When I came across these trees in a forest I was stopped in my tracks. The forest was quite a wild one, and I don’t think these two trees were grafted together artificially. What I mean is I don’t think there was a human hand involved. Which makes it all the more remarkable, because it looks like these two trees got really close to each other, starting kissing and never stopped!
Whatever the mechanisms involved I just love this image. It speaks to me of that most essential natural drive – to connect…..not just connect, but connect lovingly.
There is a key phenomenon which underpins all of evolution. No, not competition, which is what you’d think from the dominant orthodox view. Competition plays a role, but without integration, there would be nothing….no growth, no development, no evolution. Integration is the creation of mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts.
Let me say that again. Integration is the creation of mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts.
How did Life progress from single celled existence to the vast, diverse, web of complex multicellular organisms? Only by the individual elements getting together to make bonds which would be beneficial to both.
This drive towards integration is a loving drive.
It’s a movement based on “bienveillance” – on meaning and/or wishing well. It’s a drive to support and be supported, to nurture and be nurtured, to love and be loved.
Without these loving connections, we simply wouldn’t exist. Maybe it’s time to put competition into its proper place…..and that’s not THE most important place. I think we have to learn to live by loving instead of dominating, by co-creating rather than trying to come first. If we are going to compete let’s put that competition into the context of improvement…..of supporting all of us to grow, to become stronger, more resilient, to improve. Not to destroy, dominate, control, and grab the most for ourselves at the expense of the wellbeing of others. That old way just isn’t working.
In 2004 I took a trip to Marrakesh and the day after my 50th birthday I took this photo. When you look at it I think you’ll be struck by hint of a river. There is a long, winding, irregular path in the desert below. Some of the sand looks dark, as if it is still wet, but most of it looks as dry as dry can be. But a river runs through here. Just not always reaching the surface I suppose. So we see the path of a river. A river bed, but the water is sleeping somewhere else. The water has passed through here, right along this very patch of sand, more than once. That’s why the traces it leaves is so deep on the right hand side of the image, and so easy to follow right up until it disappears into the distance.
You can see that from time to time the water comes in significant amounts. So much, in fact, that it broadens out the river, spilling over the edges, producing that clear swelling in its belly right in the middle of the shot. Where it swells, it gets a little wild, and carves out one of the sandy banks creating what looks for all the world like a large bite mark in the desert. And just beyond that zone of intermittent turbulence the water seems to seep under the surface in both directions, creating the conditions for plants to grow.
Maybe you can see a dark rounded patch to the left of the image? That’s the shadow of the hot air balloon I’m in. This is the only time in my life I’ve had a ride in a hot air balloon…..and for me, this was above the desert at the foot of the Atlas mountains, at dawn. That one small shadow brings all that back to me. I remember the day vividly. I remember the French pilot, the cool air, the bright morning, the way that I had the distinct sensation that I was standing still in a square basket as the world fell away below me – that it was the world which was moving, not me, not the balloon. Such a strange sensation. I remember the markings in the sand showing where water flowed from time to time, the well someone had dug to find the hidden water, the walled towns and the scattered flocks of skinny sheep.
You don’t have those memories, so the shadow of the balloon won’t mean much to you, but I wanted to share this with you today because of the images of both the shadow of the balloon, and the carved out markings in the sand, left by the water which passed by in the past. In their own different ways these “marks” (one fleeting, one lingering for much longer) tell us stories…..or to be more precise, provoke curiosity and/or memories. We try to make sense of them. We try to figure out just what we are looking at, and it doesn’t take long for imagination and memory to kick in and contribute so that we see much more than could be captured by simply measuring and describing the shapes we can see.
I think this is an example of how we see and experience so much more in the world than can be captured in the form of measurements and data.
Can you think of any works of art which changed you? Any which changed your worldview? Changed how you understand yourself, your life, your world?
I was reading about Stendhal Syndrome the other day, which is the phenomenon of overwhelming emotions and physical symptoms experienced by some people in front of particular forms of art. Stendhal described it in relation to his visit to the Basilica of Santa Croce –
I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves’. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.
What grabbed me about this concept is how art can have a profound impact on us – not just on the way we think, the emotions we feel, but in changing our inner physical reality…..speeding up the heart, releasing a whole cascade of different hormones, causing us to feel a little breathless, a little light headed, to give us butterflies in the stomach, to make us weak at the knees…….but it actually does something else too….
Every experience we have sets off patterns of activity in the neurones in the brain. In neuroscience there is a phrase used which is “what fires together, wires together”. That’s a description of how these patterns of activity, when repeated, actually change the shape of the microstructures of the brain. Art, literally, can sculpt our brains. No wonder it can change us!
