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Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

Wounded rock

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography on May 8, 2020| 1 Comment »

This is a photo I shared with many patients and students over the course of my career. I saw this rock, a long, long time ago, just down from a waterfall in woods in the Scottish Highlands.

How did this rock come to have such a shape? It’s as if it had been struck by a Viking axe! What’s even more interesting is that it will never “heal”. That cleft, that wedge in the body of the rock, will never disappear.

It’s pretty common to think of healing as the complete resolution of something. We think of a cut, or a broken bone, and imagine that once it has healed, the skin or bone will return to how it had been before, forgetting somehow that all injuries leave scars. We think of infections as “self-limiting” – that is, once they have gone, they are gone. The body returns to some prior condition. We talk of “defeating disease” and use a lot of war imagery to suggest we can remove it (whatever “it” is) from our bodies, “defeat it”, and then it will be gone…for good. Job done.

But Life isn’t like that.

And neither is healing.

We don’t go backwards. Injuries, infections, traumas and diseases of all kinds change us. Even when we make a “complete recovery”, our lives have now changed. Something is altered….in the body and in the psyche. Whatever we encounter, whatever we have to “deal with”, becomes part of our story. Every event, every experience, changes our lives forever.

So, what are we to do with these wounds?

It would be nice if we could just ignore them. And in many situations they are minor enough for that to be a reasonable strategy. But the bigger impacts can’t be ignored, they can only be denied. That’s never a great strategy.

Maybe we could fill in the gap. Fill that wedge with prozac-a-filla or something like that. Would that work? Unfortunately, suppressing, and hiding the wounds tends not to work for very long. All those “anti-” medicines that we use – antibiotics, antihypertensives, antacids, anti-inflammatories, antidepressants etc combined with opiates and other sense-numbing drugs, don’t actually directly promote healing at all. They just “take the edge off” things….for a bit. You think antibiotics cure infections? I’m afraid not. They can do a very important job. They might even save your life. But what they do is kill bugs. The inflamed, swollen, and damaged tissues in your body need to heal. The antibiotics don’t do that. It’s your ability to self-repair that does. And antibiotics don’t stimulate the self-repairing functions of the body.

So what do we have to do?

Take a look at the photo again. See the river rushing by the rock? I think of the life force when I see that. The wound has become part of our internal landscape now. The illness, the experience of it, the memory of it, the impact it had on our psyches and our lives, is part of who we are now. It’s an integral part of our story. But life continues. We adapt. We find new ways to live and to thrive with this changed landscape. We evolve our inner environment.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use our modern medicines. They can reduce our suffering and even, sometimes, save our lives. But they don’t directly help us to heal. We still need to recover, repair and adapt. How much of “Medicine” or our “Health Service” is directed towards that life-long, important issue of healing?

I hope that, whatever the answer to that question, the answer will be “a lot more in the future”.

Our lives are not going to be the same once this coronavirus pandemic is over. How are we going to heal? How are we going to adapt? How are we going to live differently?

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Contexts

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on May 7, 2020| 1 Comment »

I took this photo at noon one January 1st.

You might think its pretty much just a photo of some grass, so, hold on, let’s look more carefully, and consider the contexts. If it was simply a photo of a patch of grass it wouldn’t be particularly interesting but what caught my eye wasn’t the grass, it was the interplay of shadow and light.

Despite it being noon, the Sun is still pretty low in the sky. Well, it’s taken in the wintertime in Scotland, so that’s normal. But, normal or not, the effect of the low sunlight streaming through the trees is spectacular. The angle of the light makes the shadows SO long and the spaces between the trees show frosted grass sparkling brightly.

I love the forms and the patterns of the shadows, the light, the frost and the grass. It takes all of them together to create the scene.

Here’s another scene –


This is a huge puddle which is there more often than it’s not in this particular field. I once saw swans swimming on it! But today, what makes this image so beautiful is the trees and their reflection. Without the trees, the clarity of the light and the stillness of the water, this just wouldn’t be the same. It has echoes of the previous photo but it’s completely different. However, both photos were taken within minutes of each other, the flooded field lying just a short walk along the road from the shadowed park.

