Mindfulness doesn't really resonate with me. I thought I might put my take on it here when the thread started but didn't want to be a negative voice in the conversation but as
JillyG has mentioned me.... well I don't need much encouragement.
I've had this conversation with my mate at work. She doesn't identify with it either. She reckons it's because we are both already in a place where mindfulness happens without us needing to know about mindfulness practice. She's a runner. What she tells me about running sounds very much like my experience of photography.....only much more exhausting.
Mindfulness doesn't resonate with me but flow does.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
It's not such a different concept. Flow is also about being in the moment. For me though, its almost about being absent rather than present. When I'm on a roll with photography (or anything) my self dissipates and what im doing becomes present in me. I'm almost literally lost in the moment. My self, my sense of 'I', shuts down and the process takes over.
I have this experience mostly with photography, drawing, coding and back in the day when i was a salesman, selling, but it's not limited to those.
An interesting thing happened to me last year a couple of months before I got hit by a bus. I'd been on mobitog maybe a year or more and had increased the amount of photos i took and processed as a consequence by a very large amount. One day I was walking down a passage I'd walked down countless times before and saw it differently. And everything looked subtly different, something about the scale, size, dimensions, I'm not sure and can't really put it in words but it was a qualitative difference. The quality of my visual world had altered somehow in a small but not unimportant way.
I didn't read too much into it at the time, Ive had mind altering experiences before and just chalked this up as interesting. Then I got hit by a bus and the kind of things I thought about on a day to day basis changed for several months.
My non-concious mind didn't let it go though. More than 12 months later, just a couple of weeks ago now, walking down the same passage where my perception had changed my brain shunted the thought into my consciousness that it was probably just a patch of neurons that wouldn't normally talk to my visual system connecting up because of all the extra practice id got from mobitog.
There's no big revelation from this story. For me, I channel photography, I don't do it, it almost does me. I lose my self and become the moment, the act.
I'll leave this with a picture of the eucalyptus tree I've seen every day for 5 years but which a year ago made the unusual firing of some of my neurons made me go "woah! What's going on with that?"
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Moving on to your photo of the eucalyptus tree... It’s an interesting study in what you saw with your 5 years experience with that particular tree, and what I can see in your photo, based on limited resolution, lack of on-site experience, etc. They way you wrote about it suggests there is something specific we’re supposed to be able to see.
I had to study the photo for a while to see anything besides a tree because I also studying the rest of the photo looking for clues. You know what this tree normally looks like while I don’t. I can see that at some point the tree has been brutalized by a machine operator - probably something to do with the street light. That is pretty common around power lines and street lights but I don’t think you wouldn’t have noticed it before. Maybe its something we’ve seen so often that we don’t see it at all? People have complained so bitterly about the disfiguring of trees by the power line crews that I think the crews have required some “sensitivity training” and are being more careful to do a more thoughtful job. I’ve learned to plant my trees far enough away from the power lines so the crews won’t ruin them. However, there are the native trees that are fair game in the power line right of way. I have some fast growing willows that are constantly leaning out towards the wires and if I don’t keep them in line the power line crews will cut them off close to the ground. But they pop up again and witching 5 years will reach the wires again.
I couldn’t see the picture well enough on my phone so switched to my iPad. Even so, I had to zoom in more. I’m not familiar with eucalyptus trees so I don’t know what they are supposed to look like. The sunrise, sunset colour of the light makes it more difficult to tell if the golden bunches of leaves are some natural feature of the tree, for instance brown & wilted flower clusters after blooming is finished, normal leaves coloured by the light, or are simply dead leaves. I’ve seen lots of brown dead flowers on Catalpa trees that from a distance looked like something bad had happened but closer up I could see it was just the old flower clusters getting ready to drop off. But in that case I saw that particular tree often enough that I began to recognize its natural cycle. I also notice the sunny side of the hedge also looks brown so maybe it’s just the colour of the light.
