When I look out at a view like this I see the ancient teaching about the four elements – air, fire, water and stone.
I suppose the most obvious one is the water – just look at it! Look at the rich palette of colours! Look at the expanse of it! I heard someone the other day say we shouldn’t say “Planet Earth” we should say “Planet Ocean” because much more of the Earth’s surface is covered with water than with land. As best we know Life began in the sea and evolved from there.
Above the sea, the next most obvious element is air – well, we say sky really, because we can’t actually see “air”. Look at the colour palette there too, and the expanse. That unbroken horizon where the sky meets the sea with no land in-between has some kind of magical attraction for us, doesn’t it? Do you remember the story about “The Green Ray“? It’s based on the old belief that if you watch the sun setting on a horizon of sky and sea alone then for a brief moment before the sun disappears a bright green ray of light might appear. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never seen it. The story goes on to suggest that whoever you see next, after seeing the green ray, will be the love of your life. Romantic, huh? Eric Rohmer made it into a beautiful movie. Another thing we can’t see in the air is wind. We can only infer it from its effects on other elements. We can watch it blow the clouds (and what are clouds other than the temporary appearance of otherwise invisible water molecules which saturate the air?). We can watch it whip up waves.
The element of fire comes from the Sun. We can’t look at it directly without damaging our eyes. But we can close our eyes, turn our faces towards the Sun and feel the heat of the incredible furnaces and explosions which send out waves of energy to our Earth. Waves, without which there would be no Life. And in that air that we can’t see are gases we can’t see, including ozone, which, when it breaks down, allows way too much of the Sun’s fire through. We can’t see the carbon dioxide building up and trapping the energy of the Sun’s fire between the sky and the sea and earth, warming the oceans, the lands, and threatening the existence of all that lives.
Finally, there’s the earth, or stone. If you look carefully at the front of this image you can see the colour of the sand under the water. Isn’t it amazing that those un-countable grains of sand are created by the constant moving of the water? That they started out as rock and ended up almost too small to see. Well, of course, sand is more than little rocks. It’s got gazillions of tiny shells and pieces of shells in it too. Those protective homes created by billions of tiny sea creatures – all without the use of machines or technology!
I love to stand at the edge of the beach and harmonise my breathing with the rhythm of the breaking waves. Breathing out as the water breaks on the sand, and breathing in as the ocean draws its edges back in towards itself. When that harmony falls into place its one of the most calming, centring, but also expansive boundary-dissolving experience I know.
What instruments do you have, and use, to help you make your way through this life?
Although our smartphones have compasses in them, how many times do you actually use one? I’ve used both Google Maps and Apple Maps to help me find my way through a city, and while they both let you mark, in advance, a place you want to visit, I’ve found that several times, when I come out of a metro or a station, that I set off in totally the wrong direction! Maybe I need to use the compass to figure out where north, south, east and west are…..but I haven’t done that so far.
Many of us have GPS in our cars now, and a couple of years ago we had a visit from some friends who live in Provence. Their car had GPS but they’d never used it because they are both a bit resistant to new technologies. However, I took the time to show one of them how to set her destination in her in-car GPS, then asked her to choose whether she wanted “the fastest route”, “the shortest route”, or the “optimised route” (which I explained balanced the other two options). She said, “I want to take the prettiest route”. Well, the Michelin maps in France mark many roads with green lines along each side. These “green roads” are the “prettiest” or “most attractive” ones, so I knew what she meant. I told her the GPS didn’t offer that option. She replied, “Well I don’t want to use it then”. I’ve been thinking that the “prettiest route” option is THE big missing function in most (all?) in-car GPS units ever since…..
Clocks or watches must be amongst our oldest, most used, instruments for helping us to get through life. There have been town clocks since the thirteenth century, but it wasn’t until the twentieth century that personal watches became common.
I once organised a weekend workshop at the hospital where I worked and invited a Dutch colleague to come to Scotland to deliver it. He stayed with me for the weekend and we travelled to the venue by train. On the first day, the train got held up, then moved a bit, then got held up, and so on. I was getting increasingly anxious, checking my watch every few minutes. My friend said to me “Relax, in all the times I’ve been presenting workshops, they’ve never started before I arrive!” He then went on to explain to me that about 15 years earlier he had removed his watch because he thought that constantly checking it just made him anxious. He pointed out that I could look at my watch as often as I liked but the train wouldn’t go any faster. I took my watch off that weekend and haven’t worn one since.
