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Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

Light and dark

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on July 8, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is one of those “Are you a glass half full, or glass half empty, person?” images. When you look at this I’m guessing you’re either going to be thinking “Yikes! Look how BLACK that cloud is! There’s a storm coming!!” or “Look how pretty and soft those clouds look just above the vines! Better weather is coming!”

And not or.

I’m neither glass half full, nor glass half empty. I can be optimistic some days, and pessimistic others. But what pleases me most is a sense of wholeness. I love the contrasts, polarities, and their dynamic relationship with each other. So, in fact, this is just the kind of image which really appeals to me.

I love how the blackness of the storm cloud is echoed in the blackness of the vineyard (which only happens because I exposed for the bright blue sky and white, fluffy clouds). That makes this image a bit like a yin yang symbol for me, and you know how much I like that!

I was reading some articles in the French Press about what kind of world might lie ahead for us after this pandemic. They use the term “L’après” – in English we’d use the phrase “The After World”….or, more likely, “the world afterwards”, but just using the term “The After” in the French way conjures up connections with that other “after” term – “The After Life” – which traditionally relates to life after death, doesn’t it? Well, many of the articles are in fact about the “after life” but not in that traditional sense. They are about life after the pandemic…..or how could/might/should we live in the light of what we have experienced?

That’s a really ancient question, isn’t it? “How to Live?” It’s one of my favourite questions, and I think its interesting that we humans have been wrestling with it for centuries. There are, of course, a myriad of answers based on different world views and beliefs, but, somehow, I find, it’s not answers I’m looking for…..what thrills me is the hunt….the enquiry….the exploration. Maybe one of my strongest drives is curiosity. That and wonder. And I find both of those incredibly satisfying.

So, I’m drawn to the “whole”. I’m drawn to dynamic change. I’m drawn to “émerveillement” (wonder and amazement – or “enchantment” perhaps?). I’m drawn to explore, to understand and to learn. As I move forwards through 2020 and beyond those will be my foundations – along with love and care.

Do you remember the two words I picked for this year? Based on two books I received for Christmas?

Émerveillement and Bienveillance.

How about you? What values are going to help you to navigate the weeks and months ahead?

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Locking the barn door

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, personal growth, photography, science on July 7, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I saw this a few years back in the town of Saintes, about a half hour drive from where I live. You have to agree this is a pretty impressive attempt to bar the door! There was nobody going to go through there easily!

The trouble is, as we can now see, that the rest of the building fell down. And there’s not much value in a locked door when the other three walls have disappeared! There’s definitely a story here, but I don’t know it. I mean, who went to such great lengths to bar this door? And why? And what happened to the whole building? Setting all that aside though, I think this image inspires a couple of streams of thought.

You know the phrase about barring the barn door after the horse has bolted? Well, that’s the first thing that came to mind when I looked at this photo today. Throughout this pandemic authorities have been playing catch up. Some countries have been slower than others, (and, goodness me, some countries still haven’t got a grip!), but everyone has been trying to learn as we all live this thing. Still, it’s often felt that lockdowns have come too late, or have been too sloppy, that there hasn’t been enough Personal Protective Equipment for those who need it, that testing and tracing have been slow to get off the ground, and so on, and so on.

What does that tell us?

Well, partly that our societies have been way more vulnerable than anyone has admitted, and partly, that this is life…..that life emerges, continuously evolving and developing into the unknown. We can’t live life backwards, and we are never going to be able to accurately predict the future, so maybe we need to learn how to make the present the best we can make it instead?

The other thought stream which this image set off for me, is that one about dealing with life, and, in particular, health, holistically. It’s just never going to be a successful long term strategy to focus on short term, narrow solutions. We don’t just need well defended front doors. We need strong walls, healthy buildings, safe, clean and secure places to live and work. We need them in the present…..not just once a crisis is upon us, and it’s too late!

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Unlocking is only a beginning

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, photography, science on July 6, 2020| 2 Comments »

Like yesterday, I’ve found two images that I want to use together. Unlike yesterday, they don’t represent a single phrase. Instead, I think they demonstrate a single concept.

We try to make sense of the world by focusing on bits of it. A bit like looking through a keyhole, or catching sight of what lies through a gateway.

Our left cerebral hemisphere seems to have evolved to develop this skill to the great heights we now experience. It drills down. It focuses. It abstracts elements from the whole to analyse them, categorise them and label them. In both physical and mental senses of the word, it helps us to “grasp” things.

