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Waves and seeds

August 21, 2016 by bobleckridge

surfing

Lots of us love a trip to the beach, don’t we? I love the sound of the surf, the surge of the water, the breaking of the waves on the sand, and the rush of noise as the water flows back into the sea. It’s like breathing. It’s like the ocean is breathing. Have you ever taken a little time to watch the waves and see if you can spot any patterns? I’m not a surfer but I guess the surfers learn to read the waves in a language I don’t know.

I was lying on my back on the sand and I looked up and saw a number of seeds passing by high in the sky, blown along in invisible currents of air. I wondered where they had come from, and where they would end up.

When I got back home I noticed these in the garage –

windseeds

Now I don’t for a moment think these are the same seeds! Sure, they are also windblown seeds but I really don’t think these are the ones which passed overhead at the coast making their way inland…..but probably not to my garage. But where did these ones come from? And is this the end of their journey? In my garage?

All this got me wondering about the things we do, the thoughts we think, the words we utter and write. I’ve often thought that all we do, think and say in life sets off and has effects we couldn’t predict, couldn’t have expected, and didn’t intend. I’ve tended to use the metaphor for waves for that. Like when you throw a stone into the water and you can’t tell what ripples will emerge or what effects those ripples will have elsewhere in the pond.

Others have used the story of the butterfly, haven’t they? You’ll be familiar with that I expect. How chaos theory shows that small changes in the initial conditions can result in massive differences in the outcomes, and how the story of a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can result in a hurricane elsewhere.

But these seeds, blown in the wind, strike me as another powerful metaphor for these truths about our world. The connectedness of everything…..how nothing occurs in isolation, how because of the nature of connections and openness of systems we can never contain causes and effects in simplistic terms, and, so of course, how that means that unpredictability is the essence of life. How no-one, not even an “expert” can know exactly how the future will pan out.

So, these seeds might set off from a plant somewhere on the planet, cross seas, cross lands and end up either growing into a flower, a bush or a tree somewhere distant, of landing somewhere where there is no soil (like in my garage)…….or maybe that’s not the end of their journey if I, a human being, pick them up and release them.

If our actions, words and thoughts are like that, then maybe the best we can do is choose the good ones, the loving ones, the kind ones, the nurturing ones……so that wherever they end up they might contribute something positive to our world.

 

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Ways of looking

August 17, 2016 by bobleckridge

diversity potager

Here’s a small corner of our potager. I took the photo because the beauty of the abundant diversity caught my eye.

When I look at it now I realise that different people will see different things when they look at this.

Some might see competition – survival of the fittest – as each plant fights all the others for the most sun, the most water, the best nutrients from the soil. When the world looks like that its full of fighting, of winners and losers, of the pursuit of self-interest. In such a world is there ultimately one winner? One species of plant which beats all the rest and eliminates them from the competition?

Some might see chaos – unruly, disorder, no control. Does such a world need to be tamed? Does it need to be ruled, ordered and managed to produce….to produce “outcomes” – and what will those outcomes be? Who determines them? Who measures? Who manages? Who controls?

Some might see beauty and diversity – as I do – each plant expressing its uniqueness to the full, flourishing amongst the others. When the world looks like this, it looks like a community. It looks like a living, growing, healthy being. Gaia. Nature.

I see uniqueness here.

I see flourishing here.

I see community here.

I see beauty here.

What do you see?

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A differentiated communion of subjects

August 9, 2016 by bobleckridge

petal web

Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme who developed the new story of the universe talk about three core values which seem to be embedded in evolution. It’s a really interesting and different take on evolution. The story we have heard most over the last hundred years or so is one of a random, harsh, competitive universe full of “stuff” or materials which somehow have stuck together to make ever more complex objects which can each be studied and understood in isolation from each other.

That story never resonated with me and it can be argued it has more to do with the dominant politico-economic model of capitalism and “the market” than it has with science.

The three values Berry and Swimme articulate are differentiation, subjectivity and communion. Their claim is that take away any one of these three and the whole universe as we know it collapses. Brian Swimme also claims that we can use these three values to check if our actions are in harmony with the evolutionary direction and activity of the universe. In other words they can be considered as fundamental values which help us to assess and judge our behaviour and that of others (including politicians and economists).

Differentiation.  The universe started differentiating from its earliest moments. We don’t look around and see a homogenous mush – we see clusters, or “objects”. But the universe doesn’t just produce what Swimme calls “articulated constellations of energy”. It produces UNIQUE articulated constellations of energy. No two galaxies, no two stars, no two creatures are identical. Producing uniqueness turns out to be a key universal value.