However, it’s not that I never check the time. There are plenty of clocks and timekeeping devices around us all the time – especially as most of us have phones which show the time now. But I definitely cut back on my watch/clock/time checking after that.
The French philosopher, Henri Bergson, wrote clearly about the difference between measured time and lived time (duration). My normal working day centred around fully booked clinics, divided into regular time slots. I found that I didn’t need to check the time in the consulting room. I had developed an unconscious ability to “know” how much time had passed, and, normally, my clinics ran to time. I used the same skill when teaching. If I was given a 30 minute slot, I’d deliver my lecture, then check the time, and 30 minutes would be about to lapse. If I was given an hour, I’d deliver my lecture, check the time, and the hour would be about up. Not always. But usually. So, I understand this phenomenon of lived time, and I don’t need a device to measure it.
I have seen some utterly beautiful public time-keeping devices however.
Before the invention of clocks, we used sundials. Some of them are delightfully beautiful.
Here’s another clock, this one in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. It’s a favourite of mine…not least because you can look through it, out across the city.
This next one shows the days of the week, representing each day according to the planet which gives the day its name (you knew that’s where the names of the days of the week came from, right?) I like this, because it suggests a slower pace of living – knowing the day, rather than knowing the hour, minute and second!
Another type of instrument we use is the barometer.
When I was a young boy, I had a “weather station”, which included a barometer, a thermometer, an anemometer to measure wind direction and speed, and a hygrometer to measure humidity. I learned how to recognise different kinds of clouds and I measured the daily rainfall. Not sure I ever learned how to predict the weather though!
Nowadays, it’s back to that smartphone with its weather apps! What strikes me about the one I use which shows predictions for the next ten days, is just how often the prediction changes before the day arrives. If rainy, stormy days seven days ahead turn into dry days with sunny spells before the seven days are up it feels like I’ve gained something. It feels like a win! How weird is that? I get to avoid the bad weather that was never going to happen anyway!
Which instruments did you use in your life in the past, and which ones do you use now (or do you only use apps on your smartphone or smartwatch now?)
And what do you pay most attention to? Direction, time, weather….or what? I’ve often thought that what we pay attention to influences what we experience.
One of my most favourite phrases in French is “L’Emerveillement du quotidien” – which translates as something like “the wonder of the everyday”, but actually there are other layers of meaning which I find hard to capture in English.
I suppose the thing I love about the word “wonder” is that has several connotations. It suggests a certain curiosity, a “wondering” what something is, or how it came about. But it also suggests a kind of awe, something amazing, astonishing, or, at very least attention-catching. The sense of “everyday” also has a couple of nuances. It means something common, as in something you might encounter any day, and it means something ordinary. So you immediately find yourself dealing with a paradox – how can the “ordinary” seem “extraordinary”? How does something “common” become both “particular” and “special”?
I’ve come to believe that there is always something extra-ordinary in the ordinary, and, after working with thousands of patients over four decades of clinical work, I’m convinced that every human being is “special”. Special not in the sense of above or superior, but in the sense of particular and unique. In fact, I think it a dehumanising act to reduce any person to “ordinary” or “common”. It’s a failure to really meet and get to know the individual.
So, although these terms seem somewhat paradoxical I find no conflict in them. I find that every single day I can have my attention captured and feel a sense of wonder and amazement develop inside me, just by living my “ordinary”, “normal”, “everyday” life.
I think there are two important principles to bring to this idea and practice – attention and imagination.
We humans have remarkable powers of unconscious and subconscious functioning. We can easily slip into auto-pilot. Have you ever had that experience of driving somewhere with you head full of thoughts to such an extent that on your arrival you have virtually no memory of the actual journey? This happens especially if your trip is one you have taken many times before. You navigate, without much conscious thought, from one familiar landmark to the next, through one well known intersection to another, but you might be hard pushed to describe any of the details of the journey. We are equally great at acquiring habits, and once we set those routines off, unless anything interrupts the expected flow, then we cruise through those activities, “without a second thought”, or, maybe more accurately, without a first one!
