Tag: Tides

Cycles

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I think women have a privilege and a curse, of being connected to the moon. Our own internal tides take over our bodies and minds, this can either cause symphony or discord. Women ‘s cycles will synchronise with one another, without them even realising it. There is so much more going on than we can know.

The great privilege is that women have the capacity to bring forth life from this connection. I wonder whether humans would exist at all if it weren’t for the moon that has imposed its cycles upon us, and how evolution would have been completely different.

This doodle is a sort of celebration of the feminine. The woman is offering herself openly to the moon and they exchange their energy. Or that’s the idea of it.

Change, or Progress?

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Consider at first, that a place exists, and it is simply a crossing of roads, a meeting point – almost everywhere started as a sort of trading point. So cities were built around human movement and activity, not around buildings. I know that sounds obvious, but maybe it isn’t.

Almost every western city has experienced some degree of ‘slum clearance’, clearance for roads or infrastructure, demolition for new ‘better’ development. I find it fascinating looking at old maps and trying to understand the story of a settlement’s or city’s morphological development.

Looking at older, medieval developments, there was often a high density of development centred around an open square or series of squares, with the major civic functions located there. Buildings were built to suit the topography and local climate, made from locally available materials. Of course they were different times and defence also features heavily in the plans; city walls, towers and the like. I’m not trying to be nostalgic about this, but I think maybe we have lost this art of developing cities, of shaping them for what we actually need.

I do worry about how, now more than ever with fuel and technology, we can enable change upon the world. From an architect’s perspective, I think about all the, for want of better words, ‘social experiments’ imposed on people, particularly in the 60s/70s, where large areas were cleared for ‘better, modern housing’ and motorways. Of course the ideas for change have always been about to some extent, but the rate of change of our urban, suburban, and even rural areas is accelerating. Hence, rightly so, we have a planning and building control system, though it doesn’t always stop poor development decisions slipping through the net.

I think this also has parallels in other areas of life, and the world we shape around us. We are too ready to make change without identifying first whether it is actually progress.

This post suggests the formation of a city; initially around a river and natural meeting point; trading posts develop, then people settle nearby to support (and benefit from) the activity; sufficient development occurs to justify fortification; expansion occurs with development becoming denser. The finished map might place us in medieval times. The next stage might be Enlightenment clearance, or perhaps an invasion from the south…

Breath

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I spent some time with a friend today, someone who is very advanced in their yoga practice. I’ve admittedly not been doing any for some time, and many of the things she was saying resonated with me – this idea of pushing and pulling, giving and taking back, breathing in and breathing out…a flow of energy through your body. In that moment you almost feel like the ground beneath your feet is an extension of your body, as if there is no longer any boundary to your physical self.

Funnily enough, it kind of reflects what I was thinking about with cubism in the last post. The difference is, the breath carries that energy, from the earth through your centre and out again. There is a wonderful feeling of connection. So I am reminded to try bring some yoga practice back into my daily routine.

I’ve tried to capture this feeling and energy in this image. Inevitably, it is a dynamic sketch, showing a static heaviness in the resting arms, moving to reach up to the sky.

Moods

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Along the lines of the tidal theme, I’ve been thinking how there is an apparent tendency for the most charismatic, entertaining, people to have a ‘dark side.’ I have speculated that some people must experience a greater spectrum of emotions than others. Only those who feel unadulterated happiness can also pull themselves into the depths of despair. Is that valid? Or maybe we are all somewhere along this spectrum by the nature of our own personalities…maybe life events can open new parts of the spectrum to us. Maybe the highs do not mirror the lows.

I’m not sure how much control anyone really has over any of this. Depression is an incredibly difficult thing to comprehend, and so many people suffer from it, it’s such a wasted energy. I myself get bouts of anxiety, possibly conditioned, possibly hereditary (or both). I’m also aware of how much this inhibits me, but I can’t seem to do much about it, it’s incredibly frustrating. I am resolved that screens and false worlds have a lot to do with the apparent ‘modern’ epidemic of depression, however, I also think it is impossible to know what the real historic picture is: the stigma surrounding depression, and it’s many forms, has only recently started to erode.