Subjectivity. Everything has an inside. Even the simplest atoms are self-organising, self-maintaining phenomena. The particles within the atom are held together and organised by the atom itself. This self-organisation reaches its most complex in human beings. We are all “autopoietic” – we are “self-making” creatures. We self-defend, self-organise and self-maintain. Yet this interior “self” remains unknowable. We can’t see it, can’t define it, can’t pin it down. This interiority is what enables us to see every object as a subject.

Communion. Thomas Berry used the word “communion” to describe the relationships which exist everywhere. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is connected to other things. We all live in a vast web of relationships.

This all leads to Berry and Swimme describing the universe as an “communion of subjects”, or as a “communion of differentiated subjects”.

Try this idea out for yourself. What does the world look like through this lens? What sense do you make of life which part of a “communion of subjects”?

When considering any political policy, any scientific description, any choices you might make, what happens when you set them in the context of  the three values of “differentiation, subjectivity and communion”?

For me, I experience a shift from fear to curiosity, from senselessness to meaningfulness, from isolation to belonging…..how about you?

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Far horizons

August 7, 2016 by bobleckridge

far horizons

The country where you live now…..have you lived there all your life?

What about your parents? Or their parents?

According to the UN one in every thirty people lives in a country other than their birth country in the course of their lifetime.

That’s true for me. After retiring from clinical practice in Scotland two years ago this month, I sold up and moved to the Charente in France, which is where I live now. I had an ambition to live in another country for a long time and retirement gave me the opportunity. I didn’t want to just live in another country, I wanted to learn another language and to live in the culture of that language. I find it not only enlarges and deepens my experience of the world, but it changes my perspective on my birth country and culture too. It’s not a matter of one being better than another. It’s about the difference.

I guess I’m now a migrant.

I hadn’t really thought I was until the “Brexit” vote (don’t get me started!), but I now know I’m like millions, yes, millions, of Europeans who are born in one country and live in another. The EU project emphasises what they call the “four freedoms” and they are all freedom of movement – freedom of movement of capital, goods, services and people. What the people who promoted Brexit seem to want is to take away only one of those freedoms – the freedom of movement of people. They seem to prefer only the freedom to make money.

I read an article in a French newspaper recently where the writer questioned the policies which divide people who migrate into two categories – “economic migrants” and “refugees” – and asked who decided it was more noble to flee from war and violence than it was to try to escape death from hunger. Not all migration, of course, is about escaping from anything. Migration can be stimulated not just by fear, but by curiosity.

Migration has, of course, become a huge issue because of the surge in mass migration produced by the US and Europe destroying other states and bombing their cities. Is it any surprise people want to escape Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya and so on? But migration is what human beings do. As a species we’ve done that since we were hunter-gatherers and there have been huge waves of mass migration throughout history. Without those waves we wouldn’t have the diverse countries we have now.

I feel it’s time for us to tell a new story of migration – both of migration to escape something and migration for a better, deeper or larger life.

None of us need to go back many generations to find ancestors who were born in one country then moved to another. Maybe that’s the place to start…..tell the stories of our migrant ancestors, and tell the stories of our own migrations.

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More than any of us can achieve by ourselves

August 2, 2016 by bobleckridge

two

In the Spring of 1784, Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, marquis of Puységur, discovered that Victor Race, one of the peasants who worked on the marquis’ land, had pneumonia. The marquis had become interested in the work of Mesmer and “animal magnetism” so decided to see if he could help Victor back to health using this new method.

Victor fell into a trance and began to speak. But to the astonishment of his master, he didn’t speak in his usual patois, but in perfect learned French instead. Not only that but he talked about subjects that an illiterate peasant couldn’t have known about.

What happened next is even more astonishing. The marquis and Victor became a therapeutic couple. The marquis would ask an ill person about their symptoms….he’d “take the history of the patient”, and, in trance, Victor would pronounce the diagnosis and prescribe treatments.

Neither of these men were able to carry out the acts of healing by themselves, but together, they could.

This was one of the first recorded episodes of “lay mediumship” in Western civilisation.

I think that’s a remarkable story and I know of other instances from within my own lifetime where such astonishing collaborations occurred.

