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Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

Dream time

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on December 7, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Three elements in this photo induce me to think about dreaming – sunset, a plane trail, and the moon (yes, look closely, she is there!)

We associate dreaming with sleep, even if we often wake up, knowing that we have been dreaming but have not a single memory of what it was we were dreaming about. Don’t you think that is strange? That the brain can be so active while we are not awake, creating images and whole stories for us to experience, yet somehow so little of that reaches the level of memory. There’s this annoying phenomenon of the first thought on waking – if your first thought is about the dream you were having, then you have a good chance of remembering at least a part of it. But if you are woken by an alarm, or your radio, or somebody wakes you and says something, then the dream is gone. It’s like you have one shot only to recall what you’ve just been experiencing inside your own mind just minutes ago. Turn your attention outwards, and the opportunity is lost.

We don’t only dream during sleep of course. “Day dreaming” has a bit of a bad press. It’s often condemned as distraction, as not paying attention. Or it’s dismissed as fanciful, not useful, not real. But I’m really not sure that dream processes only occur during sleep. After all they aren’t under our conscious control, are they? (lucid dreaming practices aside) So why should we think they aren’t happening below the level of consciousness all the time? Do we need to be asleep for dreaming to occur? I’m not sure that we do. Let’s imagine for a moment that dreaming goes on all the time. Is that where sudden insights come from? Is that where apparently random thoughts come from? Is that where we find inspiration, find our “muse”, tap into our creativity? I think, perhaps, it is.

Our dreams are sometimes thought of as goals or aspirations. They are focused on the future, and suggest new destinations for us to reach for. I’m not a big fan of goals. I think they’re rather over-done. After all, the future is never predictable in detail so what seems a relevant goal now, can become quite irrelevant by the time we get there. And life flows on a continuum. It isn’t broken into discrete, separated parts. Maybe a goal can be thought of as the end of a chapter in an ongoing story, but there’s a danger that goals are seen as conclusions. I’m sure lots of people like to have goals, and find them very useful. They can certainly give us something to progress towards, something to aim for. And if they do that, then fine. They can be motivating and they can help us to focus. And that’s good too.

So, I’m not against goals. I just don’t think they are ever enough. We need more than goals. We need dreams, we need free-floating thought, and we need to keep our eyes open for the whole picture, for the contexts and consequences of our ideas and aspirations.

I suppose I’m saying we need both – to be focused, and to be free-floating. Strangely, dreams can be both of those things at the same time.

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Creation is continuous

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, photography, science on December 6, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I tend to associate new growth with the Spring, but, these crocus plants popped up from under the soil through the month of December. I took this photo on December 24th last year, and so far, on the 6th December, as I write this, there is no sign of them yet.

But that just reminds me – that creation is going on all the time. The phase, or season, or time of new and emergent growth is not limited to the Spring. It’s not limited to any single season, any particular month, or even any specific day.

We have a great tendency to chop the flow of life into pieces. We did that when we invented measured time – by making clocks and “time pieces” with their minutes and their hours. We weren’t even satisfied to stop there, but chopped the minutes into seconds, driving everything faster and faster, measuring this thing we call time in ever shorter, ever smaller units.

The thing is – those units are a human invention. Time flows in Nature. It flows continuously, the way a river does. Time is experienced by each of us in different ways. It flies past when we are enjoying ourselves, drags when we are bored, can’t pass quickly enough when we want to escape. However, the one constant is…..time is continuous. And so is creation.

The other thing this image provokes in my mind is how much is going on that we just don’t see. Are these crocus bulbs lying sleeping, unmoving, unchanging under the dark soil, then in a flash they turn into green shoots stretching towards the Sun? Nope, it’s not like that. But life often seems like that to us because we invent disconnections. In reality change, growth, development, maintenance, on the one hand, and dis-integration and dying on the other, are happening all the time, and all at once. They don’t fall into nice neat boxes. Nothing in life does.

