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Archive for the ‘science’ Category

Seasonal eating

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography, science on March 4, 2021| 2 Comments »

The first white asparagus of the season are arriving. The main lunchtime news had an item about the white asparagus from the “Landes” region yesterday, showing the first harvest. This is one of the most impressive differences for me about coming to live in South West France and it’s about food. Firstly, before I came here I don’t remember the annual seasonal arrival of any foodstuffs feeling like an “event”. I’m not even sure I could tell you what were the main seasons for anything in Scotland. But there are a number of distinct foods which appear seasonly here in France. Secondly, I don’t remember the seasonal arrival of any foodstuff being covered by the national news. Both of these phenomena are just normal here.

So, here we are in March and suddenly it’s the beginning of the asparagus season. First of all, the white asparagus. This season will only last until June so you’ve just over three months to enjoy it. In other words, it’s not just about the seasonal arrival of a particular fruit or vegetable, it’s that the season is exactly what you’d expect – about a quarter of a year – then you need to wait till this time next year until the local, fresh, harvest appears again.

I took this photo a few years ago at one of the markets in Aix en Provence. I’d never seen that much asparagus before! Well, I’ve seen displays like this quite often in different parts of France since then (always, of course, at this time of year). In fact, in the weekly market in Rochefort, which isn’t too far from where I live, I heard a vendor behind a display like this shouting “Aspergez-vous!” – which would translate as “Asparagus yourself!” – nope, I don’t think you’d find that verb in a French dictionary. It was just his personal creativity and enthusiasm on display.

I don’t think I’d ever tasted asparagus before I came to live in France, and I certainly didn’t know there was both white asparagus and green asparagus. But I love it now – both kinds! I love it simply boiled with lemon juice drizzled onto it on the plate, and I love the white especially in a risotto. What a treat!

So here’s what I’ve learned from this experience – that when you eat food in its season, food which hasn’t travelled too many kilometres, food which hasn’t been processed, it tastes superb. Not only that, eating that food becomes something of an event. To eat it when it arrives in the market in season you experience a kind of excitement, a sort of thrill, which is added to the actual taste of that food. Applying this principle enhances my enjoyment of the food I eat, and when it comes to diets and “healthy eating”, enjoyment is not a supplementary option. It should be at the heart of the decision making. (This is a reverse to that old adage about the best diet being the one where “if it tastes good, spit it out!”)

I’m now more aware of variety in my diet. I’m more aware of how far the food has travelled. I’m more aware of wanting to choose what’s been produced locally where I can – and I’m happy to expand that concept of “local” depending on what the food is! (Corsican clementines are another of my all time favourite seasonal foods for example).

OK, so let me be clear. I don’t eat ONLY what is seasonal and local. But I have an awareness of those factors and I’ll deliberately choose them when I can. And yes, I know, not everyone has the same culture as the one I’m experiencing here. France has markets with local and seasonal produce really in every town….even quite small towns. That isn’t the case back in Scotland, and it might not be the case where you live. However, the culture of local small producer markets was always one of my favourite things about France when I used to come on holiday here and knowing that certainly influenced my decision to emigrate and to come and live here. (I emigrated to live in a different culture, a different language and a different climate)

How is it where you live? Are you able to access seasonal foods? If you are, I really recommend it. And, oh, yes, I’m pretty sure that a diet with plenty of seasonal and local plant based foods in it is a healthy diet. But I don’t think there is any one good diet which is best for everyone. I think it’s great we are different and we can make different choices.

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Integrating wildness and organisation

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on March 3, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This is the Kamo River which flows through Kyoto. I took this shot because I liked the colours of the trees on the bank, and the reflection in the river of the clouds floating on a blue sky. I still like it for those reasons. However, I’ve found that, in the many years since I took this photo, that I’ve returned to it over and over again. I’ve used it to illustrate what I think are some of the most fundamental lessons of the universe.

On one bank you see trees, and a pathway running between the trees and the river. The trees are diverse. They are different species, different shapes, and different colours. For me they represent diversity and a “natural” habitat. You could argue they represent “wildness” – that universal force which continuously strives for growth, difference and diversity. It’s a “multiplicity”, not a “mono-culture”.

On the other bank you see houses, hotels and offices. This is the built environment. It is planned, constructed and ordered. Yes, I agree, the buildings are not all the same, and there is a saving grace in the Kyoto architecture. In some parts of other cities the buildings really are “cookie cutter” in their shape and construction. Let’s say this represents a second universal force – that which organises and builds.

