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Posts Tagged ‘trees’

Power of uniqueness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 20, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I find many trees beautiful. Some have especially lovely leaves which are so distinct in shape and colour that it’s easy to spot and recognise them. But what I find more powerful than just noticing and naming a tree, is to focus in on an individual leaf and take the time to really see it. There are no two leaves which are completely identical. Their uniqueness emerges as we consider their exact location at a particular time on a specific tree, or even, when we see a single leaf lying on the ground after a shower of rain.

The uniqueness of the leaf doesn’t lie in its “essence”, or even its particular shape, size and colour, but in its contexts and its relationships…….the tree on which it grew, the place where that tree grew, the season, the day and the time we noticed it, and took a moment to photograph it, the place the seed from which the tree grew came from, the person, or creature which carried the seed to this specific place, planted it, nurtured it, looked after it……and so on……

It’s the same for each of us. Every single one of us is unique. Over four decades of work as a doctor engaging with patient after patient individually, I never encountered two identical patients with two identical stories. Everyone had a special, un-repeatable, un-copiable (is that a real word??), presence. There was, and there remains, something incredibly special, even magical about uniqueness….perhaps not least because it can never be completely known.

There’s great beauty in uniqueness. There’s something “enchanting” about it. Not least because it’s the gateway through which we pass to encounter the “real”……all generalisations blind us to reality. They reduce complex individuality to features, characteristics or measurements. Labelling, judging and categorising extinguishes uniqueness and turns the beauty and wonder of diversity into something bland, soulless, and inhuman.

My life experience is that an awareness of uniqueness, and a desire to explore it and understand it, leads to a richer, deeper, more satisfying life.

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Not simple

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 8, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Living organisms are not simple (no, not even the simplest of them!). Look at this tree. How could you begin to trace its beginning and its end? Where do its roots begin and end? Where does the trunk begin and end? What makes the branches emerge exactly where they do, and what determines the direction they will grow and distance they will stretch?

And, to think, this tree began as a single seed. How absolutely impossible to predict the exact shape and size of this tree from an examination of that seed.

We like to chop reality into pieces, calling this a part, and that, another part, as if there are clear divisions between what we are calling “parts”. But that’s just what our brains do. Specifically, that’s how we engage with the world from the perspective of our left cerebral hemisphere. That hemisphere was never intended to function alone, and all its hyper-focus, all its re-presentation, all its re-cognising, labelling and categorising, was always meant to be passed back to the right hemisphere for re-contextualisation, for re-absorption into the whole, so we could see the connections, the relationships, the ever changing, developing flow of the world.

I’m convinced that the world is a more satisfying place, that life is better, when I open my mind to awe, to wonder. I’m convinced that the world becomes meaner and more shallow when I reduce it to “things”, “objects” and utility.

How amazing it is to really stand and see a tree, a single tree, to gaze, and to wonder at its origins, its history, its connections and its here and now reality. How amazing.

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