Tag: Himalayas

When big isn’t necessarily better

angela findlay4 Comments

Reflections on: IN PROCESS… a life, a film, a book, an exhibition, The Vaults, Stroud. Sunday 19th October, 11am-5pm and by appointment until 1st November.

 

“We must, we must, we must increase the bust.

The bigger the better, the tighter the sweater, the boys depend on us.”

I remember chanting that with my boarding school roommates as a teenager, elbows flung back in a futile attempt – in my case at least – to inflate our adolescent chests. Bigger was definitely better, or so we believed.

Burj Khalifa, Dubai

Skyscrapers, cars, salaries, houses… In so many areas of modern society, ‘big’ still equals ‘better.’ More followers, more likes, more headlines, more sales. The biggest countries led by the most powerful leaders and largest militaries make the most noise. And yet we know, quantity doesn’t equate to quality. Magnitude doesn’t always reflect meaning or value.

This idea – that bigger isn’t always better – is something I’ve seen reflected both in the trajectory of my great great aunt Joan’s life and in my own development as an artist. (If you are new to Joan’s story, please see my previous blogs for background.)

Patshull Hall, Staffordshire

Joan’s tent

Joan grew up in a 147-room stately home in Staffordshire. Yet she spent her final weeks in a single, often soggy Meade tent pitched in a remote Himalayan Valley, surrounded not by grandeur but by shepherds, wildflowers and the sound of rain. She had traded scale for purpose. And her joy, it seems, had grown as her material load had lessened.

My own artistic journey has followed a similarly inverse curve.

Painting a mural in Sydney, 1987

I began large, unable to contain any drawing or painting within the boundaries of paper or canvas. My work spilled onto walls, first private then public, then grew further to fill stage backdrops for theatres or touring bands. Various mishaps including a paint-splattered boss’s car and a disastrous commission to paint the backdrop for INXS KICK album tour in 1987, which promptly cracked and fell off in large chunks when rolled up, nudged me toward the more forgiving surface of prison walls. There, no amount of damage could make the environment worse than it already was.

The light danced, 120x120cm

Years later, I turned my focus to canvases of my own, their size dictated by the available studio space and commercial considerations of galleries. And most recently, to works just 28x28cm – or smaller. I have replaced the vast audiences of art fairs with the quiet intimacy of just six or seven visitors at a time into the two vaults beneath my home in Stroud’s Cemetery.

The Vaults

Those vaults now house In Process… a deeply personal exhibition about Joan, her life and the resonance her death still holds for me, our family and small communities she encountered in India.

In one vault, where gravediggers once hung their tools and I now hang mine, visitors watch a short film projected into the open lid of an old trunk telling the story of Joan Margaret Legge.

In the other, where those same workers drank tea, ghostly white plaster casts hang like three-dimensional botanical drawings reminiscent of the specimens Joan collected and sent to Kew Gardens.

‘138 days’

A series of square sketchbooks chart the 138 days I followed Joan’s 1939 diary entries. Starting on 17th February when I stepped into her shoes as she boarded a ship to India, I step out of them again on 4th July, the day she slipped off the edge of a Himalayan path to her death. One photograph, one sketchbook page, each day a quiet re-embodiment across time. Not a recreation of her journey, but a chance to listen more deeply to the changing tone of her voice in the final months of her life.

At the heart of the exhibition is its smallest piece: a re-working of a first edition of Frank Smythe’s Valley of Flowers, the very book that inspired Joan’s expedition. Through collage, drawings and pressed flowers, it now tells the stories of three visitors to the valley rather than just one: his, hers and mine. Wrapped in brown paper and tied with string like an archival package, the book invites visitors to wear white gloves to turn its delicate pages, not because it is precious in a monetary sense, but out of respect, Unlike most artworks, these ones are meant to be handled and engaged with.

‘Three journeys in one’

There is nothing for sale. No press campaign. No sponsorship. Just a quiet space, tucked away in a garden, found by invitation or chance. A strange but deliberate choice, and to me, a more authentic reflection of the humbleness of where Joan’s life ended than any traditional gallery could offer.

