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Posts Tagged ‘life’

Beauty in form, spirals

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 12, 2025| Leave a Comment »

One of the commonest forms you’ll see in the plant world is the spiral. Pretty much any plant which sends out creepers to latch onto something so the plant can grow higher towards the sunlight, uses this form. It doesn’t go for a straight line….what we were taught is the shortest distance between two parts. Why not? There just aren’t that many really straight lines in Nature. It seems there’s a great preference for meandering, changing direction, spiralling around…..not what a machine would do.

Machines, and the industrialised types of management which dominate our lives now, are said to be best when they are most “efficient”. But Nature has a different idea. “Efficiency” seems, these days, to be about expending the least possible amount of effort and money to achieve a standardised outcome. It’s not natural, and it squeezing out beauty and life.

Complex, natural, living forms are not like machines. A plant doesn’t produce the least number of seeds required to produce a second plant. It produces thousands and thousands of them, using a huge number of different methods to have those seeds carried far and wide, relying on the weather and other creatures to do the scattering. Have you ever watched a bee or a butterfly collect pollen? They don’t start top left and work their way “methodically” flower by flower until they’ve harvested the most possible. There’s an inherent, apparent randomness to their flight. You just can’t predict which flower they are going to explore next.

The spiral is a favourite form of exploration in many plants. It’s a way of discovering.

It’s also extremely beautiful. One that artists replicate again and again. Here’s an example from the sculpture park near where I live……

Beautiful, dynamic, attractive, pleasing, and even in a stone carving, bursting with “life”.

I reckon we’ve taken a life destroying path through industrialisation, and I’d love to see us grow whatever we find life enhancing instead. We can do that by paying attention to, and learning from, plants and other creatures. We can privilege beauty, joy and Life instead of consumption, “efficiency” and “profit”. That would lead us to a very different kind of “growth”, and a very different society.

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On reflection

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »

One of the things I enjoy most about photography is taking the time to really look at the photos I’ve taken. I see things on review that I swear I didn’t see when I was actually there taking the photo. Or I see better something I had noticed, but didn’t take the time to look more closely while I was actually there. When either of those things happen it reminds me to slow down and pay attention in everyday life. I know some people feel that taking photos separates you from the moment, and maybe, in some ways, it does, but actually I find taking some photos, AND taking time to pay attention in the moment, AND reviewing the photos at home, (repeatedly), enhances the joy and pleasure I get out of life, and allows me to make more sense of the everyday.

Here’s an example. I was in Strasbourg and noticed the beautiful reflections of the old buildings. Probably thousands of people have taken a photo like this, standing at the exact same spot as I was standing on this bridge. You can see that happening more and more as particular views and locations become “instagrammable”. However, just as in life, every photo is unique. I framed this particular shot, not just to capture the buildings and their reflections in the water but to include the couple sitting on the steps (bottom left of the image) – because I thought that made a more appealing composition.

Having noticed them in the viewfinder, and taken the shot, I zoomed in to take a second photo, where the couple and their reflection in the water became the main subject. Here’s that second photo –

I think, at the time, my thought was, what a nice image of “reflection” this would be…..a reflection in the water, and a couple of people, well, reflecting (taking a moment).

But now that I’m revisiting these photos I’ve just seen something else. These people aren’t looking at the water, or the reflections. They are looking at something off screen to the left (there was a beautiful and very ancient tree growing at the end of the bridge. I think that’s maybe what they were looking at). Then I noticed something else. At first, I thought, oh, they’re sharing a pair of white gloves. Because it looks like they both have one gloved hand, and one ungloved hand. Now, sharing a pair of gloves is an interesting thing to do. I think I might have done that while we walked on a cold wintry day, with one hand gloved, and the other thrust deep into a jacket pocket….but, looking closer, I see that for each of them, the gloved hand is the left one. They are both wearing a left hand glove. Well, I’ve never seen anyone do that before. That sure makes me curious and stimulates my wonder and my imagination. What’s that about?

I do love it when a photo I’ve taken leads me off down very different paths of wonder the more closely I look at them.

