Author: barryh

It's a crazy world we live in. I have long taken an interest in the problems that creates and the need to move beyond the thinking that has led to them. We need a New Renaissance of the human spirit. My wife tired of my rants on 'I can't believe it', and suggested I write a blog. Here it is...

Thrive

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thriveWhat does it mean to thrive, or to flourish in life? Arianna Huffington’s book Thrive aims to answer this.

During heady days of spiritual exploration in the early 1980s, we attended a workshop by Tai Chi Master Chungliang Al Huang. At the workshop was a young and obviously intelligent lady, a bit pushy, Arianna Stassinopoulos, along with her mother. This was the lady who later became Arianna Huffington, co-founder and leading light of The Huffington Post. Arianna is also the author of a number of books. Thrive was published in 2014, so I’m a bit late catching up with it.

Thrive basically summarises all those good spiritual and personal growth ideas that were around in the early 1980s and which have been put into exemplary practice in Arianna’s hugely successful life – successful in terms of her influence on the world.

  • What is true well-being?
  • What does it mean to have wisdom?
  • Where is the sense of wonder in our lives?
  • How important is it to give, as well as to receive?

These are the subjects of the main chapters of this book. Much of it you will be familiar with, some of it may be new to you. What I can say is that it’s well written, makes much sense, and says things that are worth saying. Great stuff!

Interestingly, Arianna’s key inspiration was her mother – an almost obsessively ‘giving’ person, as was evident in that 1980s workshop!

Where is the wisdom we have lost?

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T.S.Eliot had a way with words, a way of saying what is just beyond what can actually be said with words. Thus it is in the following, which says so much…

“The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.”

T.S.Eliot, Choruses from The Rock, 1934

Quoted in Arianna Huffington’s book Thrive.

Humanity’s biggest own goals

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This is a great post by Matthew Wright on the human-created problems of global warming and potential nuclear calamity. I am reblogging it with the following observation, already made in a comment:

We will never get out of this with a ‘glass half empty’ perspective. With the ingenuity of billions of people becoming aware of these existential problems, there is always the possibility that we will collectively work out ways through the apparently impossible situation we are creating.

Matthew Wright

There’s no question in my mind that human-driven climate
change has to be one of the biggest own-goals humanity has ever struck on
itself. And we should have seen it coming. I mean, we’ve been pushing
combustion products into the atmosphere in ever-larger quantities since the
advent of industrialisation, over 200 years ago. We’ve been burning up fossil
fuels, polluting the environment, hacking down forests and generally creating
ecological mayhem at ever-increasing scale and speed. What did we think would
happen?

A beautiful picture of Earth from 1.6 million km sunwards. NASA, public domain.

When I say ‘one of’ the biggest own goals, to my thinking there’s only one other totally massive own-goal in the same league; the invention of nuclear weapons. And it’s a bigger one. The thing about human-driven climate change is that ultimately it’s not risking end-game. It’ll likely reduce what we call our civilisation. It’ll change…

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The Art of Life

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These wise words are by Roman Emperor/ philosopher Marcus Aurelius. We have a natural inclination to reject the emergence of difficult circumstances or events that do not appear to be amenable, but there is usually a lesson and opportunity for growth.

“True understanding is to see the events of life in this way:
‘You are here for my benefit, though rumour paints you otherwise.’

And everything is turned to one’s advantage when he greets a situation like this:
You are the very thing I was looking for.

Truly whatever arises in life is the right material to bring about your growth and the growth of those around you.

This, in a word, is art — and this art called ‘life’ is a practice suitable to both men and gods.

Everything contains some special purpose and a hidden blessing;
what then could be strange or arduous when all of life is here to greet you like an old and faithful friend?”

 Quoted by Arianna Huffington in her book Thrive.
Statue of young Marcus Aurelius from Capitoline Museums, via Wikimedia Commons.

Air pollution

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I remember hearing about the great smog of London in 1952 and the clean air acts that were supposed to resolve the problem. Luckily I lived far away up north, in Lincoln. Although I remember cycling through thick East-England fogs, scarf over mouth, there was nothing to compare with that polluted London smog that killed thousands.

This was brought to mind by a recent insightful article in The Times by Tom Whipple: Air pollution: Undertakers knew truth about the Great Smog (sorry, it’s behind the Times paywall). As well as outlining the story of the smog and the official prevarication before it was addressed, Whipple takes the story forward through a number of similar problems related to air pollution in the intervening years since then.

