Month: December 2023

Peace

~ windinmywheels ~ 4 Comments
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Consciousness is experience

Christof Koch
The Feeling Of Life Itself

Today I asked AI to create an image of peace, using the words ‘bright reflective colours, peace.’ I’m interested in what artificial intelligence can contribute to our conscious human capacity for creativity, experience and reflection.

Now I shall spend a few days considering the (I think beautiful) image I’ve been presented with. What can I see of peace here? I wonder, too, what you might see? Will several responses differ widely, or will we each see similar attributes of peace?

First response in me sees multi-layered, multi-coloured richness, depth and diversity with an immediately obvious lack of sharp edges. No grazed knees or broken bones here. I recall something similar from my childhood imaginings about ‘Heaven.’

What would a more fluid human consciousness look like? How would our experience of life change? Is the sharp-edged, the hard and fast, the ‘absolute,’ helpful? I see inviting pathways in this image – cohesion, unity in diversity, no walls, no weapons – and I feel something of peace.

We’re all too familiar with the experience of what it feels like when we encounter deliberate fomenting of anger, anxiety, lack, loss, and warfare in its various tragic guises. I dare to hope that our humankind may become more familiar with the sort of intelligence – ‘artificial’ and ‘human’ – that presents, holds out to us all, new visions of peace.

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When you wake

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When you wake to the dream of now
from night and its other dream
you carry day out of the dark
like a flame.

When spring comes north and flowers
unfold from earth and its even sleep,
you lift summer on with your breath
lest it be lost ever so deep.

Your life you live by the light you find
and follow it on as well as you can,
carrying through the darkness wherever you go
your one little fire that will start again.

William Stafford
The Dream of Now

And now to sleep beneath stars too many and too great for more than the smallest comprehension – but with intent to carry, and to awake to and for, my one little fire that will start again.

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Quietening

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watching a candle
illuminate a dark space
quietens my soul

Alongside a quiet watching there’s quite often a quiet listening – and we may thereby find ourselves ‘illuminated’ inside and out.

Several times today I have come across observations about the high state of anxiety that afflicts vast swathes of our humankind.

Human anxiety often arises from an acute sense of helplessness – our inability to change innumerable situations we dearly wish could be changed.

My mental chatter exacerbates anxiety and does little or nothing to help anyone. So I seek, and invite others to seek, quietening from a candle.

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Within

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Photo by Alex Andrews on Pexels.com

When there is silence, one finds the anchor of the Universe within oneself

Lao Tzu

There are times when words cannot be found and we’re all familiar with that fact, though that doesn’t stop us from straining and struggling to find the right words to articulate whatever is going on in us. Yes: whatever is going on in us. The billions of things going on in us, always and everywhere. There’s a clue in this – for whatever’s going on does a great deal of its going on in us. I wonder if others, like me, get frightened sometimes, like a person drowning, paddling furiously and shouting in terror, unaware that a rescuer, swimming swiftly and silently, steadied by a life belt, will reach them only seconds from now?

All of this comes to mind, in this late evening, in hushed Edinburgh, in silence. And for a while I observe words tumbling into the silence. Explanations. Questions. Expectations. Prayers. Protestations. Until, until … because it’s late and the words have been tumble-drying around and around in the spinner all day, the silence prevails. An ocean of silence. An ocean doing its ebbing and flowing ocean-thing within. And oddly there’s no panic here, but a kind of undergirding depth instead. This is immeasurable comfort to me, for if – after all my words of ‘life and death’ subside – I can know what it is to be held, to be ‘rescued’ if you like, then it must ultimately be so for all others as well. This safe and peace-filled holding in the silence must also be for the people – alive and dead – that I have longed for, and do long for, as they have faced, or are facing, illness, suffering, cruelty, warfare, profound aloneness – crying out to the heavens for words, for answers. The words eventually give way to the undergirding and sustaining silence. A kind of – perhaps an actual – paradise, even if only for a nano-second sometimes, available to us in the here and now, wheresoever our here, and our now …

When there is silence, one finds the anchor …

Ah, dear Love, for all souls lost for words, may it be so.

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Touching the stars

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I love this open-hearted city, celebrating life’s richness and diversity in multifarious ways, all year round. I love Edinburgh with a love that simultaneously resembles both an ache and an ever-present undercurrent of joy …

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Teeth chattering returning

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more @gardenstudiogram | click photos to enlarge

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Frosted: Norway’s tree
and a new Stable scene on
the Mound and then home

Well wrapped to say the least, still my teeth chatter – even as I smile on this frosty bright-lit Edinburgh night. Norway’s annual gift (thank you!). Invitation to outdoor community carol singing. A striking, simple, unusual representation of a striking, simple, unusual arrival on earth. A Carousel on George Street. Kaleidoscopic seasonal songs intermingled. Delighted children – some very young and some very old – in the Christmas markets. The tram bell. The illuminated Castle. A bit hungry. Looking forward to holding a hot mug of steaming herbal tea. Happy. Slowed. Grateful. Ponderous. And then home … ah, how one appreciates arriving home in Winter.

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