These are great powers and they enable us to get on with living without having to stop and make sense of life in every lived moment. But it comes at a price. We miss a lot. In fact, it comes at another, perhaps even greater price. We open ourselves up to being controlled. There are vast industries of advertising, propaganda, and persuasion designed to hustle us along towards somebody else’s desired goals without stopping to consider them.
So, how do challenge that? By slowing down and paying attention. OK, maybe not all the time, but more than we are in the habit of doing. The more often we slow down and pay attention to what is here and now, the more we notice. And, my contention is, the more we notice, the more we wonder.
Repeated experiences of wondering undermine the belief that there is nothing interesting or different about any individual, that all flowers are the same, that nothing changes, or that generalisations are more true than specificities. In fact, repeated experiences of wondering create the exact opposite. They affirm, every single day, that every person is unique, that every plant is unique, that no experience is ever really repeated, and that the truth is always found deeper than in a surface generalisation.
When I walked along the banks of this stream, which you can see in the photo at the start of this post, I noticed rocks and water. Everywhere I looked the rocks looked different, and I spent a long time mesmerised by the flow of the ever changing water.
Have another look at this particular shot. Don’t you find yourself starting to wonder? Starting to wonder about the shapes of the rocks? How smoothly they have been carved by the water. Don’t you start to wonder how each rock becomes this particular shape, and how the rock got to this position in the stream in the first place? It’s pretty easy to let a whole river of questions pour through your mind, and even without answers, those very questions start to stir a sense of amazement, of awe, of wonder.
The second element is imagination. We humans don’t just “see” the way a camera “sees”. We select, represent and interpret. We pick certain elements out of the immense flow of materials, energy and information which constantly course through our minds and bodies. We re-present those original flows and turn them into mental images, thoughts and ideas. And we interpret those representations, colouring and shading them with meanings which we draw from our memory banks and conjure up with our imagination.
I look at these particular rocks and I see a giant wide open mouth. I can imagine that some great monster fell, or was thrown or chased, into the water some time in the distant past. I can imagine that “once upon a time” something happened here, and there’s a story to be told to “explain” what we can see now. In Celtic traditions there is an abundance of such stories about the landscape. The mountains, rivers, forests, lochs, boulders, trees and ponds have stories attached to them, names given to them. Those stories and myths enrich the landscape, and add an extra, invisible layer to Life on Earth. Some people refer to this phenomenon as “enchantment” and I rather like that.
Here’s to a life of wonder and enchantment bursting up into our consciousness every single day.
Here’s to finding our inner heroes and discarding our inner zombies!
At the beginning of the year I received an invite to speak at a conference in Canada. The invitation was to talk about my experience of four decades of work as a doctor who used homeopathy. I was surprised, but it was a very kind invitation and I accepted.
The way I prepare for talks is to let some ideas and questions rattle around my brain for a bit, then start making notes. The kinds of notes I make are sort of mind maps. They aren’t as formal as those you’d find in books about the mind mapping. I just put down key words and phrases on a page, then draw circles, squares or diamond shapes around them and link them up. I’ll do a few versions of that, then I open up “Keynote” and I make a slide for each element in the mind map, pull in images from my photo library, write a few words (not many) on some of the slides, then arrange them to create a sequence which enables me to tell the story I want to tell. Well, I ended up with a set of three presentations, each of which would take about an hour to tell. I’d been told I’d be allocated two 90 minute slots in the schedule.
Then before the time arrived for the conference, along came COVID-19 and the event was cancelled. Maybe it will happen some other time, but maybe not. I’d enjoyed putting the presentations together so that gave me an idea. Why not write a book covering the same ground? I’d had an idea for a long time that I should tell my own story. I didn’t want to write a textbook, or a polemic, an argument for a way to live, a way to practice Medicine, or even make the case for the use of Homeopathy. I just wanted to make a record of my own life, my own experience.
