Heroes Not Zombies

Even on a calm day, the sea is neither still, nor flat. Looking out over the Med from Sicily I noticed these pathways on the surface of the water. I’ve seen this phenomenon pretty frequently and every time it captures my attention.

Firstly, it’s beautiful. Life is better when we look out for the beauty which surrounds us.

Secondly, it’s curious. Life is better when we wonder, when we are aware of the truly amazing phenomena of nature.

Thirdly, it’s inspiring. When I look at a scene like this I realise how little I understand about this world. I am in awe.

Truly, this is an awesome planet. We should really be careful about how we change it, how we live on it, every single day. Because we do change it, every one of us, just by making our daily choices, just by where we focus our attention. We leave our marks. We leave our traces.

Darwin identified two drivers of evolution – collaboration and competition. It’s the latter behaviour which has dominated the development of our societies, almost to the complete exclusion of understanding the importance of the former.

We need both in order to survive, and if we get the balance wrong, we all suffer. Wherever you look in Nature you see the importance of relationships between creatures, and, much less understood, the importance of positive, mutually beneficial bonds between different species – between plants and insects, insects and birds, fungi and plants….and so on.

Nothing really survives or thrives in isolation.

We need each other.

I bought this novel by the French/Sengalese author, David Diop, because I thought it was the story of a plant hunter, but really it’s a tale about colonialism and slavery in Senegal.

I loved it.

You know how some books are a real delight to hold in your hands? Well this is one of them. The publisher is Pushkin Press. I don’t know if all their books are printed on such lovely paper and with such delightful covers but I’ll be keeping an eye out for them now.

I lost myself in this story. It was completely engaging. An 18th century tale of discovery, encounter with another culture and language, as well as a challenging, powerful narrative about the inhumanity of slavery.

There are people we encounter in this life, who stay in our hearts forever even if we don’t pass all that many days with them. The actual door of no return hits hard even though you know it’s going to come at some point.

Highly recommended

One of my favourite French words is “Emerveillement” – it’s one of those words where you can’t just give a single English word equivalent when you try to translate it. It’s a bit like “wonder”, but also “amazement”, and “awe”. It’s not just a word for me, but, as it is in a French phrase “l’emerveillement du quotidien”, it’s a kind of life philosophy. That phrase means something like “the wonder of the everyday”. It’s about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. It’s about noticing. It’s about paying attention with an open mind, a non-judging mind.

I find that the more I practice this the more it becomes an everyday way of living. I expect to encounter sights, sounds, smells, textures, sensations which make me stop, delight in them, and be amazed. I expect to have experiences where I find myself wondering….asking questions, becoming more curious.

I highly recommend it as a life practice – allow yourself to encounter the amazing everyday, to relish it, to be curious about it and to wonder……

We are stars wrapped in skin. The light you are seeking has always been within.

Rumi

I read these lines by Rumi this morning, and I thought of the many photographs I’ve taken of plants backlit by the Sun. I know, of course, that the light you see in these photos is coming from the Sun, but it’s infusing these leaves with its brightness making them appear to glow. It looks as if the light is coming from the leaves themselves.

Everything we encounter is an instance of complex interactions….in this moment, the Sun is illuminating the leaves which I’ve noticed as I wander through the garden. This light has caught my attention and stirred my senses of beauty and wonder. It’s taken the Sun, the plant, and me, my consciousness, to have this experience. And now, there’s you, too. As you look at this photo, read these words, you bring your own memories, your own experiences, your own preferences and values to bear.

Enjoy this moment. Savour the beauty. Allow yourself to bathe in the river of wonder.

Have you ever come across a sphere balanced on a cube? If I understand it correctly, Goethe had a sculpture like this in his garden. It was known as the “Stone of Good Fortune” which Goethe named “Agathe Tyche”. The cube represents stability and structure, whilst the sphere represents dynamism, movement and change.

So simple, but so attractive and powerful. I love this combination. It captures two of the great forces of the universe which work together to create the reality which we experience…….regularity, laws and order combined with constant movement and change. We need both, although some of us have a greater preference for one over the other. Some of us like a life of habits, routines and rituals, where others are always looking for something different. I don’t think we need to choose. And I don’t think one of these forces is “better” than the other. The point is, my preferred, “and not or”. We really couldn’t have the lives we have without a constant interplay between these two apparent opposites.

First non-fiction read of the year. The Internet of Animals by Martin Wikelski. I loved this book. It opened my eyes to a whole world of scientific research I had no idea existed, and it’s expanded my vision of what’s possible into areas I hadn’t dreamed of.

There are three main themes to this book, and each of them is a total revelation. The first is the development of the methodologies and technologies to enable live tracking of all kinds of creatures, from giraffes to dragonflies wherever they are on the planet. Martin tells this story from the perspective of his personal experience which makes it both an engaging read, and, at times, even gives it the flavour of a thriller…hooking you in to wanting to know what they are going to do next. The second, is the way individual animals change their behaviour in relation to individual human beings. I already knew that certain birds, and even, bees, could recognise particular faces, and I had an experience here with a Redstart which got very agitated around me to let me know its chick had fallen down our chimney, and came down beside me, as if to say thank you, once I’d rescued the chick. But I had no idea that so many different species behaved differently according to the attitudes of the humans around them. The third, is about tapping in to the “wisdom of the crowds” in the animal world, and this third theme is really the core of the entire project. He gives many examples, from tagged giraffes and zebras, alerting wardens to the presence and exact location of poachers, to a better understanding of how various animals can predict earthquakes, tsunamis, and even the coming seasonal rainfall. He also describes much inter-species communication, which we haven’t really been aware of until now.

Martin gives a couple of imaginary “animal reports” in the future, where we humans can be alerted to changes in ecosystems and environments by the creatures which live there. In fact, he makes the excellent point that maybe instead of focusing on trying to find communications from potential extra-terrestrial beings, we’d be better served by learning how to interpret the communications from the other actual beings with whom we share this planet.

There’s a lot more to this book than I can summarise here. I highly recommend it. It’s really expanded my consciousness.