I’m struck by how important the contexts are in these photos. If I’d “abstracted” just one element in each – a grassy patch, a section of the puddle, a single tree – I’d lose all the context. It’s the interplay of all the elements which makes these images more than the sum of their parts.

Life is like that.

When we focus too narrowly, when we consider only a part in isolation, we achieve only a partial understanding. It’s the whole experience, in all it’s contexts and environments, with the story which holds them together, and the remembered subjective experience of being there which makes them so unique, so particular to me.

So, if I am to share any of that with you, I need to show you, and tell you, at least some of the contexts. That way, you’ll come closer to experiencing what I experienced.

That was my everyday working reality. Every single patient who came to see me had a unique story to tell. If I were to understand them I had to hear their story. I had to try to have some experience of their experience, to feel what they were feeling, to know what they knew, if I was to understand, diagnose and help them.

But it’s the same for all of us. If we are to understand anyone, friend, relative, colleague, stranger, we have to hear their story, and try to experience some of their experience.

It’s always partial. It’s never fixed. It’s never completely knowable. But there’s no substitute.

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A fascination with water

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, perception, photography, science on May 6, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I reckon a lot of us have a fascination with water. Little children love to play with water, whether its in a sink, a pool, or at the beach. Pretty much all children can spend hours filling up brightly coloured plastic pails with sea water and pouring it into holes they’ve dug in the sand.

I’ve certainly always had a fascination for water. One of the few experiments I actually remember from schooldays is “a little goes a long way” where we put a few crystals of potassium permanganate into a big trough of water and watched with amazement how quickly the entirety of the water turned purple.

Learning about the “water cycle” of nature, where water evaporates from the sea, forms clouds in the sky, falls as rain on the mountains and runs down the rivers back to the sea, was probably my first encounter with the idea of cycles and ecosystems.

But ice – now isn’t ice just completely fascinating? Not simply because it expands in volume as the water freezes, which is counter to our instincts (which tell us that heat expands things and cold shrinks them). But because it is utterly beautiful.

The town of Aix-en-Provence is partly famous for all its fountains. I can’t remember how many it has, but there are a lot. These photos I’m sharing today are all taken one day in winter on the Cours Mirabeau in the centre of Aix. They remind me that just when I think I’ve seen all the shapes which frozen water can make, one day, I discover something new to me.

At first glance that image at the top of this post is typical of a frozen fountain. There are many long dangling pointy icicles. (Poetic, huh?).

But, look more closely and you’ll see something pretty weird.


On top of the moss the water has formed ice which looks more like jelly than anything else. It actually still looks liquid, but, you can see, it isn’t. It’s frozen. Not in a smooth level way, like you’d expect to see when water lies in a puddle or pond, but undulating, almost like frozen waves, but smooth waves, not spiky ones. It’s really not like anything else I’ve ever seen. When you imagine water lying on top of moss, you think it would have a level surface, just like a puddle would. So, it should freeze like that – level. But this didn’t.

Here’s another close up.

Look at the shape of this! These tiny stalagmites of ice are so rounded. Not at all spiky or pointy like the stalactite forms higher in the fountain. How does water form into shapes like that? And, if you look at the left hand side of this image, you’ll see that frozen flow appearance I showed you in the previous photo.

Wonder.

That’s what images like these provoke in me.

A sense of wonder…..that combination of curiosity and amazement tipping over into astonishment.

This is the “émerveillement du quotidien” which I love so much – that “everday wonder”. Makes life all the more special I find.

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Earth and water and Life

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on May 5, 2020| 2 Comments »

I’ve mentioned several times how much, in the years gone by, that I enjoyed looking out from my flat in Cambusbarron towards Ben Ledi. Here’s another one of many photos I have from that time.

What grabbed me about this view?

The beauty.