I’m sure if any of us sat down to write our own story we’d immediately come up against the question, “But which story?”, because there are many stories of our lives. I didn’t want to write an autobiography which told the story of my family, my relationships, and my personal development. I wanted to tell the story of why I became a doctor, what kind of doctor I became, and how that came about. Not least because I thought it would help me to understand my own life better. I suppose it’s my “professional story”, but really, it’s the story of my “calling”.
I wanted to publish the book too, because I wanted others to be able to read it. Not to earn money from sales, nor to try to convince anyone of anything, but more to add to my over all project of sharing my personal experience of curiosity, wonder and joy – that’s what this blog is all about – and that’s what I committed to do daily from the day of lockdown. I’ve been writing a post based on one of my photos every day since the middle of March and I don’t feel like stopping any time soon. I already know, from feedback from some of you, how much you appreciate these posts and that completely delights me. Writing them adds to my life, so I’m very, very happy if reading them adds to yours!
Now, more than ever, I want to set off some positive, loving, inspiring waves. I’ve no idea where they will go, or what effect they will have, but it feels like a way to make a positive contribution to our times.
With lockdown, with the presentations already mapping out a story, and with the daily practice of writing for the blog, it all came together and I wrote this book – “And not or” – “A calling and a listening”.
This is how I did it, the tools I used, and what I had to learn.
I wrote the text using an A4 sized notebook and a pen. I wrote and wrote and wrote, till I thought I’d written all I wanted to write. Then I used that handwritten text to write the digital version using a program called “Ulysses“. Listen, before I go any further, I’m just laying out what I did, not saying you should do exactly what I did if you want to write your own book! But, on the other hand, I’ve always found it helpful to read what other writers have done. So, you could use any software you want. I started with Ulysses. I use this program on my desktop Mac, as well as on my iPad (for which I have a proper Bluetooth connected keyboard).
When I wrote the first digital version, I didn’t just copy out all the words I’d written in my notebook. Instead, I’d read a section, then start to transcribe the words into the wordprocessor, but I found I often decided to write it differently, to leave out whole sentences or passages, and to write brand new ones instead. By the time I’d done that I had what I called “draft 2” (the written text constituting “draft 1”). The way Ulysses works is that you write “sheets” – for me, each “sheet” was a chapter. I like the simple markdown language you can use with Ulysses. If you put a # sign at the start of a line it turns that line into a heading. If you put two ## signs it turns that line into a secondary heading. I only used those two levels of headings. The first level heading were the chapter titles, the second level to navigate sections within a chapter. The other main markdown tools I used were for inserting images (hey, you know how much I love my photos!), for marking a paragraph as a quotation, and for creating lists. That’s pretty much it. Ulysses presents you with a left hand column of your sheets, each one showing just the first line or two. I used that to get an overview of the whole book. That let me see what I thought was repetitive, and what I thought was missing.
Next step was “draft 3” – read through the whole digital text, correcting and editing as I went. Once I got to the end of that, I felt, well….dissatisfied! Something wasn’t right, and I couldn’t see what it was. So I put the whole project away for a week. Then when I came back to it I saw there were half a dozen chapters which seemed problematic. They were in two groups of three, and each group had overlap and repetition in it. I still couldn’t see the way ahead though. So, here’s the next neat thing about Ulysses, you can select whichever sheets you want to review and print them off. I printed off the six in question. Then I read through the printouts with pencil in hand, scoring out, adding in, and linking up different paragraphs. Once I’d done that I went back into the program and changed the text according to that latest “edit”. I also chopped out three other chapters that just didn’t seem to fit well at all. What do they call that? “killing your darlings” – dropping some of the sentences you love the most – because they just don’t fit. I guess I now I had gone through “draft 4”, to “draft 5”.
Time for another complete read through, correcting and editing as I went – “draft 6”. OK, this felt good now. Time to try and turn it into a published book. I decided I wanted a physical, paper version, and a digital version (and not or….get it?).
For the paper version I decided to use Blurb. This is a company I’ve used about once a year to make a photo album of my best, or most memorable photos of that year. I love their quality of print. And I’d already taught myself the basics of their software – “Bookwright“. Now, I’m sure with all the software I use that I’m no expert and there are probably easier ways to do things, but, hey, I only know what I know, so I don’t know any easy way to import all the text into “Bookwright”. Instead I created the pages, inserted either text or photo “layout boxes” onto each page, copied and pasted the text, chapter by chapter into Bookwright, imported all the photos I’d used, and dropped them into the right places, then ran the “preview” option, and the error checking, both of which identified things that needed fixed. Then I uploaded it to the Blurb site and ordered up my proof copy.
