This little flower caught my eye. She’s growing, and flourishing, in a small cavity on a rock face. I’ve zoomed right in to see the flower better, but, take it from me, this was a long way up! Frankly, I was astonished. I mean a seed must have blown in there, or been dropped by a bird, and, goodness knows there must have been precious little soil way up there on a rocky cliff face. And yet….not only did that seed germinate, but it grew right up to an adult stage of life, finding sufficient nutrients from who knows where, and has produced these beautiful yellow flowers at the top of the plant. Not only that, but it seems to have grown to a size which exactly fills the size of the cavity.
The first time I saw this, and every time I look at it, I get thinking about the incredible drive of the Life Force….how Life seeks to exist, express itself, and flourish, in a myriad of forms and in more than imaginable habitats across the surface of this planet. Then I marvel at the capacity of Life to be opportunistic….to make the most of whatever conditions it finds itself in and to thrive.
How often do we procrastinate? How often do we tell ourselves we’ll pursue our dreams, we’ll live the life we want to live, but just not until all the conditions are right? How many of us spend our lives waiting for those right conditions to appear?
I think this little flower teaches us a different lesson. Call it “seize the day” if you like. Call it “make the most of today”. It’s a teaching which says “you already live on this Earth with all the conditions you need to flourish”. It’s a teaching about abundance. A teaching about the underlying benevolent, supportive flow of the universe, which has enabled Life to exist, and continues to supply what it needs to grow and to flourish.
You don’t have to wait. Imagination truly has no limits, and loving attention nurtures growth…..starting with the loving attention of self-care, nurturing the desire to exist, to grow, to express your uniqueness, and to flourish.
When you look closely at a water droplet you can see that it acts as a kind of lens. You can see the world around the drop reflected in the water. But it’s upside down. Just like you’d see inside the old kind of camera which cast the image of whatever the lens was paying attention to, onto the film at the back, and/or, onto the viewfinder.
The first camera I ever had was a box camera. You held the camera at waist height, flipped up the lid and looked at the image lying on the horizontal glass plate underneath. I think it used a prism to flip the image around so that you could see it “the right way up” in the viewfinder. We don’t even think about that with our modern digital cameras which process the image before we even get to see it.
I think it makes you stop and think when you see an upside down image like this. It literally makes you look at the world differently. And we need to do that sometimes to actually see and understand what is around us. For most of our days we sail along not really noticing most of what our senses pick up. In some sense we only notice what we pay attention to, and we only pay attention to what we notice. This relationship between noticing and paying attention is curious, partly because we can make a choice and attach our attention to whatever we choose….we can choose to become more aware of a scent, a particular colour, a shape or a texture. In fact, it’s a pretty great way to live more in the present, isn’t it……to pay attention to what our senses are sensing?
But it can happen the other way around – our attention can be “caught”. Something which moves suddenly, something which changes, like a loud noise, or a change in temperature, a darkening or lightening of the room as clouds pass over the sun…… Or it can be caught by something “odd”, something “unfamiliar”, something “unexpected”.
I think these upside down images are a bit like that. We aren’t used to seeing the world upside down, so we notice it when it happens, and that noticing “grabs” our attention, and leads to a natural exploration.
There’s a Tarot card called “The Hanged Man”, which I think about when I see an upside down image in a lens like this. I’m no Tarot expert, but I think there’s something about that card which is about changing our perspective, about looking at the world differently, in order to understand it better.
We have to do that from time to time if we want to understand reality. We have to change our perspective, look from a different angle. Other people can be the trigger to doing that….but only if we encourage and are genuinely interested in other peoples’ views.
Getting stuck in social media echo chambers, or trapped in the manipulated information of advertisers and politicians happens all the time. That’s why it can be helpful, though not always comfortable, to try to understand the world view of people who don’t see things the same way we do. It’s not a question of who is right and who is wrong. It’s a question of reaching a fuller, deeper understanding of other people, and of the world.
Today I want to share this photo taken in the North of Scotland. I’m pretty sure you’ll agree it’s beautiful. Beautiful, moody, atmospheric. The still silvery grey water of the loch, the dark, craggy islands, the far shore rising to a gentle peak with low cloud and disembodied spirits of mist obscuring our view of the mountain. The large, black, lumbering cloud, dominating the upper half of the image, and the bright, white clouds with a hint of pale, washed out blue sky above the mountain slopes but below the ragged edge of the rain cloud.
