The sacred traffic in the Earl's Court Road.

I find that one way of sensing our unity with the universe- that is, with reaching a sense of in-depth commonality - is to take in the complexity of even the most apparently mundane scene.

 

We’re walking along a side-street off the Earls Court Road. It’s a grey London morning. You look at a parked car, and think briefly of the complexity of its manufacture, all the physical and chemical actions and reactions ready to burst into action when the driver arrives. 

Think of the cultural associations that went into its design, into even just its name. Think of it two years ago - molten steel being rolled into sheets, plastic dashboard being moulded, computer circuits being set up..this isn't one thing.Think of the car in 20 years' time - a rusting relic, or a cube of scrap steel.  This car is in motion even when its parked. As are we all.

Look up at the large terraces lining the street. Each storey is a flat. Each flat contains a history of arrivals and departures, joys and sorrows. Individuals emerge from the door of just one flat and hurry off towards their work, or school, or....? 

They take with them their stories to date, the stories they are building in their heads, the memories they are dwelling on, remoulding and changing them in the moment.

Here’s one of those lovely large London plane trees, just beginning to shed its leaves, moving into its autumn, maybe a little earlier than some of the other trees, a little later than some. Every tree varies, is unique, yet we can name it as a type of tree. Think of all that photosynthesis, water being drawn up the trunk, insects living in the tree far above the busy street.

We turn into Earls Court Road itself...the traffic is a loud discombobulating torrent.

You think you know the Earls Court Road. You don’t, even if you’ve lived in the area all your life. You don’t completely know anything, because to do so would tie it down to one time and place. The river of traffic in the road - a cliché but a useful metaphor if it reminds us that the road is a slower version of the traffic thundering along it. It is all processes,  not separate things.

People from the flats go their separate ways. You and I part, you to the Undergound station and thence wherever you need to get to, building your own changing story of today. 

I walk on, remembering that I’m not the same person who left the hotel ten minutes ago. All is change, all is in motion; feeling that, the traffic seems a little more bearable, part of the unique present moment that goes as soon as it arrives. 

Like that damned great truck. I need to stop musing and concentrate on crossing the road, or - squelch. I would become a quite different set of processes!

One Ocean

This is an oceanic coast, a continental coast. Nothing much between here and South Africa. Our more constrained and limited British seas can also cut up rough and nasty. So is it imagination, and/or knowledge, that makes the difference? Because this feels nothing like the seacoasts at home. Perhaps it’s an endlessly variable combination of light, colour, sound that I pick up in each case, or maybe it's just because I know the fact of difference. Either way, it feels very different from “home.”

Yet there is really only one ocean. On the whole planet, apart from inland seas (aka vast lakes) all oceans and seas are joined, are one. And the old mind-trick of turning a good-quality globe so that Australia is bottom left and you are looking at the Pacific reminds us that mostly, the planet is oceans and seas.

We often allocate human moods to the ocean, as we do to God/gods. They can be merciful, wrathful, gentle meek and mild. The ocean we can call angry, gentle, and so on. It’s not, of course. It is only and purely -  the ocean. 

Each wave is a fast-moving, continually changing, unique phenomenon, dying right in front of me and being drawn back and resumed.

The ocean is merely and entirely doing what it has done, with endless variations, for millions upon millions of years, before there were any people of any sort to watch it. Do I create each wave in front of me every time I look at it? 

 Are today’s waves two or three metres high? Hey, this next one must be 3.5 metres...That’s not what yields insight, though it might help me keep my trousers dry. 
 
Maybe I can just be with it, leaving aside analysis and measurement.

And yet, if you just contemplate for a moment the impossibly complex set of dynamic systems - tide; winds here and hundreds of miles out to sea; currents; salinity and other chemistry; air and water temperature; gravity, phases of the moon - the self-sustaining systems that create this particular breaking wave, which resembles the one before it and the one after it but is unique. 

If I add that to what I can see and here in front of me, I can feel a sense of awe (in the old and strong sense), presentmomentness,  wholeness, identity with the planet and its workings that I’m happy to call sacred, provided you don't start lugging in meanings still adhering to a Rock of Ages,  Cleft for Me, etc. (Well, you can if you wish, it's up to you, but that's not what I'm trying to get at here.)