But even setting aside the somewhat “supernatural” aspect of these tales, isn’t there something like this going on in every therapeutic act? Isn’t every therapeutic act a collaboration between the patient and the therapist. Without each other they can’t achieve healing, but together, they have the chance to become something unique and greater than either of them. Together they can gain a greater understanding, and together they can find answers they couldn’t find alone.

I think we forget that in modern medicine, thinking that the doctor can do it all by him, or her, self. Thinking that one person has all the answers, ready made, so to speak.

There can be some of the most astonishing examples of magic happening when two people form a bond and work together for a common purpose.

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Living in the real world

July 30, 2016 by bobleckridge

ladybird yellow

I was sitting under the mulberry tree last saturday afternoon reading the newspaper when this little creature landed right in front of me. In an instant I was back in the real world. Let me explain….

I think that when we are reading, particularly if we are reading something which engages us fully, then we become absorbed into a different world. It’s a world partly described by the author, and partly created by my (the reader)’s memories and imagination. It’s not that that world isn’t real, but it’s highly subjective and intensely personal. Nobody else has my memories. Nobody shares my imagination. Nobody is having an identical experience to me. I might be transported by the words and my thoughts to far away places or far away times….real or imaginary.

But when this startling, attention-grabbing, little creature lands right in the centre of my vision, I leave that place and time and return to here and now.

I read an article by a French philosopher recently who argued that human beings can never experience the real because we always bring our memories, our imaginations and our processing of the sensory signals from the world to all of our experience. What we live is our subjective creation of the real. I’m not sure what I really think about that. I understand the point he is making but I something nags at me….maybe it’s that there is no real for we humans to experience other than the real that we humans experience. Oops, that sounds rather peculiar doesn’t it? What I mean is, is there any “real” “out there” which doesn’t include us? Isn’t the universe whole? And doesn’t the universe include us? So an imagined universe without us is less real, not more real, isn’t it?

Oh, I didn’t set out to go down that path. Where I meant to go was a different story altogether. Pokemon Go was released in France last week and in the papers I read a report of over a 1000 people rushing around the public garden in Bordeaux trying to find a rare Pokemon creature. Over a 1000 people! Rushing around a park looking for something that doesn’t exist! Well, only as a digitally manufactured creation. The makers call this “AR”, for “Augmented Reality” and the reporter who wrote the piece about the crowd in Bordeaux said that it was a delight to see so many happy people, their faces beaming with anticipation as they rediscovered the childhood delights of play. Wow! Very positive Monsieur Journaliste! But does something like Pokemon Go genuinely augment reality?

But then, I’m wondering again….isn’t this just a contemporary example of how the human imagination interacts with the rest of the universe to produce the “real”, irrespective of whether you are going to use the word “augmented” or not?

Maybe these technologies are bringing people together, stimulating delight and pleasure, creating a brand new world. Maybe.

I think my reality is augmented every day by the world around me. This little yellow ladybird made my day  different and made it feel special to me.

Don’t we augment our reality through curiosity and paying attention, by delight, wonder and being prepared to be amazed?

I think it does…….

 

 

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Flourishing, because that’s what we’re all here for….

July 27, 2016 by bobleckridge

fields of gold

Fields of gold….this is what they look like where I live. Aren’t they spectacular? And don’t they go so well with a wide blue sky?

wide field

The first year I came to live here I kept driving past them thinking, must stop and take a photo sometime, but, somehow, I always had something more important to do. “I’ll catch them next time I pass by” I thought. But I didn’t. And when finally I decided to make a special trip out to photograph them, they were gone. Or almost. Heads down and turning brown. Just didn’t have the same appeal. So I missed them. Didn’t take long to miss them. It turns out they don’t look like this for very long.

I learned that lesson.

So when this caught my eye recently……

individual

….I pulled over and took a few photos.

As I stood looking out across the field up to the top of the hill I recalled the scene on the beach at dawn in the movie, “City of Angels”, and I thought, “How amazing that this field of little seeds transforms into a carpet of tall green stalks and leaves, which, one day (or at least it seems to happen in one day), the sun comes up and these glorious golden flowers unfold to greet it, bathing their petals in its rays which warm their rich, abundant crops of seeds.”

Flourishing.

How flower like.

I believe we are here to live like that. To flourish. To reach up, unfold, respond to the sun, the rain, and the wind. To emerge and to engage with a full becoming….becoming the unique and singular creatures which we are, and to express our uniqueness in full awareness of our communion with the rest of nature.

There are terrible stories around just now. Stories of acts of cowardice and killing. How are we to respond to them?

With fear? Closing down? Making our lives smaller?

