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Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

The creative Moon

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on February 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »

It’s interesting how we use the verb to light in English. This photo is of a full moon, but what it shows best is the foliage of the tree through which I took the photo. I like the effect very much.

The Moon has no light of its own. It’s not like the Sun. It doesn’t generate any physical light, but, rather reflects the light of the Sun. That makes the light of the moon a completely different kind of light than that from the Sun. For a start we can gaze directly at the Moon for as long as we want, but we daren’t even stare directly at the Sun for a second without running the risk of damaging our eyes. I suppose that makes it easier to contemplate the Moon than it does the Sun.

The Moon’s light is a softer, gentler light, but on a clear night with a Full Moon you can still find your way around in the dark. It’s enough to give us a hint about what is around us in the world. But the colours aren’t there, and neither is the clarity which daylight brings. So, it almost demands that we use our powers of imagination and creativity more. After all, vision is a creative process. You know that, right? Our brain doesn’t contain something like a movie screen for us to watch the moving images. In fact, light itself doesn’t even get into our heads. Instead our eyes convert the light to electrical signals which are passed along a vast network of nerve cells in the brain and the brain does the job of analysing all the signals, and somehow creating clear images for us to perceive – images without any gaps in them, despite the fact that the back of the eye has a “blind spot” where no light can be detected. We literally create the images we see moment by moment.

Creativity involves an interplay of memory and imagination with the current information being received by the sensory system. It’s a true, continuous blending of the present, the past and the possible futures.

I think that by moonlight, without the clarity of colour and forms, we demand more of the imagination and our creative powers to enable us to see our way in the world.

Moonlight also works through symbolism and story – is it possible to contemplate the Moon without thinking of Venus, of Love, of Romance, of the Divine Feminine? It is, but it’s not nearly as rich an experience when we ignore all that. We associate the Moon with the unconscious, with feelings and with rhythms of tides and hormones. We associate the Moon with a certain wildness of thought – the word “lunacy” meaning madness has the word for “moon” right in there – “luna”. I’m not going to get into a detailed description of the history of madness and psychiatry here, but let’s just say our understanding of the psyche and of “mental illness” is ever changing and we still don’t really understand the more severe forms of disturbance, the “psychoses” which come with “hallucinations” and “delusions”.

So, when I see a Full Moon, or even one of the phases of the Moon, I don’t just see the physical, reflected light of the Sun, but I see a whole world of imagination and enchantment.

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The hidden connectors

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on February 14, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Ok, so I’ve called this post “The hidden connectors”, but as you can see, there’s nothing hidden about this one! This is an astonishingly beautiful specimen from that Kingdom of Nature that we mostly don’t talk about and mostly aren’t even aware of – fungi.

Fungi are fascinating lifeforms. They aren’t animals, they aren’t plants and they aren’t minerals…..although this particular one looks awfully like a piece of agate. You can see examples of parts of them when they appear on the surfaces of trees, and the soil. The kind you will be most familiar with are the little toadstools and mushrooms which appear on the ground, especially in forests. But you also see them a lot growing on fallen logs in the forests.

Fungi play an important role in decomposition…..they are the essential, often invisible, link between what has lived and what is about to live. They are the recyclers, the processors, which break down the dead and dying cells of animals and plants and release nutrients to nourish emerging plants. They are the connection between the generations past and the generations to come. I’m sure you’ll have read that Nature doesn’t produce waste. There are no “land fill sites”, “incinerators” and “toxic dumps” in Nature – they are all human inventions. Nature transforms everything which has existed into everything which is about to exist. Fungi are one the key elements in those cycles of birth, death and re-birth.

But fungi are also the secret connectors which make the forests living, intercommunicating, interactive communities of individual trees. Every tree has vast root systems hidden underground, and fungi form astonishingly large and complex networks amongst and between the tree roots, carrying and exchanging nutrients, substances and information between the trees. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to compare them to the neural networks in our brains – totally different in structure and form of course – but vast threads of interconnection which create what some biologists have fairly recently termed “the Wood Wide Web” – which transforms a forest from a grouping of individual trees into a much larger, living being.

Isn’t it amazing how these creatures, these forms of life, fill that liminal space between – between trees, between life and death, between generations?

