It sounds odd, doesn’t it? See what you’re seeing…
But we don’t. We do see, but we don’t see what we’re seeing.
I’d better explain my terms, here, before it becomes an exercise in Zen paradox – which I want to avoid. There are not only two, but three phases in our act of seeing. The first is the actual biological receiving of the light waves/particles by our eye’s receptors. The second is the rapid conversion into ‘object of interest’ by our brains – based entirely on what we have seen before.
The third is the intervention of our own consciousness to examine what we are looking at; and it’s that last one that make the difference when we are trying live more ‘mindful’ lives.
Habit makes us see superficially. The brain is programmed to cut down the volume, so, essentially, we see what we’ve always seen, and in particular what we saw the last time we were in ‘this situation’. This situation may be an event, such as a confrontation or it may simply be a something seen along a footpath or road,
Nothing illustrates this better than the process of writing a blog post. You start with an idea, then maybe create an outline of what you want to say – particularly how you want to end. You then have to shift mindset from that high-level exercise to one of beginning the detail, usually with a line that will generate enough interest to carry the reader through the post. The length of the blog is critical; people lead busy lives and you can help those who support you by being succinct.
You use this stage to flesh out the post, ensuring that you include all the notes you made before beginning to write the draft.
Then a different phase begins: you begin to turn the piece into a ‘whole’ by reading it back as a single entity, noticing that the flow between certain paragraphs feels good or not so good – usually because the latter feels ‘forced’. You may be able to modify this, or may have to delete the whole paragraph… sometimes because you’ve spotted that a neighbouring one can be expanded in an economic way to include that key idea.
And so on… Until you reach the finished post and can press ‘Schedule’.
But many wise bloggers have noticed that another review, some time later – or possibly the following morning, just before publication time – can throw up a whole field of errors you must have read twenty or more times… but not seen.
That last act of checking with a different head on removes us from the initial process of ‘constructing and seeing’ together. It forces us to focus on an entirely different aspect of our written piece: its structure rather than its content…or, to use a metaphysical concept, its form rather than its force.
If you have a trade or hobby in which ‘critical seeing’ is essential, then you are likely to have developed the skill of deconstructing the image of what’s in front of you. Photographers have to do this all the time. To use our terms above, their minds have been trained, usually over many years, to see good force; knowing that it will take accumulated skill to employ the techniques of composition and image finishing to deliver that forceful form to the viewer of the image. The force gives it life; the form lets it endure.
Our minds work in similar ways, and vision is the dominant component of the input to consciousness. We can approach the mindful – the spiritual – by a simple act of deconstructing the act of seeing.
When we encounter a natural scene that affects us, emotionally, we should stop the normal process of intellectual perception by refusing to let the mind think. Thinking contains all the value judgements: the likes and dislikes that distort what we see and shroud it (an appropriate word!) in our history. We don’t want the accumulated history of seeing similar objects, we want to see the now, expressed in the beauty of nature.
Having stopped the constant voice of habitual thought )and this is not trivial, but the struggle, itself, is so instructive) we then sense a different kind of seeing, one that usually contains a degree of calm emotion. If the emotion begins to contain value judgements, such as like or dislike, then we should gently nudge it back to simply seeing and not reacting. We are aiming to get a sense of presence, with a calm and sweet quality to it. You will know it when it happens… and never want to lose it, again.
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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‘Found art’ is a style in which objects are discovered in the environment or workplace that have artistic value or gain artistic value through being arranged in new ways.
That about sums up my knowledge of the genre, though, as a keen photographer, I can see the parallel between them. Both rely on ‘seeing’ something that may not appear obvious. Both require the extraction of that from the surroundings.
The photographer often ‘crops’ the taken shot to get the composition’s proportions glimpsed with the mind and emotions.
The ‘Found Object’ artist will go to great lengths to preserve and present the find. I once saw a programme in which a fallen tree embedded in crushed railings was purchased and extracted by powerful machinery before being exhibited in a major gallery, sawn and shaped.
I’m not an artist. An illustrator, sometimes, but relying on manipulation of something already existing. Sue Vincent was an artist , and we are currently working with another – Giselle Bolotin – on the creation of the Silent Eye’s new oracle deck of cards. Giselle is painting the core images for each of the characters used as archetypes in the Silent Eye’s three year correspondence course.
Returning to my opening image:
The recent storms have brought considerable damage to South Lakeland. Thousands of mature trees have been felled; many of them in the most remote areas are still being discovered.
