Available Light

A couple of weeks back I set myself the task of photographing a bumblebee in flight. This was not because I was particularly interested in bumblebees, but because the task was difficult. Bumblebees move quickly and erratically, they are hairy and thus have ill defined edges, they are striped which makes them contrasty and thus photographically challenging and their faces have black features on a black background, ditto. Good photography is about technique more than it is about gear, and I wanted to improve my technique. Especially, I wanted to try my hand at macrophotography, which I haven't done much of before. So, I've spent a lot of time watching bumblebees through my viewfinder. I generally take a few shots, maybe 100 or so. Then I look at them on the camera's LCD screen and delete those with obvious and fatal flaws (bad focus and motion blur mostly)which is usually about 30% of them. Next I load them onto my computer and give them a second, more critical cull, del...

The sheer size and scope of Iain McGilchrist's 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World make it a challenging read. The general path for academics is to write more and more about less and less, but McGilchrist's 534 pages range over a vast smorgasbord of subject matter including, amongst others,  brain science, philosophy, linguistics, the development of language, art history, sociology and history. The challenge is one that it is rewarding to accept because despite the volume of material presented the book is clearly and accessibly written and his central thesis is intriguing. This is a book which explains so much; which puts so much into perspective.  I read this with yellow highlighter in hand as every chapter, and sometimes every page contained learnings I wished to return to. In terms of my own understanding this is probably the most influential book I've read in the last decade. McGilchrist's theory begins...

I don't like giving photos twee titles. In fact I hate that practice with a passion. But, against all my instincts I call this Birds with Truck, because although the truck is obvious the birds aren't and I want people to see them . This is a crop from a bigger picture. When I took it with a long lens I was  interested in the sky and I didn't notice the birds. Turns out they are the best bit . And none of this has anything in the slightest to do with what follows Sunday. I was up at dawn and got my duty to God and his church finished early. Other people in our house, having just come back from Christchurch late last night, rose later. They were wandering round in dressing gowns and making coffee, so I took Noah outside. I let him go where he wanted and do whatever he wished while I played guardian angel. He kicked a ball, pushed his car around for a bit and then made a beeline for the gate while I hovered. "Door, door," he said, rattling the gate. His intenti...

I drove home late this afternoon with a rainbow spanning the whole sky, moving ahead of me the way rainbows do. I stopped about a kilometre from home to take a picture and thought of a couple of times recently when I have heard the rainbow used as a metaphor for the way consciousness and reality interact.   For example, " For the rainbow experience to happen we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them… But unless someone is present at a particular point no colored arch can appear. The rainbow is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole and separate in the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated from what is perceived (the view held by the ‘internalists’ who account for the majority of neuroscientists); rather, consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrop...

It's hard to know how to categorise this book, but I'll take Christof Koch at his word and describe it as a confession, after the style of St. Augustine. It is written, seemingly for a number of purposes: to outline the discoveries Koch and his colleague Francis Crick have made regarding consciousness and its relationship to the biology of the brain; to pay tribute to Crick and work through Koch's grief at his death; to outline Koch's spiritual journey as he moved from childhood Roman Catholicism to a sort of Deism which seems to lean fairly heavily on Buddhism; to work through the issues surrounding a particular moral dilemma encountered  in middle age. Because of its variety of purposes the book is quite uneven and always surprising, and that is a good thing, on both counts. I bought it because I wanted to know about the neurobiology stuff. Here was one of the world's leading scientists in the field of consciousness setting out his insights in a form accessib...

In a previous life, when I was Vicar of Sumner in the Diocese of Christchurch, I went to an excellent ministry school at which somebody or other spoke about time management. At the time I was having problems fitting the required amount of activities into the requisite number of hours, so I paid close attention and did what the speaker suggested. I began keeping a log of how I spent my time, making notes every 15 minutes or so during the day recording as honestly as I could where the minutes went and I was horrified. At the end of a couple of weeks the number of hours I had spent doing nothing in particular, sitting, staring vacantly into space was truly astounding. No wonder I couldn't get everything done! Astonishing amounts of precious time were just being frittered away, which was alarming, but easily rectifiable using the useful second step provided by the ministry school. I began to schedule everything, including a 20 minute slot at the start of every day where I made up the s...