What Joan lost in material possessions, she gained in purpose and joy. Her life distilled into what nine porters could carry. She found a sense of completeness long before she had completed her journey.

That’s what I hope to convey in the improvised, immersive pieces shown in the warm belly of my limestone vaults. People forgive imperfection and lack of polish as they connect with Joan’s story through their hands, senses and bodies.

Just as artists learn to see not just form but negative space – the shapes between things – so Joan’s outwardly abundant life transformed into an inner world: slower, quieter, less visible, but not lesser in any way.

Maybe this is a natural outcome of ageing… the gentle decluttering of ambition and a reshuffling of values. Or maybe Joan’s story is a simple reminder that richness cannot always be seen and meaning doesn’t always require an audience.

The symmetry in our shrinking trajectories is just an observation.

But it feels strangely right.

IN PROCESS…

Sunday 19th October, 11am-5pm and by appointment until 1st November.

The Vaults, 114 Bisley Road, Stroud

 

 

 

Following Joan… Part Two

angela findlay1 Comment

(If you are joining Joan’s story now, you might like to read ‘Following Joan… Part One’ first)

‘Goal reached, Valley of Flowers. Fritillaries nodding their heads around me. Men off.’ 

On 20th June 1939, just over four months after leaving England, 54-year-old Joan and her troop of porters reached the Valley of Flowers in the northern Indian Himalayas. 

It was ‘a morning in a thousand’. Firs and jasmine scented the air, dew drops sparkled & everyone was cheerful & happy. The track wound up and down until it suddenly dropped sheer to the river. At the bottom, the worst native bridge Joan had encountered yet stretched precariously across a particularly turbulent section. ‘If I had met it in the early days I don’t think I could have faced it.’  

Then came a real climb, so steep she had to crawl part of the way. Even with ice axe and climbing boots, she couldn’t stay upright. The path clung to the side of a mountain which plummeted several hundred feet into the raging waters below, the ground crumbly and uncertain. But she pressed on. ‘One is so busy placing feet that one hasn’t time to think of possibilities.’ 

They slid down a precipice, hanging on to rhododendron bushes, crossed another snow field, then climbed again. Ganga Ram & Amba Dath – two of Joan’s three most loyal young guides – clearly thought she was too slow. ‘Each took a hand & ran me up paying no heed if I was on my feet or not. I had to beg for mercy twice as really they nearly finished me off,’ she wrote. And then they were there. The goal reached. The Valley of Flowers.

Tents were pitched exactly where mountaineer and author Frank Smythe had camped for several months in 1937. With three men managing the camp and plans to stay there until October, Joan was free to roam and explore the terrain of her new home in search of alpine flowers. The monsoon rains were gathering. Conditions would soon become unimaginably wet and the ground increasingly treacherous. But Joan was deeply happy.

July 2nd. ‘It was the most glorious evening, every way you looked magnificent, through the gorge range upon range of perfect mountains…’ The descent from these dizzying heights, however, was less glorious. Rains had rotted much of the ground and the final stretch was so steep that she had no choice but to descend on her seat, using the ice axe as a brake. Yet Joan revelled in challenge and beauty alike, undaunted by danger, enchanted by flowers and alive to every shifting shadow. ‘All the way back to camp I had the great joy of watching the last sun on the peaks across the river, orangey pink… the rest of the snow getting white & harder, then that green when they look so severe & unapproachable.‘

That night was lovely but cold. A bright moon rose over the range, catching the snowy summits in the east. Though Joan’s camp lay in darkness, the moonlight made the mountains glow. ‘A fairy world,’ she wrote, ‘beautiful beyond words.’

July 3rd. ‘The men started singing before 5 o’clock this morning, it sounded so nice. The ground has all dried up & things are extremely lovely. If we get spells of two days fine, it will be a great help. Everything is growing very fast.

The following day, Joan was dead.

©Staffordshire History Centre

As abruptly as her life ended, her diary – so alive with wonder – skids to a halt.