I like the feelings which arise when I think of this – I like the focus on flow, on continuity, connectedness, on the whole, on change, and on invisibility. They bring me joy, delight, and wonder. Hey….so do little crocus plants shooting up from under the black earth!

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Creation

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on December 5, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This sculpture in the Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen is called “Creation Fantasy”, and it’s by a Norwegian-Danish sculptor called Stephan Abel Sinding.

It reminds me of some of Rodin’s work, not least the “Hand of God“, which is one of my most favourite of Rodin’s works.

I love how the male and female bodies are emerging from, but are not separate from, the rock. It think this captures a deep truth – that we are not separate from the Earth, not separate from “Nature”, not separate from each other. But instead we emerge within all that exists, and we remain forever, embedded in everything. I think one of the most pernicious beliefs human beings have adopted is the notion that we humans are “apart from” not “a part of” Nature, that Nature is something “out there”, maybe even something to go and visit from time to time. Worse still, that The Earth and all that “out there” Nature is a resource to be plundered, consumed, polluted at will, as if none of that activity will affect “us”, we humans, because we are outside of Nature.

I hope we are beginning to move away from that terrible misconception. I hope we are beginning to KNOW that we emerge within Nature, and that we live inextricably within all that exists.

It reminds of me of the “Universe Story” – which tells how all the elements of the Periodic Table were created in the giant furnaces of stars throughout the universe, and how once the Earth was formed, all the elements which had been created in distant stars were gathered together, almost like being dealt a hand in cards. How every material substance which has ever existed on Earth has been made from those initial elements. The Earth doesn’t create new elements. She transforms what she has into every molecule, every cell, every organism, every substance which we find on our one small blue planet.

This sculpture makes me think of something else – the relationship we have between men and women. It seems to me we need to learn from sculptures like this one. For far too long we’ve built civilisations and societies on the basis of male dominance. It’s well past time to redress that imbalance and create more loving, more respectful, more mutually nurturing relationships between the sexes.

So, there’s my “Creation Fantasy” – that we are called to live by – that we humans emerge within Nature on this single planet, and that men should not dominate women.

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The arts of life

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, music, neuroscience, personal growth, photography, psychology on December 4, 2020| 2 Comments »

I can’t stress too highly the importance of art in life. We seem to be the only creatures on the planet who have the immense creative powers to produce drawings, paintings, sculpture, poetry, stories and music (OK, I know, there are other arts you can think of, but I’m just choosing these ones today)

In the Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen you can find these three sculptures in a room filled with many similar gorgeous works of art. Part of the beauty we experience when we look at these images is created by the way the works are lit (and there’s another layer of creativity between my experience and yours because I’m the one who took these photographs).

At the top, are two sculptures about music. Look at the violins, the bows, and the musicians fingers….all carved out of blocks of marble. Aren’t they incredible? The one on the right is titled “Young Mozart”, and I’m afraid I can’t remember the title of the one on the left (if you know, maybe you could let me know in the comments?)

I read in Iain McGilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary”, that one theory of language is that human beings sang before they spoke. It seems there is some evidence to support the idea that the first humans created a variety of sounds, and only later, turned some of those sounds into spoken language. Written language followed a long, long time later. Also, in his book, he explores how music works, not as a collection of notes, or moments or sound, but as a combination of notes and silences between the notes. When you stop to think about music it’s incredibly difficult to pin down what seems so simple – where is the music, actually? It’s not in the notes by themselves. It’s not in the spaces. It’s in the whole – in the phrases, the bars, the themes, the entire melody and the rhythm. I love how it seems to resist reduction – you can only appreciate it, and enjoy it, when it’s whole.

Another thing about music is how personal it is. I bet you had the experience when you were younger of your parents just “not getting” the music you enjoyed. Perhaps always telling you to turn it down? Or saying “That’s not music!” Then as you got older, if you’ve had children of your own, you might find they like a lot of the music that you like, but I bet you’ll also find that they enjoy some music that has you saying “That’s not music! Turn it down!”