The priority has been to clear the roads and pathways. The result is the appearance, everywhere, of sawn-through tree trunks, like the one above. In this case the chainsaw has cut through both trunk and surrounding ivy to create a neat cross-section of circles. A striking image on the path where I came across it. It’s the closest I’m likely to come to a true ‘found object’.
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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There are a handful of them along the seafront at Grange-over-Sands. They lie quietly beneath the promenade, encased in the stonework crafted by Victorian engineers, whose design allowed the water to pass beneath the all-important railway tracks.
They carry the amalgamated water of several small streams into the turbulent waters of Morecambe Bay… and backwards when the tide is high – which is quite a sight…
At the far end of the creek (see the photo) is a small beach. Really, you need wellingtons to get to the meeting point of water and bay. Families are often to be see trudging back to the shore covered in mud, having underestimated the marshy salt flat, which returns wonderful lamb, but very dirty humans..
I would have loved this little creek as a child. We used to go out ‘for a run’ on most Sundays. In my parents’ car, any sighting of a creek was met with excited pointing from the back seat. For me, there was – and is – something utterly magical about the fact that the vast wildness of the ocean can flow gently inland into such beautiful features.
I’m tempted to draw a male-female metaphor, but I’m not so sure, and suspect that something more subtle is at work in the deeper layers of our selves that draws out these symbolic parallels.
A deeper contemplation sees the sea operating on an emotional, female level, showing the masculine land how it, too, can be penetrated by the imaginative gentleness of inspiring water.
Around the curve of Morecambe Bay and south of Lancaster is the village of Condor Green. Here is a wonderful creek that is deep enough to float sizeable boats, and navigate them – carefully – into the sea near Lancaster’s old port at Glasson Dock. It’s a less expensive option than a mooring inside the sheltered waters of the dock. It’s also perilous, and a handful of boats have been wrecked by storms over the years.
I remember when, as a young boy, my parents stopped the car so that I could take a look at this delight. Years later, I returned on my first vehicle – a Ducati motorcycle – and simply sat by the creek, watching the tide fill its contours. It’s a vivid and very happy memory; and one that still makes me smile with its well remembered sense of freedom and discovery.
To close… The photo, above, was taken inside the basin at Glasson Dock – beyond the reach of the nearby creek. It shows that even sheltered waters are not safe. The boat – whose remains now lie beneath the surface – was wrecked in a storm, but towed to the side of the dock, where it gradually rotted to its present state. Ironically, the only visible remnant is the ship’s wheel, occupied in my shot, by a family of ducks.
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Like many who write on psychological or spiritual topics, I often wonder about the nature of time. Does it have an existence or is it solely a product of our interaction with a world that we consider to be ‘out-there’?
Out-there is an interesting notion, for it immediately creates an ‘in-here’. What is the content of that? Does it have any substance?
One of my favourite philosophers is Gurdjieff, the creator of what became known as the Fourth Way system in the first half of the last century. He famously said that ‘time is breath’; an idea that, initially at least, sounds as interesting as it is preposterous. Most of Gurdjieff’s preposterous ideas turn out to be living gateways to a mental ‘crisis’ that precipitates a different way of thinking – which in turn creates a new way of living. His is not a way to toy with, unless you want to mess with the Universe… and the Universe just adores people who want to mess with the ‘normal’ view of it…and I mean that in a positive way.
Let’s go back to ‘time is breath’. Breathing is life, in the sense that we cannot sustain our organic life – and hence the consciousness that is built upon it – without its continuous cycle. Second after second, we live in a rhythm of in and out breath, vitally restoring our body with the oxygen and other chemicals that exist in the air. We can live for about a month without food, a few days without water, and a few minutes without air. We can safely assume this frequency is a sign of air’s importance to our ‘mechanism’, and, above that level of biology, to our sub-consciousness (unseen guardian of our biology) and our consciousness, a key part of which is the sense of ‘me’; an all-important identity.
The Buddha taught that the stuff of the world involved us to such a degree that we live in a constant state of interruption and confusion. We have a conviction that there is a ‘me’ experiencing this, rather than that there is just experiencing. He considered the most powerful method to combat this was to focus on the breath.
We’ve all read this so many times that it has lost what should be a deep connection to our existence. We have become ‘dull with the news of it’, but we shouldn’t. If we truly wish to create a wonderful doorway to the new in our lives we need to revisit and embed this into our waking consciousness – thereby altering our sense of ‘me’.
