Tag Archives: perception

beauty is participatory

“People argue about beauty. Is it in the eye of the beholder or is it a property of the beholden? From a relational perspective, the question is clearly dualistic, cast in either/or terms. If there is an answer, it is clearly both. Beauty is in the thing seen, and we grant beauty, making that with which we identify, in some resonant way, beautiful. Beauty is the experience of a shared vibration resonating between the thing seen and the one who sees … Beauty, then, might best be named in terms of resonance, a vibration that moves us, that makes us see and do differently. We bow, cry, or give thanks. We want more and soften in order to get it. We participate. Beauty becomes a call for engagement.”

*text from: Sewall, Laura. Sight and Sensibility: the Ecopsychology of Perception.

“Something inside you won’t stop loving the world, no matter what weather comes.”

November 11, 2013Earthautumn, beauty, Charlotte Du Cann, Earth, heart, perceptionWendy

In a beautiful, brief, meditative post on autumn and life’s tenuous tenacity, Charlotte Du Cann writes,

Some things you can’t capture in a photograph in a time of fall: the scent of woodsmoke, the perfume of a quince, the sound of the sea roaring in the darkness, a sky with bright constellations, the knowledge that once this was the time of the reed, now sere in the marshes, which was gathered to thatch the rooves of houses. A time of shelter from the storm and of waiting…

In her typically grounded-in-place writing style, she considers a downed thrush, still warm in her hands and what the un-photographable has to do with being

In a world that is fast losing its songbirds and its poets. On a day when you struggle to pick up the camera and go into the lane and photograph the colours and shapes of those things you write . . . . and yet you go. Because something inside you won’t stop loving the world, no matter what weather comes. It’s a covenant we made with the earth a long time ago.

Read her full post here, it’s really lovely.

the realm of the most precious

“Whenever we take the trouble to plumb the depths of an experience and extract from it all it contains, the simplest as well as the most hidden, we cease to speak of ourselves and ourselves alone. Instead we enter the realm of the most precious, the realm of universal experience which we share with others.”
—Jacques Lusseyran

tiny tweak, expansive meaning

July 26, 2012Uncategorizedabout this blog, consciousness, paying attention, perception, Trey RatcliffWendy

I made a miniscule change to my blog yesterday. Nothing really newsworthy, but it had been something niggling at the back of my mind for a while which finally, today, demanded attention.

The tagline used to be “playing conceptual dress-up.” All well and good for someone who, as I wrote in one of my first posts, likes ideas. I said, “I like to try on new ones and old ones and mix and match and play with them, to juxtapose them, to find comfortable ones and really sparkly strange ones too. Maybe they sometimes even match.”

And then I went for a walk in the woods – something I recommend for helping sort out niggling details, and I tried my darndest to open up my perceptions, to really pay attention, to breathe deeply and notice where smells changed, where the sound of cricket song started (in the sun-warmed, flowering, pathside at the top of the rise) and where the woods were hushed. My skin thrilled at the brush and catch of spider silk and, my eyes softened to the spaces between trees and their shadows.

And I thought, “Ideas? Concepts? What was I thinking?” That’s only part of the picture. What I really want to include is all the ways it’s possible to pay attention, play with perspective, shift perceptions and that’s not just mental conceptualizing. So I changed the tagline to “playing perceptual dress-up.”

I am energized by the edges of territory, with using concepts as lenses and perceptions as doorways.

The universe is vast and there are many ways to experience it.

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image source: Trey Ratcliff‘s flickr (via Compfight) where he kindly licenses his work through creative commons. Quality photos – really interesting person. Apparently I like his Angkor Wat photos because he was the source for this image, here, as well.