embedded, embodied, emergent, within Gaia, this one, living, beautiful, awe inspiring planet. I wish we lived more with a conscious knowledge of that. I wish we lived more knowing how interconnected and interdependent we all are. I wish we lived more as ONE.

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Pining

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on March 31, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I took a walk in a pine forest yesterday.

We are still living under significant restrictions, and there are rumours that they might even be tightened later today, so I took the opportunity to drive about an hour west of here to the coast, have a walk in a pine forest, have a picnic, then stroll along the beach at the “côte sauvage” which means the “wild coast”, a stretch of coastline here in South West France where you can stand at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

I took several photos in the forest and down on the sand. Here’s one of them.

This is a single pine cone forming at the end of one stem of a pine tree. The forest floor was covered with pine cones of all shapes and sizes, but this one, still in the process of emerging, caught my eye. It’s a beautiful collection of developing pine seeds, and the long narrow pine leaves radiating out in all directions gave it the appearance of a sort of “starburst” – the very shape of the plant capturing the essence of the behaviour to come, where the seeds will be dispersed in all directions.

When I look at this image I see potential. I see that abundance I mentioned the other day in an earlier post, where each plant produces millions of seeds and scatters them near and far to produce the greatest chance of proliferation yet more plants, yet more pine trees. Because I zoomed in towards the seed head you can’t see the edges of the pine leaves….so every one of them looks like a direction indicator….it heads out in all directions and you can’t see just how far any individual leaf can reach.

So we see potential here – the potential to be more than we can see in this moment, the potential to be more than we can see in this small space. When we look too closely, when we separate out whatever we are looking at from all of its contexts, connections and environments, then we fail to grasp its reality.

To see the whole we need imagination. To see the whole we need to “see” in our “mind’s eye” what the part is attached to, where its come from, where its going, and how it interacts with everything else. I capture an aspect of that in the little phrase at the top of this blog – “becoming not being”. I am always more excited by vibrant, dynamic living forms than I am by artificially disconnected, dead parts.

I pine for Life, for growth, for the realisation of potential, for the expansion of possibilities, for the deepening of understanding.

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Twists and turns

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on March 30, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This isn’t the only plant I’ve seen which twists and turns a lot, but perhaps this is one of the most striking. I always find myself wondering two things when I look at an image like this one.

The first thing is just how amazingly complex the structure is. When this plant started as a single seed, nobody could have predicted the shape it would achieve today. Even more, at no point in this plant’s life could anyone predict with accuracy the detail of the directions it would take, the exact places where it would turn to the left, the right, head up, or head down. Its shape size and uniqueness at every point are unpredictable in the details. And that’s the same for us in our own lives.

Every individual patient who ever consulted with me had a unique, personal story to tell. Nobody could have predicted the detail of their story from the day of their birth. That truth remains the case day after day after day. What I mean is that whatever treatment I gave someone, the only way I could know whether or not it would help them, and, in particular, just how it would help them, was to have another consultation with them, days, weeks, or months further on and listen to them tell me their unique experience. Only the patient could tell me how helpful the treatment was. I think that, sadly, that’s a bit forgotten in a lot of modern medicine. We can’t know for certain what the outcomes are going to be for an individual patient, no matter what “evidence base” we are aware of.

Secondly, I look at this plant and I wonder about the events in its life. What happened, and when, to produce those particular dramatic significant turns of direction. When I consulted with patients I liked to ask “When were you last completely well?” Then we would explore the emergence of their illness and the contexts of their personal life in which the symptoms appeared. Asking that didn’t just help me make a diagnosis, it helped me and the patient to make sense of their illness and their life. The events of our life play a significant role in the emergence of the illnesses we suffer. But they play a significant role in our growth, our development of character and personality, and in our experiences of joy, love and satisfaction too.

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Beauty in the soul

Posted in art, books, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on March 29, 2021| Leave a Comment »

There’s a bird reserve near Nimes, in the South of France, where you can see flamingos. I’ve visited it several times, and each time I take a host of photos. They are SUCH beautiful creatures!

I’m reading Gary Lachman’s “Lost Knowledge of the Imagination” just now, and this morning read these lines about beauty –

We perceive beauty, the Neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus said, when we perceive something that is in accord with our soul.

Knowledge of beauty is knowledge of soul. It is self-knowledge, and when we discover beauty we are discovering part of ourselves.

The knowledge we receive in this way is not of fact but of quality, of value and meaning.