One of the sites I follow is Dhamma Footsteps, hosted by a man whose pen-name is Tiramit. He’s been running a series of posts to take us progressively deeper into a style of Buddhist meditation. It’s a gift from him, you don’t need to be a Buddhist.
The progressive instructions have been aimed at establishing a calming and restoring state of meditation via a focus on our breathing. This was the Buddha’s favourite and most powerful method of breaking the chain of events that make up our awareness of daily existence. When that link is broken, we automatically come back into contact with what is truly ‘us’. It’s that simple: when we stop one, we enter the other.
This ‘other world’ is calm, gentle and warm… and filled with love for us. There are two ‘fools’ involved in this deepening perception. As the Beatles sang; one of them sees the Sun going down, the other sees the world going round.
The ‘sun-down’ fool is the ‘me’. His or her daily life dominates the consciousness, which is so full of reactive stuff that it shuts out the greater and more real vision of the other fool; the one who sees – and feels – the world spinning round.
The ‘world spinning round’ fool is the ‘I’ or Self. We have to keep a clear head, here, because the word ‘self’ is traditionally associated with the reactive self – the ‘me’ in the paragraph above. Buddhist meditation is concerned with the eventual revelation that this ‘me’ has no substance; that it is simply a set of associated reactions to the world’s events. We don’t even see that world clearly, because we see through lenses that are built from our past, making it quicker to superficially examine what’s in front of us, much like machine learning, or AI does.
Working with the breath can be one of the keys to peacefully breaking this habitual existence; and letting in the light of new living, where we raise our heads in delighted surprise at the rush of a higher form of ‘oxygen’.
The technique, as given by Tiramit, is really very simple…
We find a quiet spot, ideally somewhere where our back can be vertical-ish. I have found it ideal to begin by a rush of consciousness from my feet to the top of my head, like a wave. To begin, this may be faint to nothing, but a surprisingly short period of practice will engender a gentle ‘wave of thrill’, as our mind – already freed from routine cares – energises the intent.
Before focussing on the breath itself, we have to prepare an inner place of working. With the same kind of ‘wave of thrill’ we take the whole of our past, and render it irrelevant. Just like that… What we are doing owes nothing to that past, no matter how much the ‘me’ protests. The ‘me’ has no place at this table…
Next, we free ourselves of the future in the same way. If the future had any importance in this work, it would already be here. Yes, that’s right, meditation is all about involvement with the now… and only the now. It’s another revelatory concept that has been dulled with repetition, but its effects are instantly life-changing.
Gently close down any thoughts that don’t support this now place of working. Feel yourself to be a bright bubble of essential existence – not the reactive soul that wanders the troubling world of the day.
Now, into this bubble of essential experience, bring one thing: the awareness of the cycle of your breathing. Don’t try to alter it – simply listen to what its doing. We could stop here, and, if you did this several times a day, this would change you and your world.
But we can go deeper… As we engage with the breath, passively, not trying to change, it.. it changes itself, intelligently watching us as we watch it. The results of that cannot really be described, they have to be experienced… and it’s very simple to do that. We just have to work at it a few times until we have the basis of a fool’s habit – one that will serve us for the rest of our lives.
Gurdjieff’s ‘time is breath’ statement now makes more sense. Time is involvement with the true unfolding of the world, seen from that loving and calm perspective – which is freed from past and future.
In that gentle and powerful place, we can choose which fool we wish to live as… and take the results of that into our daily lives.
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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The Quiet Places
by Steve Tanham
They live concealed within the ebb and flow of life recycled. That very nature is why they are so hard to find. The extraordinary hidden in plain sight…
Their camouflage is the blindness caused by seeing what we saw, before, and not what is before us.
A spell so strong, it takes our will to see it, differently. To reach into what seems to be ‘it’, but is really ‘me’; a world painted on our eyes by our mind.
From memory, of course; that pale repeater and drain of the new.
Close your eyes, facing the unfolding, and will to see what was not seen before, knowing it can never been seen again beyond this.
But this once…
Not recycled: lived again, but lived anew. And then the act of seeing the quiet places will become a song whose chords that stroke the soul will never be repeated in that symphony of delight that is our new-seen life.
Only the see-er changes. The rest was always there.
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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I suppose the surprise arrival – by post – of a batch of smoked kippers that morning should have triggered the gene in me that I’ve named: How Strange!