Well, this image here is of Anthony Gormley’s work entitled “The Field”. I saw this for the first time in Inverleith House, in the middle of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. I stood in the doorway and looked at these thousands of little creatures, all looking up at me, all the same. Then, as I looked a little more closely I realised that each and every model was different. Not only were they not all the same, but every one of them was unique.
That’s it, I thought! This is the paradox at the heart of my work as a doctor. Every single patient who I meet has some characteristics, some symptoms, some signs of change in their body, in common with other patients I’ve met before. That’s why I needed to learn anatomy, physiology, pathology, the natural history of disease. That’s why I had to learn how to make a diagnosis. But, at the very same time, every single patient who I meet is unique. Every single patient has a story to tell me which I’ve never heard before because nobody has lived an identical life to them. The diagnosis of the “pathology” or “disease” isn’t enough. I need to understand it in the context of a life story, and a present life. What exactly is this person, today, experiencing? How has this present experience and change come about? What sense do they make of this “illness”? What does this “illness” mean to them, mean in their life, mean to the others in their life?
Well, that became the core of my understanding of the Practice of Medicine.
But it went further than that, because I realised, just as quickly, that this insight wasn’t relevant only to my work as a doctor. This is the essence of what it is to be a human being. We share a lot, you and I. But we are also unique, you and I. We can’t be reduced to a single characteristic, demographic, or “data set”, but we can be gathered into those groups…..we can find some common values, beliefs, desires in those features and factors. But we can never, ever, stop there. We can never rest in our understanding of a person by summing up their data, by figuring out what group we want to put them into. We have to discover the individual. What makes this particular person different? What is distinct and different about this person’s life story?
Even as I write this today, I find this excites me. It delights me. It moves me. It activates my thinking, my feelings, even my body.
What caught my eye here was the juxtaposition of the advert for the photographer and the statue in the alcove.
The older work is the statue. It’s a representation of prayer. France, Italy and Spain are three of the countries I know best on the continent, and all three share a rich religious tradition. To be more exact, they share a Catholic tradition. Representations of the crucified Christ, of the Virgin Mary, and of various saints can be found everywhere…..not just in churches and cathedrals, but on street corners, city centres and in small villages. What struck me about this particular statue was the act it portrays – prayer.
I know there are many different kinds of prayer, not least prayers of intercession (asking for help), and prayers of gratitude, but the image of the wedding photos in the windows just next to it led me quickly onto thinking of dreams, of hopes and desires. So, that context drew me into the consideration of prayers of that type – prayers of hope.
I don’t think we can underestimate the importance and the power of hope. I don’t think people can live without it. I’ve seen that many times in my medical career. People with no hope slip into despair and decline. I once I had a patient I knew say to me that her husband had just been diagnosed with cancer and that the doctors had given him six months to live. I asked her how she felt about that and her response surprised me. “Angry”. I asked why, and then came the bigger surprise. “How come he gets to know how long he’s got and I don’t know how long I’ve got?” Well, I didn’t see that one coming. However, it did lead to an interesting discussion about prognosis and what we can, and can’t, predict. Too often predictions like that turned into self-fulfilling death sentences. Because the reality is that, in any individual, we cannot make such accurate predictions. I learned that the hard way as a young doctor.
But let me return to prayers and dreams. I’m sure you’ll have come across the idea of visualisation? Of creating “mood boards” or “vision boards”? Of creating “goals” and “targets” even? Well, those are psychological methods we can use to create the life we want to lead. And isn’t that one of the things which prayers and dreams can do?
Have you noticed how many athletes seem to say a short prayer before the start of their race? Have you noticed how many perform an act of gratitude to the heavens, or to their god, when they win? I’m sure in our more materialistic, so-called rational, times, that prayer, belief, faith and dreams are dismissed more than ever before, but I always wonder if that’s really a rational response?
Because without hope, without dreams, without prayers, without vision, then what kind of life can we co-create?
My answer would be – the kind of life other people create for us! “Heroes not zombies” folks! We human beings really are the co-creators of our own lives. A person cannot be reduced to molecules and random events if we want to understand them. More than that, I suspect that fear and resentment are powerful factors in creating the kind of world we live in, and that there are plenty of players out there who know exactly how to stoke up both.
So, I’m a fan of prayers and dreams. I’m a fan of dreams and visions. I think that what we imagine, what we put our energy into, what we pay attention to, all contribute to both our personal experiences of daily life and to the reality of the world that we share with every other living creature on this little planet.
