Reflecting On Refraction

A couple of days ago I was sitting at my favourite café early in the morning with a freshly brewed hot coffee in front of me. A light shower of rain began to fall. Within a minute or so a rainbow formed its arch across the sky. When I looked downwards at the creek that flows beside the café, I could see the rainbow reflected in the waters. (see photo)

The rainbow and its reflection in the water was a beautiful sight.

I was moved to reflect.

I recalled from my school days learning about the physics of how a rainbow is formed. Light is refracted, reflected, and dispersed into its constituent colours by the drops of rain. Most people know the colours of the rainbow from the initials: ROYGBIV. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. These are the classic seven colours of the rainbow. Most of us know that the section of the electro-magnetic spectrum that we see as light is made up of many more colours than these seven. It is though, these seven that we classically associate with a rainbow.

I reflected further.

The rainbow is a pleasing metaphor for life and its myriad forms. Individual lives do not exist in isolation. No matter what animal or plant you can think of in nature, it does not exist without interacting with other animals and plants around it. Together, all the various plants and animals combine in almost unimaginable complexity to co-create whole eco-systems.

Each eco-system supports and sustains all the plants and animals within it. Each plant and animal supports and sustains the eco-system.

We humans are part of these complex eco-systems. We are not isolated beings. Without the eco-systems we are part of we could not exist. We are like one of the colours of the rainbow.

Try to imagine a rainbow without one of its colours. Suppose the colour blue was missing. It would no longer be a rainbow, would it?

Sadly, much of humanity is acting (metaphorically) as if one or more of the colours of the rainbow do not matter. Species (and even genera) of plants and animals are being made extinct as an insane rate.

My reflection continued on.

If light is passed through a prism the entire visible spectrum of colours appears on the other side of the prism. The unity of light (what we call white light) is refracted and dispersed by the prism, and we see the diversity of colour contained in that unity. Unity creates diversity.

Now place another prism after the first prism. But invert it. Now pass the white light through the first prism and then the colour spectrum through the second. What happens?

The colour spectrum is returned to white light. Diversity creates unity.

It is a metaphor worth reflecting upon often, because it can be very easy to forget that everything in the world is co-created by everything else. Nothing arises or exists completely on its own. Nothing is independent of other things, although it may be unique (i.e. it may be the unique colour red in our metaphor).

Next time you see a rainbow think and reflect upon the diversity of life and how that creates the wondrous unity that life is.

Decay Embraces Beauty

A couple of days ago on my morning walk I came across a decaying leaf on the ground (see photo.) I picked it up and thought to myself – what a beautiful leaf. The speckled and spotted pattern gives this leaf a lovely chaotic look. The broken tip and serrations on the edges tell me that this leaf has lived a full and productive life.

This leaf is a metaphor for our own lives, is it not?

This leaf reminds us that life is not simply about newness, freshness, or blossoming. Life is also about decay, dotage, and atrophy. It reminds us that everything is impermanent. Everything that is born will die.

Yet, this simple leaf shows us that at all stages of the life-death cycle there is beauty. Indeed, there are many cultures who consider that beauty increases with age, and that youth are too young to have grown into beauty yet. Whatever is believed, this leaf is a reminder that aging can be entered into with grace and beauty.

Decay too is a beautiful process. It is the process, whether a leaf or a human being, of giving back. The decaying process returns vital nutrients to the soil, and so contributes to the continuation of life, and to new births.

The eco-psychologist Bill Plotkin calls this the return to mystery. An apt naming, for we come from mystery, and we return to mystery.

The esteemed Catholic priest and student of earth history, Thomas Berry (who died at age 94) called this a time of fulfillment.

So, next time we look at a decaying leaf, or think of ourselves as slowly decaying, think again. There is profound beauty in that process.

Whether we be mottled and specked, and with bits missing around the edges, we are entering the time of fulfillment, mystery, and beauty.

Mystery, Awe, and Curiosity

How many times have you stood, sat, or lain, watching a sunrise or sunset? How many times have you gazed at a rainbow as it hung in the sky? What about the stars at night? Have you peered at them and wondered how many there are, how far away they are, or how big they are?

Turning to the smaller things in life: have you ever lain in a field and studied a blade of grass, or a tiny flower? How about sitting on a beach and letting a handful of sand filter through your splayed fingers? Have you seen the world, as Blake did, in each of those grains of sand?

Mysterious isn’t it? How is a sunrise or a rainbow formed? What enables that blade of grass to grow?

If we do stop to ask ourselves such questions, we are compelled to stand, sit, or lie, in wonder and awe. Life, in all its magnificent arrays is mysterious. Albert Einstein commented that, ‘the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science.’ Remember that this was a man who probably understood the workings of the cosmos far better than any other person. Yet, he perceived this cosmos as mysterious.