Thomas Berry, in his “The Great Work”, describes these two forces beautifully and points out that an excess of “wildness” produces destruction, chaos and disorder….things can fall apart, whilst an excess of “discipline” produces too tight limits, narrow boundaries and a level of organisation which makes life impossible. I see this story represented in this photo.

Right down the middle of these two forces we see a calm, harmonious, “integrated”, flowing river. This is the “sweet spot”, that place where the interplay of these two great forces produces both Life and beauty. In this photo, there is even a bridge connecting the two. The bridge is a connector, and it’s through the creation of “mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts” that we experience “integration”, harmony and growth.

You can think of a life journey sailing down this river, sometimes veering off towards more organisation, and sometimes off to the other bank to find diversity and wildness. As we navigate our way between these two opposites, we experience a full life, a rich life, a life of depth, meaning and purpose, a life of beauty and joy.

The final thing I’d say about the universal lesson I see in this photo is that it encourages us to appreciate the “whole”, not to judge one bank as “good” and the other as “bad”. After all, if we only had one bank, we wouldn’t have a river……we wouldn’t have a life.

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The breath of life

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on February 28, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I love this photo of a tree in winter. Without its leaves you can see how the tree has a classic structural pattern – a pattern which we call “branching” – no doubt in reference to where we see this most – in trees!

This is a pattern we see in many, many places. You can see how water runs down the mountainsides in small streams which gather together into larger streams, then rivers, until one big river makes its way down to the sea. You can also see it at the coast where rivers form an estuary. You see it in root structures under the ground, as well as in bushes and trees above ground. And, perhaps more for me because of my lifetime work as a doctor, you see this pattern throughout the human body – in our circulatory system, in our lymphatic system, in our urinary system, nervous system, our liver, and especially in our lungs.

So when I see an image like this I see something “universal” – something fundamental. It gives me a glimpse of some of the underlying structure of the world. And I find it beautiful. I love how seeing this in the tree brings to mind all those other locations – out in the countryside and within the human body – so that the single tree elicits a broader and deeper reality.

Mind you, we mustn’t get carried away and think that this is the only kind of structure we find in the universe. Of course it isn’t. It’s just one of THE main ones. Equally, or maybe even to a greater extent, we uncover the patterns of networks and webs.

And in those places where we find a beautiful merging of both of these core forms.

Deleuze and Guattari clarified this best for me when they described these two structures as “arboreal” and “rhizomal”.

Take a look around you and see where you can spot them. It’ll help you to become more aware of how often you use these structures when you think, and when you try to make sense of your world.

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Limits

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on February 27, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This pandemic is giving us a really clear experience of living within limits. We experience that as a series of constraints. It’s frustrating and uncomfortable. We want to be free, don’t we? Free to do whatever we want, whenever we want, without a care in the world.

Wouldn’t that be bliss?

But, wait, isn’t that kind of naive? Because there is no such thing as living without limits. We are never free to do absolutely anything we could imagine or desire. That’s a fantasy. Or even a delusion.

I found myself thinking that as I looked at this old photo of a thin layer of cloud hugging the contours of Ben Ledi.

I have just read “Ou suis-je?” by Bruno Latour where he describes some of the limits we live. One of those is what scientists call “the critical zone” – which is the space in which Life can exist. It’s an astonishingly narrow space. You can probe down into the Earth about ten kilometres and you’re down to rock where nothing lived, and you can soar up into Space about ten kilometres and beyond that the atmosphere becomes so thin nothing can live there.

The actual numbers aren’t that important. What is amazing is that all of Life exists within a very, very narrow zone. I don’t know if you’ve seen a photo of the Earth from Space which captures the thinness of the atmosphere. Let me find it for you.

There you are.

Well that’s the image which came to my mind as I looked at my photo of Ben Ledi.

We all live within these very narrow limits. We share, with every other living organism, this astonishingly thin “critical zone”.

The fact that living with limitations has become such an intense experience for so many during the pandemic has woken us up. We live in One interconnected world, a world of precious and limited resources. Now we have to learn to change the way we live – to change away from consumption and destruction to sustainability and creativity.

The pandemic has also shone a strong light on inequality showing us, perhaps more clearly than ever, that too many people are struggling to live with financial and social limitations which make them most vulnerable to serious illness and death.

So maybe now is a good time to think about the reality of living with limits and start to make the changes which increase the chances of better lives for more of us, rather than keeping our eyes closed and hoping for the impossible.

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Not really separate

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on February 25, 2021| Leave a Comment »

When I look at this photo I think “This is what life feels like, and this is what life really is”.