“Things”. That’s an important word to use here, because this is what this type of narrow focus does. It turns whatever it grasps into objects. It separates “objects” out from each other, and from their contexts. This can work pretty well when we are dealing with material forms, but it starts to go wildly astray when we are dealing with living creatures, with non-material reality such as feelings, thoughts, beliefs and relationships, or, even, I would claim, when dealing with illness.

We often hear illnesses described as if they are objects or entities – “stand up to cancer!”, “conquer heart disease!”, “defeat dementia!” etc. But illnesses are not objects, and neither are they entities. They are more like processes, dysfunctions and disorders of complex networks of relationships.

There is no doubt that zero-ing in on some phenomena helps us to recognise them, classify them, and, yes, grasp them. But the job is only partially done at that point. The normal function of the brain involves the left hemisphere handing back to the right hemisphere the results of its analysis, where the contexts, environments, connections and relationships are re-created. This is how we better understand what we are dealing with….by seeing the whole, by seeing the flows of materials, energy and information, by spotting the dynamic movements, the constantly changing web of connections and relationships. And, in so doing, “objects” often turn out not to be “things” after all.

These two photos remind me of that.

They remind me of the value of peeking through the keyhole, but also the need to step through and into whatever we are observing, in order to know better, to understand more deeply, to more fully grasp….

Looking through the keyhole, turning the key, unlocking the door, approaching the gate…..these are all just a beginning. They invite us to enter, to experience, to explore.

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Whole hearted

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on July 5, 2020| 2 Comments »

Unusually, I’ve decided to start my post today with two images, instead of one. I’m steadily working my way through my photo libraries of pictures I’ve taken over the last couple of decades. I have, literally, tens of thousands of them. In fact, I’ve always been utterly daunted by the size of my image libraries and haven’t made any attempt to edit or organise them. But then the lockdown kicked in and I decided to create and share a post every single day. I reckoned that was one of the best things I could do in this current situation. There is so much uncertainty, fear, and negativity about that I thought one of ways I could respond to that was create and publish positive, inspiring and encouraging posts. My thinking was, and is, that the deliberate dissemination of positive waves might contribute to others, might provide some support and reassurance in these difficult times.

Two of the things I do a lot is take photographs and write. It’s a long time now since my blog evolved to have this consistent structure – each post created around one of my photos, plus an associated written reflection.

My experience of doing this continues to delight me. These daily posts have become something of an addiction. I’d find it difficult to miss a day now! Every day I edit and organise some photos in one of my photo libraries, and I download one of two of them which inspire me to write something. Then, each day I choose one of those downloads, pop it into a new post, take a little time to contemplate and reflect, then I write. From time to time, I hear from one of you, sending me a message of gratitude for a post I’d published and that, too, delights me, because it confirms for me that positive ripples can, indeed, travel right around the world.

Today I was thinking of using one of these two photos but wasn’t sure which one, then……guess what? Yep, I decided “And not or“, and popped them both in, because together they make a small sentence. Ok, not quite a sentence, but a small phrase…..

Whole hearted.

The half frosted leaf struck me as a natural yin yang symbol when I saw it, and it still has that power over me. Because the left half is frosted and white, where the right half has warmed up, lost its frost, and revealed its brown colour again, it really does speak to me of contrasts, opposites, and polarities, and of how all such things exist only in connection with their partners. The yin yang symbol is such a great symbol of wholeness. Of dynamic wholeness. I love it.

The shape which has appeared on this tree is typical of the way we draw a symbolic heart. I know we humans are good at spotting, or seeing, faces everywhere, but I think we are equally good at spotting, or seeing, hearts. The heart is a symbol of love, of soul, of deep feeling and commitment for us, isn’t it? “Heart felt”, “heart to heart”, “broken hearted”, “the heart of the matter”, are all phrases which reflect the place of the heart in the human psyche.

But, perhaps my favourite heart-connected phrase is “whole hearted”. That idea of “going all in”, of “fully committing”, of generosity, of love, of passion, of enthusiasm and desire. I’ve long since thought “why do anything in a half-hearted way?”

This is how I want to live my life.

Whole hearted.

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How we change the world

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science on July 4, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Look at the sand. Look at these lines. They look like waves, don’t they? Except sand doesn’t really do waves, does it? We know, when we look at this, that the sand has been shaped by some other force. We know that that force was water. Well, not really water, although water was involved. It’s been shaped by the forces which shaped the water.

Water often looks like this. Whether it’s the surface of a pond, a lake, or an ocean, the surface of the water breaks into long peaks and troughs which we call waves.

Nothing remarkable there?

Well, actually, it is. Because those waves in the water are movements of energy. You can’t capture a wave and examine it under a microscope.

A wave is more a verb, than a noun.

A wave is more a process, than an object.