I’ve mentioned our love of a kipper breakfast in previous posts. We had recently returned from our annual November visit to see our good friends on the Isle of Man. Part of our trip had been a visit to a pub that offered a ‘kipper tea’, something we all enjoyed. Kippers are polarising; you either love them or hate them. Our friends had decided to follow up our visit by sending us a fresh kipper package from the island – a lovely and much appreciated gesture.
We put most of them in the freezer, but kept out two pairs for later. They made the basis of our evening meal. Then we hunkered down from the gathering winds of storm Arwen… which had begun to throw things around the garden…
I had spent the whole day raking up the last of the leaves on the lawns. Our house has numerous large trees on two sides of the property. It’s strenuous exercise and I was tired by the end of it. The compost heap had swelled to three times its normal size – though that would soon reduce, as the leaves compressed under the weight of two cores from an ash tree we had to have felled due to Ash die-back – that horrible disease that is decimating the ash population in the UK. At least you can use ‘green’ ash in domestic log-burner. The log store at the back of the property was full to overflowing with top-quality fresh wood, and we had selected some to burn that night, by way of a distraction from the coming gales.
Replete with our kipper meal, we settled in front of the freshly-lit wood fire and watched the ash burn brightly and fiercely, filling the living room with a warm glow and the roar of the flames.
With a log-burner, once the fire ‘takes’, you reduce the intake of air so that the wood lasts longer. It was then that things began to go wrong…
No sooner had I done this, than the wind outside began to howl and we noticed that smoke was escaping around the door of the log burner. I jumped up and opened the fire, checking for splinters of wood that were possibly preventing it sealing. Nothing amiss, I closed it again.
This time it was worse. The howling outside increased, but it was essential to open the patio doors to clear the smoke that was now filling the living room to a dangerous degree. Still coughing, I stood outside and just about held the patio door open while the gale tried to wrench off my right arm.
Still the smoke billowed from the log-burner… I knew that something else had to done, or we would shortly be dying of smoke inhalation. I ran upstairs to open the door to the small balcony. Nothing I did seemed to generate enough through-draft to clear the air. It was while upstairs that I realised that this was due to the gale creating a freak down-draught in the dedicated chimney stack for the log-burner. By moderating the fire in reducing the air intake, I had allowed the atmospheric chaos to overcome the established flow of the rising heat.
We were close to calling the Fire Brigade when I persuaded Bernie that we should try one more thing: to remove the burning timbers from the fire and douse them! I had a pair of long fire-proof gloves; not cheap, but worth their weight in gold in an emergency.
Three minutes later, I was reaching into the flames and extracting the burning logs of wood, dumping them into a brass bucket filled with water, then carrying out their hissing remains and leaving them on the wet grass. No-one was injured, or even scalded, but it was a surreal few minutes…
We still had a house full of smoke, but at least it was no longer being added to. I had a hunch that height was the issue. If I could open the right high window, then a sufficient draught would ensue – and slowly clear the smoke.
My study is just about the highest point of the house, and it has a Velux window that rotates vertically. Standing on my chair I opened it to its full extent – and was nearly spun off the chair as a huge up-draught began, dragging the smoke from the rest of the open-plan core of the house.
It took about an hour to clear the air, though the smell of smoke was to last for several days. Thankfully, apart from coughing a lot, neither of us suffered any injury, and the pets seemed unmarked by the episode. The whole thing lasted no longer than half an hour, though it seemed like a lot longer at the time. The problem has not recurred, despite residual high winds after the gales had passed.
The humour of smoked humans; on top of the receipt of the kippers, was not lost on us…
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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In part one, we travelled through a world of autumn’s dying colours to consider the continuing life beneath the earth – the world of the root. There is an inevitable sense of loss as the warm months fade away, leaving us with memories of pale blue skies and the perfume of the summer days… and the fullness of life.
We are presented with a ‘bare’ world, where only evergreens break up the grey and ochre of the wet and frozen world of winter. But we know that life continues beneath the damp earth, indeed, we can say that the very foundation of upper (or outer) life is approaching a subterranean frenzy. The beneath is also the world of the ‘blind creatures’ such as worms, whose role is essential to the quality of the soil and hence the continuation of life on earth.
We are not present to this world, though it supports our life. Even if we could see into it, our normal range of bright and varied colours would not be present. It’s a good illustration of how fundamental colour is to our sensory existence. We associate colour with life and health; we say ‘you’re looking’ pale. And mean that someone is ‘off-colour’.