Last night I participated in a symphony. Clemency's extended family (and therefore, of course, mine) gathered at Helen and Alan Edward's place to see the new year in by performing Haydn's Toy Symphony aka Cassation in G major for toys , 2 oboes, horns, string and continuo . We didn't have a lot of oboes or horns but there was a piano and a clavier and for the rest we made do with recorders, electric guitar, bass, a violin, a bird whistle and a lot of rattles, drums and other things that could be whacked or shaken by musical illiterates such as myself when someone who knew what they were doing gave the nod. I sat with 7 year old Emmie, and drank red wine and ate quince jelly and contributed my part to the wonderfully structured mayhem. Gilbert giving a virtuoso performance on the nightingale decoy We have always been a close family but an hour of making music together means we are somehow even closer. Such is the miracle working power of noise. Earlier in the we...

No one should take up meditation unless they are prepared to deal with the consequences and nobody warns you before you start what is likely to happen. At least, no-one warned me. You sit in the quiet and get the chattering machine to be still for a while. Sometimes you succeed, admittedly not as often as you'd like to be able to boast about in a blog post, but sometimes. And sometimes is often enough, especially when you are diligent about getting in some practice every day over a lengthy period of time. Every time the stillness comes, unknown to you, a small drill starts and a tiny well is sunk down into the dark bits of your mind: the bits that lie forty fathoms deep beneath the moving, shallow surface. And when there is enough of the tiny wells, the flow from them becomes steady and continues even in the parts of your day when you are not meditating. Especially in the parts of the day when you are not meditating. Life changes happen. Old issues are raised. Light is cast into pr...

Get up early and sit in an uncomfortable position in the dark for a long time and do nothing? You're kidding, right?  It's hard to explain why anybody would want to meditate. For  a long time I didn't want to myself,  and then for an equally long time I did but couldn't gather up the requisite willpower to make a regular thing of it. But now there's been a corner turned and the quiet spaces in the day are my favourite bits of it. Partly, it's a cognitive thing. My life has been dominated by an insatiable quest to understand and lately there's been a sort of nagging inner certainty that the path to understanding somehow lies through this period of enforced inner silence. There's also Ian Gawler, who seems to think that meditation is as important, more important even, than any other lifestyle change you might want to make if you are intent on pursuing healing, and I have been quite predisposed to listen to him of late. And then there's lots of frazzled...

Let's imagine for a moment that reincarnation is true (and, no, all of those concerned for my orthodoxy, please don't send me the scripture references proving that it's not. This is a thought experiment. A fantasy, OK?) Now assume something else: that when your soul departs for the great waiting room in the sky where you hang about until you get your next posting, you are beyond space and time. That is, the waiting room doesn't follow our linear timescale and it is quite possible for your next life to be historically before the one you have just exited from. Or, it might be that you are reincarnated contemporaneously with your current existence. With me so far? Now let's say, purely as a fantasy that the second scenario holds: that you come back again, in a different body and live a different life, but you live it at the same time as your current life. You could run into yourself in the street, and of course you would never know it. Now lets take an even greater an...

The Universe seems to me to be a giant consciousness making machine. It throws up ever more complex organisations of matter and ever more complex and self aware ways of being. The Universe does this by evolution; the complex forms arise out of the less complex; they don't just appear. One place where this is seen is in the most complex single thing known to humankind: the human brain. This wonderful instrument of being didn't just arrive fully formed but developed from less complex brains, and they in turn from less. It seems that God doesn't go back to the drawing board and redesign from scratch. God develops by adding things on, and changing what is already there ('redemption', we call it, in Christian jargon). This growth is seen in the structure of the brain itself which has "layers". At the core, in the physical centre, is a brain stem which is similar to the brain of a reptile and is responsible for those functions we share with animals of about sim...

Buried in the backstreets of South Dunedin is the old gasworks. No-one these days knows where it is, although in times past everyone went there: to buy coke for the open fire, or tar for sealing rooves, or, for many, to work. It used to sprawl over several blocks, built with no concern for aesthetics, but purely for functionality: in this is was quintessentially modern. Now it is confined to a smallish site in Braemar St. where some of the old machinery has been restored and made to function again. There are some crumbling brick buildings, a very Freudian chimney and some huge old machines turning quietly, pushing non existent gas into non existent holding tanks. There are tables of worn old tools and a massive coke furnace sitting cold and empty. There is the evidence of an explosion that happened more than a century ago and safety notices for the workers of thirty years ago. A small group of people is working to preserve it and restore it. Some of the equipment dates back to the 1860...