This image is a bit of a play on Picasso’s portraits. I’ve always enjoyed these and his studies in Cubism in particular. What I specifically like is that he seems to blur the definition between the subject and their surroundings, sort of melting them into the space. He captures sometimes several perspectives to build up a more complete representation. This is very much just a silly doodle – I’ve tried to show the ‘two sides’ of the character as simply happy/sad.

Harvest

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Seasons and growth. At this time of year nature is at it’s most bountiful. The seasons are like tides; cycling, sometimes providing bumper harvests, other years producing less.

When you’re not directly involved in food production, you become divided from this seasonal effect. We ship food from across the globe and eat many of the same foods year round. It’s easy to forget the benefits of seasonal variation, and the awesome fact that many foods appear locally, just as they are needed, to supplement our diet with the vitamins and minerals required, particularly to see us through the winter.

So what are we putting in our mouths? Probably the same stuff over the course of the year. Many successful agricultural cultivars have been developed with much lower nutritional value than their wild cousins, and harvested before reaching full or even semi-ripeness. Animals and fish are often farmed intensively, yielding similar results. It’s easy to conclude that we may be building up too much of some content and be permanently depleting ourselves of others. I genuinely think this must be why many of us in modern society never feel satiated and overeat.

According to environmentalists, it is consumers that have to drive the change in demand to supermarkets. But this is a choice for the privileged few. Most of us just have to feed ourselves with the little money we have. And until there is more locally produced, seasonal food readily available, we will choose the cheaper packet of food, somehow still cheaper after being shipped and frozen, from the other side of the globe.

So food production is something that is behind-the-scenes for most of us. But the status-quo cannot continue. Agriculture has turned into this modern monster and it is causing huge problems around the world – floods and droughts, mega pests and diseases, soil depletion, deforestation, and we are completely, utterly at the mercy of this process…we cannot survive without food, and farmers cannot survive without being paid.

I don’t know how to solve this problem. At a local level, it means trying to support producers that practice good land management and animal husbandry wherever possible, eat seasonally, forage where possible (or learn to), and learn to grow some food ourselves. Above this, governments have to support change and, in particular, subsidise the better farming practices, and possibly even consumer choices in supermarkets.

What’s happening in the world now has demonstrated that we need to become more resilient and self-reliant in our food production, among (many) other things.

Riding the wave

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Today I’ve been appreciating things. The sun was golden this evening and, at this time of year, the warm, humid air late in the day brings all the perfume out of the hedges. The air is heavy with the scents of honeysuckle, late meadowsweet, bracken and brambles. There are times when I really do feel this energy, and I feel thankful – to who or what I don’t know!

I have also been thinking about times in life when I have felt myself ‘riding a wave’. For a moment this evening it felt a little like it. I think great musicians and artists can capture and convey this, but I’m sure just about anybody, truly passionate about what they are doing, can also ‘ride a wave’. It’s those times in life, those times when everything appears to stack in your favour, that we can capture this feeling.

I think I have felt this most strongly with some friendships, when I first met my husband, art I have painted (not recently, I’m afraid!), maybe even one of the last projects I completed! But I’ve never quite ridden a monster wave like I imagine some musicians do. I grew up trying to learn instruments, and loving singing (I still do, though I know I’m no good at it!) but no matter how hard I tried, I knew I didn’t have ‘it’. That flow. You know when someone has it. It normally results in goosebumps.

I’ve written this whole post playing all the music from the original Fantasia (c1940) in my head.

Vessels

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After yesterday’s venture round the rabbit hole, I decided I need to get back on the proverbial ‘ship’. That ship is our Earth, the world around us that we can see and understand. It is bearing us safely through this spaghetti web of space and time; it is the point of relativity relevant to our existence.

I was thinking about vessels in this way and started to also think about how our bodies are vessels too; but they go further than this – obviously, we interact with the world around us through all of our senses. We navigate this world and all its offerings around us. But we are not captains of this ship.