Meantime I had to think how to produce a digital version. Apple have something called “iBooks Author” which I’d used before, (I’ve since learned Apple are about to discontinue that software) and there were ebook creation tools I knew existed to produce “Kindle” or “ePub” versions.
Whoa! Too much to think about it! I then discovered that Amazon had produced new software called “Kindle Create“. I downloaded it, discovered you could import a “Word” file into it, make a cover, preview it, then upload it to Amazon. Ulysses makes it easy to export your sheets as a single “.docx” file so I did that, opened it up in “Pages”, then exported the document from there as a “Word” doc into Kindle Create. It was easy, and straightforward, just took time and care.
Now, I’m sure if you use Windows your workflow and the tools you can use will be different, and maybe some of you know a lot more about these programs and methods than I do – and if that’s true, please go ahead and share what you know in the comments here, or share links to your own articles if you’ve written them.
and a Kindle version – https://amzn.to/2UozjIw – if you are in the UK. If you are not in the UK, go to your local Amazon site and search for “Leckridge” – you’ll find it quickly that way (let me know if you don’t!)
Here’s my summary of the book –
Why become a doctor? This is one doctor’s response to that question. It begins with a calling, then continues through listening. Patient after patient, over four decades of Practice, tells their own unique story. Each one is an attempt to find healing. To find healing, the doctor and the patient embark on a relationship which allows them to uncover Nature’s pathways to health. Each pathway is a life of adaptive strategies revealed through the body, the emotions, and in patterns of behaviour, language and thought. Two small words open different doors of understanding. “Or” divides, separates and focuses attention on single parts. “And” connects, integrates and focuses attention on the whole. We need both approaches but if we are to heal, individually, together, and at the level of the planet, we need to shift the balance away from “or” to “and”. Through an exploration of narrative, psychoneuroimmunology, neuroscience, complexity and complementary medicine, this is one doctor’s experience of shifting the balance from “or” to “and”.
If you fancy reading it, go ahead, and if you’d like to give me feedback you can find me most places by searching for “bobleckridge” – I’m here on WordPress, but I’m also easily found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and I use gmail.com (just put “bobleckridge” before the @ sign)
One of the most beautiful shapes in the universe is the spiral. From the spirals of galaxies to the double helix spiral of DNA, and so, from the largest scale to the smallest, there are spirals.
One of the commonest places to see them around you is where ferns grow. I love those spiral shapes you see as a fern unfurls.
Spirals make me think of the kind of path that life follows.
Clearly life does not follow a straight line. It doesn’t run directly and steadily from birth to death with no curves, pauses, deviations or ramblings.
And although there are many cycles in Nature and in our lives, the life story doesn’t follow a circular path either. Although sometimes it feels that way when you have one of those “How did I end up HERE again?” moments. When we don’t learn, when we try to solve our problems using the same solutions which brought those problems about in the first place, it often doesn’t go so well, or, at least, not so differently.
It seems to me that life is more spiral in character, and that, yes, we revisit unresolved issues, unhealed traumas, and unsolved problems repeatedly until we resolve them, solve them, until we heal. But each time around when we revisit something, when life throws up what seems like the same challenge yet again, it’s different. We are different. Because we change all the time. Every experience we have changes us, contributes to our memories, influences our choices and our actions, creates new behaviours, thoughts and habits. So when we hit that “How did I end up HERE again?” we are not exactly “HERE” again!
That always gives me hope.
We have a chance to respond differently this time, to make a different choice, and maybe set off along a brand new path…..another path with its own new spirals to come.
But here’s the thing about that fern in this photo – is it spiralling or un-spiralling? Is there even a word “un-spiralling”? I think instead of “unfurling” because that’s what it seems to be doing. It’s unfolding, opening up, stretching out, expanding. But, hey, I guess that’s a kind of un-spiralling…..something to learn from that I think!