Much of our existence is based on seeing the colour of things; so, let’s have a closer look at colour. We all remember the school experiment where a beam of light is separated into the colours of the rainbow as in the image, above.
We can probably name the colours if this rainbow, and in right order, but, if asked to name the single colour from which they came, we would reply, ‘white light’. If, at night, we employ a domestic torch and point it at an object, we would see its features and colours highlighted in the circular beam. But we may not stop to consider what colour that beam is before it reaches the objects.
If we stand back, holding out our torch arm, what we see is a beam of light made slightly visible by tiny dust particles in the air. In all other respects, the beam is colourless and invisible. It is not white light, it is bright light. Light is visible to our eyes as brightness, but only visible as colour when it reflects off something else.
The property of colour is a puzzle for science. It can be described, mathematically, as a vibration – a wavelength and frequency; and even a particle – but its experience in consciousness cannot be described in scientific terms. To our minds, the idea of a warming red is the simplest of experiences but our consciousness of it remains outside of the descriptive powers of science. It is as though its realm existed before science… and has never been subject to the powers of number as quantity.
The fact that light has no colour except ‘bright’ might make us think that nature has set a trail for us to follow? When bright light strikes an object, its ‘rays’ are reflected. Used to our scientific thinking, we assume this reflection is to ‘everywhere’ within range of the object; but the experience of colour is present only in ‘your’ eyes – and each human has a unique experience of their own colours.
The meanings of the word ‘reflection’ are many. The mechanism for colour’s perception is only one of them. Psychologists have long detailed the mechanism of ‘projection’, which externalises powerful aspects of our conscious and unconscious natures onto other people. The implications of this are seldom discussed as part of everyday life, and yet they are as important as the fact that the traffic-light ahead has just changed to red.
Everywhere, there is reflection. In the summer, we drink the colours, yet we are the source of their meaning and effect, the sea in which they generate their emotive results. In the winter, we are robbed of this brightness… perhaps to make us look harder?
The winter takes away much of nature’s outer colours. The solar brightness fades and we are left to explore the life that is ‘dormant’ yet busily unseen beneath the earth. It was no accident that many of the ancient religions and mystical schools had their most potent rituals in association with this period approaching the shortest day and longest night. Sunrise on the winter solstice was considered one of the most powerful times of the year. Its effects were on the natural world, most certainly, but also on the inner person, the one from whom the ‘colour of life’ originated. Infused, he or she would be filled with power seeded in the deepest winter. Thus, the priest earned his influence and his respect.
Just as the summer solstice celebrated and enjoined the powers of the full visible outer cycle of nature, so too did the winter solstice celebrate the height of the invisible powers of nature at work in that which is fundamental to – and the basis of – the inner life.
It’s not obvious, but we have the deep, ancestral and unforgotten ability to attune with this profound time in the spiritual calendar. All we need to do is open different eyes to the Sun behind the Sun.
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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I walk a lot. it’s a necessity when you have a collie. Fortunately, we live in the country and the scenic walks begin through the gate in the bottom of the garden…
There are lots of variations, but the standard walk, when we’ve only got an hour or so, is to follow the line of the old canal for about twenty minutes, then take a sharp left, which then turns sharp-left down across farmland and into a ‘tunnel of a path’ that leads to the meadows beside the River Kent.
The walk begins by crossing two fields which usually house local sheep. Here we encounter the first of the ‘bridges to nowhere’, as we have named them. It seems to be a popular nickname, as we have noticed others using it… The original land has been bought by householders or farmers. It can be incorporated into agricultural land or landscaped as part of a garden, but may not be built on, as it retains the full rights of a a ‘navigation’: and basis of public transport which is protected by old parliamentary laws.
The walk then enters a small forest, again following the line of the old canal. Here the old towpath is currently blocked by three large fallen trees which will probably take months to chainsaw into pieces and clear.
The stile, above, marks the end of the forest. Still on the old canal towpath, we approach the last of the ‘bridges to nowhere’.
Here, we leave the canal path and descend into the adjacent sheep-meadow. At a gate, this narrows into a track that skirts a second forest before turning sharp left and descending to the meadows that borders the River Kent.
At the end of this descent is a final gate. Through this we reach the edge of the River Kent, one of Cumbria’s rivers that flow out into the northern side of the vast Morecambe Bay.