Silence.

A telegram or letter from the sub-postmaster in Joshimath informed her family. Joan had slipped, fallen and died instantly. Due to the remote terrain, her body was carried back to camp and preserved in the snow until a magistrate could formally record the death. When her sister, Dossy, requested that Joan be buried in the valley, a small grave was made. A year later a headstone was erected, apparently delivered by Dossy herself.

Except that last bit has been deemed most unlikely by Dossy’s grandchildren who can find no record of their grandmother having made the long, arduous journey to India in the first year of the Second World War.

Without Joan’s detailed voice to explain what happened, conflicting accounts have taken root, a Chinese whisper of history… herstory. Was she reaching for a flower to add to her collection of specimens for Kew Gardens? Did she just slip, the edge of the cliff invisible in dense fog? For several years, I’ve tried to disentangle fact from error and in late July 2024, I and three of Joan’s descendants travelled to Ghanghariya, a colourful, bustling shanty town of damp hotels, pilgrims and donkeys, ready to make the long climb into the Valley of Flowers. The landscape might not reveal the past, but it could not lie.

Ghanghariya

We were warmly welcomed at the impressive Information Centre, honoured guests of the great-great-grandchildren of shepherds, villagers, and guides from Joan’s time each eager to share their version of what had happened to ‘Legge Ma’am’. Soon I had scribbled five different endings to Joan’s life in my little green notebook, the one that would mysteriously vanish a few days later as if to tell me: it didn’t really matter. The only truth that did, was that Joan had not been forgotten.

The next day we set off, once again retracing Joan’s footsteps, traversing the same raging river (via a slightly less terrifying bridge) and climbing the steep slopes into the valley.

Low cloud concealed Joan’s snowy ‘majesties’ and even the valley itself. Flowers, shoulder high, lined the narrow trail until a small hand-painted sign forked it and directed us to the right.

‘Leggy Grave’ could not have been more remote. With the original, broken headstone having been generously replaced by Infinity Outdoor Explorers and the area lovingly tended by villagers, Joan rested, Ophelia-like, among geraniums, potentillas and flowers whose names I don’t know. But she did.

Buried under snow for eight months of the year, this was where my intrepid great-great aunt found peace. A ‘lost daughter of the Himalayas’. And in the prophetic words of the sub-postmaster written over eight decades ago, ‘though death is inevitable, her death in a lonely forest under the tragic circumstances will always be mourned.’

While Joan lives on in the hearts and imaginations of people in northern India – many of whom have trekked miles to pay their respects – back in England, her name, her journey and her collection of flowers had all but vanished into the obscurity of family attics and forgotten archives. She entered my orbit in my twenties, a bright star that inspired independence, courage, a different way to be a woman in the world. I’ve followed her willingly, right to the edge. Imagined her fall… falling… falling… time stretching to infinity like a bungee… then snapping.

A tragic death, or an enviable end to a life well-lived? I’ll let Joan speak for herself.

‘… if we would only give up struggling after worldly things. They don’t count much when you come face to face with what the old Sardou calls the sublimity of the Himalayas whose magnificence, serenity and everlastingness grip one right to the core. You will probably think I am mad, but I don’t think so. There are things that stand and are I think increased, they are love and gratitude.’

Joan, June 1939

Forthcoming Event:

At the end of September, you are warmly invited to an exhibition/series of events showing research and art created in honour of Joan. Exact dates and details to be confirmed, but it will be in the beautiful Chapels of Rest in Stroud Cemetery.

Random, chance, God… or what?

angela findlay15 Comments

Zinc Oxide Tape. Waterproofing Wax. Leech socks.

These were the entries listed on the first page of my new notebook. And I ignored all three.

The fourth, written in slightly brighter blue ink read ‘Tanya Vad… Thank you’. I had arrived in India. Dhanyavaad was the most important word I wanted to learn.