Dark earth, bright sky, glimpsed between two bodies of water….the loch and the heavy, black cloud.
You see all of that, don’t you?
I wonder what you noticed first? Whether it was the foreboding heavy weight of the black rain cloud, or the bright white, sunlit clouds over the pale blue sky?
And where did you go from there? Did you start with a sense of foreboding, only to end with a feeling of optimism? Start from an experience of dark times, softened by a hint of brighter times to come? Or did you start with the bright light between the dark mountain and the black cloud, only to feel it in danger of disappearing under the lumbering weight of the Death Star rain cloud?
Or have you finally ended up appreciating it all, delighting in the contrasts, the shades, the variety of forms and of light, of the interplay of water, earth and the fire of the sun, and the belief in the pure, clean, fresh, life-giving air which you can’t see, but which you know is all around?
Breathe deep. Breathe deep. And breathe deep again. Take a moment, then carry on.
In my photo library I have this image entitled “The road north”, but when I looked at that title just now I thought, “Maybe it’s also the road south”? I know why I called it “the road north” – because I took it while driving north and I stopped to take some photos of the amazing mists travelling over the surface of the hills ahead. I was mesmerised with how they moved, how some grew bigger and how some disappeared into thin air. I was fascinated by the thought – are these mists or “low cloud” and realised I didn’t really know the difference – and did it matter anyway?
But when I took this particular photo of the mists, I included the road and the little house to make it an interesting composition. I had pulled up by the side of the road to take these photos and I know I was on my way north so the title seems appropriate.
However, without that experience and memory, this road can be seen from two different directions, can’t it?
You can look at it and see it as the road ahead. You can wonder where it is leading to. You can speculate about what lies over the crest of the hill, whether the road turns sharply to the left or the right, or carries straight on for a bit yet (there aren’t many straight roads in this part of Scotland!) In other words you can orientate your thought and your attention to the future.
On the other hand, you can see it as the road just travelled. You can see it as a moment’s pause on a journey, to look back, recall and reflect. If you weren’t the one travelling along this particular road, then it’s more likely you’ll be drawn to imagine the future, than to reflect on the memories from the past…..after all, if you didn’t actually travel along this road, then you don’t have any memories of it, do you? Interestingly, you can’t say the same thing, exactly, about the future. We can all imagine the future. In fact, we humans are doing that all the time. We are always imagining what lies ahead, or around the corner, or in some distant time later in our lives. We are always imagining, even fearing, what might happen next, falling down a rabbit hole of “what ifs”.
There’s a third option of course, which is mine. I can mix them together, the memories and imaginings. I can remember the day, but discover, as I have discovered, that I don’t remember what lies beyond the little white house. But I do remember stopping to take the photo, so memory definitely colours my imagining……
….now there’s a thought – the truth is we use memory and imagination at the same time all the time. We have no imaginings without memories to influence them, and we have no memories without re-imagining them (they don’t lie in some brain drawer or filing cabinet, waiting for us to pull them out and blow off the dust – we re-create them every single time)
Story telling. We humans are storytellers par excellence, aren’t we? We tell stories to make sense of our lives and our experiences. We tell stories to know who we are and to find out who other people are. We tell stories to express our uniqueness, to appreciate the uniqueness of others and to make empathic connections with each other.
This image begs us to tell a story, don’t you think?
So, why not activate a few memories and imaginings today and see what story might emerge for you when you look at this image…..does it produce a story of a journey you once took, or does it produce a story of a journey you hope to take one day?
Many years ago I did a road trip to Skye, and as I travelled up through the Highlands, around the island for a few days, then back down to the Central Belt again, I was stunned again and again by the beauty of the country. There’s no doubt that Scotland is a beautiful land. It isn’t best known for blue skies, sunshine and beaches, but, actually, on the right day, all of that is there. However, it’s always seemed to me it’s easier to find the darker, moodier, and I might even say, richer, atmosphere in Scotland. On that particular road trip I think it rained every day, and I got some of the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever taken.