That’s the short answer. I find it utterly beautiful. The pale blue sky, the grey and pink clouds (“Caravan” reference in there for those of you who know 😉 . The shape of the mountain with its snowy peak, the surprisingly warm shades of the uncovered hillside. The low lying mist in the mid ground with just a row of trees appearing through it, and the familiar farm in the foreground.

But there’s more.

Yes, there are the birds flying past, which bring some life to the scene. But I mean the shape of the mist. Look at it! You’d expect mist just to fade out as it rose, but this mist, for some reason, has fashioned itself into a peak, that looks for all the world like an echo of Ben Ledi itself.

So what engages me about this image is every single element, plus how the whole adds up to a lot more than the sum of the parts.

I adore discovering these symmetries and they challenge my day to day perception that water changes quickly and that mountains never change. The most dynamic part of the scene is the birds in flight, creatures whose unceasing change (movement) keeps them flying through the invisible air. But the next most dynamic part is the water in three of its forms – mist, snow and clouds. Every one of those forms is changing moment by moment, but that’s not nearly so easy to spot as the movement of the birds. Then there is the mountain. The mountain which changes moment by moment in appearance as the Sun changes his angle and casts shadows from the ever-changing clouds. But the mountain changes too. In its substance, shape and form. Maybe it takes millennia to be able to spot that, but doesn’t everything have its own innate pace?

So, here’s the core paradox of this image – stillness and movement.

At first glance, this is an incredibly peaceful, quiet, static scene. But it doesn’t take much to see there is nothing static about it.

I love that.

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Everyone is different

Posted in art, creativity, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on May 4, 2020| 3 Comments »

Anthony Gormley’s “The Field” is an installation which made a lasting impression on me. I saw it many, many years ago in Inverleith house in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh.

When I first looked into the room and saw all these terracotta creatures I thought, how amazing, look at all these wee guys, all the same! Then I started to look more carefully and realised that they were not all the same. In fact, Gormley hadn’t made all these models himself. He’d invited hundreds of people to each make their own one. So every one of them was unique.

That image stayed with me because I thought this was an essence of the work of a doctor. Every patient would present me with features which they had in common with other patients who had the same diagnosis, but every one them was unique. I had to juggle with the opposites of sameness and difference every day.

Years later I visited Otagi Nenbutsu-ji Temple on the edge of Kyoto. In the grounds there I found something similar to Anthony Gormley’s “The Field”. Under the direction of an artist dozens of people had created their own stone sculptures. Again, at first glance, they looked the same, but, quickly you can see that every single one of them is unique.


Look at some of them….I bet you find a favourite or two

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Looks like…..

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, psychology on May 3, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is a spider web, but doesn’t it look spooky?

It looks like the big hole in it is an eye socket and the central lower part looks like a beak, or a nose.

I see a mask when I look at this.

And a pretty disturbing mask at that!

I think this is a bit like one of those drawings you look at which at first glance might be an abstract pattern, but once you’ve seen a face or something in it, you just can’t unsee it ever again.

It really can be hard to see something “as if for the very first time” when you’ve already seen it and “made up your mind” what it is you can see.

 

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Looking through filters

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on May 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »

The light filtered through the paper caught my eye.

It’s soft and pleasing. It drew me to it. Then when I looked more carefully I saw the matrix of stalks criss-crossing behind the paper, and that changed my perception of it again. Then I noticed the woven circular frame. From first glance, to detailed inspection, I find this utterly beautiful.

I was thinking about it today as I contemplated it again and I remembered a book I read decades ago – The Lens of Perception, by Hal Bennett. I must say I don’t remember the details of the book all these years on, but the central metaphor did stick with me. The author proposed that we don’t see the world directly. We see it through a series of lenses, or filters, each of which is coloured by certain values and beliefs. It was quite an imaginative way of exploring how culture and social conditioning profoundly influences our perception and experience of the world.

Using a different metaphor, in these days of social media we read about “echo chambers” where we only read the messages and information put out by people who closely share our pre-existing beliefs and our prejudices. As the world divides into separate echo chambers people lose the ability to communicate with each other. Differing views are described as, at best, dissent, and, at worst, as betrayal. This is a powerful way of enforcing conformity. Divide and rule. Hardly a new idea is it?