Perhaps, like another Albert – Albert Schweitzer – both of them understood that, ‘as we acquire more knowledge, things don’t become more comprehensible, they become more mysterious.’

Mystery invokes curiosity.

A meteorologist can tell us how a rainbow is formed.

But, a meteorologist cannot explain why a rainbow is formed. A meteorologist cannot take away the mystery.

And I, for one, do not want a meteorologist to remove the mystery.

I want to stand, sit, or lie, in awe and wonder. I want to be curious about the mystery of life and all it has to offer.

The mystery of life does not need to be explained to me. I do not need a first cause. Nor do I require, as Aristotle did, an unmoved mover.

We might want to explain this mystery by positing an anima mundi, God, Allah, the One, or even the Divine. Yet, all of these imply a first cause, as if everything can be explained if only we could trace each effect back to a cause, which itself is an effect with a cause. We could do this ad infinitum, without ever arriving at the initial cause.

Because there isn’t one.

Everything is dependent upon everything else. In the ancient Indian texts of the Vedas and Upanishads and early Buddhist writings we find the Pali word Pratītyasamutpāda which has roots in words that can be translated as to spring up together, or to come to pass together.

Simply put, when everything arises together, and co-dependently, we can only stand, sit, or lie, in awe and contemplate the mystery of it all.

Furthermore, we are part of this mystery. Jack Kornfield observes that; ‘We not only are witness to the mystery, we are the mystery looking at itself.’¹

So, next time you are gazing at a sunrise or a blade of grass, or letting grains of sand run through your fingers, or looking up at the Milky way, be curious enough to consider that you are seeing yourself.

You are contemplating the Mystery.

Note:

1. Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart, Ebury Publishing, London, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg, 2008

Vita Brevis, Vita Continuus

Cueva de las Manos,
Argentina

How long is your life? Many would answer that life is fleeting. Indeed, there is a saying – Ars longa, vita brevis – claiming that art is long, and life is short.

Well, yes, it is, when viewed in cosmic terms. Three score and ten (70 years) is the supposed appointed human life expectation. That is just a blink compared with the age of the Universe.

Compared with how long Homo sapiens have been treading the Earth (200,000 – 300,000 years) 70 years is fleeting. Suppose you visualise your allotted 70 years as 7 cm – the average length of a man’s thumb. Then the first Homo sapiens began striding across the Earth some 200 to 300m away from us. That’s a lot of thumb lengths.

Measured like this then, our human lives are short and fleeting.

And art is long.

Speaking of art. There is another perspective with which we could look at our lives. And, there is no need to change the timeline with which we considered life’s fleeting nature.

All around the world there is art from millennia ago – cave art.

No matter who we are, or what part of the world we come from, it is likely that an ancestor of ours was responsible for (or witnessed the making of) one or more of these paintings.

One of the oldest sites is the cave of Maltravieso in Spain. Uranium-thorium dating gives a date of 64,000 years ago for a hand-stencil in that cave. It is thought that the creator of this hand-stencil was possibly Homo neanderthalensis. Since modern Europeans have around 1% - 3% Neanderthal DNA then, if you have European ancestry, were the paintings in this cave created by an ancestor of yours?

Or, further East. Hand-stencilling found on a cave on the island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, are dated to 39,900 years ago. What is of further interest is that paintings of an almost life-size Sulawesi warty pig, found in 2021, has been dated to at least 45,000 years old. This makes it the oldest figurative cave art in the world. Perhaps your ancestor caught the pig, or painted the pig, or cooked and ate the pig around a fire with companions?

In the Cave of Hands (Cueva de las Manos) in Argentina there are hundreds of hands stencilled on rock walls in a number of collages. The earliest of these paintings were stencilled around 9,000 years ago, and the youngest just 1,300 years ago. Perhaps a hand from an ancestor of yours is amongst them?

The final example in this blog of cave art comes from Australia. At a site known as Nawarla Gabarnmung (Hole in the Rock) in Arnhem Land, far north Australia, the walls are covered with paintings of fish, crocodiles, wallabies, people, and spiritual beings. These depictions are at least 44,000 years old, and could be as old as 60,000 years. These paintings were created by the ancestors of someone alive today.

The purpose of the above examples is to show that we are all part of a continuous life. We may not know the name of those wo created these cave art pieces, but we can be sure they were ancestors of ours, or of someone we know.

So, yes, our individual lives may be fleeting, but our lives are part of a continuing cycle of life. A life cycle that has been in existence for at least 300,000 years.

Let us amend that Latin phrase then:

Ars longa, Vita brevis, Vita continuus.