We live in a completely interconnected world. Maybe this pandemic has shown us that more clearly than ever before. But all our artificial boundaries and separations, all our arbitrary states, borders, our constant dividing of reality into “us and them”……it’s just not real. It fails to show us how inseparable we are from each other, how intertwined we are with each other and with all the other species and biosystems of Planet Earth.

Isn’t it time to insist on the importance of what we share? Isn’t it time to insist on our inter-dependence and inter-connectedness, instead of these false divisions and separations? Isn’t it time we understood that we ALL live on the same planet, with the same air, the same water, the same resources? Isn’t it time to remind ourselves how whatever we do, as individuals or as societies, has ramifications and impacts which spread way, way beyond what we can control?

I think we can all choose to become conscious connectors, building positive relationships, integrating our unique differences to create mutually beneficial bonds. I think that’s how we will change our world.

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How do you grow a forest?

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on February 13, 2021| Leave a Comment »

How do you grow a forest?

One seedling at time.

This beautiful little seedling is captivating. I spotted it growing from the moss covered forest floor, the seed casing with its wind driven system of flight and dispersal still intact, but the bright green of new growth clearly visible, and the beginnings of the spiral of unfolding showing us that this little seed has taken root, and is beginning the long journey to become a tree.

It makes me think about the relationship between the tree and the forest, between the particular and the general, between the individual and the group. A relationship I think we tend to get badly wrong. With the rise of statistically driven data collection and analysis, along with the development of algorithms, we reduce the unique person to a point in a set far too often. We pick one, or a handful, of observable, measurable characteristics, categorise them and use them as the be all and end all.

We define people according the group we’ve put them into. In so doing, we fail to see them as unique, individual, human beings. You just can’t know and understand a person from a data set. It’s not enough, and it’s often a fast track down the wrong cul-de-sac.

We make people invisible by reducing them to examples of a group.

All my working life I saw one person at a time…..whether that was in the GP surgery, with a rhythm of one patient every ten minutes or so, or in the specialist referral centre for people with long term intractable conditions, where we’d spend an hour to an hour and half for the first visit, then about twenty minutes for each follow up. In both these settings the rhythm of my day was determined by the scheduled appointments allowing me to give full attention focus to every single individual who came to consult me. I found that a great meditation practice, a great way of continuously coming back to the present moment…..not thinking ahead to who might come next, and not hanging on to the story of the person who has just left the room….but, rather, encountering the crowds, the queues, the “lists”, one person a time.

Of course I learned a lot from all these individuals which informed me about others. But the point is, it was a practice of focusing on the individual, and gleaning the general knowledge from there……not learning the general knowledge and trying to force each person into the right pigeon hole.

I learned from the work of Iain McGilchrist that this was the result of how we use the two hemispheres of our brain. The left hemisphere focuses in, abstracts information from its contexts, labels it and categorises it. It works with sets, groups, and generalities, continuously trying to fit new information into what we’ve learned already. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, focuses on the whole, seeking what is unique and particular in every context, every relationship, every circumstance, endlessly fascinated with what’s novel and what’s particular. As he says in his “Master and His Emissary”, we’ve let the left hemisphere become the dominant one, but evolution never intended that.

It’s time to re-balance, to prioritise the approach to life driven by the right hemisphere and to reap all the potential benefits of the analytic, labelling and classifying left hemisphere by handing those insights back to the right – in other words, by putting whatever we encounter, whatever we understand, back into the contexts and environments in which we found it.

We need to re-learn how to experience life, one seedling at a time. That’s how we’ll grow a healthy forest.

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Co-creating reality

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on February 12, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I took this photo many years ago at a waterfall in Scotland. I’ve long since been fascinated by the interplay between water and rocks in streams, rivers and, especially waterfalls. I suppose in waterfalls the power of the water to sculpt the rocks is at its greatest as the water roars down the hillside.

In this particular photo you can see how the water has smoothed the surface of some of the rocks to the extent that they actually look like water streaming over them. It’s as if the water has fashioned the rock in its own likeness.

One of the other rocks is revealing its multilayered structure in such a way that it, too, resembles, the flow of water, and reminds us of the often hidden depths that lie beneath the surfaces of what we see.