Or with LIFE? Opening up, living our lives to the full?

Maybe I can learn from the sunflowers. Maybe I can stand up, radiate with the beauty of the life force which surges through me. And flourish.

Let me use that astonishing capacity which I share with all human beings – the ability to make conscious choices.

I choose to relish this moment, this day, this present, because if I put it off, I might miss living altogether.

I choose love instead of hate.

I choose to create instead of destroying.

I choose to be grateful for this “one wild and precious life“.

I choose to share my delight.

 

 

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Liberty, equality and fraternity

July 20, 2016 by bobleckridge

liberty

14th July, 2016.

As I stood amongst the gathering crowds in Bordeaux on Thursday evening the sun went down and I spotted what looked like an angel watching over the city.

She’s “Liberty”, and sits on top of the column at Quinconces. Up close you can see that she is holding a broken chain.

The fireworks were spectacular, fired up into the night sky from a barge in the middle of the river, opposite the Bourse. The crowd was immense. I was watching from the left bank and surrounded by children, parents, young and old, ooh-ing and ah-ing, and finally applauding and cheering as the final glorious fireworks seemed to fill the entire sky. I was struck by the sheer delight around me. How much people thrill to firework displays!

The crowd slowly dispersed and I got back to the hotel, where the TV in the lounge was showing the dreadful events of Nice. As the details slowly emerged, the horror intensified. A lorry driven through a crowd, a crowd like the one I was part of, who had been enjoying exactly the same kind of show as I had, just minutes before. Incomprehensible.

I spent my medical career trying to understand. Diagnosis is really just a word for understanding. A person comes with a story, tells of their symptoms, has physical changes in their body. Medical treatment starts with understanding what’s going on, with what you are dealing with. That’s the diagnosis. Then you have to choose from a range of options as you decide what to do about it. What actions you should take now.

I approach these terrible events in the world in the same way. But I’m struggling. I don’t understand how a human being can go from taking smiling selfies in the middle of a crowd of happy people in the afternoon to driving a truck at them in the evening in an attempt to kill and maim as many men, women and children as possible. I don’t understand how it happens. The only thing I know is that it’s not simple. There will be multiple factors in play. Some of them will be society-wide, some world-wide, some very specific to certain individuals, or certain families.

My approach to health was not one of fighting diseases. I didn’t use all those military metaphors of eliminating, battling, fighting, killing and so on…..instead, I always sought to understand what might assist and stimulate the individual’s powers of recovery and resilience. Health seems to involve such things, at least in part.

So, as I try to make sense of these events in a country whose core principles are “liberty, equality and fraternity”, I reckon some of the answers will involve strengthening just those features. How do we grow freedom? How do we move towards, instead of away from, greater equality? How do we spread a sense of all being in this together, we human beings, regardless of race, gender or religion?

But maybe we have to start by making a decent diagnosis. Maybe a healthier society can only emerge from a greater, (and, I’d argue, better) level of understanding?

After that, we need to act. We need to do something different.

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Becoming – nature and nurture

July 13, 2016 by bobleckridge

cygnet

peachicks

On a recent trip to the nearby town of Saintes, I chanced across two little families.

Do you know what these particular chicks are going to look like when they grow up?

We are all dealt a certain hand when we are born, a particular and unique pattern of DNA. Our personal pattern shares a lot with others of course. All we humans have distinct DNA patterns that distinguish us from other animals. The surprise really is how shared the common patterns are. Some patterns are the same in humans, chimps, fruit flies and earthworms. Fruit flies and earthworms? I’m not too astonished about the similarities between humans and chimps (over 95% similar genome apparently), but fruit flies and earthworms? Who’d have thought it?

But there’s more to how we begin than our DNA code. From the very first moments of life we begin to develop differently. We humans have fingerprints for example, and there are no two identical sets of fingerprints in the world – ever. We have unique patterns all over our bodies, not just in our fingertips. Our eyes, for example, are also very distinctly different. We’re all becoming a lot more familiar with that uniqueness as we use our fingers to gain access to our mobile phones, or our irises and fingers to gain access to particular rooms, buildings, or even countries.

Babies develop distinctly different patterns of behaviour from their very first hours in this world. If you are a parent of more than one child you’ve probably wondered many times how can your children be SO different when they both came from the exact same parents, and grew up int he exact same family?

It’s so, so difficult to know what a little one is going to become. We can’t know what events will occur in their lives. We can’t know how their personalities will develop, what coping strategies they will acquire, what choices they will make.