This image captures so much that delights and inspires me. The first thing I notice is the bridge. It’s a traditional, old, stone, single arch bridge. There are dozens like it in the Highlands, and no two the same. I think it’s beautiful and I’m a big fan of bridges because I think they are the technology we humans invented to allow us to do two of the things closest to our natures – explore and connect.
We are insatiably curious creatures, we humans. Some of us more than other I’ll grant, but I still think the desire to explore and discover is as core to us as the Life Force. In fact, Jaak Paksepp, who is so important to an understanding the fairly new discipline of affective neuroscience – the neurological science of our emotions, identified seven core or “prototype” emotions, of which SEEKING is perhaps THE most basic and important. SEEKING is connected to the basic motivational arousal state of all forms of life, and we humans probably access it, and use it, more than any other other creatures on the planet.
Bridges speak to me of that SEEKING, that desire to discover what lies on the other bank of the river, what lies on the slopes of the opposite hillside.
They also inspire me to think of that equally strong drive which is central to our being – connecting. Iain McGilchrist, with his brilliant and detailed analysis of the human brain, shows us how the two halves of the cerebral hemisphere engage with the world in distinctly different ways. The right hemisphere is especially interested in making and exploring connections. Just stop to ponder for a moment – absolutely everything we encounter, everything we experience, everything we think, we connect to whatever else we know and imagine. It’s impossible for us to really consider anything at all as utterly and completely isolated from everything else. We are connection-driven creatures.
But there’s more than a bridge in this photo. There is a river too, which runs under the bridge, and this particular river has very stony banks. Stony banks with small shrubs and bushes growing in it. Rivers never stay the same. The water which flows down from the mountains doesn’t follow the exact same path every day. Some times the river will swell and all those stones will be hidden. Other times it will reduce to a trickling stream revealing vast stony banks. I love the river as a symbol of constant flow and constant change.
There are the mountains too. Tall peaks, so tall here, that the cloud base is hiding their higher regions. I love mountains. They inspire me to remember times I’ve climbed such hills in the past, struggling to get to the top, then finding myself utterly filled with delight at the views laid out before me once I get there (being careful not to go hill climbing on a day like that shown in this photo!) They inspire me too to think of the old philosophical practice of “the view from on high” – how helpful it is to stand back from the busy cluttered flow of the everyday, ascend to a height, and contemplate the bigger picture, change your perspective, and see how life changes as a result.
And then there are the clouds – clouds which hide tall mountains, clouds which dissolve into rain which then trickles down the hillsides to form the rivers which all run off to the sea again. Clouds which merge seemlessly with mists here – hiding trees, rocks and bushes, soaking them all as they pass on by. Mists which drift across the face of the glen like ghosts of clans from the distant past. Yes, I find that mists stimulate my imagination. They lead me to contemplate the invisible, and the traces of the past which still soak the present, the lives from the past which are still with us, carried by us in our genes, our memories and our stories.
Really, I can get a lot of enjoyment out of a scene like this. This is what I mean by “rich” experience, multi-layered, entangled, connected, inspiring……
Whether you think of waves appearing and disappearing on the surface of the sea, or of the emergence and disappearance of beautiful forms within a cloud, you know that both the wave and the cloud formation are inextricably connected to either the sea, or the rest of the cloud. Neither exists apart from the environment in which they appear.
We humans are like that too, even if we’ve been pretending to ourselves for hundreds of years that we aren’t. Whether we take on board a religious or a scientific concept that we humans are apart from Nature, we are wrong. Nature isn’t a thing, and doesn’t exist outside of us. We cannot relate to Nature by “dominating it”, or “controlling it”. Partly because Nature is not an “it”, but more so because we are as much Nature as the cloud form is the cloud, as the wave is the sea.
We emerge within Nature, never leaving Nature, never living outside Nature or separate from Nature. Nature isn’t a part of the country to go and visit. But we can definitely understand that the “natural environment” is different from the “built environment” or the “urban environment” – not separate from, or detached from, but different.
