30 Days of Perception: (3) 'Encounter' - days 21-25

This is the fifth post in the 'Perception' series. Earlier posts, including explanation of the project, are here(1), here(2), here(3), and here(4).

Day 21 - Reciprocal (give-and-take, resonance-with, interaction)

This morning - a cold, grey, overcast, drizzly day - I went outside to empty the kitchen compost caddy into the compost bin at the end of my back garden. The robin whose territory includes my garden immediately appeared to check out what was happening. As long as I kept my gaze averted, he was happy to be quite close to me; so I backed off, very slowly, to go and get my camera. I crept into the garden again, camera at the ready, and sat down near to where I'd previously been . . . and immediately he was there. If I feigned indifference, he came close; if I turned my gaze or the camera lens towards him, no matter how slowly and carefully, he instantly flitted off. So I had to make do with some (technically appalling) distant and murky shots in the poor light. In the last one, he was perched high up, singing his territory, but I didn't manage to catch him with his beak open.

Day 22 - Silence and Stillness

After yesterday's poor-quality photos of 'my' robin, and with today's prompt in mind, I thought I would stand very still at my open bedroom window, overlooking the garden, with a long lens at the ready, and wait patiently for the robin, or other birds, to appear. I waited . . . but was preempted by my neighbour's cat, perched on my fence, equally still and silent, but with nefarious purpose! In spite of my stealth, he sensed my presence and turned a baleful eye on me, doubtless because he thought that it was I who was frustrating him!

Day 23 - Contrast (edges and transitions)

I was really interested by this prompt. In ecological terms, edges - the junctions of different terrains -  are biodiverse, rich in habitats and species. In permaculture design, the maximising of edges is one of the major considerations. One of my favourite local walks (which has appeared in images already in this sequence) is to a local green space - huge for the size of the small town that it's in - which is not quite a traditional urban park but nor is it a wild/natural space. It has trees, mown grass, long grass, hedgerows, a flowing stream, and a lake with a wide margin of bullrushes and other marginal plants. Over the years I have taken close-up photos of individual elements, panoramic shots, trees covered in hoar frost, or bursting into spring leaf, birds on the lake, and so on. Here is an image showing the lake edge and several of the ecological niches, now in their winter unclothed-ness.

Day 24 - Patterns

A behavioural pattern of mine is that I have around me, in my home, patterned items from the natural world that I see, and actively look at, as I go about normal life. These range from ancient fossils and rocks to just-cut fresh flowers. Below is an ancient/modern pair.

The fossil, on the left, is of a sea urchin, that I found on a beach when I was about six or seven years old and on holiday with my family. It somehow escaped my mother's rule that pebbles and shells from the beach may not be taken home at the end of a holiday. It somehow escaped my mother's habit of throwing things away, without consultation, if she decided that they were no longer desirable. It somehow survived my growing up, leaving the family home, being a student, making my own home, moving house several times . . . and it's still here. These are, I have more recently discovered, charismatic fossils, with a wealth of folklore attached to them. They have been found in significant numbers as grave goods in Neolithic tombs (see Kenneth McNamara, The Star-crossed Stone). I knew none of this, but nevertheless hung onto it.

The second image is of something much newer and much more fragile. It's the skeleton of a hydrangea bract, which emerged from last winter's leaf litter earlier this year. Already it's disintegrating - it won't endure long in my home as one of my companion objects.

Day 25 - Depth (distance, horizon, long view, high places)

My house stands in the bottom of a small valley and my views out are upwards to houses, trees and sky . . . no chance of a horizon. And I live in a lowland county, with only a very few not-very-high areas of 'high' ground. But even locally there are are relative humps and bumps, undulations in the landscape that enable a view. One of these is in my local park, which has featured several times in this project! This is the view from the top of the hill down to the lake, which is a natural dew-pond, originally dammed and managed by medieval monks to make a fish pond. I find this a very satisfying view and I see it as a tamed, miniature version of the landscape in which humanity evolved: I imagine that my ancient hominid brain reads this scene as open grassland, forest edge, and a good viewpoint from which to stalk any animals coming to the water-hole to drink. In the low light of winter, it was tricky (without a tripod) to get the small aperture, and thus depth of field, to convey the sense of today's prompt.

30 Days of Perception: (2) 'Seeing' - days 16-20

This is the fourth post in the 'Perception' series. Earlier posts, including explanation of the project, are here(1), here(2), and here(3).


Day 16 - Inbetween (being between places or actions or events)

This alleyway is called, rather delightfully, 'Needless Alley'!

