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Happy New Year (what do you mean by that?)

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on January 1, 2014| 3 Comments »

Every New Year near Kyoto, there is a tradition to climb the hill to the shrine at Fushimi Inari. It’s a spectacular trip at any time of year, but the main reason people go there at the start of the year is for luck and prosperity.

This is the time of year when you meet people and say “Happy New Year”…….what are you wishing for them? Is it happiness? Luck? Prosperity?

Look at the path in the photo above. See how it winds around the corner……we can’t quite see where it is leading, can we?

That’s where we are, unable to see what lies ahead, but we can certainly choose which direction we want to go, and how we want to walk today……and isn’t that how we find happiness, luck and prosperity?

By choosing the direction we want to go, and by living today the way we really want to live.

Happy New Year. I hope its a year of growing, of flourishing, of becoming more fully you.

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What does spirituality mean to you?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on December 30, 2013| 1 Comment »

In the fields of holistic and integrative medicine people often talk about taking a body/mind/spirit approach. The body and the mind aspects are pretty uncontentious. But what about “spirit”?

For many people the word spirit conjures up either organised religion, or non-denominational ideas like spirit beings, beliefs about life after death, or reincarnation, and so on. But is there a spirituality which isn’t supernatural?

Think of the idea of the “thin spaces” for example, where you feel connected to something greater than yourself.

In fact, I do think this is a key to the concept of spirituality – connection – connection to something greater than yourself. There’s a great pdf about integrative medicine (download here) across on the humanmedia.org site which includes a page on spirituality. They say it is

a means of connection and/or self-reflection through which one finds comfort, purpose and inner peace.

Not a bad definition, and it highlights both the key ideas of connection and of purpose. We are meaning seeking, meaning creating, beings. We do that through stories, through seeking patterns, by joining things up……and that gives us our myths, our beliefs and a sense of purpose. It’s pretty hard to live a life with no sense of purpose.

The Humankind document goes on to say that spirituality includes the qualities of

compassion, humility, generosity and simplicity

I wonder if thinking about qualities such as these helps us to see spirituality as something essentially integrative – in the sense of it being that which connects and pulls the body and the mind together……

Back to the idea of spirituality including a sense of being connected to that which is greater than yourself – remember this little RSA Animate video of Jeremy Rifkin’s fabulous talk on “empathic civilisation”? No? Click through and watch it now.

What does spirituality mean to you? What part does it play in your life?

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Light on Earth

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography on December 28, 2013| Leave a Comment »

What I love about this photo is the way the light appears – it’s almost as if there must be multiple sources of the light, shining with different intensities on different parts of the landscape.

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Finding your own path between actuality and imagination

Posted in books, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, perception, philosophy, photography, psychology on December 27, 2013| Leave a Comment »

$fractal cloud$

Ursula Le Guin, in the introduction to her selected short stories, “Where on Earth”, says

I had been writing realistic stories (bourgeois-USA-1948) because realism was what a serious writer was supposed to write under the rule of modernism, which had decreed that non-realistic fiction, if not mere kiddilit, was trash. I was a very serious young writer. I never had anything against realistic novels, and loved many of them. I am not theory-minded, and did not yet try to question or argue with this arbitrary impoverishment of literature. But I was soon aware that the ground it offered my particular talent was small and stony. I had to find my own way elsewhere. Orsinia was the way, lying between actuality, which was supposed to be the sole subject of fiction, and the limitless realms of the imagination.

How liberating! How inspiring! Of course, all fiction is a work of the imagination, whether you call it “realism” or not, and, actually, isn’t Life, which can only be lived from the perspective of the subject, also a work of imagination? Or at least, it’s a work of finding that path between “actuality” (the objective Real), and the “limitless realms of the imagination” (how we subjectively interpret and experience that Real)?

I also love her phrase “arbitrary impoverishment of literature”. Why indeed should we limit ourselves to “realism”, especially if that same realism ignores, or worse, denies, the inclusion of the imagination?

Finally, I like that phrase “the ground if offered my particular talent was small and stony”. Isn’t it true that for each of us, our particular talents flourish in quite different environments, or on quite different paths?

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thin to the divine

Posted in books, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on December 26, 2013| 2 Comments »

Kenneth Steven, in his poem of imagined fragments, “A Song Among The Stones”, describes what the journey might have been like for the Celtic Christian monks who are believed to have travelled from Iona to Iceland.
On the first page, these two lines grabbed me

yet this is the place they came to find
an island thin to the divine

That’s a wonderful phrase, “thin to the divine”. I can think of many places where it feels as if the land is thin to the divine, those special places which move and stir your spirit. Off the West coast of Scotland is definitely one of those places for me.