What shape is the water?

That’s a strange question, isn’t it? Because water always seems to assume the shape of whatever contains it. Certainly the rocks, whilst not permanent in their forms, create the boundaries or limits against which the water can flow. When there is no clear, solid container, water evaporates, disappearing into the air, rising upwards to form clouds, or staying close to the earth to make mists and fog. But even then it’s contained within the atmosphere. It doesn’t disappear away out to the rest of the universe (at least not in significant amounts, I don’t think).

So water is the shape of what contains it. But that statement doesn’t quite capture reality does it? It assumes that both the water and the container are passive…..that neither changes the other……but we can see, even in this photo, how the water constantly changes the rock and how the rock constantly changes the water. In fact, that interaction carries on at microscopic levels which we can’t see with the naked eye, as minerals and micro-organisms are exchanged between the water and the rock, changing the actual composition of each moment by moment, year by year, aeon by aeon.

That’s the nature of reality, isn’t it? A constant flow of co-creation. Nothing exists in isolation. Nothing lives outside of everything. Connections, interactions, relationships and co-creation are at the heart of universe. They are the fundamental, inescapable basis of reality.

And that’s both beautiful and wondrous, wouldn’t you agree?

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Life force

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on February 11, 2021| Leave a Comment »

My consulting room at the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital had a glass wall, half of which could slide open to let you step out onto wooden decking and from there into the garden. Each of the five consulting rooms in a row had that same design, and each of them were separated outside by a wooden trellis with clematis and wisteria growing up towards the upper level of the building.

A few years after the hospital opened and the gardens were laid, I noticed what this climber had done to the woodwork of the trellis as it wound its way upwards. I was astonished. I knew that climbers had great powers to reach out, connect, hang on even, but I hadn’t imagined that these plant stalks could become both so thick and so powerful. You can see this one has actually broken the wooden straps in several places.

Of course, I didn’t notice it happening. We’re not that great at noticing the reality of the present moment, are we? But I sure noticed it this day…..still don’t know why….don’t why it was this particular day and not one of surely many others which preceded it where I might have noticed. Oh well, you can see why I use “heroes not zombies” as my blog title, can’t you? We really do pass through life on autopilot, reacting to overt and covert stimuli which move us this way and that, allowing our attention to be grabbed by the loud, the dramatic, and the shocking. Living, but not fully.

It doesn’t have to be like that, does it. We can wake up, become more aware of the here and now, more mindful, more conscious of life and being alive. We can notice when our attention is caught, when our passions are stirred, and we can choose what we want to do with that knowledge. We can write a new story, our own, unique story, with ourselves as the main character……moving from a zombie existence to a hero one.

When I do that I find that the so called “ordinary” day is filled with what seems to me to be quite “extraordinary”. I mean, just look again at this photo. Think of the Life Force, of the drive to exist, to survive, to grow and to thrive which runs through every living being. And look how it overcomes every flimsy structure, every material object, which we humans fashion and build.

I’m sure you’ve noticed something similar in the surprising appearance of a wild flower, or “weed”, pushing its way up through a pavement, cracking apart the tarmac, or concrete.

Isn’t it astonishing, this “Life Force”?

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Drawn to the light…..and the dark

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, perception, photography, psychology on February 10, 2021| 1 Comment »

I love to photograph light….sunbeams, dawn, sunsets, moonlight, you name it. But I am especially drawn to scenes where there is a lot of contrast. I just love an image like this with the dark land before me, the grey clouds above, the grey sea below, and then, there on the horizon, at the far edge of the scene, is a display of sunbeams stretching down to the make the sea shine, and turn the grey clouds, blue.

Maybe it’s the yin and yang thing that attracts me. That’s been my favourite symbol for most of my life, and I have worn a rose gold/yellow gold version of it around my neck for decades. I love that statement of reality which isn’t just that there are always opposites, but that neither can exist without the other. I also love what that symbol says about the constancy of change.

Or maybe we are all drawn to images of sunlight on far horizons. Maybe they spark our imaginings and our longings for what might lie ahead, and give us hope as we journey towards it.