What kind of life do you want to lead? What kind of world do you want to live in? One focused on fear and despair, or one focused on love and hope? I do think we have a choice. Not in an “either/or” way, but in what we give emphasis to, what influences our world view, what lenses we use to understand the world, and as an act of co-creation.
I managed a trip to the coast this week, for the first time in months. Walking along the sandy beach listening to the sound of the breaking waves and breathing the salty, fresh air, was a real tonic.
There were hardly any other people on the beach, and that particular beach is so big that you can have a couple of hundred people on it and it still feels almost deserted.
One of the things a lot of us like to do at a beach is to look for shells, driftwood, and whatever else the sea might have thrown up onto the sand. But something else which always catches my attention is a pattern. I love to see the patterns left in the sand by creatures who have moved across it, trails left by rivulets of water as they run back to the ocean, impressions imprinted by seaweed and shoes……you name it.
This photo today shows you one of the patterns I stumbled across. Actually there are three elements on this sandy canvas. There is the little piece of red seaweed, demonstrating the classic branching pattern of trees, plants, our lungs, our blood vessels, the way streams gather together to make rivers…..and so on. Then opposite that are the marks left by what? Water trickling away back towards the ocean? Seaweed which has been washed away? I’m not sure. Actually, when I look at it in this photo, that pattern is strangely convex. It seems to be sticking out of the sand. But when I was there it looked convex, grooves imprinted into the sand. The third element is the trace of a shoe. Someone before me stood here. Perhaps. Stood and looked at this very pattern. Or else they were just walking by and only by chance did they miss standing on the patterns in the sand. (I think it’s the former because I looked and couldn’t see other prints to the right of the pattern, so I saw no evidence that someone had just walked right through it. Besides, I like to think that someone else also experienced that “stopped in your tracks” effect of this piece of natural sand art!)
It’s the first two elements which really interest me. There is a sort of symmetry between them. There is an echo, a mirroring almost, between the red seaweed and the tracings on the sand. The similarity is so striking to me that I can even imagine that the sand and the seaweed are reaching out towards each other…..stretching out long thin fingers to almost touch each other.
I see this and I think “attraction”. Perhaps the most basic characteristic of the universe. There is a universal movement of elements, particles, and objects towards each other….to connect, form bonds, make relationships, to become attached to each other.
Curiosity is one of my strongest features, and what is curiosity other than an attraction to whatever it encounters? A drive to get closer, to understand, to connect, to make a bond?
Yes, I know, some of you will be thinking, hey, wait a minute, what about repulsion? Because don’t a lot of things repel each other, rather than attract each other? That’s true, repulsion too, is a fundamental characteristic of the universe. In fact you could say there’s a dynamic, constant balance between attraction and repulsion, which lies at the art of all the phenomena of the universe. Everything that exits is held in an ever changing, constantly moving tension between attraction and repulsion.
But if you stand back a little from that ongoing dance of attraction and repulsion, you can see what holds both of those opposites together…..a relationship. It’s the fact that they are connected which enables the interaction. Or the fact that they interact which enables the connection!
Either way, here it is, right in front of us, in the sand……..the essential nature of reality…….connections.
I took this photo about twenty years ago. I’m not brilliant at organising my photos, so I’m not totally sure where this is. I think it’s Genoa. Well, it sits between photos taken in Florence and others taken in Genoa and it looks a lot more like Genoa than Florence to me. Either way, it’s definitely Italy.
What I love about this photo is that isn’t static. You know I’m a great fan of “becoming not being”. I love the concept of the constantly changing, every evolving, moment. I love the experience of the present emerging from the streams of the past, and fashioning the possible futures in every lived moment.
I have many photos of paths, and when I look at a path, I feel pulled towards it, to go exploring and discover what lies along that path…..not just where the path might lead, but what I might find as a follow that path. This street adds another level of dynamism, in my opinion, because of the steps. The steps entice you to climb, or to pause, and look back to see where you came from.
The first thing I notice in this image are the two people, a woman wearing a white shirt, and striped skirt, carrying a bag in her right hand, and a young man, dressed in black, hands jammed into both pockets of his not quite full length trousers, his black dog keeping so close to him that at first I didn’t even spot the dog was there! Both of these characters are heading towards the archway, but haven’t quite got there yet.
Above the archway is a statue of, I presume, the Madonna. Her gesture catches my attention. It looks as if her arms are positioned to hold or caress an infant, but there is no infant there. So I see her, I interpret her gesture as caring, and I see a void, a space waiting to be filled? Maybe that’s one of those half glass of water events – is she preparing to care for a child, or has she just lost one? Either way, I find the statue surprisingly emotional. Well, that’s what art can do.
