Showing posts with label Leaves. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leaves. Show all posts

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Secret Order


"In all chaos there is a cosmos,
in all disorder a secret order."

C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

A Pattern or Dance


"Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.

Perhaps one of the reasons for this silence is that you have to know how to read music. For instance, the scientific article may say, “The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half in a period of two weeks.” Now what does that mean?

It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine, and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.

So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week’s potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday."

Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Sunday, December 17, 2023

Lily Math

"Philosophy is written in this all-encompassing book that is constantly open to our eyes, that is the universe; but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand the language and knows the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures; without these it is humanly impossible to understand a word of it, and one wanders in a dark labyrinth."

Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)
Il Saggiatore

Monday, December 11, 2023

Illimitable Spirit


"My religion consists of a humble
admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the
slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind."

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

"Blessed be you, mighty matter,
irresistible march of evolution,
reality ever newborn; you who,
by constantly shattering our
mental categories, force us to go
ever further and further
in our pursuit of the truth."

Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

"What matters most:
What he had yearned to embrace
was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark,
the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Wind, Sand and Stars."

Richard Bach (1936 - )

Friday, November 17, 2023

Movement of Colors


"Light in Nature creates the movement of colors."

- Robert Delaunay (1885 - 1941)

"In nature, light creates the color.
In the picture, color creates the light."

Hans Hofmann (1880 - 1966)

Sunday, November 12, 2023

The Color Nearest the Light


"[Yellow] is the color nearest the light. It appears on the slightest mitigation of light, whether by semi-transparent mediums or faint reflection from white surfaces. In prismatic experiments it extends itself alone and widely in the light space, and while the two poles remain separated from each other, before it mixes with blue to produce green it is to be seen in its utmost purity and beauty.
...
As no color can be considered as stationary, so we can very easily augment yellow into reddish by condensing or darkening it. The color increases in energy, and appears in red-yellow more powerful and splendid. All that we have said of yellow is applicable here, in a higher degree. The red-yellow gives an impression of warmth and gladness, since it represents the hue of the intenser glow of fire.
...
As pure yellow passes very easily to red-yellow, so the deepening of this last to yellow-red is not to be arrested. The agreeable, cheerful sensation which red-yellow excites increases to an intolerably powerful impression in bright yellow-red. In looking steadfastly at a perfectly yellow-red surface, the color seems actually to penetrate the organ. It produces an extreme excitement, and still acts thus when somewhat darkened."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Theory of Colours

Saturday, November 11, 2023

Leaves, Color, Wholeness

"When we understand what order is,  I believe we shall better understand what matter is and then what the universe itself is ... Learning to see … wholeness … not muddled or contaminated by words and concepts, is extremely difficult, but it is possible to learn …When we see wholeness as it is, we recognize that [its] seeming parts … are merely arbitrary fragments which our minds have been directed to, because we happen to have words for them. If we open our eyes wide, and look at the scene without cognitive prejudice, we see something quite different ... geometric wholeness is not merely beautiful in itself as an accompaniment to the beautiful color. It is essential, necessary, for the release of light. Color, far from being an incidental attribute of things, is fundamental to the living structure of wholeness. Inner light is not merely a phenomenon, but the character of wholeness when it ‘melts.’"

Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Flying Leaves of Autumn


"Autumn leaves don't fall, they fly.
They take their time and wander
on this their only chance to soar."

- Delia Owens (1949 - )
Where the Crawdads Sing

Sunday, October 22, 2023

The Clearest Way Into the Universe


"And into the forest I go,
to lose my mind and find my soul.
...
Most people are on the world, not
in it — have no conscious sympathy
or relationship to anything about
them — undiffused, separate, and
rigidly alone like marbles of
polished stone, touching but separate.
...
The clearest way into the Universe
is through a forest wilderness."

John Muir (1838 - 1914)

The image above was captured - or, more precisely (following on the heels of Kim Grant's superlative video meditation on the follies of doing photography while stressed; Kim is one of my favorite YouTube photographers: list here), was creatively seen while I was in a quiet state of mind - along a trail at the Niagara Glen Nature Centre I've been posting about recently. As Kim's beautifully eloquent vlog post says so much better than I am able to by using only lifeless words and a lonely image, it is only when we allow ourselves to slooooow down while doing photography, and let go of our everyday pressures and stressors (as I had the privilege of doing for a few happy hours last weekend while on a trip with my wife), that we can take those first steps beyond just "capturing" images to seeing them. Indeed, it is in those brief precious moments when we somehow manage to quiet the "chatter in our heads" (as Alan Watts liked to describe the constant internal noise we all live with as conscious beings), that the illusory boundary between "self" and "world" dissipates to reveal nature's bountiful creative possibilities. Thank you, Kim, for a wonderfully poignant reminder of the need to clear our minds and become one with nature and our surroundings, if only for a few moments 😊