Where are yours?

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more, more, more…..more what?

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on December 23, 2013| 1 Comment »

As we come towards the end of another year, there are many articles and programmes looking back over 2013, and looking forward into 2014. In the socio-economic world what we hear about most is “growth”. Concern about whether or not there has been “enough”, and how we can all strive to produce more. Every single country in the world is measured in terms of the “growth” of its economy. Very little growth, bad marks. Increasingly more growth, good marks!

But growth of what? And for what?

Growth of consumption. That seems to be one marker. Consumption of what? Doesn’t matter. Stuff. Just, the more consumption, the better. Growth of “activity”. That’s another. But what kind of activity? Just activity. Busy turning financial derivatives into even more complex products to sell others. Busy making stuff. Busy moving stuff. Just activity.

Why? Why is more consumption and more activity good no matter what is being consumed, no matter what activities are being carried out?

Is it to produce more and more wealth for less and less people? Because that’s the sure and certain trend we are seeing.

Meantime we are seeing two other forms of growth. Growth of the number of people alive on the planet. Growth of the amount of finite resources we are taking out of the planet. Growth of the number of drugs people take every day. Growth in long term diseases and cancer.

Something isn’t going right, don’t you think?

Marc Halévy, in his “Prospective 2015 – 2025”, [ISBN 270331017X] takes this whole issue by the scruff of the neck and points out with stark clarity that we are just not on a sustainable path. More than that, we seem to be caught in a communal delusion, that this current path of ever more consumption by ever more people is a good thing – in fact THE good thing – THE criterion on which to judge the health of any economy.

This is just crazy. It makes no sense.

Marc suggests an alternative and he captures it in a simple French phrase – “la jouissance de la frugalité”.

These aren’t the easiest words to translate into English (help me out here if you are good at translating!) – but you get a bit of the sense of “jouissance” from the french phrase “joie de vivre” (which, interestingly, is one of those phrases we English speakers use directly as it is). It’s something to do with pleasure, joy, delight, satisfaction, something life enhancing. It’s, fundamentally, about quality. And “frugalité” isn’t exactly “frugality” as we would say in English. In fact, frugality isn’t a word which is used much by English speakers any more, but Benjamin Franklin had it as one of the most important of his virtues. It doesn’t mean something inadequate, or poor. It isn’t about poverty. But it is about “less”…..a kind of making the most of whatever it is you have…..

We can find this suggestion in the “sweetness of life”, and in the “slow movement“.

It’s about more quality for less consumption. It’s about living in the present, savouring, enjoying, mindfully experiencing every single moment.

Once you apply that personal principle to the universal, then you stop to ask yourself at each level. Does this enhance my life? Does it enhance the life of the human species? Does it enhance Life on Earth? Does it enhance the Universe?

Enhance might not be the best word, but I hope you get the idea. We need to shift our focus from more, more, more numbers and stuff, to deeper, greater, more impactful quality of living.

We need more of “la jouissance de la frugalité”

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Becoming all you can become

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, personal growth, photography on December 22, 2013| 1 Comment »

Here’s what you can do.

You can do what the whole universe does.

You can do what absolutely everything in the universe can do.

You can realise your potential, your completely unique potential.

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Paths

Posted in from the dark room, photography on December 21, 2013| 2 Comments »

Paths…do you wonder what kind of path you are on? Have you taken any time recently to look at it? To really see and feel what this path is like?
I read a small poem recently by Alec Finlay it was about “today“, the word “today” which starts, in the “t” with a junction, he says, and ends in fork (in the “y”). I like that. A lot. The thought that every day starts with a junction and at the end of it we come to a fork. Because that’s true, isn’t it? We have a choice every day about which path to take next…..

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the world poetizes

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the reading room, life, perception, photography on December 16, 2013| Leave a Comment »

When I read the word “poetizes” I thought it was a neologism, or maybe a bit of French-English creation, but, of course, it’s a regular English word, meaning “To describe or express in poetry or a poetic manner”. I stumbled over this beautiful verb today in the following quote

From the moment we begin to look at things, the world changes, the world poetizes immediately if you begin to pay attention to the grain of a jacket, the color of a curtain, or a falling drop tap…….says Thomas Clerc

Here’s a little collection of some of my photos which I think show that phenomenon clearly……enjoy yourself for a moment as the world poetizes itself…….

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sparks and echoes

Posted in from the dark room, photography on December 10, 2013| 3 Comments »

When I look through my photos I’m often surprised that one picture makes me think of a totally different picture – or at least totally different in terms of subject matter, place and time of taking – but somehow one photo sparks my memory of another. It’s a bit like doing a word association game but with photos….