Music is intensely personal. It’s one of the best, most powerful ways, to evoked memories. A certain song can take you right back to a particular moment years ago, or can evoke all the feelings you have for a loved one. It stirs us, moves us, changes our entire physiology, affecting our breathing, our heart rate, the mobilisation of chemicals and hormones in our bodies. It affects our muscles, our movement, our stomachs.

I saw a short piece on French TV recently about Melody Gardot, who at age 19 had a serious bike accident. She was in hospital for over a year and had many difficult neurological problems. At one point a doctor suggested music therapy and her mother bought her a guitar. She taught herself to play it, started writing songs, and made a full recovery. She is now an internationally famous, beautiful jazz singer. Check her out. Quite a story! And such beautiful music!

The lower photo above is of Anacreon the poet. Poetry, like music, is handled mainly by the right hemisphere of the brain (whereas language, words stories are largely handled by the left). Poetry is closely related to music. It’s not about conveying instructions or information. It evokes emotions, changes our bodies the way music does, and also has the power to evoke intense memories. In this sculpture, Anacreon has two infants in his arms….and doesn’t he so obviously love them? They are Bacchus and Cupid. Bacchus is the God of Wine, and Cupid the God of Love. Well, not hard to see why he loves them so, huh? Bacchus is also known as Dionysus. You can read a bit more about him here. He’s the God of a lot more than wine. Cupid, the God of passionate desire, of affection and attraction.

Finally, here’s an interesting fact connected to this issue of how our two cerebral hemispheres engage with the world in different ways. Iain McGilchrist’s thesis is that we’ve become a bit stuck in our left hemispheres and we need to develop a better integration of the two halves. One way to do that might be to consciously use the right hemisphere more – so, what better way than to start with spending more time each day listening to music and reading poetry?

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How does it feel?

Posted in art, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on December 3, 2020| Leave a Comment »

One of my most favourite museums in the world is the Glyptoteket in Copenhagen. One of their permanent exhibits is a sculpture room filled with beautiful works by French and Danish sculptors. Many of them are utterly breath-taking. Over the next few posts I thought I’d share some photos I took during my visit there back in the pre-Covid era!

Look at this! Carved from a block of marble. I think it is astonishing. What incredible skill to make solid rock look like soft flowing fabric.

That’s what I wanted to focus on today, because I think when we pay attention to the perceptions and sensations of the everyday present, life seems better. And even though many of us are still living under stringent restrictions, we can experience sights, sounds, scents, tastes and textures every single day. I’m a very visual person. I take lots of photos, and I’ve been re-viewing and organising thousands of my images this year. Despite the fact I suffer from tinnitus and my hearing isn’t as good as it was when I was younger, I also love sounds. Where I live in the French countryside, I’ve been able to hear more bird songs this year than I’ve ever done before, thanks to the quietening of human activities – especially those human activities involving machines! I love music too, and a day doesn’t go by without me listening to, and/or playing music.

This image though, reminds me of the importance of the sense of touch. And with all this physical and social distancing going on, I suspect most of us are missing that kind of contact. Zoom calls, WhatsApp groups and so on can be good for communication but they aren’t a substitute for physical contact, are they?

So, I wonder if it might be an idea to focus on the sensation of touch for a day? What textiles are in contact with your body? How does that feel? What surfaces do your fingers touch today? How does that feel? How many different sensations of touch have you experienced today? And how would you describe them?

That’s my idea for today, inspired by this astonishing sculpture – take a day to consciously experience the sensation of touch. Notice each sensation and make a short note about it in your diary or journal……or in the Notes app on your phone. Then, at the end of the day, review what you’ve written. How does that make you feel? In other words, what emotions are created by the physical texture of your day?