But all of that is ok. It’s the nature of life. It unfolds. Little ones grow, change and develop every single day. And when I say little ones, I don’t just mean little human children. We see the same, albeit over shorter timescales, when we watch chicks grow into adult birds, or seeds grow into flowers, vegetables or trees. We see it everywhere.

I’m sure at some point you’ve chanced across an old photograph of yourself, your parents, or your children and you recognise them. Instantly. But oh how they’ve changed! Oh, how I have changed! And isn’t that second insight often quickly followed by “but I still feel the same me” (or some variation of that).

What’s the best thing we can do for the little ones?

Nurture them.

Love them in their developing uniqueness, knowing that from those very first days they are already different from us, and it’s our job to help them on the way to becoming all they can be.

If you’re still not sure what those chicks at the start of this post are going to turn out to be like when they grow up – here’s a couple of hints –

swan family

peacock family

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Kahlil Gibran (On Children. From “The Prophet”)

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The butterfly effect

July 6, 2016 by bobleckridge

butterfly

I was sitting in the garden yesterday next to some buddleia bushes which are very, very popular with the butterflies. I watched a few of fly around, then took this one’s photo when he landed on the blossom near me.

Isn’t this creature both beautiful and astonishing? The colours and patterns on its’ wings, its’ delicate antennae, the long proboscis probing deep down into each little flower to gather up nectar? Have you watched a butterfly flying and feeding like this? Its’ movements seem completely random. It doesn’t start on one flower then move outwards or around in some obvious pattern. It will select this flower, then that one over there, then that one next to it, then it flies up into the air and lands on a completely different part of the bush, only to reappear again on the original flower a few moments later.

We can’t predict exactly which direction a butterfly is going to fly next.

Butterflies are almost a symbol of unpredictability. The apparent randomness of their flight is one of their key characteristics. When scientists discovered that everything on Earth was actually connected, they picked the butterfly as an example to explain how small changes lead to large, unpredictable ones. “The butterfly effect” poetically describes how the flapping of a butterfly wing in one part of the world can change the air movement there, which sets off a cascade of interconnected changes, leading to a hurricane in another part of the world.

Small changes that we make can lead to huge changes down the line. That always makes me think two things – first that if I want to bring about a big change, the way to do it is to keep making small changes. In other words, the choices and actions I make in my daily life, are the best, indeed maybe the only, way to bring about the changes in the world I want to see. The second thing is there are no guarantees. Despite the claims of some to know that if we do this or that, then the outcome will be exactly this other thing, that’s just not true. It’s better to stay humble and realise that not only is there much I don’t know, but I have no way of knowing exactly how things are going to turn out. Some people find that frustrating, but I think it’s empowering. It means I need to make my choices and actions on the basis of my values, not on the basis of control. I can’t control the future. But I can sure choose to act in loving ways. I can sure choose to act in “integrative” ways, building healthy, mutually beneficial bonds between me and the others (the well differentiated parts). I can choose to create. I can choose to increase diversity. I can choose to tolerate. I don’t need to be in control of the future.

Butterflies are magnificent examples of change. They go through four utterly different, distinct phases of life – egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, then winged insect. The four phases are so different that some people still think a butterfly is more than one creature. No wonder they are the symbol of change and metamorphosis.

All of life is change.

We are all in a continual process of becoming. It’s a characteristic of life – emergence – an unfolding, a developing, a creative changing reality.

Butterflies are also great examples of connectedness. I see that two ways. First of all, the day the buddleia bushes in my garden began to bloom the butterflies appeared. The more the blossom, the more the butterflies. You could almost think both the blossom and the butterflies emerge from the same source. They are certainly intimately connected. Mysteriously connected.

Secondly, some butterflies, like some birds, are migratory. They spend some part of their lives in one part of the world, and some in others. For the British “painted lady” butterfly that involves distances as far apart as Africa and the Arctic Circle. If that’s not enough to astonish you, wait till you hear this! They complete this migration over SIX generations. Yep, no single butterfly makes the full trip. No butterfly and its’ immediate offspring makes the single trip. It takes SIX generations to make the round trip.

How does that work?

I read that they navigate “using a time-compensated sun compass” – a what?! How does THAT work?

No wonder we see butterflies as symbols of change, metamorphosis, mystery and complexity.

Don’t we live on just an incredible planet? Isn’t life, literally, astonishing?

Every, single, day.

 

 

 

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