There is an enormous amount of evidence that spending time in “natural environments” is good for us. A recent study of 20,000 people showed that two hours a week could be a threshold. Researchers found significant differences in mental and physical health of those who spent more than two hours a week in natural environments, from those who spent less than that. They also found that people who lived in streets with more trees in them seemed to need less prescriptions for antidepressants. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can just replace antidepressants with trees! There are many other factors affecting the environments which people live in. Still, the finding of the benefit of trees, persisted even when the researchers controlled for other social factors.
Of course, we are never really outside of “natural environments”, any more than we can ever be outside of Nature. It’s a matter of degree, isn’t it? We know when there is a lot of life around us – trees, flowers, shrubs, birds and other creatures. What these studies confirm are that we need to be aware of that connection with the rest of Life on this planet. That when we feel cut off from the living world, our health declines.
As we move forward through this pandemic we’re going to have to reconsider how we live, both as individuals and collectively. Some of that change might be best informed by a change of mindset – one which considers that we are “a part” of Nature, not “apart” from Nature.
This is Loch Gary. When I stopped at the side of the road to take this photo many years ago, I was struck by how the shape of the loch so closely mimics the shape of the Scotland. It’s almost good enough to be a map!
If you do look at this as a map of Scotland, then one of the interesting little extra things is that the bridge you see could represent the connection between Edinburgh and Glasgow across the “Central Belt”.
I was born in Stirling, a town which is almost equidistant between Scotland’s two cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. I studied Medicine in Edinburgh, worked there for most of the first two decades of my career then changed to work in Glasgow for the second two decades. There’s a long, long rivalry between these two cities. Each has a very distinct culture, and each is home to remarkably different accents. Maybe because I came from Stirling, people in Edinburgh often guessed that I’d come from Glasgow, and people in Glasgow often guessed I’d come from Edinburgh. I never subscribed to the rivalry between the two cities, liking them both for their very different cultures.
Maybe all of that has contributed to my love of connections, of seeing, accepting and even relishing difference, and my distaste for rivalry and competition.
I wonder how much the geography of our lives affects our values and our beliefs?
What do you think? What comes up for you if you reflect on that?
This glowing leaf reminds me that all the energy which supports every single life on this planet comes from the Sun. We don’t get energy from anywhere else. Plants are much better at capturing the Sun’s energy than we animals are. They have chlorophyll in their cells and can turn sunlight directly into sugars to sustain them and to use to turn the carbon dioxide and water which they capture into the structures of their stalks, leaves and flowers. We humans, like other animals, have to eat something which has already done this part of the work – ie plants – or other animals further up the food chain which have taken the energy from plants, and even other animals by consuming them.
It does make me realise that the most direct way for us to get the energy we need to stay alive, healthy and growing, is to eat plants. Yeah, we can eat animals too, but, for the most part, that’s a more indirect and expensive way to get the energy we need.
I wonder if we are anywhere near making the kinds of devices which capture the Sun’s energy directly, the way that plants do it? Imagine if that was our primary source to meet ALL of our energy needs? No more need for carbon based fuels, nuclear power plants and so on. Wouldn’t that be good?
That idea is typical of a whole way of approaching new technologies – it’s called “biomimetics” – learning how Nature does something, then seeing if we can invent a way to either do the same, or to develop technologies using the same principles. I think that’s one of the most exciting potential routes forward for we humans. After all, Nature works on the basis of using all the possible connections, and never producing any waste. The lessons of millennia of evolution are lessons which are surely worth learning….
For me, this is a photo of flow. It’s a still image, and you might say if I wanted to illustrate flow I’d be better sharing a video but I like the juxtaposition of stillness and movement which this single frame shows us.
There’s a lot of advice to live in the present moment, to “be here now”, to draw your attention into the current time and space. I know, I’ve shared such advice many times. I get the value of it. But there’s a paradox at its heart which we often ignore.
Life, time, and reality, is not divided into neat frames. It doesn’t exist as a series of isolated, bounded, limited, even disconnected pieces. So when we stop to think about what we actually mean by “the present” or even “this moment”, it rapidly becomes hard to pin down. Does the present moment last for a minute? Does it last a few seconds? Does it last only for a fraction of a second? Isn’t it the case that the very act of reflecting on the present turns into a reflection on the past……ok, maybe the immediate, very close, past, but the past, all the same. And where does the future come from? If it isn’t sitting waiting for us like the next train station along the line (and I don’t think it is), if it is, rather, “emergent”, that is created out of the present moment, then, again, as we stop to reflect on this moment, we pretty quickly find it’s being changed by the future unfolding before our very eyes.