This small 11 x 7.5cm notebook would accompany me for the next 18 days, safely tucked away like a baby joey in the blue pouch strapped to my tummy. I would dig it out regularly, flip the turquoise-green cover over the black spiral spine and scribble something, often illegibly, as I walked or rattled round a hairpin bend in our bus dodging landslides. Over the weeks it gathered names, email addresses, dates, details and ideas for my new creative project.

As anybody who has travelled with a purpose knows, the notes you take become an invaluable aide-memoire for when you return home. As you re-enter your everyday, the sharp outlines of a foreign, multicoloured present seal into a soft-focus bubble that drifts away to bob among other memory balloons in skies gone by. Experiences fade and jumble in a cacophony of impressions. Verbal re-tellings omit details as they settle into a condensed narrative designed for low attention spans. Bring out the notebook, however, and you instantly have a co-witness; a means to tangibly touch the past. 

I have boxes of such notebooks. They have helped me write or paint, jolting my memory, filling in gaps. That is why losing this little green one, felt like the end of the world.

It happened a few days before the end of the trip. I mentioned my impending adventure in my previous blog, how I was about to embark on a journey following in the 1939 footsteps of my Great Great Aunt Joan to the Valley of Flowers in Northern India. Our happy, harmonious group consisted of my sister, two female cousins, three or sometimes more local guides plus a driver. We made a dream team and I am telling you about this specific incident because I can’t yet put the bigger whole into words. And because in essence it captures the magic of the entire trip. The many small miracles we experienced and the power of stories.

On this particular day, just as Joan had done 85 years earlier, we were visiting the temple in Badrinath. An atmosphere of noisy celebration, dancing and orange-coloured joy pervaded the streets of this small but hugely important Hindu town located at an elevation of around 3,100 meters in the Garhwal Himalayas. Inaccessible and closed for six months of the year due to extreme weather, it is one of the most visited pilgrim destinations in India attracting 5-mile queues in the summer months as people line up to pay their respects to the 2000-year-old black granite deity of Lord Badrinath housed in the main temple building. 

Being slightly off-season due to the monsoons, we were able to simply kick off our shoes and, bearing wreaths of marigolds, join the gentle flow of pilgrims, many of whom would have travelled for days to be here. Once inside we planted ourselves on some steps to watch people of all ages circling the inner temple, taking (prohibited) selfies and videos and gathering goodie-bags of holy sweets, sultanas and nuts for their families. After some time, we shuffled out again in a bubbling counter stream that spilled onto the temple forecourt, an architectural wonder that miraculously clung to the riverbank while other sections downstream had succumbed to gravity and slipped into the raging, milky-beige waters of the Alaknanda River. 

We retrieved our shoes and stood discussing where to go for lunch. That’s when I noticed it was gone. My pouch was open and empty. An all-too familiar plummeting sensation drained my face and body as a memory surfaced from the depths of 1987, my last visit to India, when my bag containing 3-months of undeveloped film, diaries, recordings not to mention passport, visa, ticket home and money were stolen on a train, never to be seen again. A small wave of panic broke out within our group, scooping strangers into its current. The men in charge of storing shoes searched their patch; sister, cousins and guides dispersed in all directions to scour corners, dustbins and donations boxes both in and outside the temple complex. Our main guide, by now friend, Kiran, took me to a small nearby room stuffed with five uniformed security guards and fifteen or so screens of surveillance footage. We fast forwarded our way through videos following my movements – me feeling both relief that I had refrained from taking a sneaky photo and slight concern that a hidden camera might have caught me ducking behind a wall to remove my leggings. The loss of ‘a little green diary’ was announced over the temple’s Tannoy system, but our efforts were to no avail. 

Thoughts raced through my head as I searched the grainy grey images both for the moment of its disappearance and any possible symbolic significance I could attach to it. Maybe I am not meant to be doing a project on Joan – or Legge Ma’am as she is known in these parts. Maybe this is a sign I should have just experienced the trip and trusted I would remember what is important rather than constantly jotting things down. [This is just how my mind works.] Will this ruin the trip for me, for everyone? How could I have dropped it? Who could have taken it… why would they? Maybe…

Then the phone call came. The little green diary had been found. I restrained myself from hugging the guards in the rush of relief and hope. But for me to fully believe it, I had to see it. 