The response to the smog was to reduce smoke by mandating smokeless fuels and tall chimneys. But nothing was done about the sulphur, until ‘acid rain’ made the problem unavoidable from the 1970s.

Then, in the 1980s and 1990s it was realised that lead in fuel was reducing the general IQ, so there came lead-free petrol.

Then came global warming and the move towards more diesel cars to reduce C02 emissions. Sadly, the car manufacturers and standards authorities were economical with the actualité of NO2 and other emissions, and gradually another major pollution problem has engulfed our cities. And there is an unexplained spike in occurrences of asthma, alzheimers, cancers,…

So what did we learn over those nearly 70 years since the London smog?

Basically, we need more checks and balances on introducing new technologies, and we need to anticipate the downsides that are inevitably there, with more effective regulation. So we need a U-turn from the current political atmosphere of deregulation.

But don’t hold your breath… Or maybe you should, while waiting to cross the road at a busy junction.

Featured image Nelson’s Column during the great smog 1952,
by N T Stobbs via Wikimedia Commons

Looking at aging with the glass half full

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Here’s a great post by Jane Fritz, putting a wise perspective on ageing, from a ‘glass half full’ perspective.

Robby Robin's Journey

“If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands …” If everyone were to sing this well-known ditty, which age groups would clap the loudest? 1-5 year olds? 10-20 year olds? 40-50 year olds? 70-80 year olds?

If you were to read John Persico’s blog post from earlier this week (and he’s not always as negative as this), you would definitely think that it must be the 40-50 year olds, those at the peak of achieving the goals they started in their youth. He suggested that youth is a time of “getting” (friends, education, a career, a spouse, kids, a home, promotions, status, etc.), whereas old age is a time of “losing” (our careers, friends and family as they pass away, teeth, hair, eyesight, hearing, flexibility, dexterity, balance, our knees, our hips, our homes because we can’t climb the stairs, and our money to pay…

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Pluto might be a planet again. Or not.

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Pluto disappeared from our local Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope visitor centre some years ago, when it was decategorized from being a planet. It no longer seemed to exist, which seemed a bit unnecessary. Also, as one interested in astrology, Pluto is a planet of great significance here, and has certainly not disappeared from use.

So I was very interested to see this great post by Matthew Wright. He’s also questioning our tendency to classify everything into categories that may then obscure things of real significance, such as the astrological significance of Pluto!

Matthew Wright

Remember Pluto the planet? And then Pluto the not a planet? Well, it’s back. Possibly. Apparently an informal forum held the other week came down in favour of reinstating the ‘planet’ classification. Of course these things carry little weight with the International Astronomical Union.

Pluto in true colour, as seen by New Horizons. NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

What interests me is the way that the debate over whether Pluto is, or is not a planet also sums up the biggest flaw in modern human analytical philosophy; our need to categorise everything and fit it into patterns and slots as a part of being ‘scientific’.

In a way this is not surprising. We appear to be hard-wired to see patterns everywhere. Sometimes they even exist. The ‘evolutionary psychological’ explanation is that it conferred an advantage during our very, very long hunter-gatherer period. Humans who were better at identifying patterns were…

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Snowy Egret

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At first I thought this was a great egret in Houston’s Hermann Park in March. Eventually I realised that it is actually a snowy egret, which is somewhat smaller.

 

The way the wind has whipped up the neck and tail feathers makes for an interesting effect (click to enlarge).

According to Cornell Lab of Ornithology, snowy egrets have a black bill and yellow feet, whereas great egrets have a yellow bill and black feet. Hopefully I’ll remember that for next time!

Mother Earth – A Message from Jane Goodall

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Jane Goodall has long been a source of inspiration on our need to re-establish our connection with nature. This video is well worth 6 minutes of your time. She says it all really, and it matters.

Magical Elements Nature Photography

I’ve watched and followed Jane Goodall most of my life. In my eyes, she is the icon of conservation, environmental sustainability and love for our Mother Earth.

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Blue Jay

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Almost everywhere we go in Houston, particularly when near Buffalo Bayou, we can hear the raucus cry of the blue jay. Occasionally you get to see these beautiful birds and that brilliant flash of blue. But they do seem to be camera shy. What a nice surprise when this one posed on a car park near the bayou.

 

Being not far from the sea, this is probably the ‘coastal’ variant mentioned by Wikipedia, as opposed to the ‘interior’ or ‘northern’ variants.

Mainstream Environment?

