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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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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Picasso’s Chateau de Vauvenargues

The Chateau de Vauvenargues has never been open to the public before, but for four months this summer it’s possible to visit. I went yesterday and it was wonderful. It really is in a beautiful location as I’m sure the photos above will show. It sits at the foot of Mont Saint Victoire, which Picasso [...]

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Learn to yearn

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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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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Where water meets rock, look what happens

One of my favourite walks locally is to the Bracklinn Falls in nearby Callander. I love to gaze at the peaty brown water tumbling and foaming over the rocks and to wonder (yes, with emerveillement) at the incredible way the water continuously sculpts the stone.

Isn’t that amazing? It makes me think of the interconnectedness of [...]

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