I decided, long ago and in one of those philosophical yet anarchic moments, that certain sections of a walk tend towards a ‘particular kind of emotional feeling’. It’s a bit like ‘strange attractors’ in Chaos Theory – a comment I will explain further in a coming blog, but, for now, let me illustrate the idea by saying that every time I have passed this beautiful section of the river, I have had a peaceful feeling, but one that has a deeper component.
At first this was a vague feeling, but in the past two years it has resolved itself into an warm and peaceful feeling of ‘acceptance’. The idea of acceptance will be familiar to those whose life-journeys have taken them into anything mystical. The ‘doctrine’ of acceptance says that to resist what ‘already is’ is futile. We can spend years resisting something that we despise, but we cannot refute that ‘it is’. By the time we have accumulated enough energy to truly resist, the ‘battle’ has moved on to something else; which in turn we may view as good versus bad.
As the years pass, I have realised that much, if not all, of this is in the head of the individual. The real battles are those that take place in our consciousness… and heart.
More of this in posts to come. Hopefully, these images have illustrated the walk to the River Kent’s ‘watery curve of acceptance’, allowing me to further discuss this at another time.
Perhaps you, too, have a favourite place that has, over a period of time, introduced a deeper understanding of a characteristic of reality that has become precious to you?
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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It sat there… peaceful; serene, even. The tide came in, washed off the loose, blown sand, then went back out. Pretty much like any other day, really. But the rock knew this day was different…
The young boy came over and stared at the rock, as he had done most days since that first day – the day they had started speaking to each other.
“Can we talk?” asked the young boy, his golden curls flying in the summer breeze. The plastic bucket and spade dangled from the fingers of one hand, the spade about to fall out and onto the sand.
“I’ve got to go away,” said the boy. “Auntie Sarah is better now and mum says we have to catch the train and go home.” He shuffled his bare feet on the sand, digging with his toes.
The rock said nothing. But it did look sad.
“You could come with me?” ventured the boy, but without much hope. “ I suppose you’re a bit big for my small suitcase…?”
The rock nodded, thinking how much of its shape was below the sand, even below the ever-refreshed water pool in which he lived, like a king with a moat. No castle, just a moat… unless he was the castle. He often wondered about that. A friend rock had said that was an existential issue that he shouldn’t lose any sleep over.
“There’s always a way,” said the rock, sensing the boy’s sadness. “You just have to hang on till everything else falls off… then it’s there; what you wanted.”
The boy thought about it, then walked all the way round the rock, as if studying it. He said nothing, but waved his spade as he trundled back up the beach towards his mother.
——
“Bloody miracle – a train on time…” said Dad, fifteen minutes late to the station at Fernmoor. “Cat got yer tongue?” he said, half turning to the back seat. Roger continued his silence… not even gazing out of the window, just staring straight ahead, letting it all fall off. Mum said nothing, too. But for other reasons…
Once home, the boy ran through the house and made straight for the back door, not even looking at the pile of accumulated comics sitting on the toy box.
“He’s keen!” Muttered Dad, walking to the window to follow the flight of his son. Then he froze, drumming his fingers on the cold glass.
“Cynthia!” he said “Is that your giant rock sitting in the garden pond!”
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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The other side of colour (1 of 2)
by Steve Tanham
It’s a poignant time of year…
I love colour. I’m sure we all do. It’s difficult to say farewell to the mellow flashes of autumn; to know that it will be four months – one third of a year – before renewed colour returns in full to this beautiful land.
It’s important to make the best of the last; to have the camera always ready for those few instances of brightness holding out against the rising trails of mud.
I’m a bit sentimental about this. I always say a silent thank you to the traces of colour that retain their brightness against the brown and grey. Sometimes, I find a single object worthy of more detailed study and bend or kneel to take a close-up shot of it. My favourites are ‘lines of things’ that draw the eye into the distance.
There are compensations… The blue skies of the winter are more intense than the summer’s softness and pastels. Best in the early morning, as below, when the sun’s capture of the leafless and bare branches of a tree contrasts in a deeply poetic way with the frosted darkness below it.
Buildings, too, respond to the stark contracts between winter’s light and shadow. The days are short, but the energy in the sky often makes up for this with intensity.
It’s important that we find a way to react to the darkness, loss of colour, and short days in a positive way. That seems a tall order… but perhaps the winter has a story of parallel life to that of the spring and summer: one that is the key to our own psychological well-being… and one that may even have significant signposts to our spiritual development.
