“They Silently Changed the World”, mixed media/canvas, 23” x 23” available at Paragon Fine Arts, Lewisburg, WV
Like so much of our world, we can see things and enjoy experiences and never give consideration beyond our self. I’m glad that at times I can get lost in the moment and fully experience life with my senses and tune out thinking. Color offers me an easy means to let go of my tendency to name, categorize, and analyze. Like a mini-state of awe, it removes the veils of separation and lets my being shine with all else.
Of course flowers are the embodiment of chromatic sensation. Perhaps initially we found them attractive because millions of years ago we came to understand that their presence indicated future fruit, to most humans they still elicit an unforced smile.
Yet I also find it fascinating to consider that flowers are a relatively recent phenomena. Plants existed for millions of years before flowers evolved. But when they got a foothold, the “success” of their unique design steadily transformed and affected life on the entire planet.
The whole system of pollination is among the countless “miracles” in this grand circle of dynamic life, involving as many life forms. The seeds and “food” of flowering plants are further dependent on the steady decomposition and composting of life by fungi, which we finally are beginning to see as its own wondrous process. No mud no lotus, as they say.
Roughly for the last 500 years, taken to an extreme by modern industrialized culture, we’ve been so entranced with the prospect of indentifying the parts and initiating and documenting discreet reactions between them, making use of these energies, it seems we’ve often lost track of the whole and our place within it.
IE: Take this medication and it stops your body from processing fat but has a dozen other affects; spray some Round-up and kill the plants we don’t want, but ignore its impact on the micro-organisms and ecosystems thriving within the topsoil, or the latent effects of “once called safe” glyphosate within Round-up on our bodies; or similarly ignore the disrupting results of convenient and profitable PFAS chemicals in all manner of products on our endocrine systems; or the run-off of synthetic fertilizer that spur crop growth on life in our streams, rivers, and oceans.
How is it homo-sapiens, we “wise apes” could create a world that accepts such foolish short-sightedness?
I’ve recently learned more about how our brains function through the work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist, who’s studied and articulated the distinctions between the two hemispheres of our brains. It seems the more recent research and understanding is that both hemispheres participate in all tasks—not, as was expressed a few decades ago, that language is the sole domain of one side of the brain, music the other, the right-hemisphere is imaginative, the left is rational, and so on.
Rather, they work in overlapping tandem. The more accurate distinction is that each hemisphere provides us (and the brains of nearly all animals have a degree of bifurcation), different ways of relating to the world. In humans the left tends toward a narrow focus, defining discreet aspects, identifying “things”; the right sees the larger perspective, provides a broad overview, is alert to the unknown. The left names parts, the right grasps the relations of the parts—including our self—to the whole.
Both were and remain essential to our survival. Since the way we see the world shapes our sense of reality, it deeply affects how we see our selves, our world, and how we interact with life. As McGilchrist suggests, with ample evidence, our modern culture and the global economy are so overly left-hemisphere dominated it’s created a great imbalance. The laughable notion we communicate fully and clearly with texts comes to mind, or the more extreme and disturbing quest for super AI is the epitome of this. Yet technology of any sort will never be able to grasp simple yet crucial organic and mysterious concepts like friendship, trust, wonder, and a sense of purpose and awe and love, the profound unquantifiable notions that make us human and are integral to wisdom.
Driven by a right-brain dominated culture we focus on parts, so often miss the interrelationships. Most of us can recognize the health of our bodies can’t be separated from what we eat, or the nurturing or toxicity of the environment in which we live, or the degree of stress or peace we cultivate in our lives. Similarly our ecosystems are impacted by the ongoing, woven interplay of forces. We can’t treat our bodies nor our environment as “fixable” as if we may take one medication or add a chemical to the land and not have it affect the dynamic of the whole.
In some aspects physical processes can be likened to the way simple machines work, but Life is never an isolated mechanistic “thing.” Each part we isolate is always an organic piece within a whole. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe" said John Muir 115 years ago. Most indigenous cultures, especially those that thrived for far more than a few hundred years had a similar understanding and ethics baked into their society. Our bodies and our minds, the bugs and the trees, the clouds and the oceans and the soil — all that we can know — exists in dynamic relationship with all else.
Which, if incorporated into how we treat life on the planet, flies in the face of our extractive, “earth is a resource for our use”, consumer-oriented society. It creates quite a bitter pickle for a world where private property is a foundational concept. As systems science reveals, the cascading impacts of say, mining ore, or damming a river’s flow, or clear cutting a hillside, or burning coal have far-reaching impacts on everything else as the planet (and universe) are always seeking equilibrium.
The momentum and impacts of this Frankenstein monster, this Gollum of our own making that is modern society, worries me more each year. I struggle with my participation in it, swept along by the sheer force of its current. All I know to do is continue to adjust my behavior, try to consciously do less that’s toxic or causes current and future suffering, and more that’s nurturing and loving.
Painting affords me a way to settle my mind and (perhaps in a sideways contrast to cliches of ego-driven artists) briefly tune into something beyond my self. Maybe this is why my being seeks and savors the balance that the unadulterated, irrational experience of flowers and color brings to my soul.
