Posted in from the dark room, photography on November 24, 2013| Leave a Comment »
I’ve never seen anything like this. As I was driving through the “Sma’ Glen” the gold on the water caught my eye.
My favourite is probably the photo above, but look at this one (probably the most abstract)
and, this one (which shows you what caught my eye in the first place)
then, this one shows you more clearly just where the gold was coming from
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on November 23, 2013| 2 Comments »
What’s this blog all about?
BECOMING NOT BEING
You can see that phrase in the title banner, and its that phrase which kick started my writing of this blog.
Look at this photo I took this week. I think it captures the absolute essence of “becoming not being”.
Start wherever you want. At the top you can see the blue sky, whispy clouds kissing and caressing the surface of the snow covered mountain, or is the snow blowing up into whispy clouds in the sky? You can see the shadows of the clouds darkening the surface of the land, and you know, you just know, that those shadows, those clouds, and, yes, the borders of the snow, are constantly changing.
In fact, it’s quite hard to see the boundaries up there. Where does the land end, the cloud begin? Where does the blue sky end and the cloud begin?
Then as you come down further you see the land without snow…..the blues, the greys, the browns……all, forever, becoming not being.
Posted in from the dark room, photography on November 22, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Posted in books, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, photography, psychology on November 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »
David Suzuki writes (in “The Sacred Balance”)
Definition identifies, specifies and limits a thing, describes what it is and what it is not; it is the tool of our great classifying brain. Poetry, in contrast, is the tool of synthesis, of narrative. It struggles with boundaries in an effort to mean more, include more, to find the universal in the particular. It is the dance of words, creating more-than-meaning, reattaching the name, the thing, to everything around it.
Iain McGilchrist, in his astonishing, “The Master and His Emissary“, describes the brain’s left hemisphere approach to the world as analytical, naming, classifying, analysing. And he cites poetry as one of the great functions of the right hemisphere’s way of engaging with the world. The right hemisphere “struggles with boundaries”, sees the connections, synthesises, holistically discovers “the universal in the particular”.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, photography, science, Uncategorized on November 19, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Relationships – here’s the key to understanding living organisms.
We don’t understand a human being by measuring his or her parts and adding up the results. We understand a human being by studying how the parts relate, and how the person relates to the rest of Nature.
Fritjof Capra puts it this way –
Systems thinking emerged from a series of interdisciplinary dialogues among biologists, psychologists, and ecologists, in the 1920s and ’30s. In all these fields, scientists realized that a living system – organism, ecosystem, or social system – is an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. The “systemic” properties are properties of the whole, which none of its parts have. So, systems thinking involves a shift of perspective from the parts to the whole. The early systems thinkers coined the phrase, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” What exactly does this mean? In what sense is the whole more than the sum of its parts? The answer is: relationships. All the essential properties of a living system depend on the relationships among the system’s components. Systems thinking means thinking in terms of relationships. Understanding life requires a shift of focus from objects to relationships.
I find this completely thrilling and it explains so clearly why we can’t use reductionism to fully comprehend living beings.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, photography, science on November 17, 2013| Leave a Comment »
How does ice form? Because the water gets cold? Yes, ice doesn’t form until the water molecules settle down their activity enough to form a crystal structure. But it needs something else…….a seed. For ice to form, there has to be a starting point, such as an impurity or a roughness on the surface of the container.
When it starts to happen, it is beautiful to watch. Here, in the garden of the hospital, the ice is just beginning to form at the edge of this lovely bowl. Can you see it?
Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on November 16, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Two important characteristics of nature are uniqueness and change.
Every leaf is unique. The lifetime of every creature, every person on this planet is unique.
And that uniqueness cannot be captured, cannot be measured, cannot be fully described at any one particular point in a lifetime.
No story is complete.
Nothing is fully understood, and, as change never ceases, there is always more to unfold, always more to develop.
I love the wonder and awe which spring up from my heart in the face of uniqueness and change.
I love the humility that demands of me.
To know that I will never fully know means I always have more to discover. To know that nothing is ever “finished” means that every day is a new creation.
Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, health, life, photography on November 13, 2013| Leave a Comment »
I was gifted this stone recently.
I love it’s yin yang quality of inextricably bound black and white. You can’t have one side without the other. You can’t separate one side from the other.
This is what the “mind body” idea is to me. I don’t tend to use the term “mind body” because I don’t accept it’s duality. I don’t accept the implication that mind and body are separate/separable entities.
We live with our whole being. We become ill in our whole being.
Health involves the coherence of the whole organism, not just a part of it. Aren’t mind and body just two different perspectives on a person? Each with its own qualities, but each inseparable from the other.
Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, photography, Uncategorized on November 12, 2013| 3 Comments »
There’s a lot of talk around just now about “patient centred care”. It’s one of those concepts that nobody argues against. In fact, pretty much everyone claims to be doing it. If that’s true, then it must mean different things to different people. Or it must have so many aspects, that different people resonate with the concept because they understand and value one of those aspects.
There’s a vast and growing literature on “patient centred care” but I’d like to make a contribution to the debate. I’m writing here from the perspective of a generalist, holistic, integrative doctor. I work at the “NHS Centre for Integrative Care” which, we claim, is a patient centred service within the NHS.
Some health care services are disease centred. There are Diabetic Clinics, Asthma Clinics, Hypertension Clinics and so on. These are specialist services where only people with particular diseases are seen, and where progress is measured primarily by measuring changes in the disease activity.
Some services are therapy centred. When you attend one of those services, only particular therapies will be used, no matter what your diagnosis, or who you are. The two biggies are surgery and drugs. Most services are designed to support the delivery of one of those two therapies. “CAM” (“complementary and alternative medicine”) clinics are often therapy centred too. Acupuncture Clinics, Osteopathic Clinics, Homeopathic Clinics etc. When you go to one of those you will see someone who has specialised in that particular therapy, and they will try to help you using that therapy.
Integrative Care is a patient centred therapy. It delivers individualised, multidisciplinary care using a range of different therapies, based on a holistic, personalised understanding of the individual patient. It is generalist, in that it is not limited to patients with specific diseases, and it is integrated in that it is not limited to the use of one particular therapy.
Now, I’m sure, there are many who will explain why their disease-centred, or therapy-centred service is also patient-centred, but I hope it’s helpful to clarify why an “integrative care” service cannot be defined by either the therapies used, or the disease diagnoses of the patients attending.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography, psychology on November 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Jung said
life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries
James Hollis, in “The Middle Passage” ends that book with
A great mysterious energy is embodied at conception, bides a while and finally goes away. Let us be gracious hosts, let us consciously assent to the luminous pause
Isn’t that wonderful?
Heroes Not Zombies 