Saturday, March 04, 2023

The Celestial Way


"So it is said, the life of the sage follows the celestial way, and in death he dissolves and merges with all things. In stillness he is at one with the virtue of yin; in movement he flows with yang. He does not bring fortune and does not cause misfortune. He only responds when external circumstances call for it. He only acts when pushed. He only rises up when there is no other alternative. He throws away the whys and wherefores, and follows the celestial way. Therefore, he does not meet with disaster. Nor is he burdened by material things. He is not slandered by people nor punished by the spirits. He floats with life and rests with death. He does not worry and does not scheme. He is like light that does not dazzle. Completely trustworthy, he does not need to make promises. His sleep is dreamless and his waking hours are free from worry. His spirit is pure and his soul is not tired. In emptiness, nothingness, and simplicity, he is in harmony with the celestial way."

Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)
Translation in Teachings of the Tao by Eva Wong

Wednesday, March 01, 2023

Into Another Intensity


"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

- T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Eternal Energy


"You, yourself, are the
eternal energy which
appears as this Universe.
You didn't come into this world;
you came out of it.
Like a wave from the ocean.
...
We are the eyes of the cosmos.
So that in a way, when you look
deeply into somebody's eyes,
you're looking deep into yourself,
 and the other person is looking
deeply into the same self."

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Thursday, February 02, 2023

Photograph-Not-Taken, Taken


 "Without birth and death, and
without the perpetual transmutation
of all the forms of life,
the world would be static,
rhythm-less, undancing, mummified."

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Postscript. This lovely image was captured early this morning both before and after my wife and I took our after-breakfast walk through the neighborhood (a habit we picked up during the early "stay at home" phase of the pandemic, and which we still try to do whenever our almost-back-to-normal work schedules permit). The "before" part consisted of me simply noticing - then, more deeply "seeing" - this beautifully rhythmic dance of half-decayed leaves on display on a corner of a neighbor's lawn. More to the point, and by sheer coincidence, literally seconds before I "saw" this static-yet-living form, my wife and I were chatting about a book I reviewed over 10 years ago called Photographs Not Taken. As the title suggests, the book is a collection of short stories by photographers describing images that, for whatever reason, were never taken; of course, the book itself contains no photographs! I reminded myself of the (lessons in this) book after heading out on our walk without my camera (not even an iPhone!) and immediately commiserating about "another gorgeous dramatic cloud-ridden sky gone to waste!" A split-second later, my eyes fell on the small patch of leaves you see above. What did the intrepid photographer do? Nothing. I merely continued commiserating: "Oh, if only I had brought my iPhone!" (How has my muse put up with me over the decades?) The "after" part of the image started about a mile or so later, as my wife and I returned to our house to start our workdays; the book - and the siren call of the little patch of leaves - were both still firmly on my mind. I grabbed my "walk around" camera, ran back to our neighbor's corner house, and made sure that, today at least, this was going to be a "photograph-not-taken taken." 😊

Tuesday, November 08, 2022

Vibration of Spirit


"The vibration of Spirit is at such an infinite rate of intensity and rapidity that it is practically at rest — just as a rapidly moving wheel seems to be motionless. And at the other end of the scale, there are gross forms of matter whose vibrations are so low as to seem at rest. Between these poles, there are millions upon millions of varying degrees of vibration. From corpuscle and electron, atom and molecule, to worlds and universes, everything is in vibratory motion. This is also true on the planes of energy and force (which are but varying degrees of vibration); and also on the mental planes (whose states depend upon vibrations); and even on to the spiritual planes. An understanding of this Principle, with the appropriate formulas, enables Hermetic students to control their own mental vibrations as well as those of others. The Masters also apply this Principle to the conquering of Natural phenomena, in various ways. 'He who understands the Principle of Vibration, has grasped the sceptre of Power,' says one of the old writers.
...
...the differences between different
manifestations of Matter, Energy,
Mind, and even Spirit, result
largely from varying rates of Vibrations...
...the higher the vibration,
the higher the position in the scale."