What I mean is this – look at those bubbles (I’m going to guess that when you looked at this photo the first thing you noticed were the bubbles). Each one looks perfect, and perfectly separate from the rest. Each bubble is distinct, different in size, different in location, different in the exact way it reflects the light, and also, although you can’t see this in a still photo, each moving along its own distinct, and different path (there are hints of that in the flows of water currents which you can see creating that marbling effect between the bubbles).

We feel like this. Separate, distinct, different. We feel, and we are, unique. There are no two of us with identical characteristics, identical stories, living in exactly the same time and place having exactly the same experiences. We have a membrane which seems to separate us from the rest of the world. On the outside, that membrane is our skin. On the inside it’s mucous membranes lining our lungs, our digestive system and our urinogenital system. Inside, and within, that, is our immune system, a distributed network of cells and chemicals which recognise “foreign” substances and protect us from their potential harm.

But actually, we are not separate. Those membranes are porous. They are not impermeable. And that’s for a very important reason. They enable us to connect. They enable us to interact with others and with the rest of the planet. They enable us to ingest nutrients, inhale oxygen, expel waste materials and exhale carbon dioxide, amongst many other exchange processes. So, to see them as simple barriers or borders is wrong. They do distinguish what is “me” from what is “not me”, but they enable my life by enabling these, and multiple other connections and flows.

Look again at these bubbles. Where do they come from and where do they go? They emerge from the water itself, and they dissolve back into the water they emerged from. So do we. We emerge within the rest of this “natural” world, come into existence for a brief period of time, then we dissolve back into the great web of being from which we came. In the part between birth and death, that part we call life, we don’t disconnect from that great web. We live in communion with it. We live as part of it, not apart from it.

Life is flow – flow of molecules and chemicals, flow of energy, flow of information. Our existence is a delicate but distinct dynamic interplay of those flows, creating the appearance of separateness and difference, but never disconnecting from, or existing apart from, the whole.

Our lives are distinct and beautiful, but they are not separate.

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Why do we open up?

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on February 24, 2021| 2 Comments »

Why do we open up? Why do we “unfurl”? As I wrote the other day, my word of the year is “épanouissement” – which means to flourish, to blossom, to fulfil – we follow that path by uncurling, unfolding, unfurling, just like these ferns. And why do we do that? Because, just like these ferns suggest – it enables us to connect.

Opening up, vastly increases our chances of making meaningful, healthy, nourishing connections. Closing down does the opposite.

There are times we need to enfold ourselves, to close down, curl up like a hedgehog for defence, but actually, much, much more, we need to do the opposite. Because without making connections we die.

We do not exist in isolation. Even if it feels like we are being asked to do exactly that during this pandemic, what we’ve discovered is that it isn’t possible. None of us can live without the vast world wide web of others…..without whom we wouldn’t have shelter, food, water, comfort or care. It’s the natural state of affairs – connectedness. And connections aren’t worth much unless they act as channels of exchange – of materials, energies and information.

When I look at this photo, I don’t just see two ferns unfurling, opening up, but I see two ferns touching gently, almost as if they are having their first kiss.

Isn’t this what we need to grow in our world? Not grow our consumption of “stuff”, nor grow our production of waste. We don’t need to grow our destruction of ecosystems. We’ve been doing that all too well. It’s time to change course, isn’t it? To grow our connections, our “integrated” connections – the ones which enable mutually beneficial relationships to thrive. We need to grow our capacity for care and creativity. We need to grow our passion for love, tolerance and acceptance. And to do all that we need to open both our minds and our hearts.

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Inner and outer

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 February 19, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This pandemic with its lockdowns (or “confinement” as we call it in France) has been, and continues to be, tough for a lot of people for many reasons. It’s the biggest global disruption of our way of life that most of us have ever experienced. So many “normal”, “everyday” and “routine” activities and experiences disappeared over an incredibly short period of time. Apart from the disruptions of work, family and social life, we’ve seen an end to “mass” everything – no crowds of spectators at sporting events, no theatre or cinema audiences, no music concerts, no festivals…..well, I’m sure you can add to that list.

However, there have been two positive developments which I’ve read that many people have experienced – one inner, and one outer which enhances the inner. Pardon? Let me explain.

With the shrinking of our horizons, physical and social, many of us have been spending more time in contemplation – yes, maybe deliberate meditation or other such exercise, but, also a more general reflection. A kind of reassessment and revaluing. It’s given us the time and space to become more aware of our habits and routines and ask if we want to re-establish them when the time comes (when the pandemic is over).

What patterns of behaviour, what modes of living, what activities have been disrupted that I don’t want to re-establish? That I want to let go off.

What new patterns, rituals, activities do I want to create instead? What new ways of living do I want to begin?