Our other guide, also now friend, Naresh, had re-entered the complex and gone to the place where people were gathered to listen to the teachings. The door of the temple was firmly locked for the daily offerings – the prasadam – so he made his way to the middle of the crowd and started reciting the beautiful story of Legge Ma’am and why we, her four descendants had come here. He was an excellent story-teller. And that’s when “the magic happened,” he told us afterwards. “It was so strong, so strong that everybody came near to me and started listening to the story. And they were very curious… finally they get to know the importance of this notebook, for all of us and for them as well.” 

A young boy then came forward. He had found the notebook but hadn’t known what to do with it so had put it in the main donation box at the foot of Lord Badrinath in the temple…. which was closed. Naresh called us back into the complex and we waited. We gained fresh red teekas (or bindis) between our eyebrows and more handfuls of sticky white sugar balls and showered the young hero, Shriansh (which fittingly means Part of God) with all the muesli bars we could scramble together from the bottom of our bags.

By now, people were very keen to help, including the priest. When the temple finally re-opened, we were all ushered in. The bright viridian green of the notebook cover could be spotted through the glass walls of the donation box, nestling on a bed of faded rupee notes. So close and yet… Only one man had the authority to open the box. A District Officer (DO) based 200 km away. He was the sole person to hold a key. And he came to Badrinath just once a month. 

That was the point when Naresh, who hadn’t planned on praying that day, asked the deity of Lord Badrinath to help us, just as some of us had already been asking St Anthony, the Christian finder of lost objects. One, or both, stepped in. 

The priest told Naresh to look behind him. There was the DO. Not on his official monthly visit, but by some serendipitous miracle, he had come to pray that day. He willingly fished the key out of his pocket and a little while later, a policewoman handed me my precious notebook. Hugs, tears, smiles and many clasped hands and bows followed… ridiculous really, but we all knew the true value of these spiral-bound pages.

With Shriansh, the finder of the little green notebook

Each one of us will interpret this story differently. For some it might be a random string of events with a lucky outcome. For others it might be evidence of God, a sign that Joan was watching over us, a meant-to-be moment or proof of the power of stories that need to be told. Meaning, just like beauty and truth, is made within. For me personally, the magic of the story lies in the glimpse it gave me of a huge force for good that works behind the scenes we snap with our phones and try to capture in words. Like the evasive Himalayan peaks – or ‘Majesties’ as Joan called them – that briefly appeared in their full glory between parted clouds only to vanish again, this benign power shone through the many eyes that sought contact and connection. It was what I saw in the faces that so readily broke into smiles and laughter; in the hearts that were wide, wide open inviting us to open ours too.  

The ghosts of lost flowers

angela findlay6 Comments

On 4th July, while the minds and eyes of many people in Britain and further afield were firmly focused on Election Day, mine were occupied with my Great Great Aunt who died on this day 85 years ago. In one of those unintentionally magical examples of serendipity, I had managed to secure an appointment at Kew Gardens, London to view some of the fruits of her trekking and gathering in the Himalayas in 1939 just prior to her sudden death.

I introduced Joan Margaret Legge in a recent blog and talked a little on how, while the Second World War was rumbling towards its beginning, she had travelled to the Valley of Flowers, otherwise known as the Bhyundar Valley, in Northern India.

As a keen amateur botanist she had been inspired by the recent discovery of the valley in 1931 by a team of three lost British mountaineers returning from an ascent of Mount Kamet and seeking shelter from inclement weather. One of the climbers, Frank S. Smythe, had been so entranced by the valley that he returned in the monsoons of 1937 to explore and collect examples of its flora. His book, published in 1938, was the inspiration for my great great aunt to set sail in February 1939 and travel up through India to her base camp in the lower hills around Ranikhet. Waiting there for the snows higher up to melt, she spent two months acclimatising, doing practice hikes and organising porters and equipment for the big trek to her destination where she planned to spend the summer gathering seeds and samples for Kew.