The symmetry of the tree is disrupted but whether by the street light, the works crews trimming around the light to prevent the leaves blocking the light, or something else. How recently was that street light installed? Could the tree have been locally sprayed with defoliant to clear the area around the light?¿ I’ve also seen trees partly dead after the bark has been shredded by a bear’s claws or bobcat, lynx, or bark chewed off by a porcupine, which isn’t very likely in a residential area, or damaged by a careless machine operator. It doesn’t look like the street light is newly installed when such damage to the tree could likely happen. But I remember you said you first observed it a year ago. Perhaps the damage cause to the tree by a machine could have taken some time to show itself before parts of the tree died. Maybe some maintenance to the street light was needed and they pushed the lift machine through the branches to clear the way? I’ve seen trees along power lines sprayed with defoliant to kill them and that effect is fairly quick, just a few days. They wouldn’t normally do that in a residential area.
Zooming-in a lot there seems to be some loose bark on the left? I can’t tell for sure. If I was there in person I could look at those details more closely. That would be an important detail in deciding if it was a sick tree or not. The rest of the tree looks OK. There’s a face on the trunk of the tree with pretty well formed lips but I can’t tell if it is natural or carved there. Mostly the details disappear in pixel jaggies.
If it is, in fact, dead leaves, then a closer look at the leaves might reveal if they are being attacked by insects eating the leaves, or if the leaves show no sign of insect damage then perhaps the flow of nutrients to the leaves has been cut off.
The thing that keeps coming into my mind is trees I have seen that have been close to a fire, for instance where someone was burning a pile of brush, or got carried away with their bonfire, and one side of the tree got cooked. Also trees near a house fire or just next to a forest fire. That one side normal/the other side cooked look. They had a similar look. Yet I don’t see any signs of fire on that side of the photo. The hedge looks normally green, except for the brown area farther back.
So if the golden foliage is actually dead leaves and not a natural feature that means they grew out green, normally, but soon afterwards something happened to the tree, like fire or disease, or serious insect attack in the bark which disrupted the nutrient flow. I’ve seen trees attacked by bark beetles but it usually takes a few seasons for the tree to be visibly affected and it affects the entire tree. I’ve seen trees devastated by caterpillars stripping off the leaves fairly quickly but usually these caterpillars build web-like nets around a cluster of leaves to protect themselves while the focus on eating. A tree can be stripped of leaves an just a few weeks by a serious caterpillar infestation.
I have seen shrubs with withered leaves caused by an unusually late frost but usually trees leaf out late enough to be after the risk of frost has passed. That could happen mostly on one side if wind was a factor. Is the eucalyptus tree happy in that climate zone or is it somewhat outside it’s normal zone? For instance, the catalpa trees I so admired in my parent’s neighbourhood have never done well where I live now because I’m one climate zone colder and the trees I planted suffer too much winter die-back every year.
I’ve seen birch & poplar trees, in years past, where the uppermost leaves on branches reaching above the surrounding canopy would all turn yellow, wither, and die, caused, I learned later, by acid fog condensing on the isolated leaves. Acid fog as it turns out (there was a study nearby) is more than 10x more acidic than acid rain. I’ve also seen trees affected by fungus diseases that just affected part of the tree, but again, theses are usually slow-progressing processes and not as sudden as green leaves coming out normally but soon afterwards withering.
So I’m left wondering, what among the details I can figure out are normal, and what are not, before I rush in to make a judgement based on uncertain evidence.
You apparently saw something unusual that caught your attention, based on your long experience with the tree. How long had it being going on before you noticed? What is the threshold level of different appearance of the tree required to bring it to your conscious awareness? Anyhow, that’s the type of thoughts that went through my head as I studied your photo. Sort of Photo CSI.
) I've been practicing a form (?) of contemplative photography called, Nalanda Miksang; based on the teachings of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the Shambhala tradition. Of course, you do not need to be a buddhist at all to practice this unique form. (Lisa, the book you're referring to, "Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes", by Andy Karr, is also a Miksang student.) My teacher is Miriam Hall and she and her writing partner, John McQuade, have written, 2 beautiful books about this practice, "Looking and Seeing", Way of Seeing Volume 1 and more recently, Heart of Photography, Way of Seeing Volume 2." The practice in one sentence: "Nalanda Miksang teaches you to make an equivalent image of a true first perception." Sounds simple?!? If you ever have a chance, Miriam often offers Levels 1 and 2 on line through the Shambhala website. I can't recommend them enough! The practice, for me, elevates my image making experience to a completely other/different/extremely subtle level.