This un-asked for, and, frankly, pretty unwelcome, pause, is a real opportunity for both awareness and change. You don’t need to have a meditation space, like the man in this photo, to do that, but maybe there’s something inspiring in this image anyway? Maybe it would be good to create, if possible, a place, a space, which we find is conducive to contemplation and reflection? Or maybe we can do that wherever we are?

That’s the inner – this is an opportunity to develop our inner selves – to pay some more attention to our physical and mental health and our lifestyles. To become aware of our habits of thought and feeling and ask ourselves if we want to develop along different paths now.

The second is about what we call “Nature”. You know, I’m a bit uncomfortable about talking about “Nature” as if Nature is a thing, and more than that, as if “it” is a “thing” “out there”. We are part of Nature, not apart from Nature. But then, we’ve sort of forgotten that, as a species, and maybe that’s one of the problems which has brought us to this pandemic. So, maybe this is a great time to reconnect, to re-engage, to re-orientate ourselves with regard to the “natural world”.

I’ve found that noticing the cycles of the flowers, the vegetables, and the trees, has become something I am much more aware of now. I’ve found that I’ve noticed many more species of birds in the garden. I’ve noticed that when I’ve had the chance a walk in vineyards, in amongst some trees, or along a sandy beach on the Atlantic coast, then I feel a huge boost. That shouldn’t be a surprise. I’ve written before about the recognised benefits of spending time in the natural world – to the extent that some people now talk about “Nature Therapy“.

There is something truly life enhancing about becoming more aware and more engaged with “the natural world” and from “forest bathing” to spending time in open spaces we know that such activities boost the chemicals in our bodies and minds which influence our immune system, our moods and our thought patterns.

So, connecting better to the “outer” enhances the “inner”.

Again, you don’t need a beautiful Japanese garden like the one in this photo, (although, isn’t that gorgeous?) – but I recommend taking advantage of this time and space to develop your inner self, and your connected self, by grabbing or creating every opportunity you can get to do so.

Contemplation and Engagement with the Natural World.

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The whole

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on February 17, 2021| 2 Comments »

In many ways this is a very simple photograph. What do you see?

Having ignored the “rule of thirds” in my composition, I’ve put the cherry blossom bang, smack in the centre of the image. It’s literally right in front of your eyes. It’d be pretty hard to respond to the question “what do you see?” without referring to the cherry blossom, don’t you think.

But I’ve long since had a fascination for appreciating the whole over the parts, and in this photo, I think it’s equally difficult to ignore the presence of the “background” – the bamboo – even though I’ve blurred that background for the purposes of contrast.

When I look at this I definitely see “cherry blossom in front of a bamboo forest” – well, I was there at the time, and I remember that. You might not be aware that the bamboo is part of a whole bamboo forest, but you can certainly see bamboo stretching in all four directions to every edge of the image.

This insistence on seeing both the foreground AND the background to have full appreciation of the scene, is consistent with my desire to always take into consideration contexts and environment when I encounter anything. For example, in my work as a doctor, a patient would “present” to me their symptoms, and with my knowledge, plus any relevant physical examination, and, if necessary imaging or tests, then I would make a diagnosis – probably the diagnosis of a “disease”. A “pathology”. But that was never enough. I had to see the presence of this foregrounded disease in the context of the backgrounded personal life story. I had to “situate” the disease into the time, place and meaning of this individual’s life. If I wanted to understand, not just the “illness” as the whole experience of the patient, but how it came about, what impact it is having, and how it might change this person’s perception of themselves and their life, then I had to see them “whole”, not limit my focus to the the “presenting” parts.

I think this same principle applies throughout the whole of life. If I want to understand anything about my life, about others, about this planet we all live on, then I need to see the “whole”. It’s not good enough to reduce reality to a data set, a package of characteristics and elements. I always need to consider the connections, the relationships, the contexts and the multiple layers of environment and meaning. I know that doesn’t sound as quick and easy as focusing just on a part or two, but, hey, who said reality could ever be reduced to what was quick and simple without losing all understanding? Not me.

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The hidden connectors

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on February 14, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Ok, so I’ve called this post “The hidden connectors”, but as you can see, there’s nothing hidden about this one! This is an astonishingly beautiful specimen from that Kingdom of Nature that we mostly don’t talk about and mostly aren’t even aware of – fungi.

Fungi are fascinating lifeforms. They aren’t animals, they aren’t plants and they aren’t minerals…..although this particular one looks awfully like a piece of agate. You can see examples of parts of them when they appear on the surfaces of trees, and the soil. The kind you will be most familiar with are the little toadstools and mushrooms which appear on the ground, especially in forests. But you also see them a lot growing on fallen logs in the forests.