Between 22nd May and 20th June she trekked north sleeping in precariously pitched tents with a hardy team of local men carrying provisions. Usually on her feet but sometimes on her bottom, she scrambled and climbed her solitary way through the mountains in a state of sweaty or rain-drenched awe of the ‘Glories’ as she called the soaring peaks that emerged and disappeared in the sky. She took cameras, presses supplied by Kew, wrote diaries and filled collectors’ notebooks with minuscule handwriting describing calyxes and tuberous roots while always scanning the terrain for flowers to press and send to the Herbarium in the hope of filling some of the gaps in Smythe’s earlier, spoiled-by-mould attempts to record what grew there. 

On my first visit to Kew in 2022 I had been told that none of her notebooks or specimens could be located, that they had probably not survived or had been of insufficient quality or significance. It was impossible to search for them… understandably so, the Herbarium houses an incredible seven million specimens!  

The Herbarium at Kew, founded in 1852

When I research I sometimes get this dogged instinct not to accept the first claim of something no longer existing or being lost in the annals of some past archival system and, not quite ready to give up, I renewed my quest to locate them. Following a string of helpful leads, several kind employees at the Herbarium, intrigued by my aunt’s story, joined me in my search. They soon discovered that a collector’s notebook and an as-yet unknown quantity of her specimens had indeed survived and the latter had been recently digitalised as part of a huge project to create a digital catalogue of the contents of Kew’s filing cabinets.

Digitalised specimens of Joan Margaret Legge ©Kew Gardens

And so, on the anniversary of Joan’s death, dodging ballot papers and predictive polls, I immersed myself in the sepia papers of a time and world that no longer exists.

Joan’s Collector’s Notebook, 1939  ©Kew Gardens

Exhumed from their graves and held in place by tiny straps, I was able to connect to Joan through the physical ghosts of the plants she had harvested. Traces of earth still clung to their roots, potent yellow pollen spilled from crumpled and flattened flowers, residual colours blushed petals and leaves as their ethereal beauty gently concertinaed the 85-year stretch of time between Joan’s picking and my viewing into a space in which I could almost touch her. 

Strange to think that these faded blooms had made it back to England while she hadn’t… It was a poignant preamble to an impending trip with my sister and two first cousins, all female descendants of Joan, designed to follow in her footsteps through the monsoon rains and soaring peaks of Uttarakhand, from Ranikhet to Joshimath and Badrinath and on to her isolated grave in the Valley of Flowers. As far as I know, we will be the first members of her family to visit Joan. It will be the realisation of a dying wish of my dear uncle who had long wanted to travel there himself but, unable to fulfil his dream, invited us to go there in his place.

Time marches on, history is made. We have a new prime minister and his government’s actions and inactions will make it into the newspapers and history books. Meanwhile, the silent and unseen reside as untold stories pressed between their pages awaiting discovery.

All images are © copyright of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and/or The Herbarium Catalogue, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Published on the Internet http://www.kew.org/herbcat [accessed on 04/07/2024]

 

Finding new ways forward in a valley of flowers…

angela findlay8 Comments

For the past month I have been immersed in the sights and sensations of Northern India… not literally but in my head, psyche and the screen of my desktop.

©Staffordshire Records Office

Having stepped out of my German ‘grandfather’s shadow’ and the darkness of the times in which he was embroiled, I am now switching families to walk in the footsteps of my English Great Great Aunt, who travelled to the Himalayas to gather flower seeds and specimens for Kew Gardens. Surrounded by the blooms of Spring and regularly soaked by rains, just as she was, it has not been difficult to feel my way into her world. And it’s a great deal more enjoyable than marching across Russia in 1941.

 

A friend recently asked me, what is it that makes you research your predecessors? Why do you feel a need to look back? I couldn’t come up with an off-the-cuff answer, just an interest in the question and a strong sense that ‘looking back’ wasn’t really what I was doing.