However, it isn’t easy to see what filters or lenses we are using. Well, it seems easier to see which ones other people are using than our own ones anyway. (And what was that old Bible teaching about taking the plank out of your own eye before trying to remove the splinter from someone else’s?)

It’s not impossible though, and I suspect there are at least two very different ways to do it. One is to take the time to reflect on our pre-occupations. Have you ever done the “Morning pages” exercise promoted by Julia Cameron? Quite simply it is writing continuously without stopping until you’ve filled three A4 pages. It’s a stream of consciousness form of writing. You do it every morning for thirty days. Whenever I have done it I don’t read what I’ve written until the end of the thirty days. Each time it’s been a revelation. I find themes, phrases, and issues recurring over and over again. I find preoccupations I either didn’t know I had, or which I, at very least, didn’t know I held so strongly.

There are other ways to explore your values and beliefs but they all involve a conscious effort to describe them.

The other major way is to “phone a friend” as they say in the famous game show.

Robert Burns, my national poet, said –

“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion.”

A wish to be able to see ourselves as others see us.

Well, there’s only one way to do that – other people.

This is where it gets tricky. Because to do this you need a friend or colleague who you trust. You need someone who won’t judge you. There’s no point jumping into somebody else’s echo chamber and challenging everyone there to find out what they think about your views! I suspect you know the answer to that before you even begin.

No, I think you have to start by sharing at a very personal level. But the trouble with that is, those others who you trust are likely to be seeing the world through the same filters and lenses as you do in the first place. I know they say “opposites attract” but I’ve always found that applies more to magnets than it does to people. However, there is no substitute for dialogue when it comes to clarifying what beliefs, values and world views you hold most dear.

Can we promote dialogue? Surely we can.

How do we escape the echo chambers, but criticise and challenge our views safely? I don’t know any way to do that which doesn’t involve non-judgemental engagement. It’s the key that opens the door.

Is there a non-judgement lens or filter?

What would the world look like when viewed it through that one?

 

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Influencers? What influencers?

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on May 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I can remember science lessons in High School where we studied waves. I thought they were fascinating. I still do. All kinds of waves. Waves in the sea

waves in a pond

the electromagnetic spectrum which includes the light and colours we can see, the radio waves we can tune into and many other varieties of invisible waves which affect us.

the waves produced by our hearts and brains which we can’t see, but we can measure and represent on charts (did you know that when your heart rhythm emits a wave pattern which can influence the heart rhythms of people who are physically close to you? 

Even the representation of waves drawn in the stones in a temple or shrine (like the one at the start of this post).

Waves change us.

Waves carry energy and information.

As energy and information reaches into our bodies and minds it changes us.

I read the other day that “influencers” are having a hard time. Bear with me, I’m 66 next month, and “social media influencers” are not my specialist subject, but as best I can tell people who make a living from advertising and marketing revenues from companies by sharing pictures and videos of themselves wearing or using those companies’ products have seen a sharp decline in their income.

Seems one of the things during this pandemic is that people are consuming less “stuff”. Well, given that around the world millions of shops are closed and production lines are at a standstill, maybe this is no surprise. But there’s another element to this story which seems to be a sort of re-evaluation that’s going on. Less people seem interested in the lives of “celebrities” (ie people who are famous for being famous) just now. Priorities and values are changing.

However you want to look at this, the underlying reality is that we are all influencers. There is nothing I do, from the breaths I take, to the beating of my heart, to the communications I make and the behaviours I show, which doesn’t change the world. OK, yes, of course, not the whole world! Well, probably a very small part of the world actually. But collectively we are all influencers.

We send out materials, energy and information into the world constantly. Unceasingly.

What materials do you send out? What “waste” do you produce and what do you do with it?

What energy do you send out? How does that energy affect your relationships?

What information do you send out? What are your messages? How do you say them? Are they based on kindness or hate? Hope or fear? Anger or Joy?

You cannot escape being an influencer.

The question is – what waves are we making? You and I.