Between the sides of the alleyway, walking between place and place

Day 17 - Perspective (different perspectives, viewpoints)

I've included so far quite a few photos taken looking down the length of my garden from an upstairs window . . . so, here are images from ground level, at the other end of the garden, looking either towards the back of the house, or sideways to the lateral boundaries.

And I noticed from these photos that my sundial is wonky and needs straightening!

Day 18 - Subtle

Day 19 - Curiosity and Compassion (steady gaze, not looking away)

This tiny (< 1 cm) creature breathed its last on the edge of my bathtub

Day 20 - The Field (seeing the entire field, with everything in it having equal importance)

The explanation for this prompt included the following:

Every season I go for what I call a 'blur walk'. This is one of my favourite exercises, one that helps me see beyond the labels we put on 'things'. In blur mode, your everyday surroundings become impressions – colours, shapes, light circles, etc. You see the entire field and how everything fits together. It’s a whole new world.

This made me smile: all my life I have been very short-sighted and also very astigmatic.  'Blur' is what I have lived with for 60+ years whenever I take my glasses off! But it's a dangerous state - I'm not safe to boil a kettle, let alone go outside, cross the road, etc. So, instead, for this prompt, I opted for the kind of awareness of 'everything' that leads me to think: 'this is something for which it's worth getting out the wide-angle lens.'

30 Days of Perception: (2) 'Seeing' - days 11-15

This is the third post in the series '30 Days of Perception'. The first two posts, with explanation of the project, are here and here.

From Day 11 we move from 'being' prompts to 'seeing' prompts.

Day 11 - Ditch the story ('just seeing')

Opening the bedroom curtain . . .

Day 12 - Overlooked

When I open my bedroom curtains in the mornings I look over my back garden to the allotments beyond. At the end of my garden is a tangle of Rosa rugosa, literally overlooked (looked over) as my glance falls on the space beyond. But this morning the bright, low autumn sun was falling just so and drew my eye to the gleam of the bright red hips.

Day 13 - Ground (that which is beneath your feet)

On the ground outside the greengrocer - mixed Iceland poppies in bright sunlight, blowing in the breeze

Day 14 - Space (the volume of space in front of you, the space between things)

(a) the volume in front

(b) the space between

Day 15 - Periphery (seen out of the corner of your eye . . .)

One of the interesting things about wearing varifocal spectacles is that the edges of vision are distorted, but that movement at the outer edges of the field of view is especially noticeable. This afternoon I was sitting on a bench in an art gallery, adjacent to the revolving entrance doors. My eye was caught by a flash of movement to my right as the doors revolved, and then the reflections of rainbow colour . . . it was only later, looking at the photo, that I noticed the reflection of the two figures outside in the lobby.

Lake at dusk

November in the park - autumn colour

30 Days of Perception: (1) 'Being' - days 6-10

This is the second post in the series '30 Days of Perception'. The first post, with explanation of the project, is here. But something more needs saying about the process of using the daily prompts. They aren't topics which we're being asked to 'illustrate' with images. They are prompts for a particular focus of present-time awareness throughout the day.

So, in my own case, I 'hold' the prompt in my mind, a bit like a meditation focus for the day . . . and then 'notice what I notice', so to speak, as the day progresses. As a result I may particularly be struck by some experience, that will happen in a specific time and place, with specific surroundings . . . and then I will  return to make an image of it. Photographing 'in the moment' is not always feasible . . . in the previous post, for instance, I didn't have my camera to hand in the shower!

For Day 6, our prompt was movement - of two kinds: first 'inner' movement, that is movement of/in the body; second 'outer' movement, movement of elements of the external world. In this instance, I made two images, one for each of these aspects.

Day 6 (a) - movement in/of the body
It happened that I went to Birmingham on this day, and walked a lot on the city pavements. I became very aware of my feet, of my heel striking the ground, of the roll of my foot as I moved forwards, and consequently of the orthotics in my shoes which help with the stability of my ankles. So when I got home, I took this photograph of my foot resting on an orthotic.

Day 6 (b) - movement in the external world
As I was returning home from Birmingham, the rain was falling and I felt the movement of it as it fell on me, saw the movement of it as it fell in front of my eyes, saw it running down the bus windows as I returned from the train station. So when I was back in my house, where my camera would stay dry, I took this (grainy, low-light) photograph of raindrops running down my bedroom window.

Day 7 - intuition
Today's email prompt included:

Today, we’ll tap into your intuition, or body wisdom. How are you at listening to what your body is telling you? Many of us are not so much because we’re used to letting our minds lead. Today, you’ll flip the switch and let the body lead for a change.