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Celestial rhythms

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on December 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I wonder how much the sky influences our lives. I don’t just mean how a blue sky lifts our spirits, and a heavy grey cloud cover can dampen them. I’m not only thinking of the reds, tobacco browns, and goldens of a setting sun. I’m thinking about the evening sky, like this one, and the night sky which you know, looking at this, is only a few minutes away.

I don’t share this photo because it’s a great photo of the Moon and Venus in a twilight sky. I share it because it sets off a train of thought in my mind. It gets me thinking about the rhythms of our planet, and how, for millennia, we humans have learned to understand some of those rhythms by looking at the night sky. I know there are stories of how ancient peoples navigated by the stars and worked the Earth by the progress of the constellations. I know that even now, there are farmers and gardeners who plant, cultivate and harvest according to the phases of the Moon. I know I get a lift in my heart when I see Orion appear for the first time on the Eastern horizon, knowing that I’ll be able to see him make his journey to the West every night until Spring comes again, knowing that Orion is a winter companion in this part of the world.

But I also look at a sky like this and am struck by both the Moon and Venus, and, instantly I’m thinking of the Divine Feminine, as both the Moon and Venus are associated with goddesses. I wonder if they evoke the anima in me. I wonder if they start me thinking about intuition and beauty.

Actually, I don’t wonder that at all. They do. For sure. I look at this scene and I am entranced, I am enchanted, I am absorbed in feelings, thoughts and images of intuition and beauty.

Have you ever wondered how much the sky influences your life?

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Peering into the mist

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, music, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on December 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This time of year it’s not uncommon to wake up and find that the vineyards have disappeared. They are hidden in dense morning mist. Just like in this photo here.

I can almost see some of the trees. I can see the nearest vineyard but I know there are several others beyond this one. I can’t see the next village.

The fog brings the horizon much closer. I can only see what is close to me. I’m reminded of a passage by the late, great John O’Donohue –

Today the light is very low so the fog is covering the mountains. When the fog is there, half of them are missing. But, in some sense, that is the duty of the imagination: to help us connect with that which is invisible but is actually very close.

What a great reminder that we need our imagination to “help us connect with that which is invisible but is actually very close”.

How do we see the invisible? Well, Saint-Exupery told us

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No clear edges

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on November 30, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I took this photo of a sunset with a long exposure time and my hand moved a bit but when I looked at the result I really liked it.

OK, it’s obviously not exactly what I saw as I looked out over the vineyards that evening. In fact, it’s almost more like a water colour painting than an exact representation of what I could see with my eyes. But don’t you think that makes it, somehow, all the more appealing?

We have a tendency to prefer clear boundaries, to be able to pick out an object or an individual as separate from all the others, in order to recognise them, to name them. This recognition and categorisation skill takes us a long way. Such a long way that we tend to forget the power of fuzziness, the reality of uncertainty, and the unavoidable fact of dynamic change.

Nothing exists in isolation. Everything changes all the time. The future is unpredictable with any accuracy when we pay attention to the details, to the unique and to the individual.

Seeing how everything flows into everything else, how there are streams of substances, energies and information flowing through us and everything else constantly, streams which form us, which we process, which flow through us on into the future and into other beings and other objects.

We need that skill too. That ability to shift our perspective away from labelling and categorising to flows, to connections, relationships and uniqueness.

Maybe that’s why I find this image so beautiful. Because reality can’t be fully understood as made up of separate “bits”.

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Two ways of seeing

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, photography, science on November 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »

There are three common predator species of birds which I see around where I live, pretty much on a daily basis. There are the buzzards which circle on invisible airstreams way high up in the sky. I hear one call with a distinct but also distant cry and look up at the blue sky which I then have to scan till I spot what is often just a small dot against the blue. Then there are the owls, both the “barn owls” and the “little owls” which live in neighbouring outbuildings. On of the “little owls” sat up on my neighbour’s TV aerial last night calmly watching me while I closed all the shutters on our windows. Finally, there are the kestrels, like this one in the photo above.