This remains one of the strangest trees I ever saw in any forest. In fact, it seemed to me that there were two trees here. You could clearly see two trunks arising from the forest floor, then something odd happens, the one of the left sends out a substantial branch, so substantial I’m not even happy calling it a branch, which connects with the one on the right. They fuse. Then they continue upwards in parallel, each distinct but traveling in the same direction, until about a metre or so further up they fuse again, and from that point on, continue upwards as one.
I’m happy simply to contemplate them, to trace their separate and entwined paths as they reach up to the Sun…..but I seem unable to resist the thoughts they inspire in me.
This is such a beautiful representation of how all of Life seeks out more Life. We get close to certain others, connect with them, form relationships with them, bond with them, entwine and entangle our lives with them. We influence each other. Yeah, sure, we still know that we are individuals, that I am me and you are you, but our shared experiences change us. I am not the same since I met you.
Each of us emerges from, and lives in, a multiplicity of environments. We are embedded in certain times and places. We exist within certain cultures and societies. We become who we are becoming in vast interconnected webs of relationships which span across the face of the Earth and reach both back in history and forward into the futures we will create together.
Each of us lives, an embodied, unique, singular being, never completely separate, never completely alone, never completely independent. So let’s just embrace that shall we?
How might life be if we acknowledged our entwined, entangled, embedded, embodied nature? Could we begin to share our lives better, here and now, in this present time and place, as co-inhabitants, co-creators, and co-operators?
Wherever we are….in a particular street, town, city, region, country, hemisphere, planet…..we share our entangled, interconnected lives with everyone else who has ever lived, every other inhabitant of this time and place, and every other child we haven’t even dreamed of yet.
Social distancing, physical distancing, isolation, “confinement”, lockdown. We’ve been going through an enormous period of physical separation from each other, and from the Earth.
Sure, there’s Zoom and WhatsApp, and FaceTime and all the rest, but we’ve been reduced, I think, by connecting through screens. These virtual meetings, avatars and asynchronous communications have got two sides, haven’t they? They open up channels for us and allow us to speak, to send messages back and forth, and so to have some sense of connection. But they add an extra layer between us, almost as if there is a mist, or a fog that we can’t quite see through.
I think part of the problem is that reality is physical and even the apparently invisible, un-measurable, Self, is embodied. Our feelings and our thoughts are embodied. Our everyday experience exists within physical reality.
Yet we’re being told that touch is dangerous. That we must keep a metre or two away from everybody else. In France you’re not supposed to kiss anyone on the cheek anymore, and in many countries you’re not supposed to shake hands…..and I don’t know about you but this knocking elbows or kicking each others ankles just doesn’t do it for me! We’re told that surfaces are dangerous. They need to be wiped, and washed, and sprayed and cleaned again and again and again. We’re told to wash our hands for longer and more frequently than most of us have ever done before…to remove all trace of whatever we might have touched.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand what this is all about. I know this virus can only spread through physical and/or close contact. But, all the same, these new habits and new rules have turned the sensation of touch into a fear of touch. And that doesn’t strike me as a good thing.
So, today, I want to remind you of that particular one of your five senses – touch.
Look at this tiny white feather. Don’t you just long to reach out, pick it up, stroke it gently, or stroke your skin gently with it? It is beautiful to look at, that’s for sure, but to touch it, to feel its almost weightless physical presence, makes it more real.
At the other end of the scale, look at this burr. What an amazing creation! What a way to spread around the world! It looks a little bit like those images we’ve seen of the coronavirus, and if you’ve ever brushed up against a burr like this you’ll know it catches onto to you pretty damn effectively. And no wonder…look carefully….every single one of those spikes has a sharply hooked arrowhead at the end of it. If you wanted to design something to easily fix onto whatever creature comes close to it, you couldn’t do much better than this. At first glance, of course, this mass of needles looks like a protection mechanism. It looks like a huge STAY AWAY signal. And if you touch it with your fingers, it really isn’t a pleasant experience. But it’s not designed to keep creatures away. It’s designed to connect, to attach, to hook on and stick.