Fungi play an important role in decomposition…..they are the essential, often invisible, link between what has lived and what is about to live. They are the recyclers, the processors, which break down the dead and dying cells of animals and plants and release nutrients to nourish emerging plants. They are the connection between the generations past and the generations to come. I’m sure you’ll have read that Nature doesn’t produce waste. There are no “land fill sites”, “incinerators” and “toxic dumps” in Nature – they are all human inventions. Nature transforms everything which has existed into everything which is about to exist. Fungi are one the key elements in those cycles of birth, death and re-birth.

But fungi are also the secret connectors which make the forests living, intercommunicating, interactive communities of individual trees. Every tree has vast root systems hidden underground, and fungi form astonishingly large and complex networks amongst and between the tree roots, carrying and exchanging nutrients, substances and information between the trees. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to compare them to the neural networks in our brains – totally different in structure and form of course – but vast threads of interconnection which create what some biologists have fairly recently termed “the Wood Wide Web” – which transforms a forest from a grouping of individual trees into a much larger, living being.

Isn’t it amazing how these creatures, these forms of life, fill that liminal space between – between trees, between life and death, between generations?

We live in a completely interconnected world. Maybe this pandemic has shown us that more clearly than ever before. But all our artificial boundaries and separations, all our arbitrary states, borders, our constant dividing of reality into “us and them”……it’s just not real. It fails to show us how inseparable we are from each other, how intertwined we are with each other and with all the other species and biosystems of Planet Earth.

Isn’t it time to insist on the importance of what we share? Isn’t it time to insist on our inter-dependence and inter-connectedness, instead of these false divisions and separations? Isn’t it time we understood that we ALL live on the same planet, with the same air, the same water, the same resources? Isn’t it time to remind ourselves how whatever we do, as individuals or as societies, has ramifications and impacts which spread way, way beyond what we can control?

I think we can all choose to become conscious connectors, building positive relationships, integrating our unique differences to create mutually beneficial bonds. I think that’s how we will change our world.

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How do you grow a forest?

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on February 13, 2021| Leave a Comment »

How do you grow a forest?

One seedling at time.

This beautiful little seedling is captivating. I spotted it growing from the moss covered forest floor, the seed casing with its wind driven system of flight and dispersal still intact, but the bright green of new growth clearly visible, and the beginnings of the spiral of unfolding showing us that this little seed has taken root, and is beginning the long journey to become a tree.

It makes me think about the relationship between the tree and the forest, between the particular and the general, between the individual and the group. A relationship I think we tend to get badly wrong. With the rise of statistically driven data collection and analysis, along with the development of algorithms, we reduce the unique person to a point in a set far too often. We pick one, or a handful, of observable, measurable characteristics, categorise them and use them as the be all and end all.

We define people according the group we’ve put them into. In so doing, we fail to see them as unique, individual, human beings. You just can’t know and understand a person from a data set. It’s not enough, and it’s often a fast track down the wrong cul-de-sac.

We make people invisible by reducing them to examples of a group.

All my working life I saw one person at a time…..whether that was in the GP surgery, with a rhythm of one patient every ten minutes or so, or in the specialist referral centre for people with long term intractable conditions, where we’d spend an hour to an hour and half for the first visit, then about twenty minutes for each follow up. In both these settings the rhythm of my day was determined by the scheduled appointments allowing me to give full attention focus to every single individual who came to consult me. I found that a great meditation practice, a great way of continuously coming back to the present moment…..not thinking ahead to who might come next, and not hanging on to the story of the person who has just left the room….but, rather, encountering the crowds, the queues, the “lists”, one person a time.

Of course I learned a lot from all these individuals which informed me about others. But the point is, it was a practice of focusing on the individual, and gleaning the general knowledge from there……not learning the general knowledge and trying to force each person into the right pigeon hole.

I learned from the work of Iain McGilchrist that this was the result of how we use the two hemispheres of our brain. The left hemisphere focuses in, abstracts information from its contexts, labels it and categorises it. It works with sets, groups, and generalities, continuously trying to fit new information into what we’ve learned already. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, focuses on the whole, seeking what is unique and particular in every context, every relationship, every circumstance, endlessly fascinated with what’s novel and what’s particular. As he says in his “Master and His Emissary”, we’ve let the left hemisphere become the dominant one, but evolution never intended that.

It’s time to re-balance, to prioritise the approach to life driven by the right hemisphere and to reap all the potential benefits of the analytic, labelling and classifying left hemisphere by handing those insights back to the right – in other words, by putting whatever we encounter, whatever we understand, back into the contexts and environments in which we found it.

We need to re-learn how to experience life, one seedling at a time. That’s how we’ll grow a healthy forest.

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