Heroes Not Zombies

Entry phone with a sense of humour

March 21, 2010 by bobleckridge

Who do you think might answer if you press the top button? (use google translate if you don’t speak French)

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Let’s play

March 18, 2010 by bobleckridge

As adults we tend to forget how good it was to just play.
Have a look at these orange balloons at play……they’ll remind you how good it is to play, and, especially, to play with someone else who you feel connected to!
(seriously, isn’t it easy to imagine that these two balloons are ALIVE?! Just watch they way they move)

(I made this little video in Cassis, Provence, then set it to a little of the soundtrack of Amelie)

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the beauty and the importance of impermanence

March 17, 2010 by bobleckridge

I listened to a Thich Nhat Hanh talk yesterday. He said, without impermanence there is no life. I hadn’t thought about that before. He said, without impermanence the seed will not become a flower.

Without impermanence we wouldn’t get to enjoy these beautiful blossoms every year.

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the colour of rock, the colour of water

March 16, 2010 by bobleckridge

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A tulip moment

March 15, 2010 by bobleckridge

Try this.

click on this photo and you’ll be taken to the original I uploaded onto Flickr. Click on it there and choose the “all sizes” option on the top left above the photo. Look at it in the biggest version available.

Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it as if there’s a whole universe in there? In that single flower? Look at the colours. Aren’t they astonishing?

I hope you enjoy this little tulip moment.

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Bormes les Mimosa

March 14, 2010 by bobleckridge

Every Spring in Japan the Cherry Blossom appearance is a great event. Thousands of people go out with their cameras and photograph the new blossom, the parks are full of strollers wandering around, stopping to look at the blossom-laden trees. The front pages of the national newspapers in Japan carry photos of the first blossom and the nightly TV news tracks the spread of the blossom through the country day by day. We don’t have anything quite like that in the UK, or anywhere else I’m aware of actually, but there’s a little village in the South of France which is named after it’s spectacular annual blossom and this year, after several years of wishing, I’ve managed to make a trip to see it.

Let me show you around.

The village is Bormes les Mimosa. Here’s what the village looks like during the blossoming of the Mimosa trees.

Let me share some photos of the Mimosa with you, then I’ll show you some of the village.

Sadly, I’m not very good at describing scents but the scent of this blossom is really lovely. It’s everywhere in the village making the whole place seem both sweet and fresh.

Here are some overviews of the village

The old village itself is a medieval village with winding, twisting little alleys climbing up the hillside. There are loads of tiny passageways and stairways making it a wonderful place to go exploring.

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1, 2, 3

March 13, 2010 by bobleckridge

Walking along Cabasson Plage yesterday, the sand was so sparkly I couldn’t resist taking off my socks and shoes and making a few footprints.
Actually, the sand was so firm it wasn’t easy to leave a footprint at all. I was happy with final result though……and with the feel of the cold, firm, silver sand beneath my feet.

As Lao Tzu said “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I wonder where these three steps will take me now……

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The delusion of separateness

March 8, 2010 by bobleckridge

I’ve stumbled across this quotation twice in the last seven days. It struck me as interesting first time. It struck me as important to share the second time.

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us, universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Einstein

Are you ready to break out of this prison by widening your circle of compassion?

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Seeing ourselves reflected in others

March 6, 2010 by bobleckridge

I had a conversation with someone this week where we discussed how you can’t know someone in isolation. If you put a person into an empty room and observe them through a video link for example, you’re not going to discover a lot about who they are. We need others to reveal that. We are fundamentally social, relational creatures. I stumbled across a comment recently which went something like this “isolation is the dark room I go to to develop my negatives”.

I’ve known that truth about how we reveal ourselves in our interactions with others for a long time. I’ve also long been aware of how we can see ourselves in others too, both in the positive sense of empathy, feeling resonant with another, and in the revealing sense of how the behaviours of others can teach us something about ourselves (ever met someone who consistently presses certain of your buttons? How would you know what buttons even exist without those people?).

I think this is an aspect of being human which we often neglect. A lot of attention to the “self” is focused inwardly, but our “selves” are not contained within us. Another phrase I heard this week was something about how limited it was “to consider the self from the one skull perspective”. A striking way of getting us to realise that the self is inter-relational, not isolated within the human body.

I just read this by Virginia Woolf, writing about watching people looking at a portrait of Montaigne.

There is always a crowd before that picture, gazing into its depths, seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the longer they look, never being able to say quite what it is they see.

She goes on to write….

As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror…And the novelists of the future will realise more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue.

Now there’s a creative writing project to explore!

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