..
Like so much of our world, we can see things and enjoy experiences and never give consideration beyond our self. I’m glad that at times I can get lost in the moment and fully experience life with my senses and tune out thinking. Color offers me an easy means to let go of my tendency to name, categorize, and analyze. Like a mini-state of awe, it removes the veils of separation and lets my being shine with all else.
Of course flowers are the embodiment of chromatic sensation. Perhaps initially we found them attractive because millions of years ago we came to understand that their presence indicated future fruit, to most humans they still elicit an unforced smile.
Yet I also find it fascinating to consider that flowers are a relatively recent phenomena. Plants existed for millions of years before flowers evolved. But when they got a foothold, the “success” of their unique design steadily transformed and affected life on the entire planet.
The whole system of pollination is among the countless “miracles” in this grand circle of dynamic life, involving as many life forms. The seeds and “food” of flowering plants are further dependent on the steady decomposition and composting of life by fungi, which we finally are beginning to see as its own wondrous process. No mud no lotus, as they say.
Roughly for the last 500 years, taken to an extreme by modern industrialized culture, we’ve been so entranced with the prospect of indentifying the parts and initiating and documenting discreet reactions between them, making use of these energies, it seems we’ve often lost track of the whole and our place within it.
IE: Take this medication and it stops your body from processing fat but has a dozen other affects; spray some Round-up and kill the plants we don’t want, but ignore its impact on the micro-organisms and ecosystems thriving within the topsoil, or the latent effects of “once called safe” glyphosate within Round-up on our bodies; or similarly ignore the disrupting results of convenient and profitable PFAS chemicals in all manner of products on our endocrine systems; or the run-off of synthetic fertilizer that spur crop growth on life in our streams, rivers, and oceans.
How is it homo-sapiens, we “wise apes” could create a world that accepts such foolish short-sightedness?
I’ve recently learned more about how our brains function through the work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist, who’s studied and articulated the distinctions between the two hemispheres of our brains. It seems the more recent research and understanding is that both hemispheres participate in all tasks—not, as was expressed a few decades ago, that language is the sole domain of one side of the brain, music the other, the right-hemisphere is imaginative, the left is rational, and so on.
Rather, they work in overlapping tandem. The more accurate distinction is that each hemisphere provides us (and the brains of nearly all animals have a degree of bifurcation), different ways of relating to the world. In humans the left tends toward a narrow focus, defining discreet aspects, identifying “things”; the right sees the larger perspective, provides a broad overview, is alert to the unknown. The left names parts, the right grasps the relations of the parts—including our self—to the whole.
Both were and remain essential to our survival. Since the way we see the world shapes our sense of reality, it deeply affects how we see our selves, our world, and how we interact with life. As McGilchrist suggests, with ample evidence, our modern culture and the global economy are so overly left-hemisphere dominated it’s created a great imbalance. The laughable notion we communicate fully and clearly with texts comes to mind, or the more extreme and disturbing quest for super AI is the epitome of this. Yet technology of any sort will never be able to grasp simple yet crucial organic and mysterious concepts like friendship, trust, wonder, and a sense of purpose and awe and love, the profound unquantifiable notions that make us human and are integral to wisdom.
Driven by a right-brain dominated culture we focus on parts, so often miss the interrelationships. Most of us can recognize the health of our bodies can’t be separated from what we eat, or the nurturing or toxicity of the environment in which we live, or the degree of stress or peace we cultivate in our lives. Similarly our ecosystems are impacted by the ongoing, woven interplay of forces. We can’t treat our bodies nor our environment as “fixable” as if we may take one medication or add a chemical to the land and not have it affect the dynamic of the whole.
In some aspects physical processes can be likened to the way simple machines work, but Life is never an isolated mechanistic “thing.” Each part we isolate is always an organic piece within a whole. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe" said John Muir 115 years ago. Most indigenous cultures, especially those that thrived for far more than a few hundred years had a similar understanding and ethics baked into their society. Our bodies and our minds, the bugs and the trees, the clouds and the oceans and the soil — all that we can know — exists in dynamic relationship with all else.
Which, if incorporated into how we treat life on the planet, flies in the face of our extractive, “earth is a resource for our use”, consumer-oriented society. It creates quite a bitter pickle for a world where private property is a foundational concept. As systems science reveals, the cascading impacts of say, mining ore, or damming a river’s flow, or clear cutting a hillside, or burning coal have far-reaching impacts on everything else as the planet (and universe) are always seeking equilibrium.
The momentum and impacts of this Frankenstein monster, this Gollum of our own making that is modern society, worries me more each year. I struggle with my participation in it, swept along by the sheer force of its current. All I know to do is continue to adjust my behavior, try to consciously do less that’s toxic or causes current and future suffering, and more that’s nurturing and loving.
Painting affords me a way to settle my mind and (perhaps in a sideways contrast to cliches of ego-driven artists) briefly tune into something beyond my self. Maybe this is why my being seeks and savors the balance that the unadulterated, irrational experience of flowers and color brings to my soul.
..
RSS Feed