For me, anthropomorphic deities don’t work, and the ocean is not wrathful. It is other than me, indifferent, total. Powerful beyond imagining, yes. Impossibly complex and beautiful, yes, with a beauty that goes much deeper than pretty or scenic. It’s in the curve of the wave as is crumples and blues into white that I find a sacred wholeness to sit with for a while.

 

The cycle of seasons personified - The January Man

 

I've put this song up before, either on this blog or my previous one, so I hope you're not bored by it. 

The steady plod of the instruments under Karine Polwart's lovely voice suggests to me the welcome relentlessness of the seasons' cycle. It'll roll round no matter what we do.

On the last day of the old year, with lots of nervousness and fussing about the political events likely to occur in the year ahead, lots of gloom and dismay about what is happening to our own society and cultures, bitter divisions in politics and public policy, I find, and I hope you do, solace here - right here and now, 31:12:16 - in knowing and feeling that I am part of the seasons' turning. It is in me, I am of it.

It's not a matter of being controlled by these cycles of change, it's more being part of them, the same "thing."

Why do disturbed city kids respond well (often/usually) to programmes that take them out into the countryside, or into  city farms? Is it just some lovely views, some sweet furry animals?

I think it is easier in these locations for them to feel, even if not to know rationally or consciously, that each of them is a natural system, a set of changes that is part of something much huger than each of them alone. 

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever."

Are these lines lamenting the passing of time and the coming of age? I don't think so, because they contain both the wintry fever and the green fuse - the cycle.
 
That's how it is for all of us; we don't need to tell the crooked rose anything, in any literal sense. If we can be as one with the cycle of change, live in and with it, in this moment, then maybe we can carry our being-in-the-present through into whatever next year brings. It's bound to help.

Inuit "Sila," and the still point of the turning world

If we feel underlying unease, anxiety sometimes, about being our individual selves in a world out there that seems not-us, separate from us, then maybe we are looking for a way of being that is more unified with the rest of our world. (Not everyone feels that sense of unease, I'm sure - or they sense it but don't know what it is?)

It's one thing to understand intellectually that we are the same stuff as the rest of the universe, just assembled differently for a life-time. It may be another thing to live and feel that oneness with It All and Now.

 
According to Emma Thompson's daughter Gaia,  above right, who's been campaigning with her mum to try to protect the Arctic sea ice, the Inuit word "sila" means "weather;" but it also means "oneness" and "consciousness."

Ms Thompson remarks "says it all, really." Er...says what?

Well, it suggests to me the Inuit culture has built into its language the understanding that being at one with the weather, the turning seasons, is the same as being truly conscious, aware of what we are. At one with the world.

Understanding and being with the range of meanings in "sila" is how we feel ourselves to be part of and the same as the rest of the universe - if we will allow ourselves to feel it, to live in that state. 

So much can prevent us from being at one, leaving us uneasy, insecure in our separateness, scared by our own mortality. So much boils down to our being "distracted from distraction by distraction."

I don't want to idealise the Inuit people - I don't know much about them for starters, and they may be just as over-busy and preoccupied with inessential but appealing stuff as we are, though I doubt it. 

We live where we do and as we do. Nevertheless, even in amongst our stuff-filled headlong lives, we can make little corners of consciousness in which feel an underlying sense of unity with the universe. We are at one anyway, all the time, but we hide our awareness of it. 

Autumn is a good time to feel part of the endless change, part of the weather, the seasons, the turning world. May that feeling help us to find the still point that is changeless change.

Cliff-Top Space

I wonder if you too get an almost inexpressible feeling on a grassy cliff-top looking out and down across the sea, hearing the stiff breeze in your ears and the sound of the sea way below you? It's a particular state of mind - state of being, I'd say.

I guess it relates to the great and empty space before you, the absence of other people. It's very beautiful - but what does that mean?

It brings on that mental state of being right in the present,  of being in unity with... It all. A state that can't be willed; it's there all the time. The sea, the breeze, the grasses and wild-flowers, the space and distance - they absorb the stuff that usually gets between It and me.