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A brainy shrub

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on April 30, 2020| Leave a Comment »

There’s something of this shrub that makes me think about the human brain. The leafy cortex forming a curved border and the mesh of branches, twigs and stems which look a bit like a neural net.

Deleuze and Maturna wrote about two common models we use to organise our world view – the arboreal and the rhizomal. They described how we use the former to create tree structures everywhere…..those hierarchical constantly branching sets of binary choices. Think of a genealogy chart, and how we refer to it as a “family tree”. But think also of “organisation charts” which lay out the positions within a company, and show the power flows, with the “Chief Executive Officer” at the top. We see it in protocols, guidelines and algorithms, which proscribe the actions to take at every point to get from a starting position to an “outcome” or “goal”.

I love trees, but “arboreal” models of thought and world view make me uneasy. They are too binary for me. At every stage you can go this way or that way, and there is often an implication that there is only one way which is the right way. It assumes that the starting conditions are exactly as the author expects them to be, and the goals or outcomes which the model maker identifies are the best, or most relevant, or most “efficient” ones, so everyone should share them. Like all models the people who make them have certain values, beliefs and world views, but, rarely are those things made explicit. They are also too hierarchical for me. I’m not a fan of strongly hierarchical, centralised power structures.

On the other hand, there is something very appealing about these tree-like diagrams. I probably drew little family trees every working day. I found it helpful to chart a patient’s relationships, siblings, parents, grandparents, partners and children. They often revealed patterns which shone a light on this patient’s illness. And there is no denying the tree-like branching structures within the body – particularly in the lungs and the circulatory system, but not only there.

In Jacques Tassin’s “Pour un Ecologie du Sensible”, he uses a variety of metaphors to show how interconnected all of life is. One of his metaphors is the tree. He says all life is like an invisible tree rooted in the Earth, each branch, each leaf a living being, a part of the same tree. I like that. If each of us is a single leaf, then, obviously we are connected to every other leaf through the over all structure of the tree. I also like his reference to the roots, which we usually don’t see, because it seems very true that we are vastly interconnected in invisible ways.

The rhizome model is more like grass. There isn’t a single trunk, or root. It’s massively interconnected. It’s a “distributed network” as opposed to a “hierarchical structure”. The brain is probably more like that. Every one of our millions and millions of neurones makes up to 50,000 connections with other neurones. Trees don’t do that. I find the network model very appealing. I love the way it reveals a multiplicity of equally “good” pathways. I love how it doesn’t pre-determine either the starting points or the end points. In fact, it’s kind of impossible to see where a brain begins and ends. It’s not even fenced off in the skull!

When I look at this shrub, then, I actually see elements of both of these models – the branching tree structure, and the presence of multiple, connected pathways.

OK, maybe only up to a point, but, hey, at the end of the day, it’s a pretty appealing and inspirational shrub!

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The beauty of simplicity

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

I was so very fortunate to travel to Japan several times over the last decade or so of my working life. Every time I was inspired by the people I met and the places I saw. There’s an aesthetic which seems characteristically Japanese and I find it SO appealing.

This photo is a good example, I think.

I don’t quite know how I’d capture what makes this so beautiful but I think its a simple, small combination of natural and hand-crafted elements.

Here you can see a rock, with some moss growing over part of it, a stone carving in the background and a simple stream of water pouring down into a stone basin (which you can’t see in this image). Laid on the stone is a bamboo ladle of the type you can find at any temple or shrine. It’s resting on two stalks of bamboo tied together with rough, black rope, over which lies a stem of flowers.

Everything looks as if it might have just fallen there accidentally, but you know everything has been carefully placed. I love that combination of natural elements, living and flowing elements, and hand crafted items fashioned from natural materials.

I have a notion that the principles of this aesthetic might become more widespread in other parts of the world if this current crisis inspires people to enjoy and savour the simple everyday pleasures, and maybe also begin to desire a better relationship to the natural world.

Some of the key principles of this Japanese aesthetic are described in wabi sabi – if you want to explore this further!

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