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I’d guess it was the 1980s when I really became aware of environmental issues, including fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect, including pollution of the air in cities, including degrading of farmland by intensive farming, including the effects of pesticides on the natural world. For so long, those 40 years since, the mainstream media have largely ignored these issues, or reported them as the concern of ‘environmentalists’, neatly compartmentalized away from the mainstream.

So I’ve had a strange sense of cognitive dissonance this past week or so as these issues are being discussed on the mainstream bulletins of the BBC, that bastion of UK establishment thinking. Of course, this is a reaction to the success of Extinction Rebellion in highlighting just how urgent now is the situation on global warming/ climate change and species loss (as well as to the success of Netflix in pinching David Attenborough and allowing him his full environmental voice). It really is a planetary emergency with little time left to effectively act.

The worry is that this is just to fill in the air time left by a government and parliament doing nothing but obsess about Brexit. There is no other legislation, no ‘queen’s speech’. The broadcasters must be sick of reiterating the minutiae of customs union, the withdrawal agreement, the splits in the two main parties and on and on.

But we have to be optimistic and suppose that
(a) something will eventually be sorted on Brexit and then
(b) this time legislators are accepting of the urgency and will eventually set out a programme that will at least partially address the climate/fossil fuel issue, encouraging people and business in the right direction. That is their job.
Difficult for a Conservative government that has spent 4 years rolling back the little environmental progress they allowed the Liberal Democrats to make in the coalition government of 2010.

The big question at the moment: Is Environment Secretary Michael Gove up to the job? He appears to understand the issues, but can he persuade the government to act and explain to the public what they are doing and why, and anyway will he still be there when prime minister Theresa May goes (ie soon)?

My optimism is somewhat subdued!

 

American Sparrow

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Still sorting through my photographs from Houston, I was trying to identify these birds that were feeding on the grass at Paul D Rushing Nature Reserve. Of course, they kept such a distance that a decent photograph was difficult, although you can see the key features from these.

To European eyes it looked like some sort of bunting or sparrow. Consulting Wikipedia, it seems that American Sparrows are not quite what I had thought.

Although they share the name sparrow, American sparrows are more closely related to Old World buntings than they are to the Old World sparrows (family Passeridae).[1][2] American sparrows are also similar in both appearance and habit to finches, with which they sometimes used to be classified.

So it’s some sort of American Sparrow, of which there is a huge proliferation, according to Wiki. A song sparrow is a likely possibility, as these certainly over-winter in Texas (it was March).

The glass IS half full

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glass half fullIt is a well known characterisation that optimists see a glass 50% full of liquid as ‘half full’, whereas pessimist see it as ‘half empty’. Does it matter which of these attitudes we take towards life and towards its mega problems such as climate change and Brexit?

The bulk of psychological evidence suggests that it does. Optimists tend to be more realistic and thus more effective at addressing the problems. Pessimists tend to expect the worst, not look at things too closely, and hide from difficulties – hence the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Life is all about change, so an optimistic outlook is the only one that enables us to face and deal with the realities of change.

Of course, there are limitations to being positive if it is not tempered with a grounding in reality. (The Brexit campaign comes to mind!)  I’m arguing against myself, but maybe we should see optimism-pessimism as a polarity that is only resolved through the ‘third pole’ of realism.

I suggest that we will only find a way through climate change and Brexit will be with an optimistic reality-based attitude. There are so many brains on the problems we will find a way through.

The glass really is half full!

The idea for this post came while reading
Professor Tom Lombardo’s book Future Consciousness.
Image by S nova via Wikimedia Commons.

Song Thrush

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We often see a song thrush in the back garden, but never with camera handy. Of course, they don’t stay long enough for me to go and get it, wisely with cats around.

This one appeared high on a hedge on a sunny afternoon walk in the Wirral, just asking to be photographed.

songthrush

I only managed 3 shots at maximum zoom before he flew off. Only this one was in reasonable focus. The lesson is maybe to leave burst mode set, but then of course you finish up with so many frames to sort out!

Orange Tip

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There seem to have been quite a lot of orange tip butterflies around the last few weeks, some looking really fresh like this one. Unusually, it paused awhile in the sun with wings open, allowing a few quick shots before normal fluttering was resumed.

orange tip

According to Wikipedia, orange tips are appearing earlier in the spring, and this must be a male, as “the more reclusive female… lacks the orange and is often mistaken for other species of butterfly”.