The next thing I notice is that this seems a residential street, with many apartments in all the surrounding buildings, each painted in, what is for me, the typical colours of the North of Italy and the South of France (more Italy than France). I see the washing hanging out of one of the windows, and, again, I’m on the Med…..at least, that’s where I remember seeing washing hanging from the windows of old city apartments.
So, I don’t just feel physically drawn to move up or down this stepped, narrow street. I feel my heart stirred. I feel my curiosity provoked. I feel the rising of my desire to hear what stories these people have to tell.
This might, at first, seem like a static, urban landscape shot, but, pretty quickly it becomes something which declares and demonstrates life and movement.
It provokes the movement of curiosity, of wonder, of the heart.
In this pandemic much has been said about “the economy” as if there is such an entity. What are the critics of Public Health measures talking about when they talk about “damage to the economy”? Profit? Well, a lot of Tory cronies in the UK are sure making plenty of profit, so I guess it’s not “profit” as such, it’s some business profits. Probably what most people think about are the shopping and hospitality sectors of society, as shops, cafes, restaurants, hotels and so on have had to close to reduce the spread of the virus.
As best I understand it this is a false choice – you can’t choose either the health of the population or the health of the economy. Both affect each other, and probably you can’t have a healthy economy if your population is sick.
But there’s another whole aspect of life which has been hit hard by this pandemic and the measures taken to reduce social contacts – culture. Now, what is “culture”? Well, I mean all of the “arts”, from performance arts, to expressive arts, from music concerts to gallery exhibitions, to dances, theatre and cinema. And more besides.
I took this photo in Florence almost twenty years ago. It’s the kind of scene you can see in many cities around the world. You could say, it’s just an entrepreneur making a living drawing portraits in the street, but this image tells us more than that. Look at that crowd. They aren’t all buying drawings, or paying to have their portrait painted. They are enjoying witnessing the act of creation.
We humans are, amongst other things, profoundly creative. We apply our creativity to our daily lives, with our problem solving, our aesthetic choices, and our own, individual acts of imagination and expression. Here in France you can find fabulous examples of “wall art” in caves, deep underground. That art goes right back to palaeolithic times. There is no way humans have ever been content to merely survive, to simply invest in getting shelter, food and drink. We have always needed culture. We have always needed visual arts, music and dance. We have always needed storytelling and songs. In fact, I think that need for culture – both personal and shared – is a defining characteristic of what it means to be human.
I suppose that during these lockdowns we have shifted our creativity and culture online, and that’s great, but it isn’t a replacement. My hope is that the online expansion will continue and will feed into the physical/social world of museums, theatres, cinemas and concert halls once this is over.
I have another hope, which is that this pandemic might have raised our awareness of the importance of creativity and culture, that many people will be shifting their priorities and values from consumption and “running the rat race” to relationships and creativity. Because if that happens, then the future could look very different from the past.
I think art is important. It nurtures us. It sustains us. It deepens the meaning of our lives. It enhances the quality of our lives…….even when we are, apparently, not paying attention to it……..
I don’t believe the past was a better place or a better time than the present. I just know it was different. But as I look at this image of the old glass in a window, I see how the patterns in that old glass act as a kind of lens on the present, and that makes me think about how it seems to me, that in many ways, we are too focussed now on the immediate, the instant gratifications, and always on what might come next.
But don’t we learn from the past? Isn’t how things were before, or what actions we took before, a useful lens through which to view the present?
Let me be clear, I am very, very keen on living with awareness of this present moment. I think that too often many of us are living on autopilot. That’s one of the big themes of this blog – “heroes not zombies” – encouraging us to wake up, become aware, and become the authors/heroes of our own stories, rather than living a life of semi-conscious manipulation by others. I’m also keen on looking forwards, though, to be frank, I’m not a big fan of predictions! But I also think that unless we pause, reflect, consider, and look back, then it is pretty difficult to learn. It seems true that if we keep doing what we are doing then we are going to keep on the same track. So, if we want to learn, want to grow, to improve, to develop, then we are going to have to learn something from how things were before.
I don’t think that means a romantic longing for an imaginary idyllic past when everything was wonderful. That’s not real. I mean learning what led up to this present moment, learning what it is we’ve been doing which might have contributed, at least, to our finding ourselves here, in this specific present, today.
I think about that as I watch this pandemic unfolding. I can’t help wondering about the countries of the world, like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and others, where the case numbers and deaths are, frankly, tiny compared to those in Europe, America and Brazil. And, whilst there is no doubt something to be learned from each other, from comparing how each country tackled this pandemic, I think there is also something to be learned from how we humans have managed infectious disease, and epidemics in the past.
