Heroes Not Zombies

Whenever I see a seed begin to sprout I feel delighted. There’s something deeply instinctively satisfying and attractive about new Life.

One of the things that strikes me about this is how I never see this as a separate event. In the moment of witnessing this burgeoning growth I think of where it has come from, of the infinite loops and spirals of new growth, maturity, reproduction and scattering of seeds. I see a whole family, generations out of which this one little life is emerging. Also in this moment I think of the future, of the potential held in this small sprouting seed, the potential to grow and become a large tree, even to begin a forest. The potential to live many many more years than any human being will.

In this moment, in this unique time and place, I see the turning of another spiral of Life on Earth.

There are so many little changes all the time, little changes we hardly even notice. But there are also the bigger ones. The days when something so significant happens that we know nothing will ever be the same again. And on those days, in these moments of endings we have a chance to glimpse the new beginnings.

What better choice to make than to nurture and nourish the new beginnings?

Read Full Post »

Yesterday I shared a photo of a lichen covered rock sitting amongst moss. All the elements of that photo were beautiful and provoked a sense of wonder and a feeling of awe.

This photo does the same. It’s a fungus growing on a tree and it’s colours make it look for all the world like a gorgeous piece of agate.

I remember times as a child, on family walks in Scotland, we’d look for pieces of agate. Finding them was like finding treasure. You could tumble them in a motor driven cylinder to polish them up but I thought the best ones were often those already polished by the sea and the millions of other pebbles they’d rattled over.

Fungus are astonishing life forms that are mostly hidden from our view. The parts popping up on the surfaces of trees or through the grass are just a tiny portion of their existence. They form the most incredibly large networks of fibres under the ground creating interconnectons and relationships between trees and other plants.

These networks have only recently been shown to function as carriers of both information and materials and are the core of what people call “the wood wide web”.

It’s amazing how little we actually understand about reality!

Read Full Post »

Isn’t this beautiful?

I love the patterns of the lichen on the stone. They make it look like a glove, a map of an unknown planet. And I also love that beautiful moss. It looks like a thousand stars densely packed into a distant galaxy. Except these stars are green!

Together this tiny part of the world instantly inspires me to think of our vast universe, full of strange, beautiful and unique planets, stars and star clusters.

I gaze at this and I’m in awe of the diversity of creation. In awe of the beauty of this universe.

A phrase pops into my head….”why is there not nothing in this universe?” It’s something scientists and philosophers wrestle with. Not just why does the universe exist, but why is there anything we call material, and why is material so diverse in size, shape and form?

Whether we look around at what lies at our feet or look up on a crystal clear night to see literally countless stars, what we see is uniqueness and diversity and an endless variety of complex forms.

What is lichen anyway? Such a strange life form. It looks a bit like a plant and a bit like a fungus. What is moss anyway? It looks a bit like grass but not like any other grass you can find.

How did a rock become such a beautiful spherical shape and how did it end up here separate from other rocks?

Where does lichen begin and where has this lichen come from? Where does moss begin and how does it develop this shape? How many different kinds of lichen are there? How many different kinds of moss are there?

Sometimes I think I have more questions than there are stars in the night sky. But I don’t need the answers to them all. I’m happy in my state of awe and wonder.

Read Full Post »

All of Life is movement. All reality is flow. All we see, hear, touch, smell or taste is in constant interaction with whatever is around. The universe is perpetually co-creating.

Nothing is fixed. Nothing exists in isolation. All of reality is constantly influencing and being influenced by the universe.

When I look at these rocks I see they have been shaped by the flow of the water. Shaped in a way that they’ve taken on the appearance of the water itself. How long did it take to create this shape? How many thousands, millions perhaps, of years. And as the water falls, creating a foaming, crashing river as it goes, it, in turn, is shaped by these very same rocks.

Water and rock, meeting each other, bounding each other, pressing against each other, exchanging molecules and shaping each other.

And even as I stand and look, although I cannot see it, this co-creation continues. It has no end. No outcome.

Becoming not being.

Read Full Post »

There’s something deeply pleasing about a circle as a symbol and maybe that partly explains why this wheel looks so beautiful. After all it’s a pretty old, and probably no longer very useful wheel. I mean, what would you fit it to? Originally someone made this wheel for a purpose, but that purpose has long since gone.

When I look at it now I think two lines of thought. One is the circular nature of time. We’re ruled by a very linear concept of time these days, with deadlines, targets, an idea that the past is gone and lies behind us while the future lies waiting somewhere down the road ahead. But Nature is better understood by seasons and cycles, phases of birth, new life, growth, maturity, decay and death, giving rise to new life again. Cycles of atoms and energy through rocks, plants, animals, the atmosphere. And the present moment is not an isolated point on a line but a lived experience emerging from all that’s gone before within the multiplicity of possible futures.

The other thought is how much we are stuck in a system dedicated to utility and “efficiency” when beauty, wonder, awe, love, joy and creativity are much deeper, much more satisfying, values. I wonder if we’ll be able to break free from the cycle of utility and control, and create a more satisfying way of life which gives precedence to relationships, uniqueness, diversity, beauty and awe?

I think I’d like that.

Read Full Post »

There’s something about our disposition that contributes to our daily experience. When I’m down the whole world loses its colour and nothing seems to go well. When I’m frustrated or angry it seems as if the entire universe is conspiring to piss me off! And when I am happy and at ease, everything seems to flow more easily.