Considering the planet in this way does somehow force more urgency on the issue of looking after it – we don’t have lifeboats. I’m not talking merely about carbon or energy conservation…but looking after ecosystems, the way we produce food, plunder the earth, treat each other, live together. As a society we have developed such an ingrained wastefulness of consumer culture that mega industries have risen and developed their business models upon. Almost all of us have become dependant upon it. Some major, very real and scary shifts will have to happen at some point.

Today’s entry is an amphora, an ancient form of vessel. I like the connotations with the vessels used by pharaohs to transport them to the afterlife; their tombs and canoptic jars. The vessel is indeed a sacred thing, and nothing more sacred than our very own Earth.

Vectors

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A quantity of both magnitude and direction. I remember first being introduced to the concept; realising that direction is merely a changing position relative to another point. But in our expanding universe, spiralling galaxy, orbiting earth and rotating planet, wouldn’t it be fascinating to trace the actual path of your own body through space, for instance, in your own lifetime? Or the earths, or our sun, through its lifetime? Again – this path, its distance, its speed, could only be presented as a comparison to a ‘fixed’, but, actually also, moving point! Nothing is static, except maybe the centre of the universe…even then some scientists suggest (I’m not sure how far the theory is proved) that there is a multiverse. I would hazard a guess that our own expanding universe is also not static stacked against these other universes.

When Copernicus developed the heliocentric model that Galileo famously later fought to prove through his Dialogue of the Two Chief World Systems, the theory was ridiculed by Galileo’s fictional character, Simplicio, for suggesting that we could be travelling at such a speed without being swept off the face of the Earth. Galileo’s opposing, Copernican-theory supporting character, Salviati, suggested the analogy of a ship – making the first argument for relativity. Of course, day to day, we have to stop thinking in these crazy spiral upon spiral upon spiral terms and just make it from here to there. It’s just not useful. The scale of space and time makes the ‘real’ (spiralling etc) movement irrelevant to us.

Or does it? Considering the more developed, modern theory of relativity, anything travelling faster than the speed of light starts to travel back in time. If you’re looking for a non-scientific explanation of this, read (or try to read, though warning: it may make you lose your mind) Shrodinger’s Cat for an expanded, not-too-sciencey explanation. When we consider that speed is relative, what does this actual mean!!!? We are already (not even theoretically!) moving faster than the speed of light, compared to something else. The light you shine from your torch…are you not moving back in time compared to it when you shine it away from you? How might the light, from its own position, perceive you?

So what am I getting at with this entry? Don’t ask. I don’t even know! Maybe it’s just that, again, vectors, distance, speed….even our own ‘physical’ existence…these are all constructs we have created and simplified for our selves to understand and use within our own context and existence. Who knows what it actually looks like from any other multitude of angles…

Corrections (thanks to my brilliant uncle):

The discussion referred to in Galileo’s Dialogue is the trialogue between three fictional characters arguing the pros and cons of a, strictly hypothetical (!), theoretical heliocentric system vs the Ptolemaic (Geo-centric) system.

Shrodingers Cat – I’m referring to a book I read, far too many years ago, that is actually about quantum physics more generally, presented in layman’s terms: In Search of Shrodinger’s Cat by John Gribbin

Inevitability

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This grim (or trying to be grim) image is attempting to depict the ‘Wigtown Martyrs’. I’ll not pretend to know my history, because although I am fascinated by the human story, I struggle to remember the huge complexity of it. The martyrs were two women, both called Margaret, prosecuted as Covenanters in the late 17th Century. Their sentence was to be drowned at stake on the incoming tide, with the older, 63 year old, Margaret staked deeper so as to give the other Margaret, a teenager, a chance to renounce in time. This ploy was to no avail. It’s a very gruesome prospect, and makes me think how sometimes the suspense or expectation can be much, much worse than the actual event. To prolong a death sentence in such a way is such cruelty, it is hard to comprehend. I’m aware of far more gory practices having taken place, but this might be the worse sentence psychologically.

So, I have been thinking about inevitability. It’s a difficult one because, we all know, everything passes. And yet, there is nothing we can do about it. It is utterly beyond our control, and yet that suspense looms and we do whatever in our power to stop it. Whatever it is, the tide will come. The only way to find peace with this is to learn acceptance.