The forces which create the wave are invisible to us. The shapes they make in the water are not.

So, when we look at the sand and see a pattern like this, we are seeing a kind of symmetry. We are looking at sand, fashioned into similar shapes to the water. But underlying both the sand and the water are these invisible forces which are doing the shaping.

Or, rather, the invisible forces are doing the shaping by interacting with the water and the sand. It’s a sort of collaboration.

I often wonder about the invisible forces which interact with the material world to produce the patterns, shapes and forms which we see around us.

I wonder about the invisible forces which interact with each of us to shape our experiences and our lives.

There is one particular quality in this kind of pattern which really captures my attention and imagination – transmission. When we see a wave move across the surface of a body of water, or we see how the sand has been shaped, then we realise we are witnessing something moving, something dynamic, something which is carrying particles, energy and information from one place to another.

That’s how I see the world now. A myriad of transient forms produced by continuous flows of materials, energies and information. Nothing exists in isolation. Nothing is fixed. Everything exerts influences which spread far and beyond the here and the now.

Everything, and everyone.

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The night walker

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, personal growth, photography on July 3, 2020| 1 Comment »

This is a photo I took many years ago, just using my phone. It’s taken in Edinburgh at night. The purple light of the underside of the bridge caught my attention. It was only once I’d uploaded the shot to my computer that I noticed the person walking along the pavement. At that moment I realised the scene was greatly enhanced by the human presence. It became a much, much more interesting image.

I believe this is a fundamental principle and value which I have. I don’t share the views of some people who think the human species is bad. I believe that we humans are not separate from Nature, we are a part of Nature. We are, in fact, an inextricable part of Nature. I can’t understand a human being without knowing them within their webs of connections, without exploring the flows of materials, energy and information through those networks, without considering them within their contexts and multiple environments, physical, social and cultural.

Yes, we humans have done, are doing, and will do, a wide range of harms to each other, to other creatures, and the one, small, blue marble, planet which we share with all other forms of life, and we need to learn how to live in greater harmony with each other and within this Nature that we are part of. But in four decades of face to face, person by person, patient by individual patient, work as a doctor, I never met a single human being I didn’t value.

I’ve found that as I get older, and in particular, since I retired and moved to live in the French countryside, that I value the rest of Nature, more and more. As I opened the shutters the other morning I looked out and saw two birds…..a Hoopoe drilling down into the grass for some breakfast, and Little Owl, sitting up on the highest point of the wall, spinning his head around surveying his territory. And I thought, well, how amazing is this? I’m more aware of the phases of the moon now, and the rhythm of the seasons. I’m more aware of sprouting seeds, the rate of growth of pumpkins, the cycles of leaves, flowers and fruits. As I garden, I feel in touch with a bond of care, attention and nurture, in this phenomenon we call Nature. But I sure wouldn’t want a world without human beings in it.

There’s something else this image does for me. It sparks the creative, story-telling part of me. Here’s something else which is uniquely human. The ability to perceive, interpret and invent. The ability to make sense of, to apply values to, and to create narratives from, our daily experiences. We are a creative species. We have a driving need to make sense of our lives. I can’t help but wonder about this solitary person, making their way through the streets of Edinburgh at night.

Maybe we just need to learn to shift the balance of our actions and efforts, away from harm, consumption and destruction, towards more harmony, more humanity, and more life-enhancing care. Maybe this pandemic has given us an opportunity to hit the reset button, and do just that.

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Symbolic objects

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, photography, psychology on July 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I’m fascinated by carved objects on buildings. Often they are above a door or a window. Other times they are under a roof overhang, or somewhere in a garden or building. Certain buildings, like churches, are often highly embellished with these works of art. This owl is on a church wall. I know most of the carvings on churches relate to saints and important people in the Christian faith, but many of them are really not so directly related (think of all the gargoyles!). Who chose them, and why?

When I’ve traveled around Japan I’ve seen lots and lots of statues and statuettes….particularly buddhas.

However, it’s not at all uncommon to find figures like this for sale in Garden Centres here in France and I’ve noticed them a lot in French people’s gardens and houses.

There’s also quite a controversy raging just now about statues, with calls for the removal of statues of famous people whose actions and values communities no longer wish to celebrate (although maybe they were never celebrated, despite standing there for decades).

All this got me thinking about the symbolic power of objects. I wonder if you have any in your house? Or your garden? I wonder which ones you notice in your Public spaces?

Maybe we should assume that they are intended to exert some influence over us. For example, I think many people with the buddha statues often see them as objects to help them to remain calm. One of the first phrases I encountered here, in the Charente, was “Soyons zen” – “Let’s be “zen” – or calm”.