I think this can even be a life or death issue. Time and again I saw that once a patient lost all hope their life force quickly faded.

Of course our disposition, our mood, our frames of reference, our beliefs and values all act together to create our daily experiences. But it’s not a one way street. They all seem to be part of a great loop, so some event can kick off a mindset then the mindset sets us up for more similar events.

That’s why I was so impressed with the heart shaped hole in this persons front door. I thought, imagine what it’s like to view the world through the frame of love, care and passion every day? What would life be like then?

So what frames and filters seem active for you today? And how might the day go if you consciously decide to use the ones which come from love, care and passion? What will the universe create with you then?

Read Full Post »

These are challenging times. I have no doubt about that. A pandemic, wars and violence, the widespread effects of climate change, to name a few global ones. But Life continues. The cycles of the seasons continue. All living creatures continue to adapt in order to do more than survive. They thrive.

Aren’t you astonished at the sheer existence of Life in the Universe? Isn’t it the most striking, seemingly unlikely happening? The continuous emergence of Life and lives from the flow of all that is?

Aren’t you astonished at the creation of another life? Of the birth of a baby and the utterly unpredictable, constantly surprising unfolding of a unique individual as that baby grows into a mature human being?

I am astonished daily in this world of wonder, creativity and diversity.

I read recently about what Gaston Bachelard wrote about nests in his Poetics of Space.

Isn’t that wonderful? I hadn’t thought of a nest that way before. I’m busy attempting to reclaim a much neglected garden, removing the biggest, longest, thickest wild clematis and wild something from the Rosaceae family! Every now and again I find the remains of a nest. This one, still well formed, with a single blue egg with a hole in it, the little robin, I think, long ago having pecked its way through the shell, been nurtured, then drawing on all its instinctive knowledge and courage and hope, jumped out of the nest on its first flight.

There’s so much hope in new life. No, it’s more than hope. It’s confidence.

Would I bother to get up each morning if I weren’t confident I’d live through this day and return to my bed, to sleep and to dream again, tonight?

This isn’t a question of logic or statistics or probability or utility. It’s the deep, strong, unceasing flow of a creative, increasingly complex, universe from which I emerge for a short time, a unique human being at a unique moment in this diverse, massively interconnected web of existence.

We dream, we hope, we have the confidence to live, survive and grow.

Not just we humans, but all living creatures, and maybe all of reality, wherever we look, astonished yet again by our existence.

Read Full Post »

Funny thing about light – you can’t see it. You can see what it illuminates, but you can’t see the light itself.

Yet in a photo like this, it looks as if at least some light has become visible. In fact, you’d probably agree that this is a photo of a “shaft of light”.

But it’s all the tiny, otherwise invisible particles suspended in the air which can see all of a sudden.

Why is this shaft so narrow? Aren’t the tiny particles everywhere? I expect they are. What makes the shaft so narrow is the width of the gap in the trees through which the sun is shining.

So, we have sunlight, trees and air filled with normally invisible tiny particles, all combining to create this visual treat for us.

But does that matter? Do I need to understand how the sunbeam appears? Not really. I can be happy, delighted, filled with wonder and delight just in the moment of the encounter, when I raise my camera and press the shutter release, so I can come back again and again to be equally delighted and amazed.

“L’émerveillement du quotidien”

Read Full Post »

I have lots of photos of Stirling Castle but this is one of my favourites. I was born and brought up in Stirling and, traditionally, that made me a “son of the rock”. My grandfather read me all of Walter Scott’s “Tales of a Grandfather” which was my introduction to Scottish history. Stirling, with its castle, and strategic bridge over the River Forth played an important part in many of those stories.

But even without that personal history and associates the castle never fails to impress. Actually, in France, where I live now, the popular associations people have with Scotland is castles, mists and ghosts! So this photo will no doubt further spread those connections.

I like that the castle isn’t quite “clear” in a literal sense in this photo. We bring our stories, our preconceptions and our imagination to all of our perceptions and experiences so when we aren’t overwhelmed with an image full of detail and colour, I find that imagination and memory have a chance to come to the fore.

In that sense I see the castle more clearly in a photo like this because I’m more aware of the connections, memories and imaginings which create my own, unique appreciation of it.

So what’s the clearer view? The one empty of association and imagination or the one full of it?

Read Full Post »

A couple of mornings ago I woke up to this very strange light. The whole sky seemed covered with cloud but instead of grey it was this odd, orange/yellow colour. The sun was shining high above the trees but only as a pale disc. You could look directly at the sun without any difficulty. I wondered if a storm was coming, but what kind of storm?

Then once outside I saw that every surface was coated with a layer of sand….the table and chairs, the car, even the flowers in their pots.

I’d seen this before, a couple of times, since moving to live here in southwest France. This was indeed sand in the air, and lining the surfaces on the ground.

A quick check online and I saw the map of the sandstorm arising in the Sahara desert and spreading northwards over Morocco, Spain and up across western France.

How strange to experience sand in the sky and in the garden, sand which has blown all the way from the desert.

In that moment I was deeply aware of the interconnectedness of our world. How nothing in Nature respects the human artificial borders of “states” or “countries”.

We might divide the Earth up into pieces for reasons of attempted power and control but ultimately we all share this one planet, this one water cycle of oceans, rains and rivers, this one sky filled with invisible highways of fast moving air.

Read Full Post »