Here’s my box of curiosities. You know the idea of a “cabinet of curiosities“? That always appealed to me. Those cabinets were, in some way, the precursor to museums, but they were more personal. I kept this box right next to my chair in my consulting room. Children, almost always less inhibited than adults, were fascinated by it, but, actually lots of the adults were too. In fact, the majority of objects in my “box of curiosities” are gifts from patients, colleagues and friends over many, many years. People who saw my box, often brought me something to add to it.
You’ll see there is a quite a variety of textures in there. There’s feather, leaf, and stone. There’s metal, shell and chestnut. There’s cord and there’s wood. Every single one of these objects begs to be picked up and handled. Yes, to be looked at, but mainly to be touched.
So why not take a little time to explore the sense of touch today? I think it connects us to reality in a completely unique way.
I do a lot of scrolling through my digital photo libraries looking for images. Sometimes I’m skipping across thumbnails not much different from this one in size. I stopped when I saw this particular image and thought “when did I take a photo of a gorilla on a wall?”
Do you see what I saw there?
One click zooms the image up to its full size…..
Ha! Where did the gorilla go??
This is a photo of a bell!
If I try hard I can just about still see the gorilla’s face in the full size image but it’s really not nearly as clear as it is in the thumbnail.
Did you know that there are parts of our brain whose whole function is to spot and recognise faces? It seems to work so well it can even see faces where there aren’t any! Like in this image. I’ve shown you examples of this before with photos I have of rock formations and so on, but I’m sure you’ll have lots of experiences of your own to confirm this.
Why should we devote such a lot of brain resources and energy to spotting and recognising faces?
It turns out that we are THE most highly social creatures on the planet. It’s one of the key features which distinguishes us from other primates. Dan Siegel, of “Mindsight” fame says that the frontal cortex of our brain is our map making part – it creates, he says, a “me map, a you map and a we map”. We use more of the brain than our frontal cortex to recognise others, establish bonds and communicate our feelings, but that’s an important part. Iain McGilchrist, of “The Master and His Emissary”, describes how the two cerebral cortexes engage with the world differently, and how the right side has a predilection for the particular, for seeing the over all, contextualised big picture, and for seeking and making connections. Neuroscientists have described specialised “mirror neurones” which we use to tune into and harmonise with others….partly explaining why if I touch my chin while speaking to you, you are more likely to touch your chin (if we are face to face….doesn’t happen on WhatsApp!)
We are the world’s greatest mimics. That’s how we learn, but it’s also how we form bonds with each other. At a trivial level, think of the “ganga style” dance moves. At a far from trivial level, see how the same slogans, gestures, and behaviours are spreading around the world just now as people in many countries respond to the horror of the killing of George Floyd.
We have an astonishingly large number of facial expressions which communicate our emotions. Are you familiar with the work of Paul Ekman on facial expressions? He has shown how certain facial expressions are universal across cultures, and has studied and documented many “micro expressions” which are used in social interaction.
I know there is a lot of talk just now about communication technologies during this time of social distancing, but we humans need the opportunity to connect literally face to face. Does video conferencing, Zoom, Google Meet, FaceTime etc do that? Well, what’s your experience?
This always makes me smile, and wonder. It’s a sculpture of a human head and it’s built into the wall of a house, just above the door. I came across it in a beautiful, old village in the South of France.
I don’t know anything of the history of this but it sure gets me wondering…..who is this supposed to represent? Was it the person who lived here when the house was built? Was it someone famous or important from the village? Or was it created as a representation of a mythical person….a god, an angel, or….well, I’m never going to know.
The fact that I’m never going to know partly bugs me. I have had insatiable curiosity as a major personality characteristic since I was a young boy. So there is a frustration there. But, on the other hand, it doesn’t bother me, because it means I can engage with it, as I find it, clear of any complications from its past.
We do that all the time. There are works of art, buildings, geographical features which make an impact on us every time we encounter them. Some of those impacts are layered with story, personal stories as well as those from history. But there are others where we come upon them with a “beginners mind” – where we can open our hearts and our attention and just note what arises.
Taking this second approach, I start with the expression on this face. At first glance this person looks sad. Their eyes seem somewhat downcast, gazing to the side and down towards some point on the ground a few metres away perhaps. Along with the gaze, the mouth seems a touch downturned too, the lips just slightly parted, conveying a kind of displeasure or even disgust to me. They don’t seem very happy. And I think, well, no wonder, really, look how this vine has grown up over their face. They seem somewhat neglected.