You will hear more about my Great Great Aunt Joan in the future for she is the subject of my current research. I don’t yet know where it will lead, I just love unpacking ‘brown paper packages tied up with string’ stored away in archives, reading diaries and letters, and scouring black and white images for visual details that will help me create a picture of a once living person long since buried in the annals of time. 

Joan’s grave lies in the Himalayan ‘Valley of Flowers’, 3,600 metres above sea level just west of Nepal and flanking the Tibetan border. She died there in 1939 aged 54. For many months of the year it is concealed by the snows but in the few months between June and September when they melt and the valley becomes accessible, a small rectangular gravestone emerges in the verdant meadows like a baby’s first tooth. Nestled below a range of snow-capped ‘glories’ that zigzag a skyline into the rarefied air, it captures the imagination of trekkers. Google search ‘Joan Legge’ and you will find she features in many a social media post or blog. People are touched by the story of this solitary British woman who found her end in such a remote and beautiful place. 

I too have long been fascinated by Joan though I can’t explain why. Her name just twinkled like a star when I first heard it in my late teens or early twenties. I knew few details other than that she was a spinster who had opted out of the trappings of aristocratic society and travelled to India; a woman who bucked the expectations and trends of the time in favour of independence and adventure. Like the tip of an iceberg her grave is just the beginning of a story I would like to find a way of telling. 

As for my friend’s question of ‘looking back’, I don’t actually feel the past lies ‘behind’ us. I am certainly interested in looking at history, most specifically Nazism, the Holocaust and the Second World War, for clues on how we can best learn the lessons of the past. And with that it mind I have explored the roles of memorials, apology, restorative justice, punishment and prisons, not least in my blogs. And yet, while they all can and do work to a degree, none of them seem to prevent cycles of violence, conflict, discrimination and trauma from repeating themselves over and over as we can witness all too frequently in the world.  

There must be something else… some other way, but we are unable to see, or even think it within the limitations of our current belief systems and knowledge of life.

My sense is that we need to go way beyond the specifics of each conflict to the very root of what leads to all of them. ‘Othering’ and seeing things is terms of clear-cut binaries that justify violent actions are clear causes. But could our fundamental, albeit often unconscious linear-based depiction of time, evolution, even ‘progress’ also be part of the problem with their goal-oriented focus on the future and belief that the past is largely done and dusted and trailing inanimately behind?

It feels increasingly like an (erroneous) modern construct (and I’m talking thousands of years ago not ten) that sees humanity as collectively shuffling forwards towards an ideal state lying in some distant future. Admittedly the present moment is where it’s all at in many belief systems, but nonetheless there is usually a destination towards which to strive. In Yogic or Buddhist practices, it might be Enlightenment, in Christian terms, Heaven or Eternal Life on the other side of death. In economics, it can be seen in politicians’ relentless chase for ‘growth’, in technology, it’s ‘progress’, in the environment, net-zero, in health, a perfect body, in leisure, a chase for something bigger, better, faster, further…

Darwinian theories of the ‘survival of the fittest’ lead to competition with winners and losers, an increasing separation of weak and strong, good and bad, rich and poor; a sense of lack, of being left behind, of missing out, of not being good enough or being better… and so many more of the psychological states that can be found behind the widespread symptoms of mental health, poverty, addictions, injustice… and war.

How well has this outlook served us? Not too well if I look around at where we are today with most problems failing to be solved using the same thinking that created them. 

My most recent attempt to find solutions has been to duck out of the continuous stream of bad news and surround myself with flowers and sepia photos of breath-taking mountains, to inhale the extraordinary, albeit understated bravery of my great great aunt and to do a deep-dive into the contents of three inspirational books that landed in my hands as gifts with the kind of serendipitous timing that, in my experience, portends something magical.

I can feel something shifting far below the surface of the present chaos. Possibilities for improvement and lasting change… in our present, not some distant future. They have not yet flowered in my mind, so you might have to wait a little while for me to articulate what they look like!