(A mobile phone video is a pretty feeble reminder, but it's better than nothing. And in human terms, nothing is what happens in this little clip, which is rather the point.)

What the Eden Project tropical waterfall says

(sorry - title's a bit forced; I needn't need to meditate or sit by the waterfall, what follows hit me from the start of a five-hour family visit.)

It's a no doubt irritating habit of mine to enthuse madly about things the people I'm talking/writing to probably already know about. But what the hell - have you been to the Eden project, just outside St Austell, in Cornwall?

A familiar image, perhaps. The meaning of the Project, what it can, in the best of all ways (immersion) teach us is valuable beyond price. 

Of course it's expensive - look at the scale and complexity of the whole thing! It's excellent value for money, though. And the kids loved it.

At the social level, it shows what can be done with a truly creative vision, given guts, energy and good team-work - and of course, brilliant fund-raising and planning. In those aspects alone, it is a truly heartwarming and encouraging place. It's brought a lot of employment and money into an area that badly needed both.

Did you ever visit the old disused claypits in the area pre-Project? Fascinating, but - yuk. This is what Eden looked like before they got going.

 It's not just the chance to explore and learn about the plants of medditeranean and tropical regions inside the mighty Biomes. I came away with a much stronger sense of the interrelatedness of organic and non-organic things - life-forms and environments.

eg this:

 The Seed. A huge solid (Cornish granite) sculpture which you are invited to contemplate quietly - it's set a little apart in its own space. It represents all seeds, and more - some deep structures. 

You'll recognise the patterning from things such as a sunflower seed-head. The sculptor worked up a groundplan plan of 2000 circles according to Fibonacci numbers onto a graceful curved cone. According to Wikipedia, "(Fibonacci sequences) also appear in biological settings,^[9] such as branching in trees, phyllotaxis (the arrangement of leaves on a stem), the fruit sprouts of a pineapple,^[10] the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone's bracts."

One of the signatures of the underlying unities of life, and of abstract human thought. Fibonacci sequences are, apparently, closely linked to the Golden Mean, that ancient guide to satisying proportionality in works of art.

What the Project tells us - no, what it makes us feel as well as think - is that we are entirely linked to the rest of the living and non-living world, and we are the first creatures to be able to conceptualise that underlying unity abstract thought and in works of art. So, er - let's not blow it.

BTW, outside the Domes there are some amusing and thought-provoking displays. It does this without being too preachy. Here's the Junk Monster - made up with what each of us will throw away in a lifetime, in the way of appliances and IT stuff:

And there's some lovely planting, to satisfy inquisitive gardeners even on a grey, showery day:

We live in a wordworld of exaggerated and trivial superlatives, but even that won't stop me saying that the Eden Project is amazing 
(OED "causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing" - so, not just "great fun" or even "cool....")

I'm proud of what they've achieved, and I'm not even Cornish!

Unity and Brent Geese at the seaside

I recently travelled from the Irish sea coast to the shores of the Solent to visit a close family member who is very ill - though he is doing fine at the moment.

Naturally, I suppose, there are moments on such an occasion when thoughts and emotions swirl somewhat, so I took a little stroll on a very busy prom - lots of people walking, cycling, jogging, driving, parking.

  A large formation of Brent Geese flew very low overhead, honking gently as they adjusted their position. They ignored joggers, cyclists, parked cars etc, and settled on  a large patch of grass.

People round these parts are obviously used to this; no-one took much notice, except some kids who did that wonderful "brave new world" bit they do when they see something for the very first time.

It felt very good to be so close to so many completely wild and untroubled creatures, part of the same busy Sunday morning as all the keepfit citizens.

Then I wandered down to the shoreline to see what the waves had to say - or rather, what would happen when I let my mind stay with the sunshine and the water.

The general feeling was: it fits. All of it. Including my sadness.

Comic relief was provided by a few sanderlings, hurrying neurotically around the line of the incoming waves.

All this on the edge of a big connurbation. Goes to show that you have to take it as it comes when it comes wherever it comes.