Postscript. In February of this year, I wrote about how the morning walks my wife and I took together during the pandemic (which we could do since I did not have to commute to my regular office; something which, sadly, I've had to resume doing recently) gave me an opportunity to see and appreciate how much beauty our local neighborhood offers. Back then, I was mesmerized with the "hosta-leaf corpses" that littered the sidewalks near our house, and which appeared to glow with a preternatural inner light. To communicate a sense of what first drew me to them (i.e., their radiance), I rendered them using reversed black and white tones (a small portfolio is here). Almost a year later, as we approach late autumn, I find my eye/I drawn to the radiance - or, better, to the colorful afterglow - of decaying maple leaves. Just as the all-but-decayed hosta leaves stubbornly clung to life with a mysterious and inexhaustible energy, the just-starting-to-decay maple leaves are now doing the same, but are suffused in an ineffably iridescent brilliance! There is a palpable fire burning inside that refuses to let go! I've tried to capture this ethereal energy by placing the leaves on a light table (using one that is sufficiently bright to illuminate the veins of the leaves), and rendering the final image on a dark backdrop in Photoshop. Although, as with the hostas, my maple macros only partly convey the excitement I felt as I encountered individual leaves, much of my raw emotion remains (albeit only in "Stieglitzian Equivalent" form). The image above is an amalgam of the photographs in a new "maple autumn macros" portfolio. Enjoy 😊

Sunday, November 06, 2022

Signatura Regrum


"All perceiving is also thinking,
all reasoning is also intuition,
all observation is also invention.
...
Man’s striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems.
...
Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways."

Rudolf Arnheim (1904 - 2007)

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Aesthetic Devolution

"The tides of time should be able to imprint the passing of the years on an object. The physical decay or natural wear and tear of the materials used does not in the least detract from the visual appeal, rather it adds to it. It is the changes of texture and color that provide the space for the imagination to enter and become more involved with the devolution of the piece. Whereas modern design often uses inorganic materials to defy the natural ageing effects of time, wabi sabi embraces them and seeks to use this transformation as an integral part of the whole. This is not limited to the process of decay, but can also be found at the moment of inception, when life is taking its first fragile steps toward becoming."

 

Thursday, October 27, 2022

Effulgent Forms


"That inner Self, as the primeval Spirit, Eternal, ever effulgent, full and infinite Bliss, Single, indivisible, whole and living, Shines in everyone as the witnessing awareness. That self in its splendor, shining in the cavity of the heart This self is neither born nor dies, Neither grows nor decays, Nor does it suffer any change. When a pot is broken, the space within it is not, And similarly, when the body dies the Self in it remains eternal."

- Ramana Maharshi (1879 - 1950)

Monday, October 24, 2022

Leaves and Paths

"In a forest of a hundred thousand trees,
no two leaves are alike.
And no two journeys along
the same path are alike."

Paulo Coelho (1947 - )
Aleph

Saturday, October 22, 2022

Between Grief and Geometry


"Geometry is a way to organize our models of the world, its shapes and dynamics. But isn’t this all contingent, balanced on a knife’s edge? Could our models have turned out very differently? If the fractal geometry of Mandelbrot had been discovered before the geometry of Euclid, would manufacture be the same? If you think the question is far-fetched, consider the iterated branching of our pulmonary, circulatory, and nervous systems, or the recursive folding of our DNA, or the large surface area and small volume of our lungs and our digestive tract. Evolution has discovered and uses fractal geometry. If people had looked more closely at the geometry of nature, rather than emulating the 'celestial perfection' imposed by the church’s interpretation of the works of Euclid and Aristotle, our constructions could be very different now.
...
Beauty is a bridge between grief and geometry.
...
Beauty and grief are next-door neighbors, or maybe grief is beauty in a dark mirror… To see beauty is to glimpse something deeper; to grieve is to glimpse a loss whose consequences we will not unpack for years, and maybe never. The beauty of geometry likewise involves great emotional weight, irreversibly alters our perceptions, and is transcendent. For we don’t see all of geometry, only a hint, a shadow of something much deeper."

- Michael Frame (1951 - )
Geometry of Grief

Friday, October 21, 2022

Harmony of Autumnal Colors


"When the eye sees a color it
is immediately excited,
and it is its nature,
spontaneously and of necessity,
at once to produce another,
which with the original colour
comprehends the whole chromatic scale.
A single color excites,
by a specific sensation,
the tendency to universality.
In this resides the fundamental
law of all harmony of colors.
...
Should your glance on mornings lovely
Lift to drink the heaven's blue
Or when sun, vieled by sirocco,
Royal red sinks out of view -
Give to Nature praise and honour.
Blithe of heart and sound of eye,
Knowing for the world of color
Where its broad foundations lie."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)