In order for anyone other than me to make any sense of the image below, a ridiculous amount of explanation is required! I suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). One of its characteristics is miscommunication between brain [NB: not 'mind'] and body. It's a bit like your brain going into overdrive, perceiving the body as more fatigued than is actually the case, and then being over-protective and urging rest, telling you that you're too tired to do . . . whatever. Thus, managing the condition, as well as actually improving the symptoms, requires systematic over-riding of these felt, intuitive fatigue signals, so as to re-educate that brain-body connection; for instance as in a 'graduated exercise programme'. For someone who believes in 'listening to my body' this is extraordinarily difficult, frustrating and 'counter-intuitive' (quite literally!).

So, I have an activity tracker that I wear on my wrist, which I use as an objective check on how much I should believe my subjective body-sense of fatigue. At about 4.30pm today I started to feel tired, that I'd done enough for today, that I might just sit down and read or listen to the radio . . . so I checked in with my wrist device which told me that I had no objective reason to be feeling like that . . . so here is a photograph of my left wrist, with my watch and the device . . . the choice of monochrome somehow reflects what it's like to override the intuition.

Day 8 - emotion
Two photos today.

First: a surge of delight . . . at the beauty of the range of autumn colours in the park, touched also by the deeper pleasure that this is autumn behaving as it should, trees looking as they should at this latitude in November.

Second: a stab of grief, this time in my back garden . . . a Forsythia tree trying to flower at the same time as it's shedding its autumn leaves. At my latitude, this is a spring flowering shrub and its confused behaviour now is a consequence of abnormal weather patterns . . . which are but the surface manifestation of climate change, the source for me of a much greater grief . . .

Day 9 - colour
Today's prompt caused me really to notice how, in my personal space, I surround myself with soft, muted colours, or else mid- to dark-toned textured colours. In neither my home nor my clothing do I favour bright, bold colours that shout at me, or impose themselves on me.

When I went out this morning my attention fell on the trees, the trees, the trees . . . the autumn colours are so wonderful just now. But I photographed trees yesterday, so I thought I would wait to see what else my eye found . . . and then suddenly there was this, in the town square (and just a quick unconsidered snap on my phone):

Day 10 - slow down
Today's prompt was another version of being-here-now: to replace goal-oriented behaviour with being - such as, for instance, walking in order to walk, rather than walking in order to get somewhere.

I received the email with the prompt, on my phone, while I was on a very early train to London. This is not characteristic of me! But I had an early out-of-hours Member's pass to see a new exhibition at the British Museum. So, on arrival in London, I needed to walk briskly, goal-oriented, to get to the museum for my timed entry . . . but then, once inside, there was the instant switch to the museum-stroll, the gallery-stroll . . . it's not at all the same thing as a mindful walk in the country, say, but it can have some of that quality if you choose . . . and then my eye was drawn strongly and deeply to this:

It's technically a terrible photo - but with only my phone, in very low lighting, looking at a spot-lit sculpture . . . nothing to be done about the blown highlights. But that's not the point . . . and it's not (though you might imagine it could be) a Buddha. It's thought to have been the head of a sphinx that formed part of a column base, from Nineveh and dating from roughly 700BCE. It stopped me in my tracks and the effect lingered for the whole of the rest of my time in the exhibition.

30 Days of Perception: (1) 'Being' - days 1-5

A few months ago I posted here from an online photography workshop led by Kim Manley Ort (titled 'Impermanence', twelve posts starting here). This is the first of six posts from a new workshop titled '30 Days of Perception'.

In her workshop introduction, Kim writes [my summary]:

Perception takes in everything, not just particular objects, but also what we see but don’t register, like foreground, background, space, periphery, etc. Many of these things we filter out of our cognition.

Perception is primary and pre-cognitive. It’s the foundation or ground of what we see, before we name or put labels on. There is not yet judgement or evaluation or even understanding.

It is sensual, an embodied experience through the senses, intuition, and emotions. It's dynamic and ever changing. It's reciprocal and relational, the way we connect with the world. It's unique: each person's perceptions are like no-one else’s. Perception is non-narrative. It’s what we see, not the story of what we see. It is as it is – no story, no judgement, no meaning. 

Why is it important? Because perceptions create our world view, our reality. And, it’s always open to change.

Part 1 - the first ten days - is about 'Being', especially our five senses, our intuition and emotions. Here are my images, one each for the first five days. It's been a slightly strange experience to make images of non-visual perceptions.


Day 1 - seeing light

Electric ceiling lights reflected in a watercolour landscape painting

Day 2 - sound

Running water splashing in the shower

Day 3 - smell

The sharp autumn scent of fallen leaves starting to decay

Day 4 - touch (texture)

Bubbles! (washing up)

Day 5 - taste

Sharp and fruity - home-grown berries, home-made chutney