We perceive beauty, are open to its presence, through a change in the quality of our consciousness. Only like can know like. We must have beauty within ourselves to see it in the world.

I hadn’t thought of beauty this way before. When I read it I thought about the old adage of “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” which always seemed to me to be a statement that beauty was in fact a matter of taste. But this perspective from Gary Lachman describes that sort of third way interpretation which I like so much. It’s not that beauty is “outside” us, as some kind of measurable object. I think we all know that. Beauty can’t be reduced to data, can’t be captured by mere facts. But neither is it just a matter of taste, as if it is entirely an experience of the individual rendering the rest of the real world unimportant.

The third way is that beauty is a resonance. It’s a harmony. And therefore it emerges in the lived quality of an experience, of an engagement, of a relationship. We need both parts of the relationship to be present…..something “within” us, let’s call that “the soul”, and something “outwith” us, let’s call that “the other”.

We know instantly when we find something, or someone beautiful. We don’t need to way it up, analyse the inputs, stimuli and signals. We just know. We know because our inner being resonates with whatever it is we are looking at….or it doesn’t. When it does, we have the sensation of joy, delight, and gratitude which accompanies all engagements with beauty.

Beauty, I reckon, is good for us. It’s good for our souls. It’s good for our consciousness. It’s good for our health.

So, here you are, a few photos in this post, all taken during one visit to the flamingos. I find them beautiful. I hope you do too. And I hope that appreciation of their beauty nourishes your soul, warms your heart, adds some positive quality to this present moment.

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Living together

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on March 28, 2021| Leave a Comment »

You’ll be familiar with the phenomenon of starlings creating a “murmuration” where thousands of them flock together and create the most astonishing shapes in the sky. I see that around here from time to time, but much more commonly I hear a few hundred, or perhaps a few thousand, starlings flying through the vineyards together. Then they’ll “assemble” on a couple of the biggest trees at the top of the hill. They make such a noise while they do that, that they absolutely catch your attention. Then as they sit on the branches together they sing and call and chatter for a while, making a unique flock of starlings racket.

Suddenly, they all go quiet. It happens over perhaps two or three seconds. The clamour of the flock is replace by silence. Having witnessed this many times I now know what’s going to happen next. They all take off! Just like you can see in this photo. In fact, it’s quite an easy photo to take if you just listen. You just focus the camera on the tree and wait a second, then, whoosh, what you hear next is the sound of a thousand wings beating as one. It’s a rush, a sudden noise of air being pushed aside by the birds. I don’t think I’ve heard exactly that sound anywhere else.

From time to time, I look up from my garden because I hear that rush of wind and I know it’s a flock of birds speeding over the tops of the vines, and settling onto their branches. Then I hear them call to each other, then a bit later, silence occurs, and a moment later….whoosh! They take off into the sky, becoming visible again as they soar over the vineyards.

It’s a delightful sight and sound.

It always makes me think about that balance in the world between competition and co-operation, and the delicate balance between individualism and collectivism. It makes me reflect on the human need for autonomy and a sense of Self, and the powerful human need to belong, to be in relationship, to love and be loved.

I do think we’ve got the balance all wrong over the last few hundred years, and there have been whole books written about that. We can look at the narrowing of consciousness from when humans lived in greater harmony with the landscape and with other creatures, to the present time where whole societies have become atomised and the sense of alienation has shot off the top of the scale. Or we can look at the rise of industrialisation, technocratic modes of organisation and control, and the mass competitive consumption of capitalism. Or we can consider the divided brain thesis of Iain McGilchrist and see that the Emissary (the left hemisphere) has cut itself off from the Master (the right hemisphere) and produced our current patterns of thought and social organisation. There are many ways to approach this same issue…..but the conclusion is……

we have got the balance wrong. We have gone way too far down the road of atomisation, reductionism, generalisation, command and control, consumption and competition. Well, that’s how I see it anyway. I think the world, our hearts, our souls, the World Soul, are all crying out for a shift in emphasis – towards a recognition of the “commons”, of how we all share one planet, one water cycle, one atmosphere, one common genetic heritage. How all of Life is part of the same, single, complex web.

Maybe this pandemic has quietened down the rush and pressure of competitive, busy life, and if we listen carefully we can hear the emerging silence which comes before we take off together with one great “whoosh” and fly higher than we’ve ever done before.

I think we need to move towards more kindness, care and love. Towards the creation of mutually beneficial bonds and relationships. I think we need to do that personally, and we need to do that together. What do you think? Maybe that would be pretty wonderful.

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