I am convinced that taking photos, and reviewing them repeatedly, encourages me to reflect more….on the world, on other people, on my life, and on my every day experiences.

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When change is more obvious

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 16, 2024| 2 Comments »

Spring and autumn are the two seasons where I notice change happening right before my eyes. Right now, in October, here in France, we are beginning to see leaves change colour. I love to gaze for a few moments at a plant like this, where some of the leaves are still bright green, some have patches of red or brown appearing, and some have gone fully deep red or even purple.

This reminds me of two things – the first is that change never stops. Everything in the world is constantly undergoing change. We are not the same today as we were a few weeks ago, and we are very different from what we were a few years ago (just browse through your photo albums to see how you’ve changed since you were a baby). The reality is that we change moment by moment. That’s why the advice to “be present”, or to “be here now”, is so relevant. Every single moment is unique, and if we breeze past it without noticing, it will be gone forever (except, of course, in the background of our subconscious the changes never cease to play their part).

The second is that change is so variable. It is heterogenous, not homogenous. You and I are unique. Our daily lives are unique. Our moment to moment experiences are unique and become even more unique over time, as nobody shares with us an exact personal history, an identical string of experiences. Just looking at this one plant and seeing the huge variation in colour as the leaves begin to change makes me even more aware of this uniqueness, of diversity.

So awareness of change slows me down, inspiring me to savour this moment, to live today as fully as I can. It inspires me to pay attention to the flow of Nature, to be aware of the fact that there are no fixed objects in this world, only different rates of change.

And awareness of change does something else for me – heightens my appreciation of uniqueness, of difference, and of diversity. Reducing life to abstractions, selecting single characteristics and bundling everyone who shares them into a single category is such a deluded way of living. We need to stop putting people into little boxes, labelling them and judging them, because when we do that, we just stop seeing them as they really are.

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Paying attention

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 14, 2024| 1 Comment »

I’ve read that we live in an attention economy. Marketers, producers, companies and individuals are all competing for our attention. They pay the social media companies to promote themselves to us using attention grabbing, and attention holding tools and techniques. “Influencers” can only influence if they attract attention, so they do whatever they need to do in order to achieve that goal.

I was pretty shocked on a recent trip to Milan to discover how “instagrammable” has become a major force. Certain buildings, certain viewpoints, or “attractions” were surrounded by dozens of, mostly young female, photographers, either taking pictures of themselves in front of whatever it was that had become “instagrammable”, or having someone else take their portraits there. Some even used portable reflectors, to “get the light right”, and had changes of clothing to model. I joked that my wife and I, standing in front of the Duomo, were the only people in the crowd actually facing the building. Most were trying to make it more beautiful, or more interesting, by putting it in the background, and themselves in the foreground.

That’s not a new phenomenon. A few years ago on a visit to the Alhambra in Grenada, I was surprised to find that most people who were taking photos of the amazing art and architecture, were only doings so by putting themselves into the foreground of each frame.

But attention is important. It’s how we see and experience the world we live in, and it influences our moment to moment moods, thoughts, and actions.

Ellen Langer, who studies “mindfulness”, describes it, simply as, “actively noticing things”.

I love that.

This “heroes not zombies” blog is all about living a more mindful life, and, I believe, that requires two things, both created out of attention. The first is, “noticing”, or as Ellen Langer says, “actively noticing”. When we pay attention, when we set out with an intention to notice – to notice the world around us, to notice others, to notice our thoughts and feelings – then we move into a more active, more conscious mode of existence. We reduce the chances of blindly following the influences and powers of others who try to shape our lives. The second is, to pay “loving attention”. I think whatever we pay attention gets magnified. If we focus on problems, we fill our lives with problems. If we focus on joys, of moments of awe and wonder, then we fill our lives with amazement and delight. But when we pay attention from a loving position – from a position of care, of empathy, of genuine interest, and love – then our attention changes, not only our own lives for the better, that of others…..whether they be other people, animals, plants, the environment, or the planet.

So, I’m all for paying attention – do it actively and do it lovingly – not mindlessly.

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