The ancient world had a different perspective on the ending of colour and the decay of ‘life’s bodies’. In this view, the processes had not stopped, but had removed themselves to the space beneath the ground, where, protected deep in soil, their activity intensified. The roots of organic forms are, literally, the foundations of life. In this view, life does not begin in the spring; it begins at the winter solstice deep in the warm and nurturing earth where there is protection from the bare, saturated and freezing surface of the earth that bears the full force of the winter… As do we.
We live on that bare and freezing surface, but we have been gifted intelligence to mitigate the hardship. We also have eyes to see the whole process of the four seasons, each with its own definite purpose and ‘essence’. Such a quaternity features strongly at the heart of many of the ancient myths and religions.
I cannot follow the underground life with my camera. And even if I could that life would look quite alien and colourless, just as our organs would if we saw them outside the body. Their beauty is in the function they perform for the whole rather than the dance of colour in the visible world.
One day, our own physical organs will falter, then fail. Whether we see this as death or an embrace of unity depends on whether we can find a parallel in ourselves.
Perhaps our task is to see the cycle of four seasons as a whole, taking rest when we can in the darker months and letting a different, more contemplative part of us delve into the mysteries of life and possibly-not-death. The seasons are very present to us – they directly affect our lives and can be a threat to our survival. But to the globe of the planet, what is happening in the northern hemisphere is mirrored and reversed in the south. It is always summer, somewhere, as it is always winter, somewhere else.
Everything is in balance, as long as we see the whole of the cycle. As long as we raise our eyes to see.
To the ancients, the turning points were the four dates of solstice and equinox. The equinox gives us equal night and day, but travelling in different directions with respect to maximum light or darkness. The solistice gives us those maxima. Their significance was so great that the Christian church layered its own religious festivals over them, rather than trying to replace their historical and cultural presence. Its seldom remarked on that Jesus the Christ was born in mid-winter, at the time of the deepest darkness, rather than in the spring.
How we relate our lives and selves to nature’s entire cycle of life and death may be one of the key questions of our lives.
Our individual lives, like the beautiful leaves, dance in the sun until their term ends. We have been gifted the use of our intelligence to combat the cold and dark so that we may remain fully conscious during the winter. Our struggle – our challenge – is to locate that part of us that develops as invisible light in the darkness, and thus reconcile life and death to something far more embracing in the long life of this beautiful planet… and beyond to the Sun, which sacrifices all its life to the support of its children in all their forms.
With energy, everything else happens. With gravity and the radiation of light, the Sun provides stability and the basis of life within the Earth as well as just on its surface. Beyond the ‘big bang’ everything depended on the blue giant suns, whose dying nuclear furnaces gave us the very chemistry of life, itself.
Could we ask for a clearer lesson, or a more noble purpose, than to mirror this in our own way?
In part two, we will examine and, possibly, challenge some of the accepted ideas about colour; with the possibility that this familiar quality of life, most poignant in the autumn, will enable us to find a deeper understanding of life and death.
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Who knows which way-less-taken lies beyond the stile
The openings of now, unnumbered, mapped in dew
Unfamiliar potentials – whispers in the icy wind,
Cry ‘untrod, unheard’ alone in wandering air
Yet one of them, clear with rising light, will claim the right
To be tomorrow…
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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It’s not, of course. There is just a man, there is a bird and a mysteriously lit stretch of sand.
But the man – dark coat, collar up, intent on his descent… is there a gun in that pocket? Surely, he has no reason to be going down to the beach in what is clearly an early winter evening lit by the moon hiding behind the clouds.
And the bird: a very dark creature, unusually solitary. Surely not linked to the man… or his actions, though its presence has assumed cinematic intentions because of the mirroring of the direction of gull and man.
The bird’s not tame… couldn’t be, could it? A dark-coated man hurrying down mysteriously lit steps to a brightened beach… guided by a dark bird?
And then the strange band of light affecting both the rocks and the promenade buildings, beyond. Do we speculate a boat with a searchlight? Possibly a police boat chasing the man and his seagull accomplice? And have we caught the scene at the moment of his arrest? What a useful photo that would be for the papers the morning after!
And that’s the difference between the film director and the photographer. The director would be compelled – at least in some small measure – to explain what’s really going on…
Whereas the photographer knows he has only a few such moments of captured, extraordinary reality, and why spoil it when so much fun could be had by not knowing?
©Stephen Tanham 2021
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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