Does anyone know what makes these marks?

This isn’t a quiz….well, at least, not in the sense that I know the answer! I came across these strange marks on fallen trees in a forest recently. Have you any idea what makes this happen? Is it a fungus? An insect? A worm?? Look at the variety, it’s quite astonishing!

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How does your day begin?

How does your day begin?
I took this photo of the sun rising behind the old factories on the other side of Stirling station yesterday, and it got me thinking about the start of the day. Every day the sun comes up (but we don’t always notice it). In some cultures and traditions this simple, daily [...]

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Resilience from equanimity

How often do you find yourself going over something upsetting? Something someone said or did which you found hurtful? Hurts have an impact. They make their marks on us. The bigger the hurt, the deeper, more long-lasting the mark.
Is there anything we can do reduce the impact? Or do we have to just stand and [...]

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The colour of water

Look at the colour of this water. It’s an amazing colour isn’t it?

Why is it that colour? It’s the effect of all the leaves on the trees of the forest through which the stream is flowing. On another day, in another season, this very water (well, actually, this very stream, not this very water!), looks [...]

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Greed is good?

First this week we have the vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Lord Griffiths,  saying
We have to accept that inequality is a way of achieving greater opportunity and prosperity for all.
No we don’t. It’s just not true. Inequality is NOT a way of making life better for ALL. The evidence actually points the other way. Inequality is [...]

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Exercises in making sense

Human beings are sense-making creatures. We continuously process all the information we can gather from our environments – internal and external – and try to put the information together somehow. I think we use two particular sets of skills to do this, and they’re related.
The first skill is pattern spotting.
What do we think when we [...]

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Strange things happen…..

The other day Ian sent me an email with a link in it (he does this quite a lot!). It was to a book which he thought would interest me. I followed the link and, yes, it sounded really up my street. The book was called “Friends in Low Places”, by James Willis and it [...]

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Picasso on the subject of truth

If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme
I saw this quote at an exhibition of the work of Picasso and Cezanne in Aix en Provence. You only need to think about Cezanne’s paintings of Mont St Victoire to understand this. Or think of Picasso’s re-working of the [...]

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The need to fit in, and the need to be different

Everyone has to deal with this paradox – how can I preserve my individuality, yet not be isolated? I think of it as a spectrum, with individuality at one end of the line, and shared membership of a group at the other. Our immune systems are designed to recognise anything that is “not me” and [...]

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Patterns

Whether its due to synchronicity or something about focus, attention and awareness, I find that I often have the experience that something I’ve been reading about crops up in all kinds of places. At the moment it’s pattern-spotting. In fact, this pattern-spotting theme is a fundamental one for me. I think it’s an important part [...]

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