What do you think?

Are you also drawn to both the light….and the dark?

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Constancy and change

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, photography on February 9, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I was born and raised in the town of Stirling, in the middle of the central belt of Scotland. It’s an ancient market town, and the Old Bridge over the River Forth was one of the only crossings allowing movement between the Highlands and the Lowlands in the past. One of the nicknames of Stirling is “The Gateway to the Highlands”. Stirling is also almost equidistant between Scotland’s two biggest cities, Glasgow, to the West, and the capital, Edinburgh to the East.

There are old rivalries between the people of Glasgow and Edinburgh which persist into the present day, and the distinct sense of difference between Highlanders and Lowlanders also remains. Stirling, I always felt, sat right at the meeting point of those cultures and traditions. I’ve often wondered how much that has influenced my values and my world view.

I’m always keen to recognise, acknowledge and understand difference. I’m not competitive. I’m much more interested in building bridges, making connections and creating healthy relationships than I am at “winning” or gaining an advantage over “the other”. I am ceaselessly curious, always keen to encounter and explore “the new” – not least, new people. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed my work as a doctor so much, and why Mondays were always a day to look forward to because someone would come into my clinic that day and tell me a story I’d never heard before.

The River Forth is a very, very winding river at this point in its path towards the North Sea. The bends, turns and loops make it look like a ribbon blowing in the wind. If you look at old maps you can see where the river used to go and compare that to its current situation. It is a river which is always changing. Did that influence my world view too? Is that why I enjoy and accept constant change? Is that why I understand the reality of adaptation and flexibility which are the basis of resilience?

You can see “Wallace’s Monument” in this photo, but you can’t see behind me, “Stirling Castle”. However, those two buildings are surely the dominant characteristic ones of my home town. My grandfather used to read me the stories from Sir Walter Scott’s “Tales of a Grandfather” when I small, so I grew up with a knowledge of the stories of Bruce and Wallace, though I never aspired to be like them! However, there is one story about Robert the Bruce which I do remember, and that’s his moment of despair after suffering defeats where he hid in a cave and he watched a spider try, try and try again, to spin a web. Ultimately, the spider succeeded, and as the story goes, that inspired Bruce to carry on…..rescued him from his despair, and put him in touch again with his determination to succeed. I suspect that was an early, very formative story for me. I still put great store by my qualities of constancy, patience and persistence.

I think of all these things as I look at this lovely photo. I’d encourage you to do the same. Find a photo of the place where you were born and raised, and see what memories and thoughts arise. Maybe you’ll find the origin of some of your own personality characteristics there?

Anyway, I think starting with a strong image is a great way to reflect, and to begin to reach a greater level of self-understanding. I recommend it.

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The singular

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on February 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This little ice crystal mesmerises me. It’s beautiful. Look at the intricate branching structure of each little bristle of ice. It’s almost like a tiny tree, or, at least a snowy leaf. Look at the way it catches the sunlight and sparkles like a jewel. But maybe the most astonishing thing about it is how it is attached to the iron bar from which it is hanging. Can you see? There is a single icy spike holding the entire structure onto the metal. In an instant you can see that this little piece of frozen water is not only incredibly strong, but that the entire crystal has grown from that single point. Isn’t that amazing?

What I love about something like this is that no matter how much you describe water and its behaviour in cold temperatures, the singular, the actual, the specific, particular ice crystal you encounter takes you beyond the limits of your expectations.

I find that everywhere in life, but, especially so in the practice of Medicine. No matter how much general knowledge I had of diseases, their origins, their life histories, and their likely consequences, I never had enough to know precisely what this individual patient today was experiencing, nor how this disease had arisen in their particular life, nor how their illness would progress. On top of that, no matter how much general knowledge I had of therapeutics, I could not predict, with 100% accuracy, what this individual patient would experience as a result of what I was going to prescribe today.

You might say that sounds like a lot of uncertainty, and I guess it is. A GP’s job, after all, has been described as dependent on his or her ability to cope with, and manage, uncertainty. But there was nothing to despair in there. It was a simple recognition that we have to be humble, because there is always more we don’t know, than there is that we know.