I have quite a lot of owls in my house. I feel an affinity with them and I think they help me access reflection, contemplation and wisdom.

A common “device” over doorways is a heart.

I can certainly see the point of that! In fact, I think I’d quite like having a house where there was a heart over the doorway. Maybe it would help everyone who entered to remember the importance of “seeing with the heart”.

There’s a really interesting mythical one in this part of France (and I believe elsewhere in Europe too) – Melusine.

Half woman, half serpent (or dragon), with wings, there are a number of variations of the Melusine myth. Here’s a passage from wikipedia about her

One tale says Melusine herself was the daughter of the fairy Pressyne and king Elinas of Albany (now known as Scotland). Melusine’s mother leaves her husband, taking her daughters to the isle of Avalon after he breaks an oath never to look in at her and her daughter in their bath. The same pattern appears in stories where Melusine marries a nobleman only after he makes an oath to give her privacy in her bath; each time, she leaves the nobleman after he breaks that oath. Shapeshifting and flight on wings away from oath-breaking husbands also figure in stories about Melusine.

I wonder what influence her presence has on the people who live with her likeness on their walls?

One of the things which makes we human beings so unique is how we handle symbols and metaphors. We don’t just see objects as “things”. We attach value and meaning to them. They provoke emotions in us. They provoke our memories, stimulate our imaginations.

The objects to which we attach symbolic value, either individually, or as part of a culture, or society, have an influence on us. We often choose them exactly for that reason.

What symbolic objects are there around you in your daily life? And are you aware of the influence they have upon you?

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Not machine-like

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the viewing room, health, life, movies, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science, video on June 30, 2020| Leave a Comment »

The tendency to think that whatever we see is made up of small parts goes back a long, long way. You can trace it at least back to the Greek concept of the “atom” – that basic unit, or building block, from which everything else is made.

Well, maybe it took the 20th century splitting of the atom to discover that there are no basic units after all…..that when you look inside the “smallest” component part, there are even smaller ones inside, then when you look inside of those, there is……well, it all fades into invisibility somehow. Turns out there are no fixed, fundamental building blocks after all.

The Italian Physicist, Carlo Rovelli, who wrote “Seven Brief Lessons in Physics”, and “Reality is not what it Seems”, describes this well. Here are a few passages from him…..

The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events.

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not stones.

A handful of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm in space even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars.”

“Elementary particles which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence” feels like a totally different universe from the one built from indivisible, fixed, discrete atoms.

The deluded idea that the universe is made of bits was compounded during the Industrial Revolution where the machine became the dominant model for interpreting the world. It still is.

Human beings are not like this.

But we still interpret experience using this lens of the machine. We want what was described by Arthur Frank as the “Restitution Model” in Medicine – just fix the broken bit and I’ll be on my way – Diagnosis is finding the wonky part and sorting it or removing it. A patient with multiple disorders is compartmentalised with each disease treated by a different team of specialists….some to deal with the heart, another one to deal with the stomach, yet another to deal with the bones and joints. We even turn symptoms into parts, treating “pain”, for example, with “pain specialists”, as if pain was an entity in its own right.

We take the same machine model and apply it to society as well, reducing human beings to mere cogs in the great machine.

The English philosopher, Mary Midgley, in her “Beast and Man”, said

I had better say once, that my project of taking animal comparisons seriously does not involve a slick mechanistic or deterministic view of freedom. Animals are not machines; one of my main concerns is to combat this notion. Actually only machines are machines.

Animals are not machines, human beings are not machines, and society is not a machine. Using machine models to understand and create institutions, policies, methods of health care, education…….I’d like to see all that disappear.

Life is not machine-like.

You think you can understand, and explain the existence of, a creature like this by seeing it as a machine?

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Art thinking

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on June 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »

What’s this young woman doing? She looks relaxed, leaning both her forearms on the low wall as she gazes, or looks, (there is a difference) towards….who knows what? You can’t help but turn your head to see if you can see what she is seeing.

Deleuze and Guattari, in “What is Philosophy?” talk about three ways of thinking – concepts, functions and affects+percepts. Philosophy, they say, is our way of thinking concepts. Science describes functions. Art deals with sensations, affects and percepts.

In the city of Angouleme, about an hour from where I live, there are many, many examples of wall art. Angouleme is a major, maybe THE major centre, for graphic arts in France. Several of them are absolutely stunning. Many of them make you stop and think.

If art is a “bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of affects and percepts”, then what does that really mean in everyday life? I’m no philosopher and I wouldn’t be surprised if I misunderstand philosophical writings, but I am a “wonderer”. So, the two photos I’m sharing with you today, in this post, are just two examples of murals I’ve come across in Angouleme…….two murals which really stimulate my powers of perception and evoke emotions. They both make me wonder.