Time and again we see that there is a basic principle – separate the sick from the well. In times gone by that was done in what now seem pretty cruel and crude ways, expelling the sick, putting them in colonies outside of the towns. I don’t think we’d want to repeat that particular strategy, but the basic principle remains a key one. To control an infection you have to identify who has the infection and limit their contact with the rest of the community. We can do that now in much more humane ways. We can treat the sick in hospitals. Actually, there was a time when there were quite a number of specifically infectious disease hospitals (and “asylums”) but most of those seem to have been closed down. Maybe it would be a good idea to create new centres for the treatment of those who are suffering from infectious disease, and staffing them with doctors and nurses who can work in the community when there are no epidemics raging. That might be better than diverting the resources for treating cancer, heart disease, etc towards infectious disease, leaving those non-covid patients to suffer (which is what is increasingly the case).
Maybe it would a good idea to have a really effective, community based, human-centred system of testing, contact tracing and genuinely supported isolation – in isolation hotels, and in peoples own homes with daily visits from health care staff?
One of the things we are seeing with Covid is how many people get very, very slow recovery, relapses and lingering, debilitating symptoms. In the past we used to have convalescent hospitals, spas and rehabilitation centres. A lot of them got closed down too. Maybe it would a good idea to open those up again, to make new ones, to support and treat those who are in for the long haul.
Finally, in epidemics in the past, people controlled their borders. The countries which have the lowest case rates now did that too. The countries which didn’t bother, have the worst rates. Isn’t it time to do that? And not just to insist on a negative test and advise someone to quarantine for 10 or 14 days. But to insist upon supported isolation during mandatory, supervised quarantine periods for all those who cross borders? OK, I know, there will be those who need to keep traveling and who can’t keep doing those quarantines, but let’s vaccinate them, and monitor them more carefully.
Just some ideas I’ve been having about how we could better manage this pandemic, by looking at the present through the lens of the past.
I must admit I have a penchant for bridges, and I have several photos of beautiful ones I’ve seen in different parts of the world. It’s pretty amazing how different a bridge can be. You could say that every single bridge is unique. Even two bridges of the same design will be built over different rivers, or different parts of the same river, and will connect two quite distinct, and particular areas of the Earth (banks, fields, towns, or whatever)
I think we need bridges more than ever. We need to make better connections between ourselves, and between human beings and the rest of the living world. In fact, between human beings and the rest of the entire planet.
Building bridges are about creating integrative relationships – the creation of mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts. In other words they are about connecting diversity and difference in ways which enhance, support and nurture both of the parts.
We need that physically. We need it emotionally. We need it socially. We need it metaphorically and literally.
Here’s to more beautiful bridges! Let’s make the connections!
Yesterday I wrote about “unfurling” and this morning I came across this photo in my library.
It’s another example of this process we see everywhere in Nature – the opening up of a bud as the flower expands itself at the end of a stalk. It’s an “unfolding”, a “revealing”, or even, a “revelation”.
Really at this stage of a flower you get a strong sense of what is to come…a strong sense of potential. But it’s not quite there yet. It’s in the process of getting there. I like images which capture that concept because I have long been taken by the primacy of “becoming” over “being” – see the phrase at the top of the blog “becoming not being”!
I first encountered the importance of the concept of becoming in the works of Giles Deleuze, but having seen it there I went on to see it everywhere. Really, as I understand it, it involves a significant, and important shift of focus from looking at objects with fixed dimensions to looking at experiences and events which literally unfold before your very eyes. When you shift away from seeing, or trying to see, reality as composed of discrete, separate, bounded parts…..like marbles in a sac……to seeing reality as composed of flows and connections, then you stop wanting to pin things down and fix them. You delight, instead, in the dynamic, living, changing, nature of the universe.
This thinking helped me understand my patients and their illnesses, because instead of looking for discrete pathologies, I became more interested in how those pathologies arose, how they were affecting the person in their everyday life, and trying to understand how to influence the direction and nature of their development into the future. I became less interested in “outcomes” because every “outcome” is an arbitrary point, and more interested in a “life” and a “life story”, and therefore far more interested in following that patient over many years, rather than seeing Medicine as a tool applied to a thing at a particular time – not “getting it done” but “understanding, supporting, encouraging and teaching” instead.
I don’t know if that brief summary is enough to help you see what a radically different way this is to live and to make sense of the every day, but I suggest you try it…….try to notice the processes of becoming, the unfolding, the revelations, the unfurling today, and then let your curiosity follow the threads back to the past and origins, as well as forwards, to potentials and maturity.
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 