But the next thing I notice is their fine features. This is quite a beautiful face. Maybe that curl of the lips is more the beginning of a smile, than an expression of weary displeasure? Then I notice the string of pearls on the person’s forehead and I realise this is a more sophisticated, perhaps more noble a person than I had first thought. Look at their hair, and what’s that on their head? A hat? Is there a bird on their hat?? I think I’ve convinced myself now that there is a small bird sitting amongst the person’s curls, right at the edge of their hat.
So, now I return to the vine, which has been allowed to grow naturally I think, to find its own way….or did someone train it up around the head? It looks natural to me. And so when I bring the bird into the picture with the vine, this face takes on an appearance of an Earth Goddess now. Is that a step too far?
Well, what would it be like to see the almost smiling (I’m pretty much convinced now that this is an incipient smile on their lips, not an expression of displeasure after all), face of an Earth goddess, welcoming you home every time you walked up to your front door?
Here’s my final thought on this……whoever carved this face literally set an expression in stone. It doesn’t change any more…even if my impression of it changes. My granny used to say “Be careful the wind doesn’t change!” if I ever showed an unhappy, grumpy or fed up face. She said that if the wind changes then your expression would be fixed forever. Strange old saying that…..because the wind changes a lot! But behind it was some teaching that your habits of expression could come to shape the way the world sees you, and the way you see the world.
I don’t really see anything in a fixed way any more. I think everything constantly changes. And I think that, every one of us brings our memories and our imaginations to engage with the present moment, whatever it holds, making each and every day unique….unique for me, and unique for you.
In one of my most favourite villages in France, Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert, there are two natural objects hanging on doors, above doors, and on walls, throughout the whole village. This is one of them. It’s a “cardabelle”.
A cardabelle is a kind of thistle which grows abundantly in this area.
Mostly you see dried specimens pinned to doors, but in some places there are copies sculpted in stone.
The other natural object you find is…..
….the scallop shell.
Why these two objects?
Well, the cardabelle is thought to be a good luck token. I suppose in a similar way to the horseshoe you see in some other cultures. It’s also been used traditionally to make predictions……about the weather! That’s partly because it changes shape according to the humidity levels and atmospheric pressure, so it acts a bit like a natural barometer. I’m told it’s also eaten and tastes a bit like an artichoke (not my favourite vegetable!). But I think its utility is a lot less significant than its power to give meaning. It changes life through the power of symbol.
The scallop shell is the symbol of the pilgrim. Specifically, the pilgrim making his or her way along the “Camino de Santiago”, or, in French, “Chemin de Compostelle”. It is used along these paths to indicate some support for, or welcome to, any passing pilgrims. The photo above indicates drinking water (“eau potable” in French, which is worth remembering if you are thirsty while walking in France!). It is also hung outside certain inns and hostels for the pilgrims to find something to eat or somewhere to rest for the night. I hadn’t realised just what an extensive network of paths make up the “Camino de Santiago”.
What really interests me about the cardabelle and the scallop shell is that both are transformed from their original, natural purpose in the world by this distinctly human capacity to make one thing represent another.
They both become powerful symbols. Symbols of place, of belonging, of tradition, of belief, and of purpose. There are a million stories connected to them.
How are we to understand this? I think symbolic thought, metaphoric thought, represented by objects, artistic creations, words and stories, are a kind of invisible, global network connecting us all. They are part of Jung’s “collective unconscious” drawing from our archetypes and myths. They are part of Teilhard de Chardin’s “no-osphere”, that extra layer of atmosphere encompassing the Earth, composed of human reason and thought. They are a world wide web of deep, complex, living and growing sense-making and meaning-giving phenomena which we can draw on to make more sense of our individual lives.
I love this power we humans have – the power to create this vast uniquely “human layer” of existence which is embedded in, and emerges from, the natural world, deepening and widening our experiences and understanding. It’s a shared phenomenon, a collective effort stretching back over centuries and we are adding to it every day, drawing from it every day, living it every day.
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 