More than that…..it meant, and continues to mean, that the individual can never be encountered, understood and helped as a mere example of the recorded experience of groups. That’s another way of saying that statistics are never sufficient to replace stories. Only this unique, singular human being can tell you what they experiencing, what has happened in their life, what sense they have made of it, and only this unique, singular human being can tell you what effect your treatment has had.

The singular can never be replaced by the averages or “norms”.

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Cold calling

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on February 7, 2021| Leave a Comment »

When was the last time you used one of these? Actually, if you don’t live in the UK and you’re half my age (I’m in my 60s), then chances are, you’ve never used one of these. I can’t remember the last time I saw a public phone in France, but there must have been some once upon a time. What were public, shared phones like in your country? Do they still exist?

This stimulates my thoughts on how we communicate. When I was a GP in Edinburgh, my partner, Sandy, and I were one of the first Practices to use mobile phones on call. We had a huge brick sized Motorola thing, and there was only one telecoms mast in Edinburgh so it only worked on one side of Arthurs Seat! How things changed…and how fast!

This pandemic has had an impact on how we communicate too….I don’t just mean what technologies we use, but who we communicate with and when. A lot of communication is now “asynchronous” – which you could have said was the case before the telephone was invented. But I don’t think that text-based or messenger-based asynchronous technologies have brought about a revival in letter writing skills! Of course, we aren’t just using asynchronous technologies, there has also been a huge growth in our use of Zoom, FaceTime, Skype and other video-calling platforms. Then there are social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which drive the growth of “one-to-many” communications, “public” communications over “one-to-one” and “private”. Obviously there are many many more, but what’s clear is that for most us, we don’t limit our communications to only one of these services. We are using combinations of them – messenger services, social media platforms, texts, email and video calls, and, hey, some of us still even use the telephone!

So, what do you think? With this vastly increased ease in our ability to communicate, are we communicating better?

Hmm…..I think I’ll take my time over that one.

The first thing that springs to mind is how many people I have reconnected with in the last twelve months. Without this expansion of services, combined with the extended, forced, physical distancing and isolation, then I don’t think that would have happened. But the second thing that springs to mind is the growth of “echo chambers” which feed conspiracy theories, fake news and social division. I suppose the answer to my question depends on how you define “better”. And isn’t that always the case? Isn’t life complex and interconnected? Nuanced and diverse?

Is anything ever reducible to a single label? Like “better” or “worse”? I don’t think so.

However, I still think it’s interesting to spend a little time reflecting on the following three questions –

  • Who do I communicate with?
  • How do I communicate with others? (I mean technologies)
  • and, finally, Does my communication build bridges?

I think that’s the important thing after all – how we use these technologies will always be determined by our intentions – and, hold me to account here, I want all my communications to be open, tolerant, kind, compassionate and understanding. When they aren’t, I want to address that, and improve.

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The ochre gods of the forest

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, photography, psychology on February 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »

It isn’t difficult to be utterly entranced by this world. Near the town of Roussillon, in the South of France, there is an ochre trail you can follow through a forest. Two things have made this place as amazing as it is…first, and foremost, the Earth herself, which has created the most incredibly beautiful ochre rocks….pink, rose, yellow, orange, and many shades in-between. They are really, really gorgeous. Secondly, human beings who have mined this rock in the past, and have since, allowed, encouraged, and nurtured the forest to grow up around the rocks. So you look at a site like this and you see that interplay of human and non-human forces.

One of the most stunning features of the ochre is how often the surfaces look like faces. As best I know, these are not art works. Nobody deliberately carved the rocks to look like this – although it would be none the less beautiful if they had. No, it seems that we see the faces because of that part of the human brain which has evolved a special skill in seeing and recognising faces. Yes, there really is such a part of the brain! We use it to recognise other humans, but it works all the time, showing us what appear to be faces in rocks, clouds, trees….you name it.

I love that all of this – the geological creativity of the Earth, the living world of trees, and the evolution of the human brain, all combine to make a place like this feel utterly magical. This is the kind of “enchantment” I think we humans long for. This is the kind of “spiritual longing” which only the Earth can satisfy.

For me, these images will always be “The Ochre Gods of the Forest”. Aren’t they fabulous?

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