The kestrel hovers, often at a height about that of a two or three storey house, whilst the buzzards circle rather than hover, and do so at much higher levels. I never see a kestrel sitting on a roof or an aerial, but I’ve spotted them in trees sometimes. Mostly, however, I see them like this. They are hovering silently, then, all of a sudden they fall like a stone onto some prey they have spotted.

Iain McGilchrist’s majestic “The Master and His Emissary” changed the way I understood the brain, and also changed the way I understood human, and other animal behaviours. He describes how birds share the phenomenon we humans have of a brain divided into two halves. You might know this already, but there is a crossover thing that happens between brains and bodies – our left hemisphere controls the right side of our body, and the right controls the left side. In birds the left hemisphere processes the information from the right eye and the right processes the information from the left eye. They choose to use each eye for different purposes.

The bird’s left eye and right hemisphere combination specialise in broad attention – they use this to be aware of potential predators around them, and to make social connections with other birds. They use the right eye and left hemisphere combination to focus in on details. The right eye, left hemisphere lets them spot prey, or find grain. They enable it catch and grasp.

As Iain points out in his book this split and asymmetry of the brain brings great evolutionary advantage – it allows the creature to be broadly aware, socially connected, and to be narrowly focused to grasp objects all at the same time. Both halves of the brain function all the time. We don’t selectively switch one off while we use the other one. But we can develop habits which prioritise the one half over the other – and that’s the key thesis of his book – that we have prioritised the attention the left hemisphere pays to the world over the broad, connecting attention the right hemisphere gives us.

I think of all that when I gaze in wonder at the kestrel. I marvel not just at its ability to hang there in the sky, but its ability to see a broad sweep of territory below, and to pick out, from such great heights, the prey it needs, exactly where it is moving in the field below.

Only once in the last six years have I been able to see a kestrel hover above me, dive down into the hedgerow and return with its catch.

Astonishing. Amazing. Wonderful.

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Diversity and order

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, perception, photography, science on November 28, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Since I retired six years ago and emigrated from Scotland to France I’ve lived in a house surrounded by vineyards. Watching the changes across the seasons and seeing how the workers tend to the vines has been an education for me. There’s something very comforting about watching the sweep of the seasons through the year. It helps me to feel more in tune with Nature’s harmonies and cycles.

I think these two photos capture two concepts which vineyards can convey – diversity and order.

You can see as you look at these images that the vineyards are not uniform. Although the individual “wires” run parallel to each other within any single vineyard, each yard runs in a different direction. Some run north to south, some east to west, and yet others seem to be on a diagonal. This brings a real sense of diversity to whole landscape, despite the fact that as far as the eye can see there are vines everywhere.

What you can’t really see in these images is that each vineyard is a different age. Each year, some old vines are removed and new ones are planted. As I look out of my window just now I can see one whole vineyard which is row after row of seedlings, each in a bright green protective plastic tube. All the other vineyards are golden or brown. Some still seem to have all their leaves, and others have hardly any left at all.

That diversity strikes me as really important because its in so many dimensions – place, direction of the “wires”, age of the plantation – and so on.

Yet at the same time there is an incredible amount of order. At the time of the pruning the workers move from plant to plant trimming each one back to only two branches, and tying them onto the wires. The row after row of vines is the most ordered, planned and maintained landscape I think I’ve ever seen. Farmland in Scotland is not at all like this. OK, maybe if you see a field with all one crop, be it rapeseed or wheat, it looks pretty uniform, but these vines seem to take order and control to a whole other level.

You might think that diversity and order are opposites, and in some way, they are. So what we have here is that key phenomenon of “integration” – two apparent opposites existing together in synthesis, in harmony, in a way where neither negates the other.

We need diversity in our lives. We need some order too. But most of all we need “integration” – bringing everything together to work in harmony.

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