No, the truth is that life, time and reality are more like flow than frames.
I’ve wondered about that too when looking at a river. Exactly what is a river? If it’s the water in it then that water is constantly flowing right by. It doesn’t stay. If it stayed, it wouldn’t be a river, it’d be a stagnant pond. (actually even stagnant ponds don’t stay the same!) So is it the course of the flow of the water? In other words the actual path which the water traces out? The banks of the river? Not so sure about that either, because if you look at old maps, or even some aerial photographs, you can see that the so-called “same” river changes its shape and direction continuously, sometimes in small ways, and at other times in starkly dramatic ones!
A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.
In other words, the way out of this dilemma is not by trying to pint down our experience, label it a and stuff it into separate boxes. Instead, we just need to think of the world being made up of “networks of kisses”. Life is “made” of “events”.
Events are happenings. The don’t have terribly easy start and finish points, and even those points which we can see turn out to be inextricably bound up in networks of other relationships and happenings. Nothing exists in isolation.
I like this view of life. I like the practice of becoming more aware in the present by becoming more aware of the flows of energy, information and forms around me. I like the focus on “becoming not being” – as you’ll see at the top of the blog.
When I worked as a GP in Edinburgh, my partner and I had two Practice premises (“surgeries” as we called them in Scotland), one up near the university, and the other down at the river front in Portobello. A typical day involved doing some work in both places, as well as visiting half a dozen to a dozen patients in their own homes (something which seems to have all but disappeared from the work of a GP). The working days were, as you imagine, busy days. There were many ways to travel between the two surgeries but one of my most favourite ways was to drive through Holyrood Park following the narrow road which snaked around the base of Arthur’s Seat. In the grass, at the roadside, I’d often spot someone sitting on a park bench, maybe reading, maybe drinking from a flask, maybe just looking around, and I’d think “Oh how I would LOVE to be sitting on that park bench!” But there was never time to do just that.
I’ve often wondered how much my work, and the busy-ness of the ordinary day, contributed to my love of park benches! Whatever the reasons, I know I’ve always had an eye out for them, and have several photos of seats in different parts of the world. The one in this photo was taken over 15 years ago in the Southern French town of Carcassonne. I still find it utterly beautiful. It pulls me towards it. I have a longing to be sitting there. Clearly it’s not about the super-comfortable shape or form of the seat, it’s what it represents – a pause, a moment of stillness, a quiet time to “do nothing”, or to contemplate, breathe, become aware of the here and now.
What this sets off for me today is reflection on the importance of slowing down from time to time, and the importance of deliberately breaking up the endless cycles of habits. We need to stop, take a breath (or several, conscious, slow deep breaths would be better), and allow ourselves to experience some moments of stillness. We need that even now in the midst of this pandemic and the total disruption of our “normal” lives (will “normal” need to be redefined after this? Probably)
So, take a moment today and ask yourself – where are your favourite seats? Best to consider a seat you can actually sit on today! Where can you take a moment, still your breathing and your mind, and return your clammer of anxieties, worries and fears to the here and now, and just notice. Just become aware. Just for a few minutes at least.
If that sets off a recollection of favourite memories of seats where you have experienced the greatest moments of calm, tranquillity and peace, then, go with that. Allow yourself to recreate those experiences as vividly as you can. What did you see there in that moment? What did you hear? What did you feel with your body? What did you taste and/or smell? Allow yourself to re-create the feelings which that moment engendered. Allow yourself to live it again for a couple of minutes.
You know what that will do? Well, what it might do anyway? It will produce a distinct harmony of the rhythms of your heart and your brain. It will set off a chain of reactions in your body which enhance your immunity, reduce harmful inflammation, and increase your resilience. It’s called “coherence“. And it’s good for you!
I welcome constructive criticism and suggestions. I will not, however, tolerate abuse, rudeness or negativity, whether it is directed at me or other people. It has no place here. ANYONE making nasty comments will be banned.
Heroes Not Zombies 