Strangely, the usually infallible autofocus on my Panasonic TZ200 does not appear to have got anything completely sharp, and that’s the same on several shots, so is probably not due to hand movement. Maybe there was just too much detail at different distances and differing illuminations in the strong sunlight (featured image shows how much was in shot).

Here today…

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The story of life. The glory of the flowering cherry petals in Knutsford every April. They used to come around May Day for the annual May Day Parade, but now they start more like mid April – the season is getting earlier. Perhaps they are out for a week…

 

Then, a good burst of rain and wind, just what our dry gardens need, but the end for the cherry petals, now a beautiful pink snow on the pavements, clogging shoes as we unavoidably walk through them. (Featured image.)

Dee Estuary Sunset 2

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A white dog runs out into the Dee estuary from the beach at Thursaston in the Wirral. The owner calls it back, and there emerges a white dog with brown legs. The estuary is actually very muddy, beyond the thin strip of sandy beach at the edge. Viewed from the low cliffs, mud, sand, river and tides combine together in wondrous picturesque swirls and patterns. Add to that the Sun descending slowly in the western sky. This combination never fails to lift the spirit.

 

dee estuary sunset 3dee estuary sunset 2

Sorry for the Ads

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When checking out my blog I’ve become increasingly annoyed by the ever more intrusive ads that WordPress has been littering the screen with. No doubt you have also.

So I’ve finally paid up for the WordPress Personal Plan, whose main selling point seems to be the removal of ads.

I guess that, at the end of the day, each internet player has to fund its activities somehow, so I don’t really criticise WordPress for their approach. Each has to find its own way. The amazing examples are Mozilla and Wikipedia, who seem to survive through donations and much idealism.

Picture ‘no more ads, still a fence’ by Andreas Manessinger via Wikimedia Commons.

The Water Will Come

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Anyone who follows the regular NASA ‘vital signs’ reports on sea level will be aware that the trend in global sea level is for an average rise of 3mm per year (see graph). This correlates with the increasing trend of CO2 concentration of around 2ppm per year (currently 410ppm). There is no significant debate about this. These are the figures accepted by most scientists.

Now, 3mm doesn’t sound much, but multiply by 100 to get us to 2119, that would be 300mm, which is 0.3 metre or about 1 foot – and that’s within the potential lifetime of babies being born today. Yes, you may say, but 1 foot is not much either.

But now consider that

  1. the rate of sea level rise is increasing as CO2 levels increase,
  2. the effect is not evenly spread around the globe, for example the East coast of North America is sinking, so the rate is much greater
  3. the increased weather variability caused by CO2 levels means greater tides, and more flooding
  4. Scientists are very worried about so-called positive feedback effects whereby CO2 and ice melting would be rapidly accelerated.

Add all this together. What does that mean for the beaches of England that I grew up with. Higher embankments? Loss of sand? Regular inundation? What of other even more vulnerable places?

I was inspired to write this by Jeff Goodell’s book The Water Will Come, which describes how some of the affected communities are today preparing for rises in sea levels – such as southern Florida, Venice, New York, Tokyo, Marshall Islands, Maldives. All are attempting to mitigate the effects, but how can they possibly cope in the long term? Consider that when CO2 concentration was last at this level, sea levels were 20 METRES higher – which it is fairly logical to assume is where we are headed in the long run.

We clearly have a global emergency that is currently being inadequately addressed. If humanity was behaving rationally, a major global programme would be in place to attempt to address and mitigate the effects of this emerging cataclysm. If only. The poorly supported Paris agreement is but a shadow of what is needed.

So all power to those young people, and to campaigning groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are trying to wake up those in power to their responsibilities.

Notre Dame de Paris

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How sad to see Our Lady, Notre Dame, in flames today.

My relationship with Our Lady began in 1967, on our honeymoon in Paris, a first introduction to one of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. We climbed the towers, took in the views, admired the gargoyles and the magnificent architecture.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Since then, we’ve visited Paris round about every decade, and of course Notre Dame always figured in the itinerary, renewal of that ever-present inspiration. She lives in my soul, is part of my conception of Paris, France and Europe.

Now, it is difficult to believe that she is disfigured, just as over the centuries, many of those great Gothic edifices have taken their turn at the destruction wrought by fire, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

Incredibly, the spirit of man is such that they are often lovingly restored. Hopefully that will also happen to Our Lady, a glory of the exceptional beauty that religions can inspire in the hearts of men and women.

Night photo by Gpesenti via Wikemedia Commons
Featured image cut from Twitter