In this first one, everything in blue is the painting, but it’s been so cleverly painted that, at least at first, you have the impression you are looking at a real woman, leaning on a real wall, in front of a real hotel. Well, actually, it is painted on the gable end of real hotel, and the painted wall is an extension of one you can actually lean on. Maybe this graphic woman is looking into the window on the left? If so, she’s looking into a real window, not an imaginary one. Here’s the full picture…..

I love how the painted image blends with the physical world around it. It transforms reality. As I gaze at this in wonder, I slow down, feel calm and contemplative, and take my time to explore the whole painting. Isn’t it amazing that the woman, who is the artist’s creation, somehow induces in me, the viewer, these feelings of slow, calm contemplation?

What would this building look like unpainted? I’m not sure I’d even have noticed it. I certainly wouldn’t have stopped to gaze at it. And, here’s the other thing….I might not have followed the gaze of the woman beyond this low wall out over the valley below, towards the winding river, the boats, the houses and buildings at the edge of the city, and the farms and forests further out. I haven’t the slightest doubt that this work of art transformed my experience of Angouleme.

But, then, so did this one….

This is one of the most imaginative, evocative, narrative murals I’ve ever seen. It also stops you in your tracks. You can’t help but get drawn in, first to the woman and the man, who are kind of embracing, but there’s a mystery in this embrace. It doesn’t look entirely comfortable. What’s going on with these two? Then, above them, the glass in the window is broken. How did that happen? And above that, this enormous moon, which doesn’t really look like our Moon, but maybe some other planet? It always makes me think of the movie, “Another Earth“….But look at the biplane flying over the face of that planet? What era is this? Which makes us look at the couple again, and wonder what era they lived in as well…..they sure aren’t dressed the way we’d expect to see someone dressed in this day and age.

Then as I look again at this photo, I see the pink bike, parked against the railing, and I can’t help but think it’s her bike! So reality and fantasy blend and blur and lose their hard edges (do reality and fantasy really ever have hard edges?)

Finally, I look up and see what looks like the shadow of an angel with a trailing umbilical cord…..at least, that’s what it looks like to me, and I can’t help but turn around to see if I can see the actual angel behind me.

Oh, there’s the angel, over there, on the building opposite….

Isn’t that quite something? A drawing of a shadow which makes you turn around to see what’s casting the shadow? What a wonderful blending of perception and imagination!

Somewhere in the depths of my memory I seem to have a story of an ancient debate about whether or angels would have tummy buttons – because angels, allegedly, aren’t born, so don’t have umbilical cords. I remember thinking what an odd thing to have a debate about! But as I stand looking at this drawing, that old story comes rushing back to me, and in so doing, makes the artwork all the more interesting and engaging.

With both of these murals my experience of the day was transformed. They both challenged my perception of reality. They both stirred my feelings, stimulated my imagination and provoked memories. They both made me wonder.

As far as I know only human beings make art.

What kind of humanity would we be without it?

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What shapes us?

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on June 28, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This photo of water flowing over rocks in a Highland stream transfixed me the first time I saw it, and it’s lost none of it power.

When you watch water pouring down over, around, and between rocks in a stream or a river, you can see how the water itself is shaped by the rocks and the earth which create its edges (the banks of the river). If you look carefully you can often see that there is an ongoing lengthy relationship between the water and the rocks. It’s not just that the rocks make obstacles which the water has to flow around. You can see that as the water flows over the rocks, it shapes them.

However, what you see in this photograph is an additional dimension. You don’t just see that the rocks are making the follow a particular path. You can see that the surface of the water itself is shaped. Those bands, or ridges, look waves spreading over the surface of the water, except you wouldn’t expect to see waves in a stream or river as it pours down a rocky hillside. Where do they come? Maybe it’s something to do with the rocks on the river bed, or the rocks within the river itself, but it looks like something different. It looks like this pattern, this shape, emerges from within the water itself. As if it looks this way because of some influence within the water.

So, this photo always makes me think of that. It makes me think of how each of us is shaped by external structures, and the environments in which we live – by which I mean the physical, social, and cultural environments at least. But how we are also shaped by our constantly evolving inner structures and environments……our memories, imaginings, thoughts and ideas, as well as our physical bodies and all the cells, tissues and organs which lie hidden inside.

Who we are, what we are like, what we look like to others, what our characteristics are, are all shaped, are all constantly being shaped, by an